pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fundamental Limit of Angular Resolution in Partly Calibrated Arrays with Position Errors
Authors: Guangbin Zhang, Yan Wang, Tianyao Huang, Yonina C. Eldar
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

We consider high angular resolution detection using distributed mobile platforms implemented with so-called partly calibrated arrays, where position errors between subarrays exist and the counterparts within each subarray are ideally calibrated. Since position errors between antenna arrays affect the coherent processing of measurements from these arrays, it is commonly believed that its angular resolution is influenced. A key question is whether and how much the angular resolution of partly calibrated arrays is affected by the position errors, in comparison with ideally calibrated arrays. To address this fundamental problem, we theoretically illustrate that partly calibrated arrays approximately achieve high angular resolution. Our analysis uses a special characteristic of Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) w.r.t. the source separation: When the source separation increases, the CRB first declines rapidly, then plateaus out, and the turning point is close to the angular resolution limit. This means that the turning point of CRB can be used to indicate angular resolution. We then theoretically analyze the declining and plateau phases of CRB, and explain that the turning point of CRB in partly calibrated arrays is close to the angular resolution limit of distributed arrays without errors, demonstrating high resolution ability. This work thus provides a theoretical guarantee for the high-resolution performance of distributed antenna arrays in mobile platforms.
Amplitude-Domain Reflection Modulation for Active RIS-Assisted Wireless Communications
Authors: Jing Zhu, Qu, Luo, Zheng Chu, Gaojie Chen, Pei Xiao, Lixia Xiao, Chaoyun Song
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted amplitude-domain reflection modulation (ADRM) transmission scheme, termed as ARIS-ADRM. This innovative approach leverages the additional degree of freedom (DoF) provided by the amplitude domain of the active RIS to perform index modulation (IM), thereby enhancing spectral efficiency (SE) without increasing the costs associated with additional radio frequency (RF) chains. Specifically, the ARIS-ADRM scheme transmits information bits through both the modulation symbol and the index of active RIS amplitude allocation patterns (AAPs). To evaluate the performance of the proposed ARIS-ADRM scheme, we provide an achievable rate analysis and derive a closed-form expression for the upper bound on the average bit error probability (ABEP). Furthermore, we formulate an optimization problem to construct the AAP codebook, aiming to minimize the ABEP. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves error performance under the same SE conditions compared to its benchmarks. This improvement is due to its ability to flexibly adapt the transmission rate by fully exploiting the amplitude domain DoF provided by the active RIS.
Locally minimax optimal and dimension-agnostic discrete argmin inference
Authors: Ilmun Kim, Aaditya Ramdas
Date: 2025-03-27 00:00:00

This paper tackles a fundamental inference problem: given $n$ observations from a $d$ dimensional vector with unknown mean $\boldsymbol{\mu}$, we must form a confidence set for the index (or indices) corresponding to the smallest component of $\boldsymbol{\mu}$. By duality, we reduce this to testing, for each $r$ in $1,\ldots,d$, whether $\mu_r$ is the smallest. Based on the sample splitting and self-normalization approach of Kim and Ramdas (2024), we propose "dimension-agnostic" tests that maintain validity regardless of how $d$ scales with $n$, and regardless of arbitrary ties in $\boldsymbol{\mu}$. Notably, our validity holds under mild moment conditions, requiring little more than finiteness of a second moment, and permitting possibly strong dependence between coordinates. In addition, we establish the local minimax separation rate for this problem, which adapts to the cardinality of a confusion set, and show that the proposed tests attain this rate. Furthermore, we develop robust variants that continue to achieve the same minimax rate under heavy-tailed distributions with only finite second moments. Empirical results on simulated and real data illustrate the strong performance of our approach in terms of type I error control and power compared to existing methods.
Debiasing Kernel-Based Generative Models
Authors: Tian Qin, Wei-Min Huang
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

We propose a novel two-stage framework of generative models named Debiasing Kernel-Based Generative Models (DKGM) with the insights from kernel density estimation (KDE) and stochastic approximation. In the first stage of DKGM, we employ KDE to bypass the obstacles in estimating the density of data without losing too much image quality. One characteristic of KDE is oversmoothing, which makes the generated image blurry. Therefore, in the second stage, we formulate the process of reducing the blurriness of images as a statistical debiasing problem and develop a novel iterative algorithm to improve image quality, which is inspired by the stochastic approximation. Extensive experiments illustrate that the image quality of DKGM on CIFAR10 is comparable to state-of-the-art models such as diffusion models and GAN models. The performance of DKGM on CelebA 128x128 and LSUN (Church) 128x128 is also competitive. We conduct extra experiments to exploit how the bandwidth in KDE affects the sample diversity and debiasing effect of DKGM. The connections between DKGM and score-based models are also discussed.
RIS-Enabled Self-Localization with FMCW Radar
Authors: Hyowon Kim, Navid~Amani, Musa Furkan Keskin, Zhongxia Simon He, Jorge Gil, Gonzalo-Seco Granados, Henk Wymeersch
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00

In the upcoming vehicular networks, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are considered as a key enabler of user self-localization without the intervention of the access points (APs). In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of RIS-enabled self-localization with no APs. We first develop a digital signal processing (DSP) unit for estimating the geometric parameters such as the angle, distance, and velocity and for RIS-enabled self-localization. Second, we set up an experimental testbed consisting of a Texas Instrument frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar for the user and SilversIMA module for the RIS. Our results confirm the validity of the developed DSP unit and demonstrate the feasibility of RIS-enabled self-localization.
Centroid Decision Forest
Authors: Amjad Ali, Zardad Khan, Saeed Aldahmani
Date: 2025-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning

This paper introduces the centroid decision forest (CDF), a novel ensemble learning framework that redefines the splitting strategy and tree building in the ordinary decision trees for high-dimensional classification. The splitting approach in CDF differs from the traditional decision trees in theat the class separability score (CSS) determines the selection of the most discriminative features at each node to construct centroids of the partitions (daughter nodes). The splitting criterion uses the Euclidean distance measurements from each class centroid to achieve a splitting mechanism that is more flexible and robust. Centroids are constructed by computing the mean feature values of the selected features for each class, ensuring a class-representative division of the feature space. This centroid-driven approach enables CDF to capture complex class structures while maintaining interpretability and scalability. To evaluate CDF, 23 high-dimensional datasets are used to assess its performance against different state-of-the-art classifiers through classification accuracy and Cohen's kappa statistic. The experimental results show that CDF outperforms the conventional methods establishing its effectiveness and flexibility for high-dimensional classification problems.
Analytic DAG Constraints for Differentiable DAG Learning
Authors: Zhen Zhang, Ignavier Ng, Dong Gong, Yuhang Liu, Mingming Gong, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhang, Anton Van Den Hengel, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Date: 2025-03-24 00:00:00

Recovering the underlying Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures from observational data presents a formidable challenge, partly due to the combinatorial nature of the DAG-constrained optimization problem. Recently, researchers have identified gradient vanishing as one of the primary obstacles in differentiable DAG learning and have proposed several DAG constraints to mitigate this issue. By developing the necessary theory to establish a connection between analytic functions and DAG constraints, we demonstrate that analytic functions from the set $\{f(x) = c_0 + \sum_{i=1}^{\infty}c_ix^i | \forall i > 0, c_i > 0; r = \lim_{i\rightarrow \infty}c_{i}/c_{i+1} > 0\}$ can be employed to formulate effective DAG constraints. Furthermore, we establish that this set of functions is closed under several functional operators, including differentiation, summation, and multiplication. Consequently, these operators can be leveraged to create novel DAG constraints based on existing ones. Using these properties, we design a series of DAG constraints and develop an efficient algorithm to evaluate them. Experiments in various settings demonstrate that our DAG constraints outperform previous state-of-the-art comparators. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/zzhang1987/AnalyticDAGLearning.
Filtered Multi-Tone Spread Spectrum with Overlapping Subbands
Authors: Brian Nelson, Hussein Moradi, Behrouz Farhang-Boroujeny
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00

A new form of the filter bank multi-carrier spread spectrum (FBMC-SS) waveform is presented. This new waveform modifies the filtered multi-tone spread spectrum (FMT-SS) system, and is intended to whiten the power spectral density (PSD) of the transmit signal. In the conventional FMT-SS, subcarrier bands are non-overlapping, leaving a spectral null between the adjacent subcarrier bands. To make FMT-SS more appealing for a broader set of applications than those studied in the past, we propose adding additional subcarriers centered at these nulls and thoroughly explore the impact of the added subcarriers on the system performance. This modified form of FMT-SS is referred to as overlapped FMT-SS (OFMT-SS). We explore the conditions required for maximally flattening the PSD of the synthesized OFMT-SS signal and for cancelling the interference caused by overlapping subbands. We also explore the choices of spreading gains that result in a low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) for a number of different scenarios. Further reduction of the PAPR of the synthesized signal through clipping methods is also explored. Additionally, we propose methods of multi-coding for increasing the data rate of the OFMT-SS waveform, while minimally impacting its PAPR.
Channel impulse response peak clustering using neural networks
Authors: Petr Horky, Ales Prokes, Radek Zavorka, Josef Vychodil, Jan M. Kelner, Cezary Ziolkowski, Aniruddha Chandra
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering

This paper introduces an approach to process channel sounder data acquired from Channel Impulse Response (CIR) of 60GHz and 80GHz channel sounder systems, through the integration of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Network (NN) and Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN). The primary goal is to enhance and automate cluster detection within peaks from noised CIR data. The study initially compares the performance of LSTM NN and FCNN across different input sequence lengths. Notably, LSTM surpasses FCNN due to its incorporation of memory cells, which prove beneficial for handling longer series.Additionally, the paper investigates the robustness of LSTM NN through various architectural configurations. The findings suggest that robust neural networks tend to closely mimic the input function, whereas smaller neural networks are better at generalizing trends in time series data, which is desirable for anomaly detection, where function peaks are regarded as anomalies.Finally, the selected LSTM NN is compared with traditional signal filters, including Butterworth, Savitzky-Golay, Bessel/Thomson, and median filters. Visual observations indicate that the most effective methods for peak detection within channel impulse response data are either the LSTM NN or median filter, as they yield similar results.
LoRA Subtraction for Drift-Resistant Space in Exemplar-Free Continual Learning
Authors: Xuan Liu, Xiaobin Chang
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Continual Learning, Exemplar-Free, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Triplet

In continual learning (CL), catastrophic forgetting often arises due to feature drift. This challenge is particularly prominent in the exemplar-free continual learning (EFCL) setting, where samples from previous tasks cannot be retained, making it difficult to preserve prior knowledge. To address this issue, some EFCL methods aim to identify feature spaces that minimize the impact on previous tasks while accommodating new ones. However, they rely on static features or outdated statistics stored from old tasks, which prevents them from capturing the dynamic evolution of the feature space in CL, leading to performance degradation over time. In this paper, we introduce the Drift-Resistant Space (DRS), which effectively handles feature drifts without requiring explicit feature modeling or the storage of previous tasks. A novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach called Low-Rank Adaptation Subtraction (LoRA-) is proposed to develop the DRS. This method subtracts the LoRA weights of old tasks from the initial pre-trained weight before processing new task data to establish the DRS for model training. Therefore, LoRA- enhances stability, improves efficiency, and simplifies implementation. Furthermore, stabilizing feature drifts allows for better plasticity by learning with a triplet loss. Our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art results, especially for long task sequences, across multiple datasets.
CAE: Repurposing the Critic as an Explorer in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yexin Li, Pring Wong, Hanfang Zhang, Shuo Chen, Siyuan Qi
Date: 2025-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Efficient Exploration, MuJoCo

Exploration remains a critical challenge in reinforcement learning, as many existing methods either lack theoretical guarantees or fall short of practical effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce CAE, a lightweight algorithm that repurposes the value networks in standard deep RL algorithms to drive exploration without introducing additional parameters. CAE utilizes any linear multi-armed bandit technique and incorporates an appropriate scaling strategy, enabling efficient exploration with provable sub-linear regret bounds and practical stability. Notably, it is simple to implement, requiring only around 10 lines of code. In complex tasks where learning an effective value network proves challenging, we propose CAE+, an extension of CAE that incorporates an auxiliary network. This extension increases the parameter count by less than 1% while maintaining implementation simplicity, adding only about 10 additional lines of code. Experiments on MuJoCo and MiniHack show that both CAE and CAE+ outperform state-of-the-art baselines, bridging the gap between theoretical rigor and practical efficiency.
Do regularization methods for shortcut mitigation work as intended?
Authors: Haoyang Hong, Ioanna Papanikolaou, Sonali Parbhoo
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00

Mitigating shortcuts, where models exploit spurious correlations in training data, remains a significant challenge for improving generalization. Regularization methods have been proposed to address this issue by enhancing model generalizability. However, we demonstrate that these methods can sometimes overregularize, inadvertently suppressing causal features along with spurious ones. In this work, we analyze the theoretical mechanisms by which regularization mitigates shortcuts and explore the limits of its effectiveness. Additionally, we identify the conditions under which regularization can successfully eliminate shortcuts without compromising causal features. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, our comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of regularization techniques for addressing shortcuts, offering guidance for developing more robust models.
Online Selective Conformal Prediction: Errors and Solutions
Authors: Yusuf Sale, Aaditya Ramdas
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, valid

In online selective conformal inference, data arrives sequentially, and prediction intervals are constructed only when an online selection rule is met. Since online selections may break the exchangeability between the selected test datum and the rest of the data, one must correct for this by suitably selecting the calibration data. In this paper, we evaluate existing calibration selection strategies and pinpoint some fundamental errors in the associated claims that guarantee selection-conditional coverage and control of the false coverage rate (FCR). To address these shortcomings, we propose novel calibration selection strategies that provably preserve the exchangeability of the calibration data and the selected test datum. Consequently, we demonstrate that online selective conformal inference with these strategies guarantees both selection-conditional coverage and FCR control. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental evidence examining tradeoffs between valid methods.
Interpretability of Graph Neural Networks to Assess Effects of Global Change Drivers on Ecological Networks
Authors: Emre Anakok, Pierre Barbillon, Colin Fontaine, Elisa Thebault
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00

Pollinators play a crucial role for plant reproduction, either in natural ecosystem or in human-modified landscape. Global change drivers,including climate change or land use modifications, can alter the plant-pollinator interactions. To assess the potential influence of global change drivers on pollination, large-scale interactions, climate and land use data are required. While recent machine learning methods, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), allow the analysis of such datasets, interpreting their results can be challenging. We explore existing methods for interpreting GNNs in order to highlight the effects of various environmental covariates on pollination network connectivity. A large simulation study is performed to confirm whether these methods can detect the interactive effect between a covariate and a genus of plant on connectivity, and whether the application of debiasing techniques influences the estimation of these effects. An application on the Spipoll dataset, with and without accounting for sampling effects, highlights the potential impact of land use on network connectivity and shows that accounting for sampling effects partially alters the estimation of these effects.
Advancing Deep Learning through Probability Engineering: A Pragmatic Paradigm for Modern AI
Authors: Jianyi Zhang
Date: 2025-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning, Image Generation, Knowledge Distillation, Text Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progression of deep learning, pushing us closer to the realization of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Probabilistic modeling is critical to many of these advancements, which provides a foundational framework for capturing data distributions. However, as the scale and complexity of AI applications grow, traditional probabilistic modeling faces escalating challenges, such as high-dimensional parameter spaces, heterogeneous data sources, and evolving real-world requirements often render classical approaches insufficiently flexible. This paper proposes a novel concept, Probability Engineering, which treats the already-learned probability distributions within deep learning as engineering artifacts. Rather than merely fitting or inferring distributions, we actively modify and reinforce them to better address the diverse and evolving demands of modern AI. Specifically, Probability Engineering introduces novel techniques and constraints to refine existing probability distributions, improving their robustness, efficiency, adaptability, or trustworthiness. We showcase this paradigm through a series of applications spanning Bayesian deep learning, Edge AI (including federated learning and knowledge distillation), and Generative AI (such as text-to-image generation with diffusion models and high-quality text generation with large language models). These case studies demonstrate how probability distributions once treated as static objects can be engineered to meet the diverse and evolving requirements of large-scale, data-intensive, and trustworthy AI systems. By systematically expanding and strengthening the role of probabilistic modeling, Probability Engineering paves the way for more robust, adaptive, efficient, and trustworthy deep learning solutions in today's fast-growing AI era.
Variational Autoencoded Multivariate Spatial Fay-Herriot Models
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Paul A. Parker, Scott H. Holan
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Small area estimation models are essential for estimating population characteristics in regions with limited sample sizes, thereby supporting policy decisions, demographic studies, and resource allocation, among other use cases. The spatial Fay-Herriot model is one such approach that incorporates spatial dependence to improve estimation by borrowing strength from neighboring regions. However, this approach often requires substantial computational resources, limiting its scalability for high-dimensional datasets, especially when considering multiple (multivariate) responses. This paper proposes two methods that integrate the multivariate spatial Fay-Herriot model with spatial random effects, learned through variational autoencoders, to efficiently leverage spatial structure. Importantly, after training the variational autoencoder to represent spatial dependence for a given set of geographies, it may be used again in future modeling efforts, without the need for retraining. Additionally, the use of the variational autoencoder to represent spatial dependence results in extreme improvements in computational efficiency, even for massive datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using 5-year period estimates from the American Community Survey over all census tracts in California.
Do you understand epistemic uncertainty? Think again! Rigorous frequentist epistemic uncertainty estimation in regression
Authors: Enrico Foglia, Benjamin Bobbia, Nikita Durasov, Michael Bauerheim, Pascal Fua, Stephane Moreau, Thierry Jardin
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Quantifying model uncertainty is critical for understanding prediction reliability, yet distinguishing between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty remains challenging. We extend recent work from classification to regression to provide a novel frequentist approach to epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty estimation. We train models to generate conditional predictions by feeding their initial output back as an additional input. This method allows for a rigorous measurement of model uncertainty by observing how prediction responses change when conditioned on the model's previous answer. We provide a complete theoretical framework to analyze epistemic uncertainty in regression in a frequentist way, and explain how it can be exploited in practice to gauge a model's uncertainty, with minimal changes to the original architecture.