Trainable Joint Channel Estimation, Detection and Decoding for MIMO URLLC Systems

The receiver design for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) systems can be a tough task due to the use of short channel codes and few pilot symbols. Consequently, error propagation can occur in traditional turbo receivers, leading to performance degradation. Moreover, the processing delay induced by information exchange between different modules may also be undesirable for URLLC. To address the issues, we advocate to perform joint channel estimation, detection, and decoding (JCDD) for MIMO URLLC systems encoded by short low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Specifically, we develop two novel JCDD problem formulations based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion for Gaussian MIMO channels and sparse mmWave MIMO channels, respectively, which integrate the pilots, the bit-to-symbol mapping, the LDPC code constraints, as well as the channel statistical information. Both the challenging large-scale non-convex problems are then solved based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithms, where closed-form solutions are achieved in each ADMM iteration. Furthermore, two JCDD neural networks, called JCDDNet-G and JCDDNet-S, are built by unfolding the derived ADMM algorithms and introducing trainable parameters. It is interesting to find via simulations that the proposed trainable JCDD receivers can outperform the turbo receivers with affordable computational complexities.

Accent-VITS:accent transfer for end-to-end TTS

Accent transfer aims to transfer an accent from a source speaker to synthetic speech in the target speaker's voice. The main challenge is how to effectively disentangle speaker timbre and accent which are entangled in speech. This paper presents a VITS-based end-to-end accent transfer model named Accent-VITS.Based on the main structure of VITS, Accent-VITS makes substantial improvements to enable effective and stable accent transfer.We leverage a hierarchical CVAE structure to model accent pronunciation information and acoustic features, respectively, using bottleneck features and mel spectrums as constraints.Moreover, the text-to-wave mapping in VITS is decomposed into text-to-accent and accent-to-wave mappings in Accent-VITS. In this way, the disentanglement of accent and speaker timbre becomes be more stable and effective.Experiments on multi-accent and Mandarin datasets show that Accent-VITS achieves higher speaker similarity, accent similarity and speech naturalness as compared with a strong baseline.

Passive Integrated Sensing and Communication Scheme based on RF Fingerprint Information Extraction for Cell-Free RAN

This paper investigates how to achieve integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) based on a cell-free radio access network (CF-RAN) architecture with a minimum footprint of communication resources. We propose a new passive sensing scheme. The scheme is based on the radio frequency (RF) fingerprint learning of the RF radio unit (RRU) to build an RF fingerprint library of RRUs. The source RRU is identified by comparing the RF fingerprints carried by the signal at the receiver side. The receiver extracts the channel parameters from the signal and estimates the channel environment, thus locating the reflectors in the environment. The proposed scheme can effectively solve the problem of interference between signals in the same time-frequency domain but in different spatial domains when multiple RRUs jointly serve users in CF-RAN architecture. Simulation results show that the proposed passive ISAC scheme can effectively detect reflector location information in the environment without degrading the communication performance.

DualVC 2: Dynamic Masked Convolution for Unified Streaming and Non-Streaming Voice Conversion

Voice conversion is becoming increasingly popular, and a growing number of application scenarios require models with streaming inference capabilities. The recently proposed DualVC attempts to achieve this objective through streaming model architecture design and intra-model knowledge distillation along with hybrid predictive coding to compensate for the lack of future information. However, DualVC encounters several problems that limit its performance. First, the autoregressive decoder has error accumulation in its nature and limits the inference speed as well. Second, the causal convolution enables streaming capability but cannot sufficiently use future information within chunks. Third, the model is unable to effectively address the noise in the unvoiced segments, lowering the sound quality. In this paper, we propose DualVC 2 to address these issues. Specifically, the model backbone is migrated to a Conformer-based architecture, empowering parallel inference. Causal convolution is replaced by non-causal convolution with dynamic chunk mask to make better use of within-chunk future information. Also, quiet attention is introduced to enhance the model's noise robustness. Experiments show that DualVC 2 outperforms DualVC and other baseline systems in both subjective and objective metrics, with only 186.4 ms latency. Our audio samples are made publicly available.

Multi-GradSpeech: Towards Diffusion-based Multi-Speaker Text-to-speech Using Consistent Diffusion Models

Despite imperfect score-matching causing drift in training and sampling distributions of diffusion models, recent advances in diffusion-based acoustic models have revolutionized data-sufficient single-speaker Text-to-Speech (TTS) approaches, with Grad-TTS being a prime example. However, the sampling drift problem leads to these approaches struggling in multi-speaker scenarios in practice due to more complex target data distribution compared to single-speaker scenarios. In this paper, we present Multi-GradSpeech, a multi-speaker diffusion-based acoustic models which introduces the Consistent Diffusion Model (CDM) as a generative modeling approach. We enforce the consistency property of CDM during the training process to alleviate the sampling drift problem in the inference stage, resulting in significant improvements in multi-speaker TTS performance. Our experimental results corroborate that our proposed approach can improve the performance of different speakers involved in multi-speaker TTS compared to Grad-TTS, even outperforming the fine-tuning approach. Audio samples are available at https://welkinyang.github.io/multi-gradspeech/

Joint Uplink and Downlink Resource Allocation Towards Energy-efficient Transmission for URLLC

Ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) is firstly proposed in 5G networks, and expected to support applications with the most stringent quality-of-service (QoS). However, since the wireless channels vary dynamically, the transmit power for ensuring the QoS requirements of URLLC may be very high, which conflicts with the power limitation of a real system. To fulfill the successful URLLC transmission with finite transmit power, we propose an energy-efficient packet delivery mechanism incorparated with frequency-hopping and proactive dropping in this paper. To reduce uplink outage probability, frequency-hopping provides more chances for transmission so that the failure hardly occurs. To avoid downlink outage from queue clearing, proactive dropping controls overall reliability by introducing an extra error component. With the proposed packet delivery mechanism, we jointly optimize bandwidth allocation and power control of uplink and downlink, antenna configuration, and subchannel assignment to minimize the average total power under the constraint of URLLC transmission requirements. Via theoretical analysis (e.g., the convexity with respect to bandwidth, the independence of bandwidth allocation, the convexity of antenna configuration with inactive constraints), the simplication of finding the global optimal solution for resource allocation is addressed. A three-step method is then proposed to find the optimal solution for resource allocation. Simulation results validate the analysis and show the performance gain by optimizing resource allocation with the proposed packet delivery mechanism.

Resource Allocation in Cell-Free MU-MIMO Multicarrier System with Finite and Infinite Blocklength

The explosive growth of data results in more scarce spectrum resources. It is important to optimize the system performance under limited resources. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve weighted throughput (WTP) maximization for cell-free (CF) multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) multicarrier (MC) systems through resource allocation (RA), in the cases of finite blocklength (FBL) and infinite blocklength (INFBL) regimes. To ensure the quality of service (QoS) of each user, particularly for the block error rate (BLER) and latency in the FBL regime, the WTP gets maximized under the constraints of total power consumption and required QoS metrics. Since the channels vary in different subcarriers (SCs) and inter-user interference strengths, the WTP can be maximized by scheduling the best users in each time-frequency (TF) resource and advanced beamforming design, while the resources can be fully utilized. With this motivation, we propose a joint user scheduling (US) and beamforming design algorithm based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) and gene-aided (GA) algorithms, to address a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed RA outperforms the comparison schemes. And the CF system in our scenario is capable of achieving higher spectral efficiency than the centralized antenna systems (CAS).

Grouping Method for mmWave Massive MIMO System: Exploitation of Angular Multiplexing Gain

A future millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system may serve hundreds or thousands of users at the same time; thus, research on multiple access technology is particularly important.Moreover, due to the short-wavelength nature of a mmWave, large-scale arrays are easier to implement than microwaves, while their directivity and sparseness make the physical beamforming effect of precoding more prominent.In consideration of the mmWave angle division multiple access (ADMA) system based on precoding, this paper investigates the influence of the angle distribution on system performance, which is denoted as the angular multiplexing gain.Furthermore, inspired by the above research, we transform the ADMA user grouping problem to maximize the system sum-rate into the inter-user angular spacing equalization problem.Then, the form of the optimal solution for the approximate problem is derived, and the corresponding grouping algorithm is proposed.The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the comparison methods.Finally, a complexity analysis also shows that the proposed algorithm has extremely low complexity.

DualVC: Dual-mode Voice Conversion using Intra-model Knowledge Distillation and Hybrid Predictive Coding

Voice conversion is an increasingly popular technology, and the growing number of real-time applications requires models with streaming conversion capabilities. Unlike typical (non-streaming) voice conversion, which can leverage the entire utterance as full context, streaming voice conversion faces significant challenges due to the missing future information, resulting in degraded intelligibility, speaker similarity, and sound quality. To address this challenge, we propose DualVC, a dual-mode neural voice conversion approach that supports both streaming and non-streaming modes using jointly trained separate network parameters. Furthermore, we propose intra-model knowledge distillation and hybrid predictive coding (HPC) to enhance the performance of streaming conversion. Additionally, we incorporate data augmentation to train a noise-robust autoregressive decoder, improving the model's performance on long-form speech conversion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the baseline models in the context of streaming voice conversion, while maintaining comparable performance to the non-streaming topline system that leverages the complete context, albeit with a latency of only 252.8 ms.