An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for RIS/IRS-aided Wireless Systems

In the past as well as present wireless communication systems, the wireless propagation environment is regarded as an uncontrollable black box that impairs the received signal quality, and its negative impacts are compensated for by relying on the design of various sophisticated transmission/reception schemes. However, the improvements through applying such schemes operating at two endpoints (i.e., transmitter and receiver) only are limited even after five generations of wireless systems. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) or intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) have emerged as a new and revolutionary technology that can configure the wireless environment in a favorable manner by properly tuning the phase shifts of a large number of quasi passive and low-cost reflecting elements, thus standing out as a promising candidate technology for the next-/sixth-generation (6G) wireless system. However, to reap the performance benefits promised by RIS/IRS, efficient signal processing techniques are crucial, for a variety of purposes such as channel estimation, transmission design, radio localization, and so on. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances on RIS/IRS-aided wireless systems from the signal processing perspective. We also highlight promising research directions that are worthy of investigation in the future.

Feature-based Recognition Framework for Super-resolution Images

In practical application, the performance of recognition network usually decreases when being applied on super-resolution images. In this paper, we propose a feature-based recognition network combined with GAN (FGAN). Our network improves the recognition accuracy by extracting more features that benefit recognition from SR images. In the experiment, we build three datasets using three different super-resolution algorithm, and our network increases the recognition accuracy by more than 6% comparing with ReaNet50 and DenseNet121.

MISS: Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Click-Through Rate Prediction

CTR prediction is essential for modern recommender systems. Ranging from early factorization machines to deep learning based models in recent years, existing CTR methods focus on capturing useful feature interactions or mining important behavior patterns. Despite the effectiveness, we argue that these methods suffer from the risk of label sparsity (i.e., the user-item interactions are highly sparse with respect to the feature space), label noise (i.e., the collected user-item interactions are usually noisy), and the underuse of domain knowledge (i.e., the pairwise correlations between samples). To address these challenging problems, we propose a novel Multi-Interest Self-Supervised learning (MISS) framework which enhances the feature embeddings with interest-level self-supervision signals. With the help of two novel CNN-based multi-interest extractors,self-supervision signals are discovered with full considerations of different interest representations (point-wise and union-wise), interest dependencies (short-range and long-range), and interest correlations (inter-item and intra-item). Based on that, contrastive learning losses are further applied to the augmented views of interest representations, which effectively improves the feature representation learning. Furthermore, our proposed MISS framework can be used as an plug-in component with existing CTR prediction models and further boost their performances. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets show that MISS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models, by up to 13.55% in AUC, and also enjoys good compatibility with representative deep CTR models.

Environment-Aware Beam Selection for IRS-Aided Communication with Channel Knowledge Map

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided communication is a promising technology for beyond 5G (B5G) systems, to reconfigure the radio environment proactively. However, IRS-aided communication in practice requires efficient channel estimation or passive beam training, whose overhead and complexity increase drastically with the number of reflecting elements/beam directions. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a novel environment-aware joint active and passive beam selection scheme for IRS-aided wireless communication, based on the new concept of channel knowledge map (CKM). Specifically, by utilizing both the location information of the user equipment (UE), which is readily available in contemporary wireless systems with ever-increasing accuracy, and the environment information offered by CKM, the proposed scheme achieves efficient beam selection with either no real-time training required (training-free beam selection) or only moderate training overhead (light-training beam selection). Numerical results based on practical channels obtained using commercial ray tracing software are presented, which demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme over various benchmark schemes.

AnchorGAE: General Data Clustering via $O(n)$ Bipartite Graph Convolution

Graph-based clustering plays an important role in clustering tasks. As graph convolution network (GCN), a variant of neural networks on graph-type data, has achieved impressive performance, it is attractive to find whether GCNs can be used to augment the graph-based clustering methods on non-graph data, i.e., general data. However, given $n$ samples, the graph-based clustering methods usually need at least $O(n^2)$ time to build graphs and the graph convolution requires nearly $O(n^2)$ for a dense graph and $O(|\mathcal{E}|)$ for a sparse one with $|\mathcal{E}|$ edges. In other words, both graph-based clustering and GCNs suffer from severe inefficiency problems. To tackle this problem and further employ GCN to promote the capacity of graph-based clustering, we propose a novel clustering method, AnchorGAE. As the graph structure is not provided in general clustering scenarios, we first show how to convert a non-graph dataset into a graph by introducing the generative graph model, which is used to build GCNs. Anchors are generated from the original data to construct a bipartite graph such that the computational complexity of graph convolution is reduced from $O(n^2)$ and $O(|\mathcal{E}|)$ to $O(n)$. The succeeding steps for clustering can be easily designed as $O(n)$ operations. Interestingly, the anchors naturally lead to a siamese GCN architecture. The bipartite graph constructed by anchors is updated dynamically to exploit the high-level information behind data. Eventually, we theoretically prove that the simple update will lead to degeneration and a specific strategy is accordingly designed.

Distilling Object Detectors with Feature Richness

In recent years, large-scale deep models have achieved great success, but the huge computational complexity and massive storage requirements make it a great challenge to deploy them in resource-limited devices. As a model compression and acceleration method, knowledge distillation effectively improves the performance of small models by transferring the dark knowledge from the teacher detector. However, most of the existing distillation-based detection methods mainly imitating features near bounding boxes, which suffer from two limitations. First, they ignore the beneficial features outside the bounding boxes. Second, these methods imitate some features which are mistakenly regarded as the background by the teacher detector. To address the above issues, we propose a novel Feature-Richness Score (FRS) method to choose important features that improve generalized detectability during distilling. The proposed method effectively retrieves the important features outside the bounding boxes and removes the detrimental features within the bounding boxes. Extensive experiments show that our methods achieve excellent performance on both anchor-based and anchor-free detectors. For example, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 achieves 39.7% in mAP on the COCO2017 dataset, which even surpasses the ResNet-101 based teacher detector 38.9% by 0.8%.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Multi-Path Beam Routing with Active/Passive Beam Splitting and Combining

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can be densely deployed in wireless networks to significantly enhance the communication channels. In this letter, we consider the downlink transmission from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to a single-antenna user, by exploiting the cooperative passive beamforming (CPB) and line-of-sight (LoS) path diversity gains of multi-IRS signal reflection. Unlike existing works where only one single multi-IRS reflection path from the BS to user is selected, we propose a new and more general {\it \textbf{multi-path beam routing}} scheme. Specifically, the BS sends the user's information signal via multiple orthogonal active beams (termed as {\it \textbf{active beam splitting}}), which point towards different IRSs. Then, these beamed signals are subsequently reflected by selected IRSs via their CPB in different paths, and finally coherently combined at the user's receiver (thus named {\it \textbf{passive beam combining}}). For this scheme, we formulate a new multi-path beam routing design problem to jointly optimize the number of IRS reflection paths, the selected IRSs for each of the reflection paths, the active/passive beamforming at the BS/each selected IRS, as well as the BS's power allocation over different active beams, so as to maximize the received signal power at the user. To solve this challenging problem, we first derive the optimal BS/IRS beamforming and BS power allocation for a given set of reflection paths. The clique-based approach in graph theory is then applied to solve the remaining multi-path selection problem efficiently. Simulation results show that our proposed multi-path beam routing scheme significantly outperforms its conventional single-path beam routing special case.

An Open Natural Language Processing Development Framework for EHR-based Clinical Research: A case demonstration using the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)

While we pay attention to the latest advances in clinical natural language processing (NLP), we can notice some resistance in the clinical and translational research community to adopt NLP models due to limited transparency, Interpretability and usability. Built upon our previous work, in this study, we proposed an open natural language processing development framework and evaluated it through the implementation of NLP algorithms for the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). Based on the interests in information extraction from COVID-19 related clinical notes, our work includes 1) an open data annotation process using COVID-19 signs and symptoms as the use case, 2) a community-driven ruleset composing platform, and 3) a synthetic text data generation workflow to generate texts for information extraction tasks without involving human subjects. The generated corpora derived out of the texts from multiple intuitions and gold standard annotation are tested on a single institution's rule set has the performances in F1 score of 0.876, 0.706 and 0.694, respectively. The study as a consortium effort of the N3C NLP subgroup demonstrates the feasibility of creating a federated NLP algorithm development and benchmarking platform to enhance multi-institution clinical NLP study.

Summ^N: A Multi-Stage Summarization Framework for Long Input Dialogues and Documents

Text summarization is an essential task to help readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models are unable to efficiently process long text commonly seen in the summarization problem domain. In this paper, we propose Summ^N, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context lengths of typical pretrained LMs. Summ^N first generates the coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on them. The framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM context size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both documents and dialogues and can be used on top of any underlying backbone abstractive summarization model. Our experiments demonstrate that Summ^N significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a newly proposed long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/chatc/Summ-N.

DYLE: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Long-Input Summarization

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on short text summarization. However, they still struggle with long-input summarization. In this paper, we present a new approach for long-input summarization: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Summarization. We jointly train an extractor with an abstractor and treat the extracted text snippets as the latent variable. We propose extractive oracles to provide the extractor with a strong learning signal. We introduce consistency loss, which encourages the extractor to approximate the averaged dynamic weights predicted by the generator. We conduct extensive tests on two long-input summarization datasets, GovReport (document) and QMSum (dialogue). Our model significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art, including a 6.21 ROUGE-2 improvement on GovReport and a 2.13 ROUGE-1 improvement on QMSum. Further analysis shows that the dynamic weights make our generation process highly interpretable. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.