Mario Huemer

Oliver Ploder, Christina Auer, Oliver Lang et al.

Machine learning (ML) and tensor-based methods have been of significant interest for the scientific community for the last few decades. In a previous work we presented a novel tensor-based system identification framework to ease the computational burden of tensor-only architectures while still being able to achieve exceptionally good performance. However, the derived approach only allows to process real-valued problems and is therefore not directly applicable on a wide range of signal processing and communications problems, which often deal with complex-valued systems. In this work we therefore derive two new architectures to allow the processing of complex-valued signals, and show that these extensions are able to surpass the trivial, complex-valued extension of the original architecture in terms of performance, while only requiring a slight overhead in computational resources to allow for complex-valued operations.

Stefan Baumgartner, Oliver Lang, Mario Huemer

In recent years data-driven machine learning approaches have been extensively studied to replace or enhance traditionally model-based processing in digital communication systems. In this work, we focus on equalization and propose a novel neural network (NN-)based approach, referred to as SICNN. SICNN is designed by deep unfolding a model-based iterative soft interference cancellation (SIC) method. It eliminates the main disadvantages of its model-based counterpart, which suffers from high computational complexity and performance degradation due to required approximations. We present different variants of SICNN. SICNNv1 is specifically tailored to single carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) systems, the communication system mainly regarded in this work. SICNNv2 is more universal and is applicable as an equalizer in any communication system with a block-based data transmission scheme. Moreover, for both SICNNv1 and SICNNv2, we present versions with highly reduced numbers of learnable parameters. Another contribution of this work is a novel approach for generating training datasets for NN-based equalizers, which significantly improves their performance at high signal-to-noise ratios. We compare the bit error ratio performance of the proposed NN-based equalizers with state-of-the-art model-based and NN-based approaches, highlighting the superiority of SICNNv1 over all other methods for SC-FDE. Exemplarily, to emphasize its universality, SICNNv2 is additionally applied to a unique word orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UW-OFDM) system, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we present a thorough complexity analysis of the proposed NN-based equalization approaches, and we investigate the influence of the training set size on the performance of NN-based equalizers.

Stefan Baumgartner, Mario Huemer, Michael Lunglmayr

In recent years, machine learning methods became increasingly important for a manifold number of applications. However, they often suffer from high computational requirements impairing their efficient use in real-time systems, even when employing dedicated hardware accelerators. Ensemble learning methods are especially suitable for hardware acceleration since they can be constructed from individual learners of low complexity and thus offer large parallelization potential. For classification, the outputs of these learners are typically combined by majority voting, which often represents the bottleneck of a hardware accelerator for ensemble inference. In this work, we present a novel architecture that allows obtaining a majority decision in a number of clock cycles that is logarithmic in the number of inputs. We show, that for the example application of handwritten digit recognition a random forest processing engine employing this majority decision architecture implemented on an FPGA allows the classification of more than seven million images per second.

Péter Kovács, Gergő Bognár, Christian Huber et al.

We introduce VPNet, a novel model-driven neural network architecture based on variable projection (VP). Applying VP operators to neural networks results in learnable features, interpretable parameters, and compact network structures. This paper discusses the motivation and mathematical background of VPNet and presents experiments. The VPNet approach was evaluated in the context of signal processing, where we classified a synthetic dataset and real electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Compared to fully connected and one-dimensional convolutional networks, VPNet offers fast learning ability and good accuracy at a low computational cost of both training and inference. Based on these advantages and the promising results obtained, we anticipate a profound impact on the broader field of signal processing, in particular on classification, regression and clustering problems.