Chen Dong

Weizhi Li, Haotai Liang, Chen Dong et al.

Semantic communication serves as a novel paradigm and attracts the broad interest of researchers. One critical aspect of it is the multi-user semantic communication theory, which can further promote its application to the practical network environment. While most existing works focused on the design of end-to-end single-user semantic transmission, a novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based multi-user semantic communication system named NOMASC is proposed in this paper. The proposed system can support semantic tranmission of multiple users with diverse modalities of source information. To avoid high demand for hardware, an asymmetric quantizer is employed at the end of the semantic encoder for discretizing the continuous full-resolution semantic feature. In addition, a neural network model is proposed for mapping the discrete feature into self-learned symbols and accomplishing intelligent multi-user detection (MUD) at the receiver. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system holds good performance in non-orthogonal transmission of multiple user signals and outperforms the other methods, especially at low-to-medium SNRs. Moreover, it has high robustness under various simulation settings and mismatched test scenarios.

Qixiu Li, Yu Deng, Yaobo Liang et al.

This paper presents a novel approach for pretraining robotic manipulation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using a large corpus of unscripted real-life video recordings of human hand activities. Treating human hand as dexterous robot end-effector, we show that "in-the-wild" egocentric human videos without any annotations can be transformed into data formats fully aligned with existing robotic V-L-A training data in terms of task granularity and labels. This is achieved by the development of a fully-automated holistic human activity analysis approach for arbitrary human hand videos. This approach can generate atomic-level hand activity segments and their language descriptions, each accompanied with framewise 3D hand motion and camera motion. We process a large volume of egocentric videos and create a hand-VLA training dataset containing 1M episodes and 26M frames. This training data covers a wide range of objects and concepts, dexterous manipulation tasks, and environment variations in real life, vastly exceeding the coverage of existing robot data. We design a dexterous hand VLA model architecture and pretrain the model on this dataset. The model exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on completely unseen real-world observations. Additionally, fine-tuning it on a small amount of real robot action data significantly improves task success rates and generalization to novel objects in real robotic experiments. We also demonstrate the appealing scaling behavior of the model's task performance with respect to pretraining data scale. We believe this work lays a solid foundation for scalable VLA pretraining, advancing robots toward truly generalizable embodied intelligence.

Lei Teng, Senran Fan, Chen Dong et al.

Semantic communication with joint semantic-channel coding robustly transmits diverse data modalities but faces challenges in mitigating semantic information loss due to packet drops in packet-based systems. Under current protocols, packets with errors are discarded, preventing the receiver from utilizing erroneous semantic data for robust decoding. To address this issue, a packet-loss-resistant MoE Swin Transformer-based Video Semantic Communication (MSTVSC) system is proposed in this paper. Semantic vectors are encoded by MSTVSC and transmitted through upper-layer protocol packetization. To investigate the impact of the packetization, a theoretical analysis of the packetization strategy is provided. To mitigate the semantic loss caused by packet loss, a 3D CNN at the receiver recovers missing information using un-lost semantic data and an packet-loss mask matrix. Semantic-level interleaving is employed to reduce concentrated semantic loss from packet drops. To improve compression, a common-individual decomposition approach is adopted, with downsampling applied to individual information to minimize redundancy. The model is lightweighted for practical deployment. Extensive simulations and comparisons demonstrate strong performance, achieving an MS-SSIM greater than 0.6 and a PSNR exceeding 20 dB at a 90% packet loss rate.