In deep-water (DWA) communications, the channel often exhibits two long-separated clusters, with the second cluster exhibiting significant Doppler spread. DWA channels are commonly found in underwater communication networks, where the significant delay spread of the channel causes traditional OFDM channel estimation (CE) methods to severely degrade the communication rate. In this paper, we propose a channel cluster structure (CCS)-based iterative CE method for DWA Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. By leveraging the channel cluster structure, we perform CE in the presence of both inter-block interference (IBI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) without compromising communication rate. Additionally, to address the problem of IBI deteriorating the measurement matrix, we propose a pilot design scheme that minimizes the coherence of the measurement matrix. We integrate the proposed method with the compressed sensing (CS)-based and the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL)-based algorithms, and apply it to DWA CE. Simulation results demonstrate that the CCS-based iterative CE method outperforms traditional method, and the proposed pilot design further improves CE performance.

What does it truly mean for a language model to “reason” strategically, and can scaling up alone guarantee intelligent, context-aware decisions? Strategic decision-making requires adaptive reasoning, where agents anticipate and respond to others’ actions under uncertainty. Yet, most evaluations of large language models (LLMs) for strategic decision-making often rely heavily on Nash Equilibrium (NE) benchmarks, overlook reasoning depth, and fail to reveal the mechanisms behind model behavior. To address this gap, we introduce a behavioral game-theoretic evaluation framework that disentangles intrinsic reasoning from contextual influence. Using this framework, we evaluate 22 state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse strategic scenarios. We find models like GPT-o3-mini, GPT-o1, and DeepSeek-R1 lead in reasoning depth. Through thinking chain analysis, we identify distinct reasoning styles—such as maximin or belief-based strategies—and show that longer reasoning chains do not consistently yield better decisions. Furthermore, embedding demographic personas reveals context-sensitive shifts: some models (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3-Opus) improve when assigned female identities, while others (e.g., Gemini 2.0) show diminished reasoning under minority sexuality personas. These findings underscore that technical sophistication alone is insufficient; alignment with ethical standards, human expectations, and situational nuance is essential for the responsible deployment of LLMs in interactive settings.

Most contemporary research in advanced smart homes has been primarily focused on understanding the environment and identifying activities. However, it can never translate these insights into actionable rules that could improve residents’ quality of life, much less optimize the entire home environment. Addressing this gap, our paper introduces HomeSGN, an end-to-end trainable Scorer-Generator system founded on the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture. Specifically tailored for smart home applications, HomeSGN extracts, assesses, and proffers beneficial rules from residents’ everyday activities, thereby improving living conditions and optimizing the home environment with adaptable targets. Complemented by pioneering data augmentation and rectification strategies, the system assures model stability, avoids mode collapse, and maintains data integrity throughout GAN training. Integrating HomeSGN into an existing smart home infrastructure establishes a seamless sensor-to-rule pipeline. The effectiveness of HomeSGN is underscored by significant benefits, notably an enhancement of life quality by over 50% in single-user homes and 30% in multi-user scenarios, thus truly embodying the promise of “smart” in smart homes.

When making decisions under uncertainty, individuals often deviate from rational behavior, which can be evaluated across three dimensions: risk preference, probability weighting, and loss aversion. Given the widespread use of large language models (LLMs) in supporting decision-making processes, it is crucial to assess whether their behavior aligns with human norms and ethical expectations or exhibits potential biases. Although several empirical studies have investigated the rationality and social behavior performance of LLMs, their internal decision-making tendencies and capabilities remain inadequately understood. This paper proposes a framework, grounded in behavioral economics theories, to evaluate the decision-making behaviors of LLMs. With a multiple-choice-list experiment, we initially estimate the degree of risk preference, probability weighting, and loss aversion in a context-free setting for three commercial LLMs: ChatGPT-4.0-Turbo, Claude-3-Opus, and Gemini-1.0-pro. Our results reveal that LLMs generally exhibit patterns similar to humans, such as risk aversion and loss aversion, with a tendency to overweight small probabilities, but there are significant variations in the degree to which these behaviors are expressed across different LLMs. Further, we explore their behavior when embedded with socio-demographic features of human beings, uncovering significant disparities across various demographic characteristics.

Quantization for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has shown significant progress with the intention of reducing the cost of computation and storage with low-bitwidth data inputs. There are, however, no systematic studies on how an existing full-bitwidth processing unit, such as CPUs and DSPs, can be better utilized to carry out significantly higher computation throughput for convolution under various quantized bitwidths. In this study, we propose HiKonv, a unified solution that maximizes the compute throughput of a given underlying processing unit to process low-bitwidth quantized data inputs through novel bitwise parallel computation. We establish theoretical performance bounds using a full-bitwidth multiplier for highly parallelized low-bitwidth convolution, and demonstrate new breakthroughs for high-performance computing in this critical domain. For example, a single 32-bit processing unit can deliver 128 binarized convolution operations (multiplications and additions) under one CPU instruction, and a single$27\times 18$DSP core can deliver eight convolution operations with 4-bit inputs in one cycle. We demonstrate the effectiveness of HiKonv on CPU and FPGA for both convolutional layers or a complete DNN model. For a convolutional layer quantized to 4-bit, HiKonv achieves a$3.17\times$latency improvement over the baseline implementation using C++ on CPU. Compared to the DAC-SDC 2020 champion model for FPGA, HiKonv achieves a$2.37\times$: throughput improvement and$2.61\times$DSP efficiency improvement, respectively.

While computer vision tasks target increasingly challenging scenarios, the need for real-time processing of images rises as well, requiring more efficient methods to accelerate convolutional neural networks. For unit stride convolutions, we use FFT-based methods and Winograd algorithms to compute matrix convolutions, which effectively lower the computing complexity by reducing the number of multiplications. For non-unit stride convolutions, we usually cannot directly apply those algorithms to accelerate the computations. In this work, we propose a novel universal approach to construct the non-unit stride convolution algorithms for any given stride and filter sizes from Winograd algorithms. Specifically, we first demonstrate the steps to decompose an arbitrary convolutional kernel and apply the Winograd algorithms separately to compute non-unit stride convolutions. We then present the derivation of this method and proof by construction to confirm the validity of this approach. Finally, we discuss the minimum number of multiplications and additions necessary for the non-unit stride convolutions and evaluate the performance of the decomposed Winograd algorithms. From our analysis of the computational complexity, the new approach can benefit from 1.5x to 3x fewer multiplications. In our experiments in real DNN layers, we have acquired around 1.3x speedup (Told /Tnew) of the Winograd algorithms against the conventional convolution algorithm in various experiment settings.

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have 1-bit weights and activations. Such networks are well suited for FPGAs, as their dominant computations are bitwise arithmetic and the memory requirement is also significantly reduced. However, compared to start-of-the-art compact convolutional neural network (CNN) models, BNNs tend to produce a much lower accuracy on realistic datasets such as ImageNet. In addition, the input layer of BNNs has gradually become a major compute bottleneck, because it is conventionally excluded from binarization to avoid a large accuracy loss.