Radio-Frequency Multi-Mode OAM Detection Based on UCA Samples Learning

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) at radio-frequency provides a novel approach of multiplexing a set of orthogonal modes on the same frequency channel to achieve high spectral efficiencies. However, classical phase gradient-based OAM mode detection methods require perfect alignment of transmit and receive antennas, which greatly challenges the practical application of OAM communications. In this paper, we first show the effect of non-parallel misalignment on the OAM phase structure, and then propose the OAM mode detection method based on uniform circular array (UCA) samples learning for the more general alignment or non-parallel misalignment case. Specifically, we applied three classifiers: K-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and back-propagation neural network (BPNN) to both single-mode and multi-mode OAM detection. The simulation results validate that the proposed learning-based OAM mode detection methods are robust to misalignment errors and especially BPNN classifier has the best generalization performance.

Joint Spatial Division and Coaxial Multiplexing for Downlink Multi-User OAM Wireless Backhaul

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) at radio frequency (RF) provides a novel approach of multiplexing a set of orthogonal modes on the same frequency channel to achieve high spectral efficiencies (SEs). However, the existing research on OAM wireless communications is mainly focused on pointto-point transmission in the line-of-sight (LoS) scenario. In this paper, we propose an overall scheme of the downlink multi-user OAM (MU-OAM) wireless backhaul based on uniform circular arrays (UCAs) for broadcasting networks, which can achieve the joint spatial division and coaxial multiplexing (JSDCM). A salient feature of the proposed downlink MU-OAM wireless backhaul systems is that the channel matrices are completely characterized by the position of each small base station (SBS), independent of the numbers of subcarriers and antennas, which avoids estimating large channel matrices required by the traditional downlink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) wireless backhaul systems. Thereafter, we propose an OAM-based multiuser distance and angle of arrival (AoA) estimation method, which is able to simultaneously estimate the positions of multiple SBSs with a flexible number of training symbols. With the estimated distances and AoAs, a MU-OAM preprocessing scheme is applied to eliminate the co-mode and inter-mode interferences in the downlink MU-OAM channel. At last, the proposed methods are extended to the downlink MU-OAM-MIMO wireless backhaul system equipped with uniform concentric circular arrays (UCCAs), for which much higher spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) than traditional MU-MIMO systems can be achieved. Both mathematical analysis and simulation results validate that the proposed scheme can effectively eliminate both interferences of the practical downlink MU-OAM channel and approaches the performance of the ideal MU-OAM channel.

A Promising Technology for 6G Wireless Networks: Intelligent Reflecting Surface

The intelligent information society, which is highly digitized, intelligence inspired and globally data driven, will be deployed in the next decade. The next 6G wireless communication networks are the key to achieve this grand blueprint, which is expected to connect everything, provide full dimensional wireless coverage and integrate all functions to support full-vertical applications. Recent research reveals that intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) with wireless environment control capability is a promising technology for 6G networks. Specifically, IRS can intelligently control the wavefront, e.g., the phase, amplitude, frequency, and even polarization by massive tunable elements, thus achieving fine-grained 3-D passive beamforming. In this paper, we first give a blueprint of the next 6G networks including the vision, typical scenarios and key performance indicators (KPIs). Then, we provide an overview of IRS including the new signal model, hardware architecture and competitive advantages in 6G networks. Besides, we discuss the potential application of IRS in the connectivity of 6G networks in detail, including intelligent and controllable wireless environment, ubiquitous connectivity, deep connectivity and holographic connectivity. At last, we summarize the challenges of IRS application and deployment in 6G networks. As a timely review of IRS, our summary will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners engaging in IRS for 6G networks.

AoA Estimation for OAM Communication Systems With Mode-Frequency Multi-Time ESPRIT Method

Radio orbital angular momentum (OAM) communications require accurate alignment between the transmit and receive beam directions. Accordingly, a key feature of OAM receivers is the ability to reliably estimate the angle of arrival (AoA) of multi-mode OAM beams. Considering the limitations of existing AoA estimation techniques, in this paper, we propose an easier-to-implement AoA estimation method based on applying multiple times the estimating signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm to the received training signals in OAM mode and frequency domains, which is denoted as the mode-frequency (M-F) multi-time (MT)-ESPRIT algorithm. With this method, the misalignment error of real OAM channels can be greatly reduced and the performance approaches that of ideally aligned OAM channels.

Adaptive Label Smoothing To Regularize Large-Scale Graph Training

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the node representations by recursively aggregating information from its neighbors, have become a predominant computational tool in many domains. To handle large-scale graphs, most of the existing methods partition the input graph into multiple sub-graphs (e.g., through node clustering) and apply batch training to save memory cost. However, such batch training will lead to label bias within each batch, and then result in over-confidence in model predictions. Since the connected nodes with positively related labels tend to be assigned together, the traditional cross-entropy minimization process will attend on the predictions of biased classes in the batch, and may intensify the overfitting issue. To overcome the label bias problem, we propose the adaptive label smoothing (ALS) method to replace the one-hot hard labels with smoothed ones, which learns to allocate label confidences from the biased classes to the others. Specifically, ALS propagates node labels to aggregate the neighborhood label distribution in a pre-processing step, and then updates the optimal smoothed labels online to adapt to specific graph structure. Experiments on the real-world datasets demonstrate that ALS can be generally applied to the main scalable learning frameworks to calibrate the biased labels and improve generalization performances.

S2Looking: A Satellite Side-Looking Dataset for Building Change Detection

Collecting large-scale annotated satellite imagery datasets is essential for deep-learning-based global building change surveillance. In particular, the scroll imaging mode of optical satellites enables larger observation ranges and shorter revisit periods, facilitating efficient global surveillance. However, the images in recent satellite change detection datasets are mainly captured at near-nadir viewing angles. In this paper, we introduce S2Looking, a building change detection dataset that contains large-scale side-looking satellite images captured at varying off-nadir angles. Our S2Looking dataset consists of 5000 registered bitemporal image pairs (size of 1024*1024, 0.5 ~ 0.8 m/pixel) of rural areas throughout the world and more than 65,920 annotated change instances. We provide two label maps to separately indicate the newly built and demolished building regions for each sample in the dataset. We establish a benchmark task based on this dataset, i.e., identifying the pixel-level building changes in the bi-temporal images. We test several state-of-the-art methods on both the S2Looking dataset and the (near-nadir) LEVIR-CD+ dataset. The experimental results show that recent change detection methods exhibit much poorer performance on the S2Looking than on LEVIR-CD+. The proposed S2Looking dataset presents three main challenges: 1) large viewing angle changes, 2) large illumination variances and 3) various complex scene characteristics encountered in rural areas. Our proposed dataset may promote the development of algorithms for satellite image change detection and registration under conditions of large off-nadir angles. The dataset is available at https://github.com/AnonymousForACMMM/.

Dirichlet Energy Constrained Learning for Deep Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) integrate deep architectures and topological structure modeling in an effective way. However, the performance of existing GNNs would decrease significantly when they stack many layers, because of the over-smoothing issue. Node embeddings tend to converge to similar vectors when GNNs keep recursively aggregating the representations of neighbors. To enable deep GNNs, several methods have been explored recently. But they are developed from either techniques in convolutional neural networks or heuristic strategies. There is no generalizable and theoretical principle to guide the design of deep GNNs. To this end, we analyze the bottleneck of deep GNNs by leveraging the Dirichlet energy of node embeddings, and propose a generalizable principle to guide the training of deep GNNs. Based on it, a novel deep GNN framework -- EGNN is designed. It could provide lower and upper constraints in terms of Dirichlet energy at each layer to avoid over-smoothing. Experimental results demonstrate that EGNN achieves state-of-the-art performance by using deep layers.

HyperNP: Interactive Visual Exploration of Multidimensional Projection Hyperparameters

Projection algorithms such as t-SNE or UMAP are useful for the visualization of high dimensional data, but depend on hyperparameters which must be tuned carefully. Unfortunately, iteratively recomputing projections to find the optimal hyperparameter value is computationally intensive and unintuitive due to the stochastic nature of these methods. In this paper we propose HyperNP, a scalable method that allows for real-time interactive hyperparameter exploration of projection methods by training neural network approximations. HyperNP can be trained on a fraction of the total data instances and hyperparameter configurations and can compute projections for new data and hyperparameters at interactive speeds. HyperNP is compact in size and fast to compute, thus allowing it to be embedded in lightweight visualization systems such as web browsers. We evaluate the performance of the HyperNP across three datasets in terms of performance and speed. The results suggest that HyperNP is accurate, scalable, interactive, and appropriate for use in real-world settings.

Robust Sample Weighting to Facilitate Individualized Treatment Rule Learning for a Target Population

Learning individualized treatment rules (ITRs) is an important topic in precision medicine. Current literature mainly focuses on deriving ITRs from a single source population. We consider the observational data setting when the source population differs from a target population of interest. We assume subject covariates are available from both populations, but treatment and outcome data are only available from the source population. Although adjusting for differences between source and target populations can potentially lead to an improved ITR for the target population, it can substantially increase the variability in ITR estimation. To address this dilemma, we develop a weighting framework that aims to tailor an ITR for a given target population and protect against high variability due to superfluous covariate shift adjustments. Our method seeks covariate balance over a nonparametric function class characterized by a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and can improve many ITR learning methods that rely on weights. We show that the proposed method encompasses importance weights and the so-called overlap weights as two extreme cases, allowing for a better bias-variance trade-off in between. Numerical examples demonstrate that the use of our weighting method can greatly improve ITR estimation for the target population compared with other weighting methods.

Integer Programming for Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables

The problem of finding an ancestral acyclic directed mixed graph (ADMG) that represents the causal relationships between a set of variables is an important area of research for causal inference. However, most of existing score-based structure learning methods focus on learning the directed acyclic graph (DAG) without latent variables. A number of score-based methods have recently been proposed for the ADMG learning, yet they are heuristic in nature and do not guarantee an optimal solution. We propose a novel exact score-based method that solves an integer programming (IP) formulation and returns a score-maximizing ancestral ADMG for a set of continuous variables. In particular, we generalize the state-of-the-art IP model for DAG learning problems and derive new classes of valid inequalities to formalize the IP-based ADMG learning model. Empirically our model can be solved efficiently for medium-sized problems and achieves better accuracy than state-of-the-art score-based methods as well as benchmark constraint-based methods.