The Rise of UAV Fleet Technologies for Emergency Wireless Communications in Harsh Environments

For unforeseen emergencies, such as natural disasters and pandemic events, it is highly demanded to cope with the explosive growth of mobile data traffic in extremely critical environments. An Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleet is an effective way to facilitate the Emergency wireless COmmunication NETwork (EcoNet). In this article, a MUlti-tier Heterogeneous UAV Network (MuHun), which is with different UAV fleets in different altitudes, is proposed to flexibly serve various emergencies. We refresh the key performance indicators of full coverage, network capacity, low latency, and energy efficiency in harsh environments. Then, we present the special challenges regarding shadowing-dominated complex channel model, energy supply limited short-endurance, various communication mechanisms coexistence, and communication island for underground users in UAV-based EcoNet, followed by the MuHun-based EcoNet architecture and its advantages. Furthermore, some potential solutions such as the new hybrid-channel adapted resource allocation, reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted UAV communications, competitive heterogenous-networks, and magnetic induction based air-to-ground/underground communications are discussed to effectively achieve full coverage, high capacity, high energy efficiency, and diverse qualities of services for EcoNets in harsh environments.

Resource Allocation for 5G-UAV Based Emergency Wireless Communications

For unforeseen natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, etc., the traditional communication infrastructure is unavailable or seriously disrupted along with persistent secondary disasters. Under such circumstances, it is highly demanded to deploy emergency wireless communication (EWC) networks to restore connectivity in accident/incident areas. The emerging fifth-generation (5G)/beyond-5G (B5G) wireless communication system, like unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted networks and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) based communication systems, are expected to be designed or re-farmed for supporting temporary high quality communications in post-disaster areas. However, the channel characteristics of post-disaster areas quickly change as the secondary disaster resulted topographical changes, imposing new but critical challenges for EWC networks. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous $\mathcal{F}$ composite fading channel model for EWC networks which accurately models and characterizes the composite fading channel with reflectors, path-loss exponent, fading, and shadowing parameters in 5G-UAV based EWC networks. Based on the model, we develop the optimal power allocation scheme with the simple closed-form expression and the numerical results based optimal joint bandwidth-power allocation scheme. We derive the corresponding capacities and compare the energy efficiency between IRS and traditional relay based 5G-UAVs. Numerical results show that the new heterogeneous Fisher-Snedecor $\mathcal{F}$ composite fading channel adapted resource allocation schemes can achieve higher capacity and energy efficiency than those of traditional channel model adapted resource allocation schemes, thus providing better communications service for post-disaster areas.

Virtual Full-Duplex Wireless Communications with Zero-Interval Modulation and Sampling

In this paper, we propose a virtual full-duplex (VFD) technique with zero-interval modulation and sampling (ZIMS), where two half-duplex (HD) transceivers can simultaneously transmit signals and each transceiver can effectively receive the desired information. In ZIMS-VFD, the transceiver inserts a zero-interval for each symbol in the transmit signal and provides self-interference (SI)-free intervals for itself. Meanwhile, it samples the receive signal in the provided SI-free intervals and restores the desired symbols. Based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), we formulate the system model and show the transmit signal structure. Then, we give the transceiver design for single input single output (SISO) ZIMS-VFD and extend it to multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communications. Numerical results verify our theoretical analyses and show that ZIMS-VFD can effectively increase the capacity and approach the FD without SI.

Enhancing LLM's Cognition via Structurization

When reading long-form text, human cognition is complex and structurized. While large language models (LLMs) process input contexts through a causal and sequential perspective, this approach can potentially limit their ability to handle intricate and complex inputs effectively. To enhance LLM's cognition capability, this paper presents a novel concept of context structurization. Specifically, we transform the plain, unordered contextual sentences into well-ordered and hierarchically structurized elements. By doing so, LLMs can better grasp intricate and extended contexts through precise attention and information-seeking along the organized structures. Extensive evaluations are conducted across various model architectures and sizes (including several 7B- to 72B-size auto-regressive LLMs as well as BERT-like masking models) on a diverse set of NLP tasks (e.g., context-based question-answering, exhaustive hallucination evaluation, and passage-level dense retrieval). Empirical results show consistent and significant performance gains afforded by a single-round structurization. In particular, we boost a 72B-parameter open-source model to achieve comparable performance against GPT-3.5-Turbo as the hallucination evaluator. Besides, we show the feasibility of distilling advanced LLMs' language processing abilities to a smaller yet effective StruXGPT-7B to execute structurization, addressing the practicality of our approach. Code will be made public soon.

Norface: Improving Facial Expression Analysis by Identity Normalization

Facial Expression Analysis remains a challenging task due to unexpected task-irrelevant noise, such as identity, head pose, and background. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework, called Norface, that is unified for both Action Unit (AU) analysis and Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) tasks. Norface consists of a normalization network and a classification network. First, the carefully designed normalization network struggles to directly remove the above task-irrelevant noise, by maintaining facial expression consistency but normalizing all original images to a common identity with consistent pose, and background. Then, these additional normalized images are fed into the classification network. Due to consistent identity and other factors (e.g. head pose, background, etc.), the normalized images enable the classification network to extract useful expression information more effectively. Additionally, the classification network incorporates a Mixture of Experts to refine the latent representation, including handling the input of facial representations and the output of multiple (AU or emotion) labels. Extensive experiments validate the carefully designed framework with the insight of identity normalization. The proposed method outperforms existing SOTA methods in multiple facial expression analysis tasks, including AU detection, AU intensity estimation, and FER tasks, as well as their cross-dataset tasks. For the normalized datasets and code please visit {https://norface-fea.github.io/}.

EarthMarker: Visual Prompt Learning for Region-level and Point-level Remote Sensing Imagery Comprehension

Recent advances in visual prompting in the natural image area have allowed users to interact with artificial intelligence (AI) tools through various visual marks such as box, point, and free-form shapes. However, due to the significant difference between the natural and remote sensing (RS) images, existing visual prompting models face challenges in RS scenarios. Moreover, RS MLLMs mainly focus on interpreting image-level RS data and only support interaction with language instruction, restricting flexibility applications in the real world. To address those limitations, the first visual prompting model named EarthMarker is proposed, which excels in image-level, region-level, and point-level RS imagery interpretation. Specifically, the visual prompts alongside images and text instruction input into the large language model (LLM), adapt models toward specific predictions and tasks. Subsequently, a sharing visual encoding method is introduced to refine multi-scale image features and visual prompt information uniformly. Furthermore, to endow the EarthMarker with versatile multi-granularity visual perception abilities, the cross-domain phased learning strategy is developed, and the disjoint parameters are optimized in a lightweight manner by leveraging both the natural and RS domain-specific knowledge. In addition, to tackle the lack of RS visual prompting data, a dataset named RSVP featuring multi-modal fine-grained visual prompting instruction is constructed. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the proposed EarthMarker's competitive performance, representing a significant advance in multi-granularity RS imagery interpretation under the visual prompting learning framework.

Joint Information and Jamming Beamforming for Securing IoT Networks With Rate-Splitting

The goal of this paper is to address the physical layer (PHY) security problem for multi-user multi-input single-output (MU-MISO) Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the presence of passive eavesdroppers (Eves). To this end, we propose an artificial noise (AN)-aided rate-splitting (RS)-based secure beamforming scheme. Our design considers the dual use of common messages and places the research emphasis on hiding the private messages for secure communication. In particular, leveraging AN-aided RS-based beamforming, we aim to maximize the focused secrecy sum-rate (F-SSR) by jointly designing transmit information and AN beamforming while satisfying the desired received constraints for the private messages at IoT devices (IoDs), and per-antenna transmit power constraint at base station. Then, we proposed a two-stage algorithm to iteratively find the optimal solution. By transforming non-convex terms into linear terms, we first reformulate the original problem as a convex program. Next, we recast the optimization problem to an unconstrained problem to obtain the global optimal solutions. Utilizing the duality framework, we further develop an efficient algorithm based on a barrier interior point method to solve the reformulated problem. Simulation results validate the superior performance of our proposed schemes.

Robust Multi-Beam Secure mmWave Wireless Communication for Hybrid Wiretapping Systems

In this paper, we consider the physical layer (PHY) security problem for hybrid wiretapping wireless systems in millimeter wave transmission, where active eavesdroppers (AEs) and passive eavesdroppers (PEs) coexist to intercept the confidential messages and emit jamming signals. To achieve secure and reliable transmission, we propose an artificial noise (AN)-aided robust multi-beam array transceiver scheme. Leveraging beamforming, we aim to minimize transmit power by jointly designing the information and AN beamforming, while satisfying valid reception for legitimate users (LUs), per-antenna power constraints for transmitter, as well as all interception power constraints for eavesdroppers (Eves). In particular, the interception power formulation is taken into account for protecting the information against hybrid Eves with imperfect AE channel state information (CSI) and no PE CSI. In light of the intractability of the problem, we reformulate the considered problem by replacing non-convex constraints with tractable forms. Afterwards, a two-stage algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal solution. Additionally, we design the received beamforming weights by means of minimum variance distortionless response, such that the jamming caused by AEs can be effectively suppressed. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme in terms of energy efficiency and security.

Mode Hopping for Anti-Jamming in Radio Vortex Wireless Communications

Frequency hopping (FH) has been widely used as a powerful technique for antijamming in wireless communications. However, as the wireless spectrum is becoming more and more crowded, it is very difficult to achieve efficient antijamming results with FH-based schemes. Orbital angular momentum (OAM), which provides the new angular/mode dimension for wireless communications, offers an intriguing way for antijamming. In this paper, we propose to use the orthogonality of OAM-modes for antijamming in wireless communications. In particular, we propose the mode hopping (MH) scheme for antijamming within the narrow frequency band. We derive the closed-form expression of bit error rate (BER) for multiple users scenario with our developed MH scheme. Our developed MH scheme can achieve the same antijamming results within the narrow frequency band as compared with the conventional wideband FH scheme. Furthermore, we propose mode-frequency hopping (MFH) scheme, which jointly uses our developed MH scheme and the conventional FH scheme to further decrease the BER for wireless communication. Numerical results are presented to show that the BER of our developed MH scheme within the narrow frequency band is the same with that of the conventional wideband FH scheme. Moreover, the BER of our developed MFH schemes is much smaller than that of the conventional FH schemes for wireless communications.

Joint OAM Multiplexing and OFDM in Sparse Multipath Environments

The emerging orbital angular momentum (OAM) based wireless communication is expected to be a high spectrum-efficiency communication paradigm to solve the growing transmission data rate and limited bandwidth problem. Academic researchers mainly concentrate on the OAM-based line-of-sight (LoS) communications. However, there exist some surroundings around the transceiver in most practical wireless communication scenarios, thus forming multipath transmission. In this paper, a hybrid orthogonal division multiplexing (HODM) scheme by using OAM multiplexing and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in conjunction is proposed to achieve high-capacity wireless communications in sparse multipath environments, where the scatterers are sparse. We first build the OAM-based wireless channel in a LoS path and several reflection paths combined sparse multipath environments. We concentrate on less than or equal to three-time reflection paths because of the severe energy attenuation. The phase difference among the channel amplitude gains of the LoS and reflection paths, which is caused by the reflection paths, makes it difficult to decompose the OAM signals. We propose the phase difference compensation to handle this problem and then calculate the corresponding capacity in radio vortex wireless communications. Numerical results illustrate that the capacity of wireless communications by using our proposed HODM scheme can be drastically increased in sparse multipath environments.