CausalMMM: Learning Causal Structure for Marketing Mix Modeling

In online advertising, marketing mix modeling (MMM) is employed to predict the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of brand shops and help decision-makers to adjust the budget allocation of various advertising channels. Traditional MMM methods leveraging regression techniques can fail in handling the complexity of marketing. Although some efforts try to encode the causal structures for better prediction, they have the strict restriction that causal structures are prior-known and unchangeable. In this paper, we define a new causal MMM problem that automatically discovers the interpretable causal structures from data and yields better GMV predictions. To achieve causal MMM, two essential challenges should be addressed: (1) Causal Heterogeneity. The causal structures of different kinds of shops vary a lot. (2) Marketing Response Patterns. Various marketing response patterns i.e., carryover effect and shape effect, have been validated in practice. We argue that causal MMM needs dynamically discover specific causal structures for different shops and the predictions should comply with the prior known marketing response patterns. Thus, we propose CausalMMM that integrates Granger causality in a variational inference framework to measure the causal relationships between different channels and predict the GMV with the regularization of both temporal and saturation marketing response patterns. Extensive experiments show that CausalMMM can not only achieve superior performance of causal structure learning on synthetic datasets with improvements of 5.7%\sim 7.1%, but also enhance the GMV prediction results on a representative E-commerce platform.

CSI-GPT: Integrating Generative Pre-Trained Transformer with Federated-Tuning to Acquire Downlink Massive MIMO Channels

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, how to reliably acquire downlink channel state information (CSI) with low overhead is challenging. In this work, by integrating the generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) with federated-tuning, we propose a CSI-GPT approach to realize efficient downlink CSI acquisition. Specifically, we first propose a Swin Transformer-based channel acquisition network (SWTCAN) to acquire downlink CSI, where pilot signals, downlink channel estimation, and uplink CSI feedback are jointly designed. Furthermore, to solve the problem of insufficient training data, we propose a variational auto-encoder-based channel sample generator (VAE-CSG), which can generate sufficient CSI samples based on a limited number of high-quality CSI data obtained from the current cell. The CSI dataset generated from VAE-CSG will be used for pre-training SWTCAN. To fine-tune the pre-trained SWTCAN for improved performance, we propose an online federated-tuning method, where only a small amount of SWTCAN parameters are unfrozen and updated using over-the-air computation, avoiding the high communication overhead caused by aggregating the complete CSI samples from user equipment (UEs) to the BS for centralized fine-tuning. Simulation results verify the advantages of the proposed SWTCAN and the communication efficiency of the proposed federated-tuning method.

Multi-Beam Integrated Sensing and Communication: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Opportunities

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been envisioned as a critical enabling technology for the next-generation wireless communication, which can realize location/motion detection of surroundings with communication devices. This additional sensing capability leads to a substantial network quality gain and expansion of the service scenarios. As the system evolves to millimeter wave (mmWave) and above, ISAC can realize simultaneous communications and sensing of the ultra-high throughput level and radar resolution with compact design, which relies on directional beamforming against the path loss. With the multi-beam technology, the dual functions of ISAC can be seamlessly incorporated at the beamspace level by unleashing the potential of joint beamforming. To this end, this article investigates the key technologies for multi-beam ISAC system. We begin with an overview of the current state-of-the-art solutions in multi-beam ISAC. Subsequently, a detailed analysis of the advantages associated with the multi-beam ISAC is provided. Additionally, the key technologies for transmitter, channel and receiver of the multi-beam ISAC are introduced. Finally, we explore the challenges and opportunities presented by multi-beam ISAC, offering valuable insights into this emerging field.

Deep Joint Semantic Coding and Beamforming for Near-Space Airship-Borne Massive MIMO Network

Near-space airship-borne communication network is recognized to be an indispensable component of the future integrated ground-air-space network thanks to airships' advantage of long-term residency at stratospheric altitudes, but it urgently needs reliable and efficient Airship-to-X link. To improve the transmission efficiency and capacity, this paper proposes to integrate semantic communication with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. Specifically, we propose a deep joint semantic coding and beamforming (JSCBF) scheme for airship-based massive MIMO image transmission network in space, in which semantics from both source and channel are fused to jointly design the semantic coding and physical layer beamforming. First, we design two semantic extraction networks to extract semantics from image source and channel state information, respectively. Then, we propose a semantic fusion network that can fuse these semantics into complex-valued semantic features for subsequent physical-layer transmission. To efficiently transmit the fused semantic features at the physical layer, we then propose the hybrid data and model-driven semantic-aware beamforming networks. At the receiver, a semantic decoding network is designed to reconstruct the transmitted images. Finally, we perform end-to-end deep learning to jointly train all the modules, using the image reconstruction quality at the receivers as a metric. The proposed deep JSCBF scheme fully combines the efficient source compressibility and robust error correction capability of semantic communication with the high spectral efficiency of massive MIMO, achieving a significant performance improvement over existing approaches.

High-order Neighborhoods Know More: HyperGraph Learning Meets Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFDA) aims to classify target samples by only accessing a pre-trained source model and unlabelled target samples. Since no source data is available, transferring the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain is challenging. Existing methods normally exploit the pair-wise relation among target samples and attempt to discover their correlations by clustering these samples based on semantic features. The drawback of these methods includes: 1) the pair-wise relation is limited to exposing the underlying correlations of two more samples, hindering the exploration of the structural information embedded in the target domain; 2) the clustering process only relies on the semantic feature, while overlooking the critical effect of domain shift, i.e., the distribution differences between the source and target domains. To address these issues, we propose a new SFDA method that exploits the high-order neighborhood relation and explicitly takes the domain shift effect into account. Specifically, we formulate the SFDA as a Hypergraph learning problem and construct hyperedges to explore the local group and context information among multiple samples. Moreover, we integrate a self-loop strategy into the constructed hypergraph to elegantly introduce the domain uncertainty of each sample. By clustering these samples based on hyperedges, both the semantic feature and domain shift effects are considered. We then describe an adaptive relation-based objective to tune the model with soft attention levels for all samples. Extensive experiments are conducted on Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA, and PointDA-10 datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art counterparts.

Sub-6GHz Assisted mmWave Hybrid Beamforming with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

In next-generation communications, sub-6GHz and millimeter-wave (mmWave) links typically coexist, with the sub-6GHz link always active and the mmWave link active when high-rate transmission is required. Due to the spatial similarities between sub-6GHz and mmWave channels, sub-6GHz channel information can be utilized to support hybrid beamforming in mmWave communications to reduce overhead costs. We consider a multi-cell heterogeneous communication network where both sub-6GHz and mmWave communications co-exist. Multiple mmWave base stations (BSs) in the heterogeneous network simultaneously transmit signals to multiple users in their own mmWave cells while interfering with each other. The challenging problem is to design hybrid beamformers in the mmWave band that can maximize the system spectral efficiency. To address this highly complex programming using sub-6GHz information, a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) architecture is proposed to learn the intrinsic relationship between sub-6GHz and mmWave and design the hybrid beamformers for mmWave BSs. The proposed HGNN consists of two different node types, namely, BS nodes and user equipment (UE) nodes, and two different edge types, namely, desired link edge and interfering link edge. In addition, the attention mechanism and the residual structure are utilized in the HGNN architecture to improve the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed HGNN can successfully achieve better performances with sub-6GHz information than traditional learning methods. The results also demonstrate that the attention mechanism and residual structure improve the performances of the HGNN compared to its unmodified counterparts.

Beyond MMSE: Rank-1 Subspace Channel Estimator for Massive MIMO Systems

To glean the benefits offered by massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, channel state information must be accurately acquired. Despite the high accuracy, the computational complexity of classical linear minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator becomes prohibitively high in the context of massive MIMO, while the other low-complexity methods degrade the estimation accuracy seriously. In this paper, we develop a novel rank-1 subspace channel estimator to approximate the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, which outperforms the linear MMSE estimator, but incurs a surprisingly low computational complexity. Our method first acquires the highly accurate angle-of-arrival (AoA) information via a constructed space-embedding matrix and the rank-1 subspace method. Then, it adopts the post-reception beamforming to acquire the unbiased estimate of channel gains. Furthermore, a fast method is designed to implement our new estimator. Theoretical analysis shows that the extra gain achieved by our method over the linear MMSE estimator grows according to the rule of O($\log_{10}M$), while its computational complexity is linearly scalable to the number of antennas $M$. Numerical simulations also validate the theoretical results. Our new method substantially extends the accuracy-complexity region and constitutes a promising channel estimation solution to the emerging massive MIMO communications.

Knowledge and Data Dual-Driven Channel Estimation and Feedback for Ultra-Massive MIMO Systems under Hybrid Field Beam Squint Effect

Acquiring accurate channel state information (CSI) at an access point (AP) is challenging for wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) ultra-massive multiple-input and multiple-output (UMMIMO) systems, due to the high-dimensional channel matrices, hybrid near- and far- field channel feature, beam squint effects, and imperfect hardware constraints, such as low-resolution analog-to-digital converters, and in-phase and quadrature imbalance. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient downlink channel estimation (CE) and CSI feedback approach based on knowledge and data dual-driven deep learning (DL) networks. Specifically, we first propose a data-driven residual neural network de-quantizer (ResNet-DQ) to pre-process the received pilot signals at user equipment (UEs), where the noise and distortion brought by imperfect hardware can be mitigated. A knowledge-driven generalized multiple measurement vector learned approximate message passing (GMMV-LAMP) network is then developed to jointly estimate the channels by exploiting the approximately same physical angle shared by different subcarriers. In particular, two wideband redundant dictionaries (WRDs) are proposed such that the measurement matrices of the GMMV-LAMP network can accommodate the far-field and near-field beam squint effect, respectively. Finally, we propose an encoder at the UEs and a decoder at the AP by a data-driven CSI residual network (CSI-ResNet) to compress the CSI matrix into a low-dimensional quantized bit vector for feedback, thereby reducing the feedback overhead substantially. Simulation results show that the proposed knowledge and data dual-driven approach outperforms conventional downlink CE and CSI feedback methods, especially in the case of low signal-to-noise ratios.

Block-Sparse Tensor Recovery

This work explores the fundamental problem of the recoverability of a sparse tensor being reconstructed from its compressed embodiment. We present a generalized model of block-sparse tensor recovery as a theoretical foundation, where concepts measuring holistic mutual incoherence property (MIP) of the measurement matrix set are defined. A representative algorithm based on the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) framework, called tensor generalized block OMP (T-GBOMP), is applied to the theoretical framework elaborated for analyzing both noiseless and noisy recovery conditions. Specifically, we present the exact recovery condition (ERC) and sufficient conditions for establishing it with consideration of different degrees of restriction. Reliable reconstruction conditions, in terms of the residual convergence, the estimated error and the signal-to-noise ratio bound, are established to reveal the computable theoretical interpretability based on the newly defined MIP, which we introduce. The flexibility of tensor recovery is highlighted, i.e., the reliable recovery can be guaranteed by optimizing MIP of the measurement matrix set. Analytical comparisons demonstrate that the theoretical results developed are tighter and less restrictive than the existing ones (if any). Further discussions provide tensor extensions for several classic greedy algorithms, indicating that the sophisticated results derived are universal and applicable to all these tensorized variants.

DomainForensics: Exposing Face Forgery across Domains via Bi-directional Adaptation

Recent DeepFake detection methods have shown excellent performance on public datasets but are significantly degraded on new forgeries. Solving this problem is important, as new forgeries emerge daily with the continuously evolving generative techniques. Many efforts have been made for this issue by seeking the commonly existing traces empirically on data level. In this paper, we rethink this problem and propose a new solution from the unsupervised domain adaptation perspective. Our solution, called DomainForensics, aims to transfer the forgery knowledge from known forgeries to new forgeries. Unlike recent efforts, our solution does not focus on data view but on learning strategies of DeepFake detectors to capture the knowledge of new forgeries through the alignment of domain discrepancies. In particular, unlike the general domain adaptation methods which consider the knowledge transfer in the semantic class category, thus having limited application, our approach captures the subtle forgery traces. We describe a new bi-directional adaptation strategy dedicated to capturing the forgery knowledge across domains. Specifically, our strategy considers both forward and backward adaptation, to transfer the forgery knowledge from the source domain to the target domain in forward adaptation and then reverse the adaptation from the target domain to the source domain in backward adaptation. In forward adaptation, we perform supervised training for the DeepFake detector in the source domain and jointly employ adversarial feature adaptation to transfer the ability to detect manipulated faces from known forgeries to new forgeries. In backward adaptation, we further improve the knowledge transfer by coupling adversarial adaptation with self-distillation on new forgeries. This enables the detector to expose new forgery features from unlabeled data and avoid forgetting the known knowledge of known...