Multi-user beamforming in RIS-aided communications and experimental validations

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology for future wireless communications due to its capability of optimizing the propagation environments. Nevertheless, in literature, there are few prototypes serving multiple users. In this paper, we propose a whole flow of channel estimation and beamforming design for RIS, and set up an RIS-aided multi-user system for experimental validations. Specifically, we combine a channel sparsification step with generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm, and propose to generate the measurement matrix as Rademacher distribution to obtain the channel state information (CSI). To generate the reflection coefficients with the aim of maximizing the spectral efficiency, we propose a quadratic transform-based low-rank multi-user beamforming (QTLM) algorithm. Our proposed algorithms exploit the sparsity and low-rank properties of the channel, which has the advantages of light calculation and fast convergence. Based on the universal software radio peripheral devices, we built a complete testbed working at 5.8GHz and implemented all the proposed algorithms to verify the possibility of RIS assisting multi-user systems. Experimental results show that the system has obtained an average spectral efficiency increase of 13.48bps/Hz, with respective received power gains of 26.6dB and 17.5dB for two users, compared with the case when RIS is powered-off.

How Sparse Can We Prune A Deep Network: A Geometric Viewpoint

Overparameterization constitutes one of the most significant hallmarks of deep neural networks. Though it can offer the advantage of outstanding generalization performance, it meanwhile imposes substantial storage burden, thus necessitating the study of network pruning. A natural and fundamental question is: How sparse can we prune a deep network (with almost no hurt on the performance)? To address this problem, in this work we take a first principles approach, specifically, by merely enforcing the sparsity constraint on the original loss function, we're able to characterize the sharp phase transition point of pruning ratio, which corresponds to the boundary between the feasible and the infeasible, from the perspective of high-dimensional geometry. It turns out that the phase transition point of pruning ratio equals the squared Gaussian width of some convex body resulting from the $l_1$-regularized loss function, normalized by the original dimension of parameters. As a byproduct, we provide a novel network pruning algorithm which is essentially a global one-shot pruning one. Furthermore, we provide efficient countermeasures to address the challenges in computing the involved Gaussian width, including the spectrum estimation of a large-scale Hessian matrix and dealing with the non-definite positiveness of a Hessian matrix. It is demonstrated that the predicted pruning ratio threshold coincides very well with the actual value obtained from the experiments and our proposed pruning algorithm can achieve competitive or even better performance than the existing pruning algorithms. All codes are available at: https://github.com/QiaozheZhang/Global-One-shot-Pruning

Multi-level Multiple Instance Learning with Transformer for Whole Slide Image Classification

Whole slide image (WSI) refers to a type of high-resolution scanned tissue image, which is extensively employed in computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD). The extremely high resolution and limited availability of region-level annotations make it challenging to employ deep learning methods for WSI-based digital diagnosis. Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to address the weak annotation problem, while Transformer has shown great success in the field of visual tasks. The combination of both should provide new insights for deep learning based image diagnosis. However, due to the limitations of single-level MIL and the attention mechanism's constraints on sequence length, directly applying Transformer to WSI-based MIL tasks is not practical. To tackle this issue, we propose a Multi-level MIL with Transformer (MMIL-Transformer) approach. By introducing a hierarchical structure to MIL, this approach enables efficient handling of MIL tasks that involve a large number of instances. To validate its effectiveness, we conducted a set of experiments on WSIs classification task, where MMIL-Transformer demonstrate superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our proposed approach achieves test AUC 94.74% and test accuracy 93.41% on CAMELYON16 dataset, test AUC 99.04% and test accuracy 94.37% on TCGA-NSCLC dataset, respectively. All code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/MMIL-Transformer