pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Differential Data-Aided Beam Training for RIS-Empowered Multi-Antenna Communications
Authors: Kun Chen-Hu, George C. Alexandropoulos, Ana García Armada
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

The Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) constitutes one of the prominent technologies for the next generation of wireless communications. It is envisioned to enhance the signal coverage in cases when the direct link of the communication is weak. Recently, beam training based on codebook selection is proposed to obtain the optimized phase configuration of the RIS. After that, the data is transmitted and received by using the classical coherent demodulation scheme (CDS). This training approach is able to avoid the large overhead required by the channel sounding process, and it also circumvents complex optimization problems. However, the beam training still requires the transmission of some reference signals to test the different phase configurations of the codebook, and the best codeword is chosen according to the measurement of the received energy of the reference signals. Then, the overhead due to the transmission of reference signals reduces the spectral efficiency. In this paper, a zero overhead beam training for RIS is proposed, relying on data transmission and reception based on non-CDS (NCDS). At the BS, the received differential data can also be used for the determination of the best beam for the RIS. Therefore, the efficiency of the system is significantly enhanced since reference signals are fully avoided. After choosing the best codebook, NCDS is still more suitable to transmit information for high mobility scenarios as compared to the classical CDS. Analytical expressions for the Signal-to-Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) for the non-coherent RIS-empowered system are presented. Moreover, a detailed comparison between the NCDS and CDS in terms of efficiency and complexity is also given. The extensive computer simulation results verify the accuracy of the presented analysis and showcase that the proposed system outperforms the existing solutions.
Rapid Phase Ambiguity Elimination Methods for DOA Estimator via Hybrid Massive MIMO Receive Array
Authors: Xichao Zhan, YiWen Chen, Feng Shu, Xin Cheng, Yuanyuan Wu, Qi Zhang, Yifang Li, Peng Zhang
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

For a sub-connected hybrid multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver with $K$ subarrays and $N$ antennas, there exists a challenging problem of how to rapidly remove phase ambiguity in only single time-slot. First, a DOA estimator of maximizing received power (Max-RP) is proposed to find the maximum value of $K$-subarray output powers, where each subarray is in charge of one sector, and the center angle of the sector corresponding to the maximum output is the estimated true DOA. To make an enhancement on precision, Max-RP plus quadratic interpolation (Max-RP-QI) method is designed. In the proposed Max-RP-QI, a quadratic interpolation scheme is adopted to interpolate the three DOA values corresponding to the largest three receive powers of Max-RP. Finally, to achieve the CRLB, a Root-MUSIC plus Max-RP-QI scheme is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed three methods eliminate the phase ambiguity during one time-slot and also show low-computational-complexities. In particular, the proposed Root-MUSIC plus Max-RP-QI scheme can reach the CRLB, and the proposed Max-RP and Max-RP-QI are still some performance losses $2dB\thicksim4dB$ compared to the CRLB.
Energy-Efficient Dynamic Edge Computing with Electromagnetic Field Exposure Constraints
Authors: Mattia Merluzzi, Serge Bories, Emilio Calvanese Strinati
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Stochastic Optimization

We present a dynamic resource allocation strategy for energy-efficient and Electromagnetic Field (EMF) exposure aware computation offloading at the wireless network edge. The goal is to maximize the overall system sum-rate of offloaded data, under stability (i.e. finite end-to-end delay), EMF exposure and system power constraints. The latter comprises end devices for uplink transmission and a Mobile Edge Host (MEH) for computation. Our proposed method, based on Lyapunov stochastic optimization, is able to achieve this goal with theoretical guarantees on asymptotic optimality, without any prior knowledge of wireless channel statistics. Although a complex long-term optimization problem is formulated, a per-slot optimization based on instantaneous realizations is derived. Moreover, the solution of the instantaneous problem is provided with closed form expressions and fast iterative procedures. Besides the theoretical analysis, numerical results assess the performance of the proposed strategy in striking the best trade-off between offloading sum-rate, power consumption, EMF exposure, and E2E delay. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing the problem of energy and exposure aware computation offloading.
Computationally efficient neural network classifiers for next generation closed loop neuromodulation therapy -- a case study in epilepsy
Authors: Ali Kavoosi, Robert Toth, Moaad Benjaber, Mayela Zamora, Antonio Valentin, Andrew Sharott, Timothy Denison
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network

This work explores the potential utility of neural network classifiers for real-time classification of field-potential based biomarkers in next-generation responsive neuromodulation systems. Compared to classical filter-based classifiers, neural networks offer an ease of patient-specific parameter tuning, promising to reduce the burden of programming on clinicians. The paper explores a compact, feed-forward neural network architecture of only dozens of units for seizure-state classification in refractory epilepsy. The proposed classifier offers comparable accuracy to filter classifiers on clinician-labelled data, while reducing detection latency. As a trade-off to classical methods, the paper focuses on keeping the complexity of the architecture minimal, to accommodate the on-board computational constraints of implantable pulse generator systems.
MCRB-based Performance Analysis of 6G Localization under Hardware Impairments
Authors: Hui Chen, Sina Rezaei Aghdam, Musa Furkan Keskin, Yibo Wu, Simon Lindberg, Andreas Wolfgang, Ulf Gustavsson, Thomas Eriksson, Henk Wymeersch
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

Location information is expected to be the key to meeting the needs of communication and context-aware services in 6G systems. User localization is achieved based on delay and/or angle estimation using uplink or downlink pilot signals. However, hardware impairments (HWIs) distort the signals at both the transmitter and receiver sides and thus affect the localization performance. While this impact can be ignored at lower frequencies where HWIs are less severe, modeling and analysis efforts are needed for 6G to evaluate the localization degradation due to HWIs. In this work, we model various types of impairments and conduct a misspecified Cram\'er-Rao bound analysis to evaluate the HWI-induced performance loss. Simulation results with different types of HWIs show that each HWI leads to a different level of degradation in angle and delay estimation performance.
RIS-aided Near-Field Localization under Phase-Dependent Amplitude Variations
Authors: Cuneyd Ozturk, Musa Furkan Keskin, Henk Wymeersch, Sinan Gezici
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

We investigate the problem of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided near-field localization of a user equipment (UE) served by a base station (BS) under phase-dependent amplitude variations at each RIS element. Through a misspecified Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (MCRB) analysis and a resulting lower bound (LB) on localization, we show that when the UE is unaware of amplitude variations (i.e., assumes unit-amplitude responses), severe performance penalties can arise, especially at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Leveraging Jacobi-Anger expansion to decouple range-azimuth-elevation dimensions, we develop a low-complexity approximated mismatched maximum likelihood (AMML) estimator, which is asymptotically tight to the LB. To mitigate performance loss due to model mismatch, we propose to jointly estimate the UE location and the RIS amplitude model parameters. The corresponding Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (CRB) is derived, as well as an iterative refinement algorithm, which employs the AMML method as a subroutine and alternatingly updates individual parameters of the RIS amplitude model. Simulation results indicate fast convergence and performance close to the CRB. The proposed method can successfully recover the performance loss of the AMML under a wide range of RIS parameters and effectively calibrate the RIS amplitude model online with the help of a user that has an a-priori unknown location.
Nondominated-Solution-based Multi-objective Greedy Sensor Selection for Optimal Design of Experiments
Authors: Kumi Nakai, Yasuo Sasaki, Takayuki Nagata, Keigo Yamada, Yuji Saito, Taku Nonomura
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiobjective Optimization

In this study, a nondominated-solution-based multi-objective greedy method is proposed and applied to a sensor selection problem based on the multiple indices of the optimal design of experiments. The proposed method simultaneously considers multiple set functions and applies the idea of Pareto ranking for the selection of sets. Specifically, a new index is iteratively added to the nondominated solutions of sets, and the multi-objective functions are evaluated for new sets. The nondominated solutions are selected from the examined solutions, and the next sets are then considered. With this procedure, the multi-objective optimization of multiple set functions can be conducted with reasonable computational costs. This paper defines a new class of greedy algorithms which includes the proposed nondominated-solution-based multi-objective greedy algorithm and the group greedy algorithm, and the characteristics of those algorithms are theoretically discussed. Then, the proposed method is applied to the sensor selection problem and its performance is evaluated. The results of the test case show that the proposed method not only gives the Pareto-optimal front of the multi-objective optimization problem but also produces sets of sensors in terms of D-, A-, and E-optimality, that are superior to the sets selected by pure greedy methods that consider only a single objective function.
Two-dimensional forward and backward transition rates
Authors: Theis Bathke, Marcus Christiansen
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Forward transition rates were originally introduced with the aim to evaluate life insurance liabilities market-consistently. While this idea turned out to have its limitations, recent literature repurposes forward transition rates as a tool for avoiding Markov assumptions in the calculation of life insurance reserves. While life insurance reserves are some form of conditional first-order moments, the calculation of conditional second-order moments needs an extension of the forward transition rate concept from one dimension to two dimensions. Two-dimensional forward transition rates are also needed for the calculation of path-dependent life insurance cash-flows as they occur upon contract modifications. Forward transition rates are designed for doing prospective calculations, and by a time-symmetric definition of so-called backward transition rates one can do retrospective calculations.
The low-entropy hydration shell at the binding site of spike RBD determines the contagiousness of SARS-CoV-2 variants
Authors: Lin Yang, Shuai Guo, Chengyu Houc, Jiacheng Lia, Liping Shi, Chenchen Liao, Rongchun Shi, Xiaoliang Ma, Bing Zheng, Yi Fang, Lin Ye, Xiaodong He
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

The infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 depends on the binding affinity of the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein with the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor. The calculated RBD-ACE2 binding energies indicate that the difference in transmission efficiency of SARS-CoV-2 variants cannot be fully explained by electrostatic interactions, hydrogen-bond interactions, van der Waals interactions, internal energy, and nonpolar solvation energies. Here, we demonstrate that low-entropy regions of hydration shells around proteins drive hydrophobic attraction between shape-matched low-entropy regions of the hydration shells, which essentially coordinates protein-protein binding in rotational-configurational space of mutual orientations and determines the binding affinity. An innovative method was used to identify the low-entropy regions of the hydration shells of the RBDs of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants and the ACE2. We observed integral low-entropy regions of hydration shells covering the binding sites of the RBDs and matching in shape to the low-entropy region of hydration shell at the binding site of the ACE2. The RBD-ACE2 binding is thus found to be guided by hydrophobic collapse between the shape-matched low-entropy regions of the hydration shells. A measure of the low-entropy of the hydration shells can be obtained by counting the number of hydrophilic groups expressing hydrophilicity within the binding sites. The low-entropy level of hydration shells at the binding site of a spike protein is found to be an important indicator of the contagiousness of the coronavirus.
SANA: Cross-Species Prediction of Gene Ontology GO Annotations via Topological Network Alignment
Authors: Siyue Wang, Giles R. S. Atkinson, Wayne B. Hayes
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Topological network alignment aims to align two networks node-wise in order to maximize the observed common connection (edge) topology between them. The topological alignment of two Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks should thus expose protein pairs with similar interaction partners allowing, for example, the prediction of common Gene Ontology (GO) terms. Unfortunately, no network alignment algorithm based on topology alone has been able to achieve this aim, though those that include sequence similarity have seen some success. We argue that this failure of topology alone is due to the sparsity and incompleteness of the PPI network data of almost all species, which provides the network topology with a small signal-to-noise ratio that is effectively swamped when sequence information is added to the mix. Here we show that the weak signal can be detected using multiple stochastic samples of "good" topological network alignments, which allows us to observe regions of the two networks that are robustly aligned across multiple samples. The resulting Network Alignment Frequency (NAF) strongly correlates with GO-based Resnik semantic similarity and enables the first successful cross-species predictions of GO terms based on topology-only network alignments. Our best predictions have an AUPR of about 0.4, which is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms, even when there is no observable sequence similarity and no known homology relationship. While our results provide only a "proof of concept" on existing network data, we hypothesize that predicting GO terms from topology-only network alignments will become increasingly practical as the volume and quality of PPI network data increase.
Molecular and Serologic Diagnostic Technologies for SARS-CoV-2
Authors: Halie M. Rando, Christian Brueffer, Ronan Lordan, Anna Ada Dattoli, David Manheim, Jesse G. Meyer, Ariel I. Mundo, Dimitri Perrin, David Mai, Nils Wellhausen, COVID-19 Review Consortium, Anthony Gitter, Casey S. Greene
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented many challenges that have spurred biotechnological research to address specific problems. Diagnostics is one area where biotechnology has been critical. Diagnostic tests play a vital role in managing a viral threat by facilitating the detection of infected and/or recovered individuals. From the perspective of what information is provided, these tests fall into two major categories, molecular and serological. Molecular diagnostic techniques assay whether a virus is present in a biological sample, thus making it possible to identify individuals who are currently infected. Additionally, when the immune system is exposed to a virus, it responds by producing antibodies specific to the virus. Serological tests make it possible to identify individuals who have mounted an immune response to a virus of interest and therefore facilitate the identification of individuals who have previously encountered the virus. These two categories of tests provide different perspectives valuable to understanding the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Within these categories, different biotechnological approaches offer specific advantages and disadvantages. Here we review the categories of tests developed for the detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus or antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and discuss the role of diagnostics in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Enhanced compound-protein binding affinity prediction by representing protein multimodal information via a coevolutionary strategy
Authors: Binjie Guo, Hanyu Zheng, Haohan Jiang, Xiaodan Li, Naiyu Guan, Yanming Zuo, YiCheng Zhang, Hengfu Yang, Xuhua Wang
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00

Due to the lack of a method to efficiently represent the multimodal information of a protein, including its structure and sequence information, predicting compound-protein binding affinity (CPA) still suffers from low accuracy when applying machine learning methods. To overcome this limitation, in a novel end-to-end architecture (named FeatNN), we develop a coevolutionary strategy to jointly represent the structure and sequence features of proteins and ultimately optimize the mathematical models for predicting CPA. Furthermore, from the perspective of data-driven approach, we proposed a rational method that can utilize both high- and low-quality databases to optimize the accuracy and generalization ability of FeatNN in CPA prediction tasks. Notably, we visually interpret the feature interaction process between sequence and structure in the rationally designed architecture. As a result, FeatNN considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline in virtual drug screening tasks, indicating the feasibility of this approach for practical use. FeatNN provides an outstanding method for higher CPA prediction accuracy and better generalization ability by efficiently representing multimodal information of proteins via a coevolutionary strategy.
Heading perception and the structure of the optic acceleration field
Authors: Charlie S. Burlingham, Mengjian Hua, Oliver Xu, Kathryn Bonnen, David J. Heeger
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

Visual estimation of heading in the human brain is widely believed to be based on instantaneous optic flow, the velocity of retinal image motion. However, we previously found that humans are unable to use instantaneous optic flow to accurately estimate heading and require time-varying optic flow (Burlingham and Heeger, 2020). We proposed the hypothesis that heading perception is computed from optic acceleration, the temporal derivative of optic flow, based on the observation that heading is aligned perfectly with a point on the retina with zero optic acceleration. However, this result was derived for a specific scenario used in our experiments, when retinal heading and rotational velocity are constant over time. We previously speculated that as the change over time in heading or rotation increases, the bias of the estimator would increase proportionally, based on the idea that our derived case would approximate what happens in a small interval of time (when heading and rotation are nearly constant). In this technical report, we characterize the properties of the optic acceleration field and derive the bias of this estimator for the more common case of a fixating observer, i.e., one that moves while counter-rotating their eyes to stabilize an object on the fovea. For a fixating observer tracking a point on a fronto-parallel plane, there are in fact two singularities of optic acceleration: one that is always at fixation (due to image stabilization) and a second whose bias scales inversely with heading, inconsistent with human behavior. For movement parallel to a ground plane, there is only one singularity of optic acceleration (at the fixation point), which is uninformative about heading. We conclude that the singularity of optic acceleration is not an accurate estimator of heading under natural conditions.
Correcting motion induced fluorescence artifacts in two-channel neural imaging
Authors: Matthew S. Creamer, Kevin S. Chen, Andrew M. Leifer, Jonathan W. Pillow
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Imaging neural activity in a behaving animal presents unique challenges in part because motion from an animal's movement creates artifacts in fluorescence intensity time-series that are difficult to distinguish from neural signals of interest. One approach to mitigating these artifacts is to image two channels; one that captures an activity-dependent fluorophore, such as GCaMP, and another that captures an activity-independent fluorophore such as RFP. Because the activity-independent channel contains the same motion artifacts as the activity-dependent channel, but no neural signals, the two together can be used to remove the artifacts. Existing approaches for this correction, such as taking the ratio of the two channels, do not account for channel independent noise in the measured fluorescence. Moreover, no systematic comparison has been made of existing approaches that use two-channel signals. Here, we present Two-channel Motion Artifact Correction (TMAC), a method which seeks to remove artifacts by specifying a generative model of the fluorescence of the two channels as a function of motion artifact, neural activity, and noise. We further present a novel method for evaluating ground-truth performance of motion correction algorithms by comparing the decodability of behavior from two types of neural recordings; a recording that had both an activity-dependent fluorophore (GCaMP and RFP) and a recording where both fluorophores were activity-independent (GFP and RFP). A successful motion-correction method should decode behavior from the first type of recording, but not the second. We use this metric to systematically compare five methods for removing motion artifacts from fluorescent time traces. We decode locomotion from a GCaMP expressing animal 15x more accurately on average than from control when using TMAC inferred activity and outperform all other methods of motion correction tested.
Systematic description of COVID-19 pandemic using exact SIR solutions and Gumbel distributions
Authors: J. E. Amaro
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

An epidemiological study of deaths is carried out in a dozen countries by analyzing the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. These countries are among those most affected by the first wave, i.e. where daily-death data series may closely resemble a solution of the basic SIR equations. The SIR equations are solved parametrically using the proper time as parameter. Some general properties of the SIR solutions are studied such as time-scaling and asymmetry. Additionally, we use approximations to the SIR solutions through Gumbel functions, which present a very similar behavior. The parameters of the SIR model and the Gumbel function are extracted from the data and compared for the different countries. It is found that ten of the selected countries are very well described by the solutions of the SIR model, with a basic reproduction number between 3 and 8.