Qiyang Zhao

Lina Bariah, Qiyang Zhao, Hang Zou et al.

The evolution of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a turning point in reshaping the future of technology in different aspects. Wireless networks in particular, with the blooming of self-evolving networks, represent a rich field for exploiting GenAI and reaping several benefits that can fundamentally change the way how wireless networks are designed and operated nowadays. To be specific, large GenAI models are envisioned to open up a new era of autonomous wireless networks, in which multi-modal GenAI models trained over various Telecom data, can be fine-tuned to perform several downstream tasks, eliminating the need for building and training dedicated AI models for each specific task and paving the way for the realization of artificial general intelligence (AGI)-empowered wireless networks. In this article, we aim to unfold the opportunities that can be reaped from integrating large GenAI models into the Telecom domain. In particular, we first highlight the applications of large GenAI models in future wireless networks, defining potential use-cases and revealing insights on the associated theoretical and practical challenges. Furthermore, we unveil how 6G can open up new opportunities through connecting multiple on-device large GenAI models, and hence, paves the way to the collective intelligence paradigm. Finally, we put a forward-looking vision on how large GenAI models will be the key to realize self-evolving networks.

Lina Bariah, Hang Zou, Qiyang Zhao et al.

The recent progress of artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new frontiers in the possibility of automating many tasks involved in Telecom networks design, implementation, and deployment. This has been further pushed forward with the evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including the emergence of large language models (LLMs), which is believed to be the cornerstone toward realizing self-governed, interactive AI agents. Motivated by this, in this paper, we aim to adapt the paradigm of LLMs to the Telecom domain. In particular, we fine-tune several LLMs including BERT, distilled BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, to the Telecom domain languages, and demonstrate a use case for identifying the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard working groups. We consider training the selected models on 3GPP technical documents (Tdoc) pertinent to years 2009-2019 and predict the Tdoc categories in years 2020-2023. The results demonstrate that fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa model achieves 84.6% accuracy, while GPT-2 model achieves 83% in identifying 3GPP working groups. The distilled BERT model with around 50% less parameters achieves similar performance as others. This corroborates that fine-tuning pretrained LLM can effectively identify the categories of Telecom language. The developed framework shows a stepping stone towards realizing intent-driven and self-evolving wireless networks from Telecom languages, and paves the way for the implementation of generative AI in the Telecom domain.

Li Wang, Chao Zhang, Qiyang Zhao et al.

The development of wireless sensing technologies, using signals such as Wi-Fi, infrared, and RF to gather environmental data, has significantly advanced within Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Among these, Radio Frequency (RF) sensing stands out for its cost-effective and non-intrusive monitoring of human activities and environmental changes. However, traditional RF sensing methods face significant challenges, including noise, interference, incomplete data, and high deployment costs, which limit their effectiveness and scalability. This paper investigates the potential of Generative AI (GenAI) to overcome these limitations within the IoT ecosystem. We provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art GenAI techniques, focusing on their application to RF sensing problems. By generating high-quality synthetic data, enhancing signal quality, and integrating multi-modal data, GenAI offers robust solutions for RF environment reconstruction, localization, and imaging. Additionally, GenAI's ability to generalize enables IoT devices to adapt to new environments and unseen tasks, improving their efficiency and performance. The main contributions of this article include a detailed analysis of the challenges in RF sensing, the presentation of innovative GenAI-based solutions, and the proposal of a unified framework for diverse RF sensing tasks. Through case studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating GenAI models, leading to advanced, scalable, and intelligent IoT systems.

Qiyang Zhao, Mehdi Bennis, Merouane Debbah et al.

Semantic communication enables intelligent agents to extract meaning (or semantics) of information via interaction, to carry out collaborative tasks. In this paper, we study semantic communication from a topological space perspective, in which higher-order data semantics live in a simplicial complex. Specifically, a transmitter first maps its data into a $k$-order simplicial complex and then learns its high-order correlations. The simplicial structure and corresponding features are encoded into semantic embeddings in latent space for transmission. Subsequently, the receiver decodes the structure and infers the missing or distorted data. The transmitter and receiver collaboratively train a simplicial convolutional autoencoder to accomplish the semantic communication task. Experiments are carried out on a real dataset of Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus, where one part of the semantic embedding is missing or distorted during communication. Numerical results show that the simplicial convolutional autoencoder enabled semantic communication effectively rebuilds the simplicial features and infer the missing data with $95\%$ accuracy, while achieving stable performance under channel noise. In contrast, the conventional autoencoder enabled communication fails to infer any missing data. Moreover, our approach is shown to effectively infer the distorted data without prior simplicial structure knowledge at the receiver, by learning extracted semantic information during communications. Leveraging the topological nature of information, the proposed method is also shown to be more reliable and efficient compared to several baselines, notably at low signal-to-noise (SNR) levels.

Hang Zou, Qiyang Zhao, Yu Tian et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize the Sixth Generation (6G) communication networks. However, current mainstream LLMs generally lack the specialized knowledge in telecom domain. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a pipeline to adapt any general purpose LLMs to a telecom-specific LLMs. We collect and build telecom-specific pre-train dataset, instruction dataset, preference dataset to perform continual pre-training, instruct tuning and alignment tuning respectively. Besides, due to the lack of widely accepted evaluation benchmarks in telecom domain, we extend existing evaluation benchmarks and proposed three new benchmarks, namely, Telecom Math Modeling, Telecom Open QnA and Telecom Code Tasks. These new benchmarks provide a holistic evaluation of the capabilities of LLMs including math modeling, Open-Ended question answering, code generation, infilling, summarization and analysis in telecom domain. Our fine-tuned LLM TelecomGPT outperforms state of the art (SOTA) LLMs including GPT-4, Llama-3 and Mistral in Telecom Math Modeling benchmark significantly and achieve comparable performance in various evaluation benchmarks such as TeleQnA, 3GPP technical documents classification, telecom code summary and generation and infilling.

Qiyang Zhao, Hang Zou, Mehdi Bennis et al.

In this work, we study the problem of semantic communication and inference, in which a student agent (i.e. mobile device) queries a teacher agent (i.e. cloud sever) to generate higher-order data semantics living in a simplicial complex. Specifically, the teacher first maps its data into a k-order simplicial complex and learns its high-order correlations. For effective communication and inference, the teacher seeks minimally sufficient and invariant semantic structures prior to conveying information. These minimal simplicial structures are found via judiciously removing simplices selected by the Hodge Laplacians without compromising the inference query accuracy. Subsequently, the student locally runs its own set of queries based on a masked simplicial convolutional autoencoder (SCAE) leveraging both local and remote teacher's knowledge. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of improving inference query accuracy under different channel conditions and simplicial structures. Experiments on a coauthorship dataset show that removing simplices by ranking the Laplacian values yields a 85% reduction in payload size without sacrificing accuracy. Joint semantic communication and inference by masked SCAE improves query accuracy by 25% compared to local student based query and 15% compared to remote teacher based query. Finally, incorporating channel semantics is shown to effectively improve inference accuracy, notably at low SNR values.

Yu Tian, Qiyang Zhao, Zine el abidine Kherroubi et al.

Wireless communications at high-frequency bands with large antenna arrays face challenges in beam management, which can potentially be improved by multimodality sensing information from cameras, LiDAR, radar, and GPS. In this paper, we present a multimodal transformer deep learning framework for sensing-assisted beam prediction. We employ a convolutional neural network to extract the features from a sequence of images, point clouds, and radar raw data sampled over time. At each convolutional layer, we use transformer encoders to learn the hidden relations between feature tokens from different modalities and time instances over abstraction space and produce encoded vectors for the next-level feature extraction. We train the model on a combination of different modalities with supervised learning. We try to enhance the model over imbalanced data by utilizing focal loss and exponential moving average. We also evaluate data processing and augmentation techniques such as image enhancement, segmentation, background filtering, multimodal data flipping, radar signal transformation, and GPS angle calibration. Experimental results show that our solution trained on image and GPS data produces the best distance-based accuracy of predicted beams at 78.44%, with effective generalization to unseen day scenarios near 73% and night scenarios over 84%. This outperforms using other modalities and arbitrary data processing techniques, which demonstrates the effectiveness of transformers with feature fusion in performing radio beam prediction from images and GPS. Furthermore, our solution could be pretrained from large sequences of multimodality wireless data, on fine-tuning for multiple downstream radio network tasks.

Thomas Mongaillard, Samson Lasaulce, Othman Hicheur et al.

While traditional optimization and scheduling schemes are designed to meet fixed, predefined system requirements, future systems are moving toward user-driven approaches and personalized services, aiming to achieve high quality-of-experience (QoE) and flexibility. This challenge is particularly pronounced in wireless and digitalized energy networks, where users' requirements have largely not been taken into consideration due to the lack of a common language between users and machines. The emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs) marks a radical departure from traditional system-centric methods into more advanced user-centric approaches by providing a natural communication interface between users and devices. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce a novel architecture for resource scheduling problems by constructing three LLM agents to convert an arbitrary user's voice request (VRQ) into a resource allocation vector. Specifically, we design an LLM intent recognition agent to translate the request into an optimization problem (OP), an LLM OP parameter identification agent, and an LLM OP solving agent. To evaluate system performance, we construct a database of typical VRQs in the context of electric vehicle (EV) charging. As a proof of concept, we primarily use Llama 3 8B. Through testing with different prompt engineering scenarios, the obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed architecture. The conducted performance analysis allows key insights to be extracted. For instance, having a larger set of candidate OPs to model the real-world problem might degrade the final performance because of a higher recognition/OP classification noise level. All results and codes are open source.

Hang Zou, Qiyang Zhao, Samson Lasaulce et al.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and communication networks are expected to have groundbreaking synergies for 6G. Connecting GenAI agents via a wireless network can potentially unleash the power of Collective Intelligence (CI) and pave the way for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, current wireless networks are designed as a "data pipe" and are not suited to accommodate and leverage the power of GenAI. In this paper, we propose the GenAINet framework in which distributed GenAI agents communicate knowledge (facts, experiences, and methods) to accomplish arbitrary tasks. We first propose an architecture for a single GenAI agent and then provide a network architecture integrating GenAI capabilities to manage both network protocols and applications. Building on this, we investigate effective communication and reasoning problems by proposing a semantic-native GenAINet. Specifically, GenAI agents extract semantics from heterogeneous raw data, build and maintain a knowledge model representing the semantic relationships among pieces of knowledge, which is retrieved by GenAI models for planning and reasoning. Under this paradigm, different levels of collaboration can be achieved flexibly depending on the complexity of targeted tasks. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies in which, through wireless device queries, we demonstrate that extracting, compressing and transferring common knowledge can improve query accuracy while reducing communication costs; and in the wireless power control problem, we show that distributed agents can complete general tasks independently through collaborative reasoning without predefined communication protocols. Finally, we discuss challenges and future research directions in applying Large Language Models (LLMs) in 6G networks.

Adnan Shahid, Adrian Kliks, Ahmed Al-Tahmeesschi et al.

This white paper discusses the role of large-scale AI in the telecommunications industry, with a specific focus on the potential of generative AI to revolutionize network functions and user experiences, especially in the context of 6G systems. It highlights the development and deployment of Large Telecom Models (LTMs), which are tailored AI models designed to address the complex challenges faced by modern telecom networks. The paper covers a wide range of topics, from the architecture and deployment strategies of LTMs to their applications in network management, resource allocation, and optimization. It also explores the regulatory, ethical, and standardization considerations for LTMs, offering insights into their future integration into telecom infrastructure. The goal is to provide a comprehensive roadmap for the adoption of LTMs to enhance scalability, performance, and user-centric innovation in telecom networks.

Xiaofei Wang, Yiwen Han, Chenyang Wang et al.

Recently, along with the rapid development of mobile communication technology, edge computing theory and techniques have been attracting more and more attentions from global researchers and engineers, which can significantly bridge the capacity of cloud and requirement of devices by the network edges, and thus can accelerate the content deliveries and improve the quality of mobile services. In order to bring more intelligence to the edge systems, compared to traditional optimization methodology, and driven by the current deep learning techniques, we propose to integrate the Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques and Federated Learning framework with the mobile edge systems, for optimizing the mobile edge computing, caching and communication. And thus, we design the "In-Edge AI" framework in order to intelligently utilize the collaboration among devices and edge nodes to exchange the learning parameters for a better training and inference of the models, and thus to carry out dynamic system-level optimization and application-level enhancement while reducing the unnecessary system communication load. "In-Edge AI" is evaluated and proved to have near-optimal performance but relatively low overhead of learning, while the system is cognitive and adaptive to the mobile communication systems. Finally, we discuss several related challenges and opportunities for unveiling a promising upcoming future of "In-Edge AI".

Qiyang Zhao, Lewis D Griffin

It is well accepted that image segmentation can benefit from utilizing multilevel cues. The paper focuses on utilizing the FCNN-based dense semantic predictions in the bottom-up image segmentation, arguing to take semantic cues into account from the very beginning. By this we can avoid merging regions of similar appearance but distinct semantic categories as possible. The semantic inefficiency problem is handled. We also propose a straightforward way to use the contour cues to suppress the noise in multilevel cues, thus to improve the segmentation robustness. The evaluation on the BSDS500 shows that we obtain the competitive region and boundary performance. Furthermore, since all individual regions can be assigned with appropriate semantic labels during the computation, we are capable of extracting the adjusted semantic segmentations. The experiment on Pascal VOC 2012 shows our improvement to the original semantic segmentations which derives directly from the dense predictions.

Qiyang Zhao, Lewis D Griffin

Many deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) make incorrect predictions on adversarial samples obtained by imperceptible perturbations of clean samples. We hypothesize that this is caused by a failure to suppress unusual signals within network layers. As remedy we propose the use of Symmetric Activation Functions (SAF) in non-linear signal transducer units. These units suppress signals of exceptional magnitude. We prove that SAF networks can perform classification tasks to arbitrary precision in a simplified situation. In practice, rather than use SAFs alone, we add them into CNNs to improve their robustness. The modified CNNs can be easily trained using popular strategies with the moderate training load. Our experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that the modified CNNs perform similarly to plain ones on clean samples, and are remarkably more robust against adversarial and nonsense samples.

Qiyang Zhao

Color image segmentation is an important topic in the image processing field. MRF-MAP is often adopted in the unsupervised segmentation methods, but their performance are far behind recent interactive segmentation tools supervised by user inputs. Furthermore, the existing related unsupervised methods also suffer from the low efficiency, and high risk of being trapped in the local optima, because MRF-MAP is currently solved by iterative frameworks with inaccurate initial color distribution models. To address these problems, the letter designs an efficient method to calculate the energy functions approximately in the non-iteration style, and proposes a new binary segmentation algorithm based on the slightly tuned Lanczos eigensolver. The experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm achieves competitive performance compared with two state-of-art segmentation methods.