Hongbin Li

Linxiao Yang, Jun Fang, Huiping Duan et al.

There has been a growing interest in wideband spectrum sensing due to its applications in cognitive radios and electronic surveillance. To overcome the sampling rate bottleneck for wideband spectrum sensing, in this paper, we study the problem of compressed power spectrum estimation whose objective is to reconstruct the power spectrum of a wide-sense stationary signal based on sub-Nyquist samples. By exploring the sampling structure inherent in the multicoset sampling scheme, we develop a computationally efficient method for power spectrum reconstruction. An important advantage of our proposed method over existing compressed power spectrum estimation methods is that our proposed method, whose primary computational task consists of fast Fourier transform (FFT), has a very low computational complexity. Such a merit makes it possible to efficiently implement the proposed algorithm in a practical field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based system for real-time wideband spectrum sensing. Our proposed method also provides a new perspective on the power spectrum recovery condition, which leads to a result similar to what was reported in prior works. Simulation results are presented to show the computational efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Bin Wang, Jun Fang, Hongbin Li et al.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that allows to accomplish model training without aggregating data at a central server. Most studies on FL consider a centralized framework, in which a single server is endowed with a central authority to coordinate a number of devices to perform model training in an iterative manner. Due to stringent communication and bandwidth constraints, such a centralized framework has limited scalability as the number of devices grows. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a ConFederated Learning (CFL) framework. The proposed CFL consists of multiple servers, in which each server is connected with an individual set of devices as in the conventional FL framework, and decentralized collaboration is leveraged among servers to make full use of the data dispersed throughout the network. We develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for CFL. The proposed algorithm employs a random scheduling policy which randomly selects a subset of devices to access their respective servers at each iteration, thus alleviating the need of uploading a huge amount of information from devices to servers. Theoretical analysis is presented to justify the proposed method. Numerical results show that the proposed method can converge to a decent solution significantly faster than gradient-based FL algorithms, thus boasting a substantial advantage in terms of communication efficiency.

Zezhou Zhang, Chuanchuan Yang, Yifeng Qin et al.

Conventional meta-atom designs rely heavily on researchers' prior knowledge and trial-and-error searches using full-wave simulations, resulting in time-consuming and inefficient processes. Inverse design methods based on optimization algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms, and topological optimizations, have been introduced to design metamaterials. However, none of these algorithms are general enough to fulfill multi-objective tasks. Recently, deep learning methods represented by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been applied to inverse design of metamaterials, which can directly generate high-degree-of-freedom meta-atoms based on S-parameter requirements. However, the adversarial training process of GANs makes the network unstable and results in high modeling costs. This paper proposes a novel metamaterial inverse design method based on the diffusion probability theory. By learning the Markov process that transforms the original structure into a Gaussian distribution, the proposed method can gradually remove the noise starting from the Gaussian distribution and generate new high-degree-of-freedom meta-atoms that meet S-parameter conditions, which avoids the model instability introduced by the adversarial training process of GANs and ensures more accurate and high-quality generation results. Experiments have proven that our method is superior to representative methods of GANs in terms of model convergence speed, generation accuracy, and quality.

Jun Fang, Linxiao Yang, Hongbin Li

We consider the line spectral estimation problem which aims to recover a mixture of complex sinusoids from a small number of randomly observed time domain samples. Compressed sensing methods formulates line spectral estimation as a sparse signal recovery problem by discretizing the continuous frequency parameter space into a finite set of grid points. Discretization, however, inevitably incurs errors and leads to deteriorated estimation performance. In this paper, we propose a new method which leverages recent advances in tensor decomposition. Specifically, we organize the observed data into a structured tensor and cast line spectral estimation as a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition problem with missing entries. The uniqueness of the CP decomposition allows the frequency components to be super-resolved with infinite precision. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides a competitive estimate accuracy compared with existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Hanling Yi, Feng Lin, Hongbin Li et al.

This research aims to accelerate the inference speed of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters. We propose \textbf{S}mart \textbf{P}arallel \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{C}orrect d\textbf{E}coding (SPACE), an innovative approach designed for achieving lossless acceleration of LLMs. By integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities, SPACE uniquely enables autoregressive LLMs to parallelize token generation and verification. This is realized through a specialized semi-autoregressive supervised fine-tuning process that equips existing LLMs with the ability to simultaneously predict multiple tokens. Additionally, an auto-correct decoding algorithm facilitates the simultaneous generation and verification of token sequences within a single model invocation. Through extensive experiments on a range of LLMs, SPACE has demonstrated inference speedup ranging from 2.7x-4.0x on HumanEval-X while maintaining output quality.

Feng Lin, Hanling Yi, Hongbin Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) commonly employ autoregressive generation during inference, leading to high memory bandwidth demand and consequently extended latency. To mitigate this inefficiency, we present Bi-directional Tuning for lossless Acceleration (BiTA), an innovative method expediting LLMs via streamlined semi-autoregressive generation and draft verification. Inspired by the concept of prompt tuning, we enhance LLMs with a parameter-efficient design called bi-directional tuning for the capability in semi-autoregressive generation. Employing efficient tree-based decoding, the models perform draft candidate generation and verification in parallel, ensuring outputs identical to their autoregressive counterparts under greedy sampling. BiTA serves as a lightweight plug-in module, seamlessly boosting the inference efficiency of existing LLMs without requiring additional assistance models or incurring significant extra memory costs. Applying the proposed BiTA, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat achieves a 2.7$\times$ speedup on the MT-Bench benchmark. Extensive experiments confirm our method surpasses state-of-the-art acceleration techniques.

Bin Wang, Jun Fang, Hongbin Li et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that targets model training without gathering the local data dispersed over various data sources. Standard FL, which employs a single server, can only support a limited number of users, leading to degraded learning capability. In this work, we consider a multi-server FL framework, referred to as \emph{Confederated Learning} (CFL), in order to accommodate a larger number of users. A CFL system is composed of multiple networked edge servers, with each server connected to an individual set of users. Decentralized collaboration among servers is leveraged to harness all users' data for model training. Due to the potentially massive number of users involved, it is crucial to reduce the communication overhead of the CFL system. We propose a stochastic gradient method for distributed learning in the CFL framework. The proposed method incorporates a conditionally-triggered user selection (CTUS) mechanism as the central component to effectively reduce communication overhead. Relying on a delicately designed triggering condition, the CTUS mechanism allows each server to select only a small number of users to upload their gradients, without significantly jeopardizing the convergence performance of the algorithm. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed algorithm enjoys a linear convergence rate. Simulation results show that it achieves substantial improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of communication efficiency.

Linxiao Yang, Jun Fang, Huiping Duan et al.

The problem of low rank matrix completion is considered in this paper. To exploit the underlying low-rank structure of the data matrix, we propose a hierarchical Gaussian prior model, where columns of the low-rank matrix are assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and a common precision matrix, and a Wishart distribution is specified as a hyperprior over the precision matrix. We show that such a hierarchical Gaussian prior has the potential to encourage a low-rank solution. Based on the proposed hierarchical prior model, a variational Bayesian method is developed for matrix completion, where the generalized approximate massage passing (GAMP) technique is embedded into the variational Bayesian inference in order to circumvent cumbersome matrix inverse operations. Simulation results show that our proposed method demonstrates superiority over existing state-of-the-art matrix completion methods.

Qian Wan, Huiping Duan, Jun Fang et al.

We consider the problem of robust compressed sensing whose objective is to recover a high-dimensional sparse signal from compressed measurements corrupted by outliers. A new sparse Bayesian learning method is developed for robust compressed sensing. The basic idea of the proposed method is to identify and remove the outliers from sparse signal recovery. To automatically identify the outliers, we employ a set of binary indicator hyperparameters to indicate which observations are outliers. These indicator hyperparameters are treated as random variables and assigned a beta process prior such that their values are confined to be binary. In addition, a Gaussian-inverse Gamma prior is imposed on the sparse signal to promote sparsity. Based on this hierarchical prior model, we develop a variational Bayesian method to estimate the indicator hyperparameters as well as the sparse signal. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a substantial performance improvement over existing robust compressed sensing techniques.

Linxiao Yang, Jun Fang, Hongbin Li et al.

We consider the problem of low-rank decomposition of incomplete multiway tensors. Since many real-world data lie on an intrinsically low dimensional subspace, tensor low-rank decomposition with missing entries has applications in many data analysis problems such as recommender systems and image inpainting. In this paper, we focus on Tucker decomposition which represents an Nth-order tensor in terms of N factor matrices and a core tensor via multilinear operations. To exploit the underlying multilinear low-rank structure in high-dimensional datasets, we propose a group-based log-sum penalty functional to place structural sparsity over the core tensor, which leads to a compact representation with smallest core tensor. The method for Tucker decomposition is developed by iteratively minimizing a surrogate function that majorizes the original objective function, which results in an iterative reweighted process. In addition, to reduce the computational complexity, an over-relaxed monotone fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding technique is adapted and embedded in the iterative reweighted process. The proposed method is able to determine the model complexity (i.e. multilinear rank) in an automatic way. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers competitive performance compared with other existing algorithms.

Linxiao Yang, Jun Fang, Hong Cheng et al.

We consider a dictionary learning problem whose objective is to design a dictionary such that the signals admits a sparse or an approximate sparse representation over the learned dictionary. Such a problem finds a variety of applications such as image denoising, feature extraction, etc. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical Bayesian model for dictionary learning, in which a Gaussian-inverse Gamma hierarchical prior is used to promote the sparsity of the representation. Suitable priors are also placed on the dictionary and the noise variance such that they can be reasonably inferred from the data. Based on the hierarchical model, a variational Bayesian method and a Gibbs sampling method are developed for Bayesian inference. The proposed methods have the advantage that they do not require the knowledge of the noise variance \emph{a priori}. Numerical results show that the proposed methods are able to learn the dictionary with an accuracy better than existing methods, particularly for the case where there is a limited number of training signals.

Jun Fang, Yanning Shen, Hongbin Li et al.

We consider the problem of recovering block-sparse signals whose structures are unknown \emph{a priori}. Block-sparse signals with nonzero coefficients occurring in clusters arise naturally in many practical scenarios. However, the knowledge of the block structure is usually unavailable in practice. In this paper, we develop a new sparse Bayesian learning method for recovery of block-sparse signals with unknown cluster patterns. Specifically, a pattern-coupled hierarchical Gaussian prior model is introduced to characterize the statistical dependencies among coefficients, in which a set of hyperparameters are employed to control the sparsity of signal coefficients. Unlike the conventional sparse Bayesian learning framework in which each individual hyperparameter is associated independently with each coefficient, in this paper, the prior for each coefficient not only involves its own hyperparameter, but also the hyperparameters of its immediate neighbors. In doing this way, the sparsity patterns of neighboring coefficients are related to each other and the hierarchical model has the potential to encourage structured-sparse solutions. The hyperparameters, along with the sparse signal, are learned by maximizing their posterior probability via an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm presents uniform superiority over other existing methods in a series of experiments.