Personalized Federated Learning over non-IID Data for Indoor Localization

Localization and tracking of objects using data-driven methods is a popular topic due to the complexity in characterizing the physics of wireless channel propagation models. In these modeling approaches, data needs to be gathered to accurately train models, at the same time that user's privacy is maintained. An appealing scheme to cooperatively achieve these goals is known as Federated Learning (FL). A challenge in FL schemes is the presence of non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data, caused by unevenly exploration of different areas. In this paper, we consider the use of recent FL schemes to train a set of personalized models that are then optimally fused through Bayesian rules, which makes it appropriate in the context of indoor localization.

Location-aware Channel Estimation for RIS-aided mmWave MIMO Systems via Atomic Norm Minimization

In this paper, we propose a location-aware channel estimation based on the atomic norm minimization (ANM) for the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter-wave multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The beam training overhead at the base station (BS) is reduced by the direct beam steering towards the RIS with the location of the BS and the RIS. The RIS beamwidth adaptation is proposed to reduce the beam training overhead at the RIS, and also it enables accurate channel estimation by ensuring the user equipment receives all the multipath components from the RIS. After the beam training, the cascaded effective channel of the RIS-aided MIMO systems is estimated by ANM. Depending on whether the beam training overhead at the BS or at the RIS is reduced or not, the channel is represented as a linear combination of either 1D atoms, 2D atoms, or 3D atoms, and the ANM is applied to estimate the channel. Simulation results show that the proposed location-aware channel estimation via 2D ANM and 3D ANM achieves superior estimation accuracy to benchmarks.

Atomic Norm Minimization-based Low-Overhead Channel Estimation for RIS-aided MIMO Systems

Large beam training overhead has been considered as one of main issues in the channel estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided systems. In this paper, we propose an atomic norm minimization (ANM)-based low-overhead channel estimation for RIS-aided multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. When the number of beam training is reduced, some multipath signals may not be received during beam training, and this causes channel estimation failure. To solve this issue, the width of beams created by RIS is widened to capture all multipath signals. Pilot signals received during beam training are compiled into one matrix to define the atomic norm of the channel for RIS-aided MIMO systems. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other channel estimation algorithms.

Dirichlet process approach for radio-based simultaneous localization and mapping

Due to 5G millimeter wave (mmWave), spatial channel parameters are becoming highly resolvable, enabling accurate vehicle localization and mapping. We propose a novel method of radio simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with the Dirichlet process (DP). The DP, which can estimate the number of clusters as well as clustering, is capable of identifying the locations of reflectors by classifying signals when such 5G signals are reflected and received from various objects. We generate birth points using the measurements from 5G mmWave signals received by the vehicle and classify objects by clustering birth points generated over time. Each time we use the DP clustering method, we can map landmarks in the environment in challenging situations where false alarms exist in the measurements and change the cardinality of received signals. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme. By comparing the results with the SLAM based on the Rao-Blackwellized probability hypothesis density filter, we confirm a slight drop in SLAM performance, but as a result, we validate that it has a significant gain in computational complexity.

Cooperative mmWave PHD-SLAM with Moving Scatterers

Using the multiple-model (MM) probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter, millimeter wave (mmWave) radio simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in vehicular scenarios is susceptible to movements of objects, in particular vehicles driving in parallel with the ego vehicle. We propose and evaluate two countermeasures to track vehicle scatterers (VSs) in mmWave radio MM-PHD-SLAM. First, locally at each vehicle, we generate and treat the VS map PHD in the context of Bayesian recursion, and modify vehicle state correction with the VS map PHD. Second, in the global map fusion process at the base station, we average the VS map PHD and upload it with self-vehicle posterior density, compute fusion weights, and prune the target with low Gaussian weight in the context of arithmetic average-based map fusion. From simulation results, the proposed cooperative mmWave radio MM-PHD-SLAM filter is shown to outperform the previous filter in VS scenarios.

Test-Time Adaptation Toward Personalized Speech Enhancement: Zero-Shot Learning with Knowledge Distillation

In realistic speech enhancement settings for end-user devices, we often encounter only a few speakers and noise types that tend to reoccur in the specific acoustic environment. We propose a novel personalized speech enhancement method to adapt a compact denoising model to the test-time specificity. Our goal in this test-time adaptation is to utilize no clean speech target of the test speaker, thus fulfilling the requirement for zero-shot learning. To complement the lack of clean utterance, we employ the knowledge distillation framework. Instead of the missing clean utterance target, we distill the more advanced denoising results from an overly large teacher model, and use it as the pseudo target to train the small student model. This zero-shot learning procedure circumvents the process of collecting users' clean speech, a process that users are reluctant to comply due to privacy concerns and technical difficulty of recording clean voice. Experiments on various test-time conditions show that the proposed personalization method achieves significant performance gains compared to larger baseline networks trained from a large speaker- and noise-agnostic datasets. In addition, since the compact personalized models can outperform larger general-purpose models, we claim that the proposed method performs model compression with no loss of denoising performance.

Personalized Speech Enhancement through Self-Supervised Data Augmentation and Purification

Training personalized speech enhancement models is innately a no-shot learning problem due to privacy constraints and limited access to noise-free speech from the target user. If there is an abundance of unlabeled noisy speech from the test-time user, a personalized speech enhancement model can be trained using self-supervised learning. One straightforward approach to model personalization is to use the target speaker's noisy recordings as pseudo-sources. Then, a pseudo denoising model learns to remove injected training noises and recover the pseudo-sources. However, this approach is volatile as it depends on the quality of the pseudo-sources, which may be too noisy. As a remedy, we propose an improvement to the self-supervised approach through data purification. We first train an SNR predictor model to estimate the frame-by-frame SNR of the pseudo-sources. Then, the predictor's estimates are converted into weights which adjust the frame-by-frame contribution of the pseudo-sources towards training the personalized model. We empirically show that the proposed data purification step improves the usability of the speaker-specific noisy data in the context of personalized speech enhancement. Without relying on any clean speech recordings or speaker embeddings, our approach may be seen as privacy-preserving.

Deep Learning-based Beam Tracking for Millimeter-wave Communications under Mobility

In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based beam tracking method for millimeter-wave (mmWave)communications. Beam tracking is employed for transmitting the known symbols using the sounding beams and tracking time-varying channels to maintain a reliable communication link. When the pose of a user equipment (UE) device varies rapidly, the mmWave channels also tend to vary fast, which hinders seamless communication. Thus, models that can capture temporal behavior of mmWave channels caused by the motion of the device are required, to cope with this problem. Accordingly, we employa deep neural network to analyze the temporal structure and patterns underlying in the time-varying channels and the signals acquired by inertial sensors. We propose a model based on long short termmemory (LSTM) that predicts the distribution of the future channel behavior based on a sequence of input signals available at the UE. This channel distribution is used to 1) control the sounding beams adaptively for the future channel state and 2) update the channel estimate through the measurement update step under a sequential Bayesian estimation framework. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a significant performance gain over the conventional beam tracking methods under various mobility scenarios.

State-of-the-Art Machine Learning MRI Reconstruction in 2020: Results of the Second fastMRI Challenge

Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.