A2CI: A Cloud-based, Service-oriented Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure to Support Atmospheric Research

Big earth science data offers the scientific community great opportunities. Many more studies at large-scales, over long-terms and at high resolution can now be conducted using the rich information collected by remote sensing satellites, ground-based sensor networks, and even social media input. However, the hundreds of terabytes of information collected and compiled on an hourly basis by NASA and other government agencies present a significant challenge for atmospheric scientists seeking to improve the understanding of the Earth atmospheric system. These challenges include effective discovery, organization, analysis and visualization of large amounts of data. This paper reports the outcomes of an NSF-funded project that developed a geospatial cyberinfrastructure -- the A2CI (Atmospheric Analysis Cyberinfrastructure) -- to support atmospheric research. We first introduce the service-oriented system framework then describe in detail the implementation of the data discovery module, data management module, data integration module, data analysis and visualization modules following the cloud computing principles-Data-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. We demonstrate the graphic user interface by performing an analysis between Sea Surface Temperature and the intensity of tropical storms in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. We expect this work to contribute to the technical advancement of cyberinfrastructure research as well as to the development of an online, collaborative scientific analysis system for atmospheric science.

DNFS-VNE: Deep Neuro-Fuzzy System-Driven Virtual Network Embedding Algorithm

By decoupling substrate resources, network virtualization (NV) is a promising solution for meeting diverse demands and ensuring differentiated quality of service (QoS). In particular, virtual network embedding (VNE) is a critical enabling technology that enhances the flexibility and scalability of network deployment by addressing the coupling of Internet processes and services. However, in the existing works, the black-box nature of deep neural networks (DNNs) limits the analysis, development, and improvement of systems. In recent times, interpretable deep learning (DL) represented by deep neuro-fuzzy systems (DNFS) combined with fuzzy inference has shown promising interpretability to further exploit the hidden value in the data. Motivated by this, we propose a DNFS-based VNE algorithm that aims to provide an interpretable NV scheme. Specifically, data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used as fuzzy implication operators to compute the embedding probabilities of candidate substrate nodes through entailment operations. And, the identified fuzzy rule patterns are cached into the weights by forward computation and gradient back-propagation (BP). In addition, the fuzzy rule base is constructed based on Mamdani-type linguistic rules using linguistic labels. Finally, the effectiveness of evaluation indicators and fuzzy rules is verified by experiments.

Self-Enhancement Improves Text-Image Retrieval in Foundation Visual-Language Models

The emergence of cross-modal foundation models has introduced numerous approaches grounded in text-image retrieval. However, on some domain-specific retrieval tasks, these models fail to focus on the key attributes required. To address this issue, we propose a self-enhancement framework, A^{3}R, based on the CLIP-ViT/G-14, one of the largest cross-modal models. First, we perform an Attribute Augmentation strategy to enrich the textual description for fine-grained representation before model learning. Then, we propose an Adaption Re-ranking method to unify the representation space of textual query and candidate images and re-rank candidate images relying on the adapted query after model learning. The proposed framework is validated to achieve a salient improvement over the baseline and other teams' solutions in the cross-modal image retrieval track of the 1st foundation model challenge without introducing any additional samples. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/CapricornGuang/A3R}.

Integrated Sensing-Communication-Computation for Edge Artificial Intelligence

Edge artificial intelligence (AI) has been a promising solution towards 6G to empower a series of advanced techniques such as digital twin, holographic projection, semantic communications, and auto-driving, for achieving intelligence of everything. The performance of edge AI tasks, including edge learning and edge AI inference, depends on the quality of three highly coupled processes, i.e., sensing for data acquisition, computation for information extraction, and communication for information transmission. However, these three modules need to compete for network resources for enhancing their own quality-of-services. To this end, integrated sensing-communication-computation (ISCC) is of paramount significance for improving resource utilization as well as achieving the customized goals of edge AI tasks. By investigating the interplay among the three modules, this article presents various kinds of ISCC schemes for federated edge learning tasks and edge AI inference tasks in both application and physical layers.

Hybrid Driven Learning for Channel Estimation in Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Millimeter Wave Communications

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) have been proposed in millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) systems to achieve both coverage and capacity enhancement, where the design of hybrid precoders, combiners, and the IRS typically relies on channel state information. In this paper, we address the problem of uplink wideband channel estimation for IRS aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems with hybrid architectures. Combining the structure of model driven and data driven deep learning approaches, a hybrid driven learning architecture is devised for joint estimation and learning the properties of the channels. For a passive IRS aided system, we propose a residual learned approximate message passing as a model driven network. A denoising and attention network in the data driven network is used to jointly learn spatial and frequency features. Furthermore, we design a flexible hybrid driven network in a hybrid passive and active IRS aided system. Specifically, the depthwise separable convolution is applied to the data driven network, leading to less network complexity and fewer parameters at the IRS side. Numerical results indicate that in both systems, the proposed hybrid driven channel estimation methods significantly outperform existing deep learning-based schemes and effectively reduce the pilot overhead by about 60% in IRS aided systems.

Decom--CAM: Tell Me What You See, In Details! Feature-Level Interpretation via Decomposition Class Activation Map

Interpretation of deep learning remains a very challenging problem. Although the Class Activation Map (CAM) is widely used to interpret deep model predictions by highlighting object location, it fails to provide insight into the salient features used by the model to make decisions. Furthermore, existing evaluation protocols often overlook the correlation between interpretability performance and the model's decision quality, which presents a more fundamental issue. This paper proposes a new two-stage interpretability method called the Decomposition Class Activation Map (Decom-CAM), which offers a feature-level interpretation of the model's prediction. Decom-CAM decomposes intermediate activation maps into orthogonal features using singular value decomposition and generates saliency maps by integrating them. The orthogonality of features enables CAM to capture local features and can be used to pinpoint semantic components such as eyes, noses, and faces in the input image, making it more beneficial for deep model interpretation. To ensure a comprehensive comparison, we introduce a new evaluation protocol by dividing the dataset into subsets based on classification accuracy results and evaluating the interpretability performance on each subset separately. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed Decom-CAM outperforms current state-of-the-art methods significantly by generating more precise saliency maps across all levels of classification accuracy. Combined with our feature-level interpretability approach, this paper could pave the way for a new direction for understanding the decision-making process of deep neural networks.

Asymptotic Average Mutual Information Over Finite Input Mixture Gamma Distributed Channels

This letter establishes a unified analytical framework to study the asymptotic average mutual information (AMI) of mixture gamma (MG) distributed fading channels driven by finite input signals in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. It is found that the AMI converges to some constant as the average SNR increases and its rate of convergence (ROC) is determined by the coding gain and diversity order. Moreover, the derived results are used to investigate the asymptotic optimal power allocation policy of a bank of parallel fading channels having finite inputs. It is suggested that in the high SNR region, the sub-channel with a lower coding gain or diversity order should be allocated with more power. Finally, numerical results are provided to collaborate the theoretical analyses.

On the Ergodic Capacity of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-Aided MIMO Channels

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a promising technique to enhance the system spectral efficiency. This letter investigates the ergodic channel capacity (ECC) of an RIS-aided multiple-input multiple-output channel under the assumption that the transmitter-RIS, RIS-receiver, and transmitter-receiver channels contain deterministic line-of-sight paths. Novel expressions are derived to characterize the upper and lower bounds of the ECC. To unveil more system insights, asymptotic analyses are performed to the system ECC in the limit of large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and number of reflecting elements (REs). Theoretical analyses suggest that the RIS's deployment can shape the ECC curve by influencing its high-SNR power offset and the ECC can get improved by increasing the number of REs.

Weakly Supervised Person Re-Identification

In the conventional person re-id setting, it is assumed that the labeled images are the person images within the bounding box for each individual; this labeling across multiple nonoverlapping camera views from raw video surveillance is costly and time-consuming. To overcome this difficulty, we consider weakly supervised person re-id modeling. The weak setting refers to matching a target person with an untrimmed gallery video where we only know that the identity appears in the video without the requirement of annotating the identity in any frame of the video during the training procedure. Hence, for a video, there could be multiple video-level labels. We cast this weakly supervised person re-id challenge into a multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) problem. In particular, we develop a Cross-View MIML (CV-MIML) method that is able to explore potential intraclass person images from all the camera views by incorporating the intra-bag alignment and the cross-view bag alignment. Finally, the CV-MIML method is embedded into an existing deep neural network for developing the Deep Cross-View MIML (Deep CV-MIML) model. We have performed extensive experiments to show the feasibility of the proposed weakly supervised setting and verify the effectiveness of our method compared to related methods on four weakly labeled datasets.