Clustered cell-free networking is a promising paradigm for future mobile communication systems, which dynamically partitions the whole network into multiple small subnetworks to avoid the cell-edge problem in cellular networks. To optimize network partition, previous approaches primarily relied on heuristics and relaxation techniques. Recent studies leveraged graph partitioning theory to address this problem by representing the wireless network as an undirected bipartite graph. In this paper, we focus on the load balanced clustered cell-free networking problem with the objective of maximizing the minimum sum rate among all subnetworks. In contrast to previous works, we propose a new directed graph model and equivalently transform the problem into a sequence of min-max K-cut problems. Subsequently, a streaming balanced assignment algorithm is proposed to solve min-max K-cut problems. Building upon this, we develop a sequential min-max K-cut approach with theoretical guarantees. Simulation results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing algorithms by significantly improving the minimum subnetwork sum rate, thereby effectively balancing the loads of subnetworks.

The fast development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents provides a promising way for the realization of intelligent and customized wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a Wireless Multi-Agent System (WMAS), which can provide intelligent and customized services for different user equipment (UEs). Note that orchestrating multiple agents carries the risk of malfunction, and multi-agent conversations may fall into infinite loops. It is thus crucial to design a conversation topology for WMAS that enables agents to complete UE task requests with high accuracy and low conversation overhead. To address this issue, we model the multi-agent conversation topology as a directed acyclic graph and propose a reinforcement learning- based algorithm to optimize the adjacency matrix of this graph. As such, WMAS is capable of generating and self-optimizing multi-agent conversation topologies, enabling agents to effectively and collaboratively handle a variety of task requests from UEs. Simulation results across various task types demonstrate that WMAS can achieve higher task performance and lower conversation overhead compared to existing multi-agent systems. These results validate the potential of WMAS to enhance the intelligence of future wireless networks.

In this paper, we propose a novel function named Rate Distortion-in-Distortion (RDD) function as an extension of the classical rate-distortion (RD) function, where the expected distortion constraint is replaced by a Gromov-type distortion. This distortion, integral to the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance, effectively defines the similarity in spaces of possibly different dimensions even without a direct metric between them. While the RDD function qualifies as an informational RD function, encoding theorems substantiate its status as an operational RD function, thereby underscoring its potential applicability in real-world source coding. Due to the high computational complexity associated with Gromov-type distortion, in general, the RDD function cannot be evaluated analytically. Consequently, we develop an alternating mirror descent algorithm that significantly reduces computational complexity by employing decomposition, linearization, and relaxation techniques. Numerical results on classical sources and different grids demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm. By exploring the relationship between the RDD function and the RD function, we suggest that the RDD function may have potential applications in future scenarios.

The error exponent in lossy source coding characterizes the asymptotic decay rate of error probability with respect to blocklength. The Marton’s error exponent provides the theoretically optimal bound on this rate. However, computation methods of the Marton’s error exponent remain underdeveloped due to its formulation as a non-convex optimization problem with limited efficient solvers. While a recent grid search algorithm can compute its inverse function, it incurs prohibitive computational costs from two-dimensional brute-force parameter grid searches. This paper proposes a composite maximization approach that effectively handles both Marton’s error exponent and its inverse function. Through a constraint decoupling technique, the resulting problem formulations admit efficient solvers driven by an alternating maximization algorithm. By fixing one parameter via a one-dimensional line search, the remaining subproblem becomes convex and can be efficiently solved by alternating variable updates, thereby significantly reducing search complexity. Therefore, the global convergence of the algorithm can be guaranteed. Numerical experiments for simple sources and the Ahlswede’s counterexample, demonstrates the superior efficiency of our algorithm in contrast to existing methods.

Information Bottleneck (IB) is a technique to extract information about one target random variable through another relevant random variable. This technique has garnered significant interest due to its broad applications in information theory and deep learning. Hence, there is a strong motivation to develop efficient numerical methods with high precision and theoretical convergence guarantees. In this paper, we propose a semi-relaxed IB model, where the Markov chain and transition probability condition are relaxed from the relevance-compression function. Based on the proposed model, we develop an algorithm, which recovers the relaxed constraints and involves only closed-form iterations. Specifically, the algorithm is obtained by analyzing the Lagrangian of the relaxed model with alternating minimization in each direction. The convergence property of the proposed algorithm is theoretically guaranteed through descent estimation and Pinsker's inequality. Numerical experiments across classical and discrete distributions corroborate the analysis. Moreover, our proposed algorithm demonstrates notable advantages in terms of computational efficiency, evidenced by significantly reduced run times compared to existing methods with comparable accuracy.

Determining the network capacity, which is a crucial performance metric of wireless systems, is becoming increasingly important with the growing need for future ultra-dense networks. There have been a multitude of works applying random matrix theory (RMT) to capacity analysis. However, most of them approximate the interference as noise and rely on the selection of hyper-parameters, and thus impairs the accuracy. In this paper, we first propose a double splitting model to decompose the capacity into four parts, two of which can be analytically calculated, while the other two are significantly smaller and thus have minimal impact on the overall accuracy. This helps to avoid the approximations of previous methods, simplifying the calculation of capacity and improving the numerical stability. Second, to compute the aforementioned smaller parts, we generalize the moment passing method to more scenarios, and avoid the hyper-parameter selection that impairs the robustness. We also derive the recursive expressions of the moments of any order, enabling flexible trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy. Numerical experiments demonstrate the high efficiency and accuracy of our methods.

Clustered cell-free networking is a promising networking scheme for future mobile communications systems where the base-stations (BSs) are densely deployed. Despite its great importance, finding the optimal networking strategy aiming at maximizing the sum rate of users in the network is a non-convex combinatorial optimization problem. Previous work relaxed the clustered cell-free networking problem into a graph min$K$-cut problem to solve it suboptimally. In this paper, we leverage optimization techniques to equivalently transform the original problem into a series of graph min$K$-cut problems with theoretical guarantee. It is worth mentioning that our approach is highly general, as it is applicable to various constraints, offering adaptability and flexibility to diverse practical networking scenarios. We apply this approach to three typical clustered cellfree networking problems. Simulation results show a consistent improvement of our approach compared to existing algorithms.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile networks is regarded as one of the most important scenarios for 6G. In 6G, a major objective is to realize the efficient transmission of task-relevant data. Then a key problem arises, how to design collaborative AI models for the device side and the network side, so that the transmitted data between the device and the network is efficient enough, which means the transmission overhead is low but the AI task result is accurate. In this paper, we propose the multi-link information bottleneck (ML-IB) scheme for such collaborative models design. We formulate our problem based on a novel performance metric, which can evaluate both task accuracy and transmission overhead. Then we introduce a quantizer that is adjustable in the quantization bit depth, amplitudes, and breakpoints. Given the infeasibility of calculating our proposed metric on high-dimensional data, we establish a variational upper bound for this metric. However, due to the incorporation of quantization, the closed form of the variational upper bound remains uncomputable. Hence, we employ the Log-Sum Inequality to derive an approximation and provide a theoretical guarantee. Based on this, we devise the quantized multi-link information bottleneck (QML-IB) algorithm for collaborative AI models generation. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our QML-IB algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Information bottleneck (IB) is a paradigm to extract information in one target random variable from another relevant random variable, which has aroused great interest due to its potential to explain deep neural networks in terms of information compression and prediction. Despite its great importance, finding the optimal bottleneck variable involves a difficult nonconvex optimization problem due to the nonconvexity of mutual information constraint. The Blahut-Arimoto algorithm and its variants provide an approach by considering its Lagrangian with fixed Lagrange multiplier. However, only the strictly concave IB curve can be fully obtained by the BA algorithm, which strongly limits its application in machine learning and related fields, as strict concavity cannot be guaranteed in those problems. To overcome the above difficulty, we derive an entropy regularized optimal transport (OT) model for IB problem from a posterior probability perspective. Correspondingly, we use the alternating optimization procedure and generalize the Sinkhorn algorithm to solve the above OT model. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach are demonstrated via numerical experiments.

In this paper, we propose a new framework named Communication Optimal Transport (CommOT) for computing the rate distortion (RD) function. This work is motivated by observing the fact that the transition law and the relative entropy in communication theory can be viewed as the transport plan and the regularized objective function in the optimal transport (OT) model. However, unlike in classical OT problems, the RD function only possesses one-side marginal distribution. Hence, to maintain the OT structure, we introduce slackness variables to fulfill the other-side marginal distribution and then propose a general framework (CommOT) for the RD function. The CommOT model is solved via the alternating optimization technique and the well-known Sinkhorn algorithm. In particular, the expected distortion threshold can be converted into finding the unique root of a one-dimensional monotonic function with only a few steps. Numerical experiments show that our proposed framework (CommOT) for solving the RD function with given distortion threshold is efficient and accurate.

Wireless network capacity can be regarded as the most important performance metric for wireless communication systems. With the fast development of wireless communication technology, future wireless systems will become more and more complicated. As a result, the channel gain matrix will become a large-dimensional random matrix, leading to an extremely high computational cost to obtain the capacity. In this paper, we propose a moment passing method (MPM) to realize the fast and accurate capacity estimation for future ultra-dense wireless systems. It can determine the capacity with quadratic complexity, which is optimal considering that the cost of a single matrix operation is not less than quadratic complexity. Moreover, it has high accuracy. The simulation results show that the estimation error of this method is below 2%. Finally, our method is highly general, as it is independent of the distributions of BSs and users, and the shape of network areas. More importantly, it can be applied not only to the conventional multi-user multiple input and multiple output (MU-MIMO) networks, but also to the capacity-centric networks designed for B5G/6G.

Mismatch capacity characterizes the highest information rate for a channel under a prescribed decoding metric, and is thus a highly relevant fundamental performance metric when dealing with many practically important communication scenarios. Compared with the frequently used generalized mutual information (GMI), the LM rate has been known as a tighter lower bound of the mismatch capacity. The computation of the LM rate,11To our best knowledge, the name LM rate first appeared in the reference [1]. The capital letter LM seems to be the abbreviation of Lower bound on the Mismatch capacity. however, has been a difficult task, due to the fact that the LM rate involves a maximization over a function of the channel input, which becomes challenging as the input alphabet size grows, and direct numerical methods (e.g., interior point methods) suffer from intensive memory and computational resource requirements. Noting that the computation of the LM rate can also be formulated as an entropy-based optimization problem with constraints, in this work, we transform the task into an optimal transport (OT) problem with an extra constraint. This allows us to efficiently and accurately accomplish our task by using the well-known Sinkhorn algorithm. Indeed, only a few iterations are required for convergence, due to the fact that the formulated problem does not contain additional regularization terms. Moreover, we convert the extra constraint into a root-finding procedure for a one-dimensional monotonic function. Numerical experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our OT approach to the computation of the LM rate.

The sixth generation (6G) era is envisioned to be a fully intelligent and autonomous era, with physical and digital lifestyles merged together. Future wireless network architectures should provide a solid support for such new lifestyles. A key problem thus arises that what kind of network architectures are suitable for 6G. In this paper, we propose a capacity-guaranteed network (CGN) architecture, which provides high capacity for wireless devices densely distributed everywhere, and ensures a superior scalability with low signaling overhead and computation complexity simultaneously. Our theorem proves that the essence of a CGN architecture is to decompose the whole network into non-overlapping clusters with equal cluster sum capacity. Simulation results reveal that in terms of the minimum cluster sum capacity, the proposed CGN can achieve at least 30% performance gain compared with existing base station clustering (BS-clustering) architectures. In addition, our theorem is sufficiently general and can be applied for networks with different distributions of BSs and users.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are regarded as one of the most promising techniques in the sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication networks. With the feature of smartly tuning the electromagnetic environment, RISs provide a possibility for ubiquitous and high-precision localization in 6G. However, proper system models for large indoor RIS-assisted networks and high-precision localization algorithms are still missing. In this paper, we propose a RIS-assisted downlink millimeter-wave (mmWave) indoor localization framework based on segment-by-segment far-field assumption. In addition, a brand new coarse-to-fine localization algorithm with low-complexity grid design is provided. Numerical results show that millimeter-level localization precision is achieved under the RIS-assisted indoor scenarios, which reveals that RIS can provide a solid support for accurate localization in the 6G era.

Information freshness, which is characterized by a new performance metric called age of information (AoI), significantly influences decision making in numerous applications. In wireless sensor networks, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely adopted for fresh data collection. The key to applying UAV lies in UAV trajectory planning. Considering several fixed waypoints in UAV trajectory, the trajectory planning is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, and is difficult to solve in practice. To well balance between the accuracy and efficiency, we propose an end-to-end AI-based framework in this paper to deal with the UAV trajectory planning within two stages. First, the hover positions of UAV and data transmission time are decided using a clustering module. Then, the AoI-minimal flight path is obtained through a neural trajectory solver. Compared with classic heuristic algorithms, the proposed AI-based framework achieves a smaller AoI with two orders of magnitude lower computational time. Besides, the proposed AI-based framework can be easily generalized to larger-scale scenarios (e.g., up to 2,000 sensor nodes) which cannot be solved by exact algorithms (e.g., dynamic programming) in a limited time. Moreover, the AI-based framework is comparable in accuracy with the commercial open-source solver Google OR-tools, but the efficiency is increased by 200%.

Data-driven approaches have recently emerged as promising remedies for communication system designs, which leverage deep learning techniques for automated development and optimization. In this paper, we revisit the designs of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless systems and investigate the end-to-end learning for MIMO systems with temporal correlations. Our objective is to develop a MIMO transceiver to improve the communication performance by making fully use of the available temporal information. Although the end-to-end learning framework has been applied to various communication systems, existing designs largely rely on memoryless autoencoders (AEs) and overlook the time dependency. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel learning-based MIMO transceiver, namely, the TC-MIMONet, which extends the conventional memoryless AE-based transceivers by customizing two neural network components with memory. In particular, a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based CSI predictor is adopted at the transmitter, while a two-timescale LSTM-based decoder is developed for the receiver. Simulation results show that TC-MIMONet achieves significant block error rate reduction compared to two baseline schemes without utilizing the available temporal information.

Recently unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction(BLI) without any parallel corpus has attracted much research interest.One of the crucial parts in methods for the BLI task is the matching procedure.Previous works impose a too strong constraint on the matching and lead to many counterintuitive translation pairings.Thus, We propose a relaxed matching procedure to find a more precise matching between two languages.We also find that aligning source and target language embedding space bidirectionally will bring significant improvement.We follow the previous iterative framework to conduct experiments.Results on standard benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which substantially outperforms previous unsupervised methods.

Computing the distance among linguistic objects is an essential problem in natural language processing. The word mover’s distance (WMD) has been successfully applied to measure the document distance by synthesizing the low-level word similarity with the framework of optimal transport (OT). However, due to the global transportation nature of OT, the WMD may overestimate the semantic dissimilarity when documents contain unequal semantic details. In this paper, we propose to address this overestimation issue with a novel Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) document distance grounded on unbalanced optimal transport theory. Compared to the WMD, the WFR document distance provides a trade-off between global transportation and local truncation, which leads to a better similarity measure for unequal semantic details. Moreover, an efficient prune strategy is particularly designed for the WFR document distance to facilitate the top-k queries among a large number of documents. Extensive experimental results show that the WFR document distance achieves higher accuracy that WMD and even its supervised variation s-WMD.

Semi-supervision is a promising paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) with limited annotations.However, previous semisupervised methods do not fully utilize the knowledge hidden in annotated and nonannotated data, which hinders further improvement of their performance.In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised BLI framework to encourage the interaction between the supervised signal and unsupervised alignment.We design two message-passing mechanisms to transfer knowledge between annotated and non-annotated data, named prior optimal transport and bi-directional lexicon update respectively.Then, we perform semi-supervised learning based on a cyclic or a parallel parameter feeding routine to update our models.Our framework is a general framework that can incorporate any supervised and unsupervised BLI methods based on optimal transport.Experimental results on MUSE and VecMap datasets show significant improvement of our models.Ablation study also proves that the two-way interaction between the supervised signal and unsupervised alignment accounts for the gain of the overall performance.Results on distant language pairs further illustrate the advantage and robustness of our proposed method.