Koji Yamamoto

Satoshi Munakata, Caterina Urban, Haruki Yokoyama et al.

It is known that deep neural networks (DNNs) classify an input image by paying particular attention to certain specific pixels; a graphical representation of the magnitude of attention to each pixel is called a saliency-map. Saliency-maps are used to check the validity of the classification decision basis, e.g., it is not a valid basis for classification if a DNN pays more attention to the background rather than the subject of an image. Semantic perturbations can significantly change the saliency-map. In this work, we propose the first verification method for attention robustness, i.e., the local robustness of the changes in the saliency-map against combinations of semantic perturbations. Specifically, our method determines the range of the perturbation parameters (e.g., the brightness change) that maintains the difference between the actual saliency-map change and the expected saliency-map change below a given threshold value. Our method is based on activation region traversals, focusing on the outermost robust boundary for scalability on larger DNNs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can show the extent to which DNNs can classify with the same basis regardless of semantic perturbations and report on performance and performance factors of activation region traversals.

Koji Yamamoto

Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI), which is originally acquired for communication purposes, has recently been reused for sensing and radar-like functionalities. However, in practical Wi-Fi systems with independent clocks at the transmitter and receiver, the lack of a common delay and phase reference fundamentally precludes phase-coherent radar-like delay--Doppler analysis. By exploiting the line-of-sight (LoS) path component, i.e., the earliest-arriving direct path, as an over-the-air (OTA) reference for delay and phase, we propose an OTA LoS-path referencing scheme, termed LoSRef, that enables delay calibration and phase alignment under this practical constraint. Unlike conventional Wi-Fi bistatic radar systems that rely on wired reference signals or dedicated reference antennas, the proposed LoSRef-based framework enables phase-coherent bistatic radar-like operation that can be integrated into typically deployed Wi-Fi systems. Through human gait and respiration experiments in indoor environments, we demonstrate that phase-coherent channel impulse responses and corresponding delay--Doppler responses can be obtained using only commodity Wi-Fi devices. This enables physically interpretable human motion sensing, including gait-induced range variation and respiration-induced sub-wavelength displacement, as well as the extraction of target-induced dynamics up to 20 dB weaker than dominant static multipath components.

Sohei Itahara, Takayuki Nishio, Yusuke Koda et al.

The distributed inference (DI) framework has gained traction as a technique for real-time applications empowered by cutting-edge deep machine learning (ML) on resource-constrained Internet of things (IoT) devices. In DI, computational tasks are offloaded from the IoT device to the edge server via lossy IoT networks. However, generally, there is a communication system-level trade-off between communication latency and reliability; thus, to provide accurate DI results, a reliable and high-latency communication system is required to be adapted, which results in non-negligible end-to-end latency of the DI. This motivated us to improve the trade-off between the communication latency and accuracy by efforts on ML techniques. Specifically, we have proposed a communication-oriented model tuning (COMtune), which aims to achieve highly accurate DI with low-latency but unreliable communication links. In COMtune, the key idea is to fine-tune the ML model by emulating the effect of unreliable communication links through the application of the dropout technique. This enables the DI system to obtain robustness against unreliable communication links. Our ML experiments revealed that COMtune enables accurate predictions with low latency and under lossy networks.

Ryosuke Hanahara, Sohei Itahara, Kota Yamashita et al.

With regard to the implementation of WiFi sensing agnostic according to the availability of channel state information (CSI), we investigate the possibility of estimating a CSI matrix based on its compressed version, which is known as beamforming feedback matrix (BFM). Being different from the CSI matrix that is processed and discarded in physical layer components, the BFM can be captured using a medium-access-layer frame-capturing technique because this is exchanged among an access point (AP) and stations (STAs) over the air. This indicates that WiFi sensing that leverages the BFM matrix is more practical to implement using the pre-installed APs. However, the ability of BFM-based sensing has been evaluated in a few tasks, and more general insights into its performance should be provided. To fill this gap, we propose a CSI estimation method based on BFM, approximating the estimation function with a machine learning model. In addition, to improve the estimation accuracy, we leverage the inter-subcarrier dependency using the BFMs at multiple subcarriers in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing transmissions. Our simulation evaluation reveals that the estimated CSI matches the ground-truth amplitude. Moreover, compared to CSI estimation at each individual subcarrier, the effect of the BFMs at multiple subcarriers on the CSI estimation accuracy is validated.

Tomoya Sunami, Sohei Itahara, Yusuke Koda et al.

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of single-antenna and single-RF (radio frequency)- anchor received power strength indicator (RSSI) localization (SARR-LOC) with the assistance of the computer vision (CV) technique. Generally, to perform radio frequency (RF)-based device localization, either 1) fine-grained channel state information or 2) RSSIs from multiple antenna elements or multiple RF anchors (e.g., access points) is required. Meanwhile, owing to deficiency of single-antenna and single-anchor RSSI, which only indicates a coarse-grained distance information between a receiver and a transmitter, realizing localization with single-antenna and single-anchor RSSI is challenging. Our key idea to address this challenge is to leverage CV technique and to estimate the most likely first Fresnel zone (FFZ) between the receiver and transmitter, where the role of the RSSI is to detect blockage timings. Specifically, historical positions of an obstacle that dynamically blocks the FFZ are detected by the CV technique, and we estimate positions at which a blockage starts and ends via a time series of RSSI. These estimated obstacle positions, in principle, coincide with points on the FFZ boundaries, enabling the estimation of the FFZ and localization of the transmitter. The experimental evaluation revealed that the proposed SARR-LOC achieved the localization error less than 1.0 m in an indoor environment, which is comparable to that of a conventional triangulation-based RSSI localization with multiple RF anchors.

Sohei Itahara, Takayuki Nishio, Koji Yamamoto

The distributed inference framework is an emerging technology for real-time applications empowered by cutting-edge deep machine learning (ML) on resource-constrained Internet of things (IoT) devices. In distributed inference, computational tasks are offloaded from the IoT device to other devices or the edge server via lossy IoT networks. However, narrow-band and lossy IoT networks cause non-negligible packet losses and retransmissions, resulting in non-negligible communication latency. This study solves the problem of the incremental retransmission latency caused by packet loss in a lossy IoT network. We propose a split inference with no retransmissions (SI-NR) method that achieves high accuracy without any retransmissions, even when packet loss occurs. In SI-NR, the key idea is to train the ML model by emulating the packet loss by a dropout method, which randomly drops the output of hidden units in a DNN layer. This enables the SI-NR system to obtain robustness against packet losses. Our ML experimental evaluation reveals that SI-NR obtains accurate predictions without packet retransmission at a packet loss rate of 60%.

Akihito Taya, Takayuki Nishio, Masahiro Morikura et al.

This paper proposes a fully decentralized federated learning (FL) scheme for Internet of Everything (IoE) devices that are connected via multi-hop networks. Because FL algorithms hardly converge the parameters of machine learning (ML) models, this paper focuses on the convergence of ML models in function spaces. Considering that the representative loss functions of ML tasks e.g, mean squared error (MSE) and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, are convex functionals, algorithms that directly update functions in function spaces could converge to the optimal solution. The key concept of this paper is to tailor a consensus-based optimization algorithm to work in the function space and achieve the global optimum in a distributed manner. This paper first analyzes the convergence of the proposed algorithm in a function space, which is referred to as a meta-algorithm, and shows that the spectral graph theory can be applied to the function space in a manner similar to that of numerical vectors. Then, consensus-based multi-hop federated distillation (CMFD) is developed for a neural network (NN) to implement the meta-algorithm. CMFD leverages knowledge distillation to realize function aggregation among adjacent devices without parameter averaging. An advantage of CMFD is that it works even with different NN models among the distributed learners. Although CMFD does not perfectly reflect the behavior of the meta-algorithm, the discussion of the meta-algorithm's convergence property promotes an intuitive understanding of CMFD, and simulation evaluations show that NN models converge using CMFD for several tasks. The simulation results also show that CMFD achieves higher accuracy than parameter aggregation for weakly connected networks, and CMFD is more stable than parameter aggregation methods.

Masao Shinzaki, Yusuke Koda, Koji Yamamoto et al.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) beam-tracking based on machine learning enables the development of accurate tracking policies while obviating the need to periodically solve beam-optimization problems. However, its applicability is still arguable when training-test gaps exist in terms of environmental parameters that affect the node dynamics. From this skeptical point of view, the contribution of this study is twofold. First, by considering an example scenario, we confirm that the training-test gap adversely affects the beam-tracking performance. More specifically, we consider nodes placed on overhead messenger wires, where the node dynamics are affected by several environmental parameters, e.g, the wire mass and tension. Although these are particular scenarios, they yield insight into the validation of the training-test gap problems. Second, we demonstrate the feasibility of \textit{zero-shot adaptation} as a solution, where a learning agent adapts to environmental parameters unseen during training. This is achieved by leveraging a robust adversarial reinforcement learning (RARL) technique, where such training-and-test gaps are regarded as disturbances by adversaries that are jointly trained with a legitimate beam-tracking agent. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the beam-tracking policy learned via RARL can be applied to a wide range of environmental parameters without severely degrading the received power.

Sohei Itahara, Takayuki Nishio, Yusuke Koda et al.

This study develops a federated learning (FL) framework overcoming largely incremental communication costs due to model sizes in typical frameworks without compromising model performance. To this end, based on the idea of leveraging an unlabeled open dataset, we propose a distillation-based semi-supervised FL (DS-FL) algorithm that exchanges the outputs of local models among mobile devices, instead of model parameter exchange employed by the typical frameworks. In DS-FL, the communication cost depends only on the output dimensions of the models and does not scale up according to the model size. The exchanged model outputs are used to label each sample of the open dataset, which creates an additionally labeled dataset. Based on the new dataset, local models are further trained, and model performance is enhanced owing to the data augmentation effect. We further highlight that in DS-FL, the heterogeneity of the devices' dataset leads to ambiguous of each data sample and lowing of the training convergence. To prevent this, we propose entropy reduction averaging, where the aggregated model outputs are intentionally sharpened. Moreover, extensive experiments show that DS-FL reduces communication costs up to 99% relative to those of the FL benchmark while achieving similar or higher classification accuracy.

Sohei Itahara, Takayuki Nishio, Masahiro Morikura et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables a neural network (NN) to be trained using privacy-sensitive data on mobile devices while retaining all the data on their local storages. However, FL asks the mobile devices to perform heavy communication and computation tasks, i.e., devices are requested to upload and download large-volume NN models and train them. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised pre-training method adapted for FL, which aims to reduce both the communication and computation costs through model compression. Since the communication and computation costs are highly dependent on the volume of NN models, reducing the volume without decreasing model performance can reduce these costs. The proposed pre-training method leverages unlabeled data, which is expected to be obtained from the Internet or data repository much more easily than labeled data. The key idea of the proposed method is to obtain a ``good'' subnetwork from the original NN using the unlabeled data based on the lottery hypothesis. The proposed method trains an original model using a denoising auto encoder with the unlabeled data and then prunes small-magnitude parameters of the original model to generate a small but good subnetwork. The proposed method is evaluated using an image classification task. The results show that the proposed method requires 35\% less traffic and computation time than previous methods when achieving a certain test accuracy.

Naoya Yoshida, Takayuki Nishio, Masahiro Morikura et al.

This paper proposes a cooperative mechanism for mitigating the performance degradation due to non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) data in collaborative machine learning (ML), namely federated learning (FL), which trains an ML model using the rich data and computational resources of mobile clients without gathering their data to central systems. The data of mobile clients is typically non-IID owing to diversity among mobile clients' interests and usage, and FL with non-IID data could degrade the model performance. Therefore, to mitigate the degradation induced by non-IID data, we assume that a limited number (e.g., less than 1%) of clients allow their data to be uploaded to a server, and we propose a hybrid learning mechanism referred to as Hybrid-FL, wherein the server updates the model using the data gathered from the clients and aggregates the model with the models trained by clients. The Hybrid-FL solves both client- and data-selection problems via heuristic algorithms, which try to select the optimal sets of clients who train models with their own data, clients who upload their data to the server, and data uploaded to the server. The algorithms increase the number of clients participating in FL and make more data gather in the server IID, thereby improving the prediction accuracy of the aggregated model. Evaluations, which consist of network simulations and ML experiments, demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a 13.5% higher classification accuracy than those of the previously proposed schemes for the non-IID case.

Kota Nakashima, Shotaro Kamiya, Kazuki Ohtsu et al.

Last year, IEEE 802.11 Extremely High Throughput Study Group (EHT Study Group) was established to initiate discussions on new IEEE 802.11 features. Coordinated control methods of the access points (APs) in the wireless local area networks (WLANs) are discussed in EHT Study Group. The present study proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based channel allocation scheme using graph convolutional networks (GCNs). As a deep reinforcement learning method, we use a well-known method double deep Q-network. In densely deployed WLANs, the number of the available topologies of APs is extremely high, and thus we extract the features of the topological structures based on GCNs. We apply GCNs to a contention graph where APs within their carrier sensing ranges are connected to extract the features of carrier sensing relationships. Additionally, to improve the learning speed especially in an early stage of learning, we employ a game theory-based method to collect the training data independently of the neural network model. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can appropriately control the channels when compared to extant methods.