Multi-Device Task-Oriented Communication via Maximal Coding Rate Reduction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cai, Chang, Yuan, Xiaojun, Zhang, Ying-Jun Angela
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Cai, Chang
Yuan, Xiaojun
Zhang, Ying-Jun Angela
author_facet Cai, Chang
Yuan, Xiaojun
Zhang, Ying-Jun Angela
contents In task-oriented communications, most existing work designed the physical-layer communication modules and learning based codecs with distinct objectives: learning is targeted at accurate execution of specific tasks, while communication aims at optimizing conventional communication metrics, such as throughput maximization, delay minimization, or bit error rate minimization. The inconsistency between the design objectives may hinder the exploitation of the full benefits of task-oriented communications. In this paper, we consider a task-oriented multi-device edge inference system over a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access channel, where the learning (i.e., feature encoding and classification) and communication (i.e., precoding) modules are designed with the same goal of inference accuracy maximization. Instead of end-to-end learning which involves both the task dataset and wireless channel during training, we advocate a separate design of learning and communication to achieve the consistent goal. Specifically, we leverage the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR2) objective as a surrogate to represent the inference accuracy, which allows us to explicitly formulate the precoding optimization problem. We cast valuable insights into this formulation and develop a block coordinate ascent (BCA) algorithm for efficient problem-solving. Moreover, the MCR2 objective serves the loss function for feature encoding and guides the classification design. Simulation results on the synthetic features explain the mechanism of MCR2 precoding at different SNRs. We also validate on the CIFAR-10 and ModelNet10 datasets that the proposed design achieves a better latency-accuracy tradeoff compared to various baselines. As such, our work paves the way for further exploration into the synergistic alignment of learning and communication objectives in task-oriented communication systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_02888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Device Task-Oriented Communication via Maximal Coding Rate Reduction
Cai, Chang
Yuan, Xiaojun
Zhang, Ying-Jun Angela
Signal Processing
In task-oriented communications, most existing work designed the physical-layer communication modules and learning based codecs with distinct objectives: learning is targeted at accurate execution of specific tasks, while communication aims at optimizing conventional communication metrics, such as throughput maximization, delay minimization, or bit error rate minimization. The inconsistency between the design objectives may hinder the exploitation of the full benefits of task-oriented communications. In this paper, we consider a task-oriented multi-device edge inference system over a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access channel, where the learning (i.e., feature encoding and classification) and communication (i.e., precoding) modules are designed with the same goal of inference accuracy maximization. Instead of end-to-end learning which involves both the task dataset and wireless channel during training, we advocate a separate design of learning and communication to achieve the consistent goal. Specifically, we leverage the maximal coding rate reduction (MCR2) objective as a surrogate to represent the inference accuracy, which allows us to explicitly formulate the precoding optimization problem. We cast valuable insights into this formulation and develop a block coordinate ascent (BCA) algorithm for efficient problem-solving. Moreover, the MCR2 objective serves the loss function for feature encoding and guides the classification design. Simulation results on the synthetic features explain the mechanism of MCR2 precoding at different SNRs. We also validate on the CIFAR-10 and ModelNet10 datasets that the proposed design achieves a better latency-accuracy tradeoff compared to various baselines. As such, our work paves the way for further exploration into the synergistic alignment of learning and communication objectives in task-oriented communication systems.
title Multi-Device Task-Oriented Communication via Maximal Coding Rate Reduction
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02888