Design and Optimization of Cooperative Sensing With Limited Backhaul Capacity

This paper introduces a cooperative sensing framework designed for integrated sensing and communication cellular networks. The framework comprises one base station (BS) functioning as the sensing transmitter, while several nearby BSs act as sensing receivers. The primary objective is to facilitate cooperative target localization by enabling each receiver to share specific information with a fusion center (FC) over a limited capacity backhaul link. To achieve this goal, we propose an advanced cooperative sensing design that enhances the communication process between the receivers and the FC. Each receiver independently estimates the time delay and the reflecting coefficient associated with the reflected path from the target. Subsequently, each receiver transmits the estimated values and the received signal samples centered around the estimated time delay to the FC. To efficiently quantize the signal samples, a Karhunen-Lo\`eve Transform coding scheme is employed. Furthermore, an optimization problem is formulated to allocate backhaul resources for quantizing different samples, improving target localization. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed advanced design and demonstrate its superiority over a baseline design, where only the locally estimated values are transmitted from each receiver to the FC.

SpikeMba: Multi-Modal Spiking Saliency Mamba for Temporal Video Grounding

Temporal video grounding (TVG) is a critical task in video content understanding. Despite significant advancements, existing methods often limit in capturing the fine-grained relationships between multimodal inputs and the high computational costs with processing long video sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel SpikeMba: multi-modal spiking saliency mamba for temporal video grounding. In our work, we integrate the Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and state space models (SSMs) to capture the fine-grained relationships of multimodal features effectively. Specifically, we introduce the relevant slots to enhance the model's memory capabilities, enabling a deeper contextual understanding of video sequences. The contextual moment reasoner leverages these slots to maintain a balance between contextual information preservation and semantic relevance exploration. Simultaneously, the spiking saliency detector capitalizes on the unique properties of SNNs to accurately locate salient proposals. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SpikeMba, which consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across mainstream benchmarks.

MIntRec2.0: A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Intent Recognition and Out-of-scope Detection in Conversations

Multimodal intent recognition poses significant challenges, requiring the incorporation of non-verbal modalities from real-world contexts to enhance the comprehension of human intentions. Existing benchmark datasets are limited in scale and suffer from difficulties in handling out-of-scope samples that arise in multi-turn conversational interactions. We introduce MIntRec2.0, a large-scale benchmark dataset for multimodal intent recognition in multi-party conversations. It contains 1,245 dialogues with 15,040 samples, each annotated within a new intent taxonomy of 30 fine-grained classes. Besides 9,304 in-scope samples, it also includes 5,736 out-of-scope samples appearing in multi-turn contexts, which naturally occur in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive information on the speakers in each utterance, enriching its utility for multi-party conversational research. We establish a general framework supporting the organization of single-turn and multi-turn dialogue data, modality feature extraction, multimodal fusion, as well as in-scope classification and out-of-scope detection. Evaluation benchmarks are built using classic multimodal fusion methods, ChatGPT, and human evaluators. While existing methods incorporating nonverbal information yield improvements, effectively leveraging context information and detecting out-of-scope samples remains a substantial challenge. Notably, large language models exhibit a significant performance gap compared to humans, highlighting the limitations of machine learning methods in the cognitive intent understanding task. We believe that MIntRec2.0 will serve as a valuable resource, providing a pioneering foundation for research in human-machine conversational interactions, and significantly facilitating related applications. The full dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/thuiar/MIntRec2.0.

Probability-based Distance Estimation Model for 3D DV-Hop Localization in WSNs

Localization is one of the pivotal issues in wireless sensor network applications. In 3D localization studies, most algorithms focus on enhancing the location prediction process, lacking theoretical derivation of the detection distance of an anchor node at the varying hops, engenders a localization performance bottleneck. To address this issue, we propose a probability-based average distance estimation (PADE) model that utilizes the probability distribution of node distances detected by an anchor node. The aim is to mathematically derive the average distances of nodes detected by an anchor node at different hops. First, we develop a probability-based maximum distance estimation (PMDE) model to calculate the upper bound of the distance detected by an anchor node. Then, we present the PADE model, which relies on the upper bound obtained of the distance by the PMDE model. Finally, the obtained average distance is used to construct a distance loss function, and it is embedded with the traditional distance loss function into a multi-objective genetic algorithm to predict the locations of unknown nodes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in random and multimodal distributed sensor networks. The average localization accuracy is improved by 3.49\%-12.66\% and 3.99%-22.34%, respectively.

The style transformer with common knowledge optimization for image-text retrieval

Image-text retrieval which associates different modalities has drawn broad attention due to its excellent research value and broad real-world application. While the algorithms keep updated, most of them haven't taken the high-level semantic relationships ("style embedding") and common knowledge from multi-modalities into full consideration. To this end, we propose a novel style transformer network with common knowledge optimization (CKSTN) for image-text retrieval. The main module is the common knowledge adaptor (CKA) with both the style embedding extractor (SEE) and the common knowledge optimization (CKO) modules. Specifically, the SEE is designed to effectively extract high-level features. The CKO module is introduced to dynamically capture the latent concepts of common knowledge from different modalities. Together, they could assist in the formation of item representations in lightweight transformers. Besides, to get generalized temporal common knowledge, we propose a sequential update strategy to effectively integrate the features of different layers in SEE with previous common feature units. CKSTN outperforms the results of state-of-the-art methods in image-text retrieval on MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets. Moreover, CKSTN is more convenient and practical for the application of real scenes, due to the better performance and lower parameters.

X-ray Spectral Estimation using Dictionary Learning

As computational tools for X-ray computed tomography (CT) become more quantitatively accurate, knowledge of the source-detector spectral response is critical for quantitative system-independent reconstruction and material characterization capabilities. Directly measuring the spectral response of a CT system is hard, which motivates spectral estimation using transmission data obtained from a collection of known homogeneous objects. However, the associated inverse problem is ill-conditioned, making accurate estimation of the spectrum challenging, particularly in the absence of a close initial guess. In this paper, we describe a dictionary-based spectral estimation method that yields accurate results without the need for any initial estimate of the spectral response. Our method utilizes a MAP estimation framework that combines a physics-based forward model along with an $L_0$ sparsity constraint and a simplex constraint on the dictionary coefficients. Our method uses a greedy support selection method and a new pair-wise iterated coordinate descent method to compute the above estimate. We demonstrate that our dictionary-based method outperforms a state-of-the-art method as shown in a cross-validation experiment on four real datasets collected at beamline 8.3.2 of the Advanced Light Source (ALS).

Sparse-View CT Reconstruction using Recurrent Stacked Back Projection

Sparse-view CT reconstruction is important in a wide range of applications due to limitations on cost, acquisition time, or dosage. However, traditional direct reconstruction methods such as filtered back-projection (FBP) lead to low-quality reconstructions in the sub-Nyquist regime. In contrast, deep neural networks (DNNs) can produce high-quality reconstructions from sparse and noisy data, e.g. through post-processing of FBP reconstructions, as can model-based iterative reconstruction (MBIR), albeit at a higher computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a direct-reconstruction DNN method called Recurrent Stacked Back Projection (RSBP) that uses sequentially-acquired backprojections of individual views as input to a recurrent convolutional LSTM network. The SBP structure maintains all information in the sinogram, while the recurrent processing exploits the correlations between adjacent views and produces an updated reconstruction after each new view. We train our network on simulated data and test on both simulated and real data and demonstrate that RSBP outperforms both DNN post-processing of FBP images and basic MBIR, with a lower computational cost than MBIR.

Multilevel Stochastic Optimization for Imputation in Massive Medical Data Records

Exploration and analysis of massive datasets has recently generated increasing interest in the research and development communities. It has long been a recognized problem that many datasets contain significant levels of missing numerical data. We introduce a mathematically principled stochastic optimization imputation method based on the theory of Kriging. This is shown to be a powerful method for imputation. However, its computational effort and potential numerical instabilities produce costly and/or unreliable predictions, potentially limiting its use on large scale datasets. In this paper, we apply a recently developed multi-level stochastic optimization approach to the problem of imputation in massive medical records. The approach is based on computational applied mathematics techniques and is highly accurate. In particular, for the Best Linear Unbiased Predictor (BLUP) this multi-level formulation is exact, and is also significantly faster and more numerically stable. This permits practical application of Kriging methods to data imputation problems for massive datasets. We test this approach on data from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) data records, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Numerical results show the multi-level method significantly outperforms current approaches and is numerically robust. In particular, it has superior accuracy as compared with methods recommended in the recent report from HCUP on the important problem of missing data, which could lead to sub-optimal and poorly based funding policy decisions. In comparative benchmark tests it is shown that the multilevel stochastic method is significantly superior to recommended methods in the report, including Predictive Mean Matching (PMM) and Predicted Posterior Distribution (PPD), with up to 75% reductions in error.

A Survey on Fundamental Limits of Integrated Sensing and Communication

The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the sensing and communication share the same frequency band and hardware, has emerged as a key technology in future wireless systems. Early works on ISAC have been focused on the design, analysis and optimization of practical ISAC technologies for various ISAC systems. While this line of works are necessary, it is equally important to study the fundamental limits of ISAC in order to understand the gap between the current state-of-the-art technologies and the performance limits, and provide useful insights and guidance for the development of better ISAC technologies that can approach the performance limits. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey for the current research progress on the fundamental limits of ISAC. Particularly, we first propose a systematic classification method for both traditional radio sensing (such as radar sensing and wireless localization) and ISAC so that they can be naturally incorporated into a unified framework. Then we summarize the major performance metrics and bounds used in sensing, communications and ISAC, respectively. After that, we present the current research progresses on fundamental limits of each class of the traditional sensing and ISAC systems. Finally, the open problems and future research directions are discussed.