Hongwei Zhang

Hongwei Zhang, Shuo Shao, Meixia Tao et al.

Existing deep learning-enabled semantic communication systems often rely on shared background knowledge between the transmitter and receiver that includes empirical data and their associated semantic information. In practice, the semantic information is defined by the pragmatic task of the receiver and cannot be known to the transmitter. The actual observable data at the transmitter can also have non-identical distribution with the empirical data in the shared background knowledge library. To address these practical issues, this paper proposes a new neural network-based semantic communication system for image transmission, where the task is unaware at the transmitter and the data environment is dynamic. The system consists of two main parts, namely the semantic coding (SC) network and the data adaptation (DA) network. The SC network learns how to extract and transmit the semantic information using a receiver-leading training process. By using the domain adaptation technique from transfer learning, the DA network learns how to convert the data observed into a similar form of the empirical data that the SC network can process without retraining. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can be adaptive to observable datasets while keeping high performance in terms of both data recovery and task execution.

Wenjian Luo, Hongwei Zhang, Linghao Kong et al.

The security issues in DNNs, such as adversarial examples, have attracted much attention. Adversarial examples refer to the examples which are capable to induce the DNNs return completely predictions by introducing carefully designed perturbations. Obviously, adversarial examples bring great security risks to the development of deep learning. Recently, Some defense approaches against adversarial examples have been proposed, however, in our opinion, the performance of these approaches are still limited. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble defense approach named the Negative Correlation Ensemble (NCEn), which achieves compelling results by introducing gradient directions and gradient magnitudes of each member in the ensemble negatively correlated and at the same time, reducing the transferability of adversarial examples among them. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results demonstrate that NCEn can improve the adversarial robustness of ensembles effectively.

Tijin Yan, Hongwei Zhang, Zirui Li et al.

Representation learning over graph structure data has been widely studied due to its wide application prospects. However, previous methods mainly focus on static graphs while many real-world graphs evolve over time. Modeling such evolution is important for predicting properties of unseen networks. To resolve this challenge, we propose SGRNN, a novel neural architecture that applies stochastic latent variables to simultaneously capture the evolution in node attributes and topology. Specifically, deterministic states are separated from stochastic states in the iterative process to suppress mutual interference. With semi-implicit variational inference integrated to SGRNN, a non-Gaussian variational distribution is proposed to help further improve the performance. In addition, to alleviate KL-vanishing problem in SGRNN, a simple and interpretable structure is proposed based on the lower bound of KL-divergence. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Code is available at https://github.com/StochasticGRNN/SGRNN.

Shengzhong Zhang, Wenjie Yang, Xinyuan Cao et al.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has become a powerful tool for learning graph data, but its scalability remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective training framework called Structural Compression (StructComp) to address this issue. Inspired by a sparse low-rank approximation on the diffusion matrix, StructComp trains the encoder with the compressed nodes. This allows the encoder not to perform any message passing during the training stage, and significantly reduces the number of sample pairs in the contrastive loss. We theoretically prove that the original GCL loss can be approximated with the contrastive loss computed by StructComp. Moreover, StructComp can be regarded as an additional regularization term for GCL models, resulting in a more robust encoder. Empirical studies on various datasets show that StructComp greatly reduces the time and memory consumption while improving model performance compared to the vanilla GCL models and scalable training methods.

Mukaram Shahid, Kunal Das, Hadia Ushaq et al.

Accurately mapping the radio environment (e.g., identifying wireless signal strength at specific frequency bands and geographic locations) is crucial for efficient spectrum sharing, enabling Secondary Users~(SUs) to access underutilized spectrum bands while protecting Primary Users~(PUs). While existing models have made progress, they often degrade in performance when multiple transmitters coexist, due to the compounded effects of shadowing, interference from adjacent transmitters. To address this challenge, we extend our prior work on Physics-Informed Neural Networks~(PINNs) for single-transmitter mapping to derive a new multi-transmitter Partial Differential Equation~(PDE) formulation of the Received Signal Strength Indicator~(RSSI). We then propose \emph{ReVeal-MT} (Re-constructor and Visualizer of Spectrum Landscape for Multiple Transmitters), a novel PINN which integrates the multi-source PDE residual into a neural network loss function, enabling accurate spectrum landscape reconstruction from sparse RF sensor measurements. ReVeal-MT is validated using real-world measurements from the ARA wireless living lab across rural and suburban environments, and benchmarked against 3GPP and ITU-R channel models and a baseline PINN model for a single transmitter use-case. Results show that ReVeal-MT achieves substantial accuracy gains in multi-transmitter scenarios, e.g., achieving an RMSE of only 2.66\,dB with as few as 45 samples over a 370-square-kilometer region, while maintaining low computational complexity. These findings demonstrate that ReVeal-MT significantly advances radio environment mapping under realistic multi-transmitter conditions, with strong potential for enabling fine-grained spectrum management and precise coexistence between PUs and SUs.

Shengzhong Zhang, Wenjie Yang, Yimin Zhang et al.

In this work, we discover a phenomenon of community bias amplification in graph representation learning, which refers to the exacerbation of performance bias between different classes by graph representation learning. We conduct an in-depth theoretical study of this phenomenon from a novel spectral perspective. Our analysis suggests that structural bias between communities results in varying local convergence speeds for node embeddings. This phenomenon leads to bias amplification in the classification results of downstream tasks. Based on the theoretical insights, we propose random graph coarsening, which is proved to be effective in dealing with the above issue. Finally, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning model called Random Graph Coarsening Contrastive Learning (RGCCL), which utilizes random coarsening as data augmentation and mitigates community bias by contrasting the coarsened graph with the original graph. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method when dealing with community bias amplification.

Hongwei Zhang, Weidong Zou, Hongbo Zhao et al.

Adaptive optimization methods have been widely used in deep learning. They scale the learning rates adaptively according to the past gradient, which has been shown to be effective to accelerate the convergence. However, they suffer from poor generalization performance compared with SGD. Recent studies point that smoothing exponential gradient noise leads to generalization degeneration phenomenon. Inspired by this, we propose AdaL, with a transformation on the original gradient. AdaL accelerates the convergence by amplifying the gradient in the early stage, as well as dampens the oscillation and stabilizes the optimization by shrinking the gradient later. Such modification alleviates the smoothness of gradient noise, which produces better generalization performance. We have theoretically proved the convergence of AdaL and demonstrated its effectiveness on several benchmarks.

Hongwei Zhang, Tijin Yan, Zenjun Xie et al.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved promising performance on various graph-based tasks. However they suffer from over-smoothing when stacking more layers. In this paper, we present a quantitative study on this observation and develop novel insights towards the deeper GCN. First, we interpret the current graph convolutional operations from an optimization perspective and argue that over-smoothing is mainly caused by the naive first-order approximation of the solution to the optimization problem. Subsequently, we introduce two metrics to measure the over-smoothing on node-level tasks. Specifically, we calculate the fraction of the pairwise distance between connected and disconnected nodes to the overall distance respectively. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we establish a universal theoretical framework of GCN from an optimization perspective and derive a novel convolutional kernel named GCN+ which has lower parameter amount while relieving the over-smoothing inherently. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GCN+ over state-of-the-art baseline methods on the node classification tasks.