Computer Science

This paper investigates the problem of synthesizing joint distributions in the finite-length regime. For a fixed blocklength n and an upper bound on the distribution approximation ϵ , we prove a capacity result for fixed-length strong coordination. It is shown analytically that the rate conditions for the fixed-length regime are lower-bounded by the mutual information that appears in the asymptotical condition plus Q ?? (ϵ) V/n ??????????, where V is the channel dispersion, and Q ?? is the inverse of the Gaussian cumulative distribution function.

High-throughput and quantitative experimental technologies are experiencing rapid advances in the biological sciences. One important recent technique is multiplexed fluorescence in situ hybridization (mFISH), which enables the identification and localization of large numbers of individual strands of RNA within single cells. Core to that technology is a coding problem: with each RNA sequence of interest being a codeword, how to design a codebook of probes, and how to decode the resulting noisy measurements? Published work has relied on assumptions of uniformly distributed codewords and binary symmetric channels for decoding and to a lesser degree for code construction. Here we establish that both of these assumptions are inappropriate in the context of mFISH experiments and substantial decoding performance gains can be obtained by using more appropriate, less classical, assumptions. We propose a more appropriate asymmetric channel model that can be readily parameterized from data and use it to develop a maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoders. We show that false discovery rate for rare RNAs, which is the key experimental metric, is vastly improved with MAP decoders even when employed with the existing sub-optimal codebook. Using an evolutionary optimization methodology, we further show that by permuting the codebook to better align with the prior, which is an experimentally straightforward procedure, significant further improvements are possible.

We present a deterministic algorithm for computing the entire weight distribution of polar codes. As the first step, we derive an efficient recursive procedure to compute the weight distributions that arise in successive cancellation decoding of polar codes along any decoding path. This solves the open problem recently posed by Polyanskaya, Davletshin, and Polyanskii. Using this recursive procedure, we can compute the entire weight distribution of certain polar cosets in time O(n^2). Any polar code can be represented as a disjoint union of such cosets; moreover, this representation extends to polar codes with dynamically frozen bits. This implies that our methods can be also used to compute the weight distribution of polar codes with CRC precoding, of polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes and, in fact, general linear codes. However, the number of polar cosets in such representation scales exponentially with a parameter introduced herein, which we call the mixing factor. To reduce the exponential complexity of our algorithm, we make use of the fact that polar codes have a large automorphism group, which includes the lower-triangular affine group LTA(m,2). We prove that LTA(m,2) acts transitively on certain sets of monomials, thereby drastically reducing the number of polar cosets we need to evaluate. This complexity reduction makes it possible to compute the weight distribution of any polar code of length up to n=128.

In this paper, a general framework is formalised to characterise the value of information (VoI) in hidden Markov models. Specifically, the VoI is defined as the mutual information between the current, unobserved status at the source and a sequence of observed measurements at the receiver, which can be interpreted as the reduction in the uncertainty of the current status given that we have noisy past observations of a hidden Markov process. We explore the VoI in the context of the noisy Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process and derive its closed-form expressions. Moreover, we study the effect of different sampling policies on VoI, deriving simplified expressions in different noise regimes and analysing the statistical properties of the VoI in the worst case. In simulations, the validity of theoretical results is verified, and the performance of VoI in the Markov and hidden Markov models is also analysed. Numerical results further illustrate that the proposed VoI framework can support the timely transmission in status update systems, and it can also capture the correlation property of the underlying random process and the noise in the transmission environment.

In this paper, we show that the soft-decision input to the main decoder in an SST Viterbi decoder is regarded as the innovation as well from the viewpoint of mutual information and mean-square error. It is assumed that a code sequence is transmitted symbol by symbol over an AWGN channel using BPSK modulation. Then we can consider the signal model, where the signal is composed of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the equiprobable binary input. By assuming that the soft-decision input to the main decoder is the innovation, we show that the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) in estimating the binary input is expressed in terms of the distribution of the encoded block for the main decoder. It is shown that the obtained MMSE satisfies indirectly the known relation between the mutual information and the MMSE in Gaussian channels. Thus the derived MMSE is justified, which in turn implies that the soft-decision input to the main decoder can be regarded as the innovation. Moreover, we see that the input-output mutual information is connected with the distribution of the encoded block for the main decoder.

Coded caching aims to minimize the network's peak-time communication load by leveraging the information pre-stored in the local caches at the users. The original single file retrieval setting by Maddah-Ali and Niesen has been recently extended to general Scalar Linear Function Retrieval (SLFR) by Wan et al., who proposed a linear scheme that surprisingly achieves the same optimal load (under the constraint of uncoded cache placement) as in single file retrieval. This paper's goal is to characterize the conditions under which a general SLFR linear scheme is optimal and gain practical insights into why the specific choices made by Wan et al. work. This paper shows that the optimal decoding coefficients are necessarily the product of two terms, one only involving the encoding coefficients and the other only the demands. In addition, the relationships among the encoding coefficients are shown to be captured by the cycles of certain graphs. Thus, a general linear scheme for SLFR can be found by solving a spanning tree problem.

Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (GF-NOMA) is a potential technique to support massive Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication (mURLLC) service. However, the dynamic resource configuration in GF-NOMA systems is challenging due to random traffics and collisions, that are unknown at the base station (BS). Meanwhile, joint consideration of the latency and reliability requirements makes the resource configuration of GF-NOMA for mURLLC more complex. To address this problem, we develop a general learning framework for signature-based GF-NOMA in mURLLC service taking into account the multiple access signature collision, the UE detection, as well as the data decoding procedures for the K-repetition GF and the Proactive GF schemes. The goal of our learning framework is to maximize the long-term average number of successfully served users (UEs) under the latency constraint. We first perform a real-time repetition value configuration based on a double deep Q-Network (DDQN) and then propose a Cooperative Multi-Agent learning technique based on the DQN (CMA-DQN) to optimize the configuration of both the repetition values and the contention-transmission unit (CTU) numbers. Our results show that the number of successfully served UEs under the same latency constraint in our proposed learning framework is up to ten times for the K-repetition scheme, and two times for the Proactive scheme, more than that with fixed repetition values and CTU numbers. In addition, the superior performance of CMA-DQN over the conventional load estimation-based approach (LE-URC) demonstrates its capability in dynamically configuring in long term. Importantly, our general learning framework can be used to optimize the resource configuration problems in all the signature-based GF-NOMA schemes.

Massive machine type communication (mMTC) has been identified as an important use case in Beyond 5G networks and future massive Internet of Things (IoT). However, for the massive multiple access in mMTC, there is a serious access preamble collision problem if the conventional 4-step random access (RA) scheme is employed. Consequently, a range of grantfree (GF) RA schemes were proposed. Nevertheless, if the number of cellular users (devices) significantly increases, both the energy and spectrum efficiency of the existing GF schemes still rapidly degrade owing to the much longer preambles required. In order to overcome this dilemma, a layered grouping strategy is proposed, where the cellular users are firstly divided into clusters based on their geographical locations, and then the users of the same cluster autonomously join in different groups by using optimum energy consumption (Opt-EC) based K-means algorithm. With this new layered cellular architecture, the RA process is divided into cluster load estimation phase and active group detection phase. Based on the state evolution theory of approximated message passing algorithm, a tight lower bound on the minimum preamble length for achieving a certain detection accuracy is derived. Benefiting from the cluster load estimation, a dynamic preamble selection (DPS) strategy is invoked in the second phase, resulting the required preambles with minimum length. As evidenced in our simulation results, this two-phase DPS aided RA strategy results in a significant performance improvement

This paper considers the problem of publishing data X while protecting correlated sensitive information S . We propose a linear method to generate the sanitized data Y with the same alphabet Y=X that attains local differential privacy (LDP) and log-lift at the same time. It is revealed that both LDP and log-lift are inversely proportional to the statistical distance between conditional probability P Y|S (x|s) and marginal probability P Y (x) : the closer the two probabilities are, the more private Y is. Specifying P Y|S (x|s) that linearly reduces this distance | P Y|S (x|s)??P Y (x)|=(1?��?| P X|S (x|s)??P X (x)|,?�s,x for some α??0,1] , we study the problem of how to generate Y from the original data S and X . The Markov randomization/sanitization scheme P Y|X (x| x ??)= P Y|S,X (x|s, x ??) is obtained by solving linear equations. The optimal non-Markov sanitization, the transition probability P Y|S,X (x|s, x ??) that depends on S , can be determined by maximizing the data utility subject to linear equality constraints. We compute the solution for two linear utility function: the expected distance and total variance distance. It is shown that the non-Markov randomization significantly improves data utility and the marginal probability P X (x) remains the same after the linear sanitization method: P Y (x)= P X (x),?�x?�X .

Stringent constraints on both reliability and latency must be guaranteed in ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). To fulfill these constraints with computationally constrained receivers, such as low-budget IoT receivers, optimal transmission parameters need to be studied in detail. In this paper, we introduce a multi-objective optimization framework for the optimal design of URLLC in the presence of decoding complexity constraints. We consider transmission of short-blocklength codewords that are encoded with linear block encoders, transmitted over a binary-input AWGN channel, and finally decoded with order-statistics (OS) decoder. We investigate the optimal selection of a transmission rate and power pair, while satisfying the constraints. For this purpose, a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) is formulated. Based on the empirical model that accurately quantifies the trade-off between the performance of an OS decoder and its computational complexity, the MOOP is solved and the Pareto boundary is derived. In order to assess the overall performance among several Pareto-optimal transmission pairs, two scalarization methods are investigated. To exemplify the importance of the MOOP, a case study on a battery-powered communication system is provided. It is shown that, compared to the classical fixed rate-power transmissions, the MOOP provides the optimum usage of the battery and increases the energy efficiency of the communication system while maintaining the constraints.