Source author record

Xiao-Wen Chang

Xiao-Wen Chang appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

What is connected

14works
8topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

GD4: Graph-based Discrete Denoising Diffusion for MIMO Detection

In wireless communications, recovering the optimal solution to the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection problem is NP-hard. Obtaining high-quality suboptimal solutions with a favorable performance-complexity trade-off is particularly challenging in under-determined systems with $N_t$ transmit antennas and $N_r < N_t$ receive antennas. Recent diffusion-based MIMO detectors have shown promise, but they require extensive sampling iterations at inference time, and their performance degrades in under-determined scenarios. We propose GD4, a graph-based discrete denoising diffusion method for MIMO detection. Unlike existing diffusion-based detectors that operate in a continuous relaxed space, GD4 performs denoising directly in the discrete symbol space and enables fast inference with one or a few denoising evaluations. Numerical results show that, under a similar inference-time compute budget, GD4 produces higher-quality suboptimal solutions than existing diffusion-based detectors and some widely used classical baseline including box-constrained Babai point and the $K$-best box-constrained randomized Klein-Babai point in both under-determined and overdetermined settings.

preprint2024arXiv

When Do Graph Neural Networks Help with Node Classification? Investigating the Impact of Homophily Principle on Node Distinguishability

Homophily principle, i.e., nodes with the same labels are more likely to be connected, has been believed to be the main reason for the performance superiority of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) over Neural Networks on node classification tasks. Recent research suggests that, even in the absence of homophily, the advantage of GNNs still exists as long as nodes from the same class share similar neighborhood patterns. However, this argument only considers intra-class Node Distinguishability (ND) but neglects inter-class ND, which provides incomplete understanding of homophily on GNNs. In this paper, we first demonstrate such deficiency with examples and argue that an ideal situation for ND is to have smaller intra-class ND than inter-class ND. To formulate this idea and study ND deeply, we propose Contextual Stochastic Block Model for Homophily (CSBM-H) and define two metrics, Probabilistic Bayes Error (PBE) and negative generalized Jeffreys divergence, to quantify ND. With the metrics, we visualize and analyze how graph filters, node degree distributions and class variances influence ND, and investigate the combined effect of intra- and inter-class ND. Besides, we discovered the mid-homophily pitfall, which occurs widely in graph datasets. Furthermore, we verified that, in real-work tasks, the superiority of GNNs is indeed closely related to both intra- and inter-class ND regardless of homophily levels. Grounded in this observation, we propose a new hypothesis-testing based performance metric beyond homophily, which is non-linear, feature-based and can provide statistical threshold value for GNNs' the superiority. Experiments indicate that it is significantly more effective than the existing homophily metrics on revealing the advantage and disadvantage of graph-aware modes on both synthetic and benchmark real-world datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Sharper Bounds on Four Lattice Constants

The Korkine--Zolotareff (KZ) reduction, and its generalisations, are widely used lattice reduction strategies in communications and cryptography. The KZ constant and Schnorr's constant were defined by Schnorr in 1987. The KZ constant can be used to quantify some useful properties of KZ reduced matrices. Schnorr's constant can be used to characterize the output quality of his block $2k$-reduction and is used to define his semi block $2k$-reduction, which was also developed in 1987. Hermite's constant, which is a fundamental constant lattices, has many applications, such as bounding the length of the shortest nonzero lattice vector and the orthogonality defect of lattices. Rankin's constant was introduced by Rankin in 1953 as a generalization of Hermite's constant. It plays an important role in characterizing the output quality of block-Rankin reduction, proposed by Gama et al. in 2006. In this paper, we first develop a linear upper bound on Hermite's constant and then use it to develop an upper bound on the KZ constant. These upper bounds are sharper than those obtained recently by the authors, and the ratio of the new linear upper bound to the nonlinear upper bound, developed by Blichfeldt in 1929, on Hermite's constant is asymptotically 1.0047. Furthermore, we develop lower and upper bounds on Schnorr's constant. The improvement to the lower bound over the sharpest existing one developed by Gama et al. is around 1.7 times asymptotically, and the improvement to the upper bound over the sharpest existing one which was also developed by Gama et al. is around 4 times asymptotically. Finally, we develop lower and upper bounds on Rankin's constant. The improvements of the bounds over the sharpest existing ones, also developed by Gama et al., are exponential in the parameter defining the constant.

preprint2020arXiv

META-Learning State-based Eligibility Traces for More Sample-Efficient Policy Evaluation

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a standard and very successful reinforcement learning approach, at the core of both algorithms that learn the value of a given policy, as well as algorithms which learn how to improve policies. TD-learning with eligibility traces provides a way to boost sample efficiency by temporal credit assignment, i.e. deciding which portion of a reward should be assigned to predecessor states that occurred at different previous times, controlled by a parameter $λ$. However, tuning this parameter can be time-consuming, and not tuning it can lead to inefficient learning. For better sample efficiency of TD-learning, we propose a meta-learning method for adjusting the eligibility trace parameter, in a state-dependent manner. The adaptation is achieved with the help of auxiliary learners that learn distributional information about the update targets online, incurring roughly the same computational complexity per step as the usual value learner. Our approach can be used both in on-policy and off-policy learning. We prove that, under some assumptions, the proposed method improves the overall quality of the update targets, by minimizing the overall target error. This method can be viewed as a plugin to assist prediction with function approximation by meta-learning feature (observation)-based $λ$ online, or even in the control case to assist policy improvement. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant performance improvements, as well as improved robustness of the proposed algorithm to learning rate variation.

preprint2016arXiv

An Efficient Algorithm for Optimally Solving a Shortest Vector Problem in Compute-and-Forward Protocol Design

We consider the problem of finding the optimal coefficient vector that maximizes the computation rate at a relay in the compute-and-forward scheme. Based on the idea of sphere decoding, we propose a highly efficient algorithm that finds the optimal coefficient vector. First, we derive a novel algorithm to transform the original quadratic form optimization problem into a shortest vector problem (SVP) using the Cholesky factorization. Instead of computing the Cholesky factor explicitly, the proposed algorithm realizes the Cholesky factorization with only $\bigO(n)$ flops by taking advantage of the structure of the Gram matrix in the quadratic form. Then, we propose some conditions that can be checked with $\bigO(n)$ flops, under which a unit vector is the optimal coefficient vector. Finally, by taking into account some useful properties of the optimal coefficient vector, we modify the Schnorr-Euchner search algorithm to solve the SVP. We show that the estimated average complexity of our new algorithm is $\bigO(n^{1.5}P^{0.5})$ flops for i.i.d. Gaussian channel entries with SNR $P$ based on the Gaussian heuristic. Simulations show that our algorithm is not only much more efficient than the existing ones that give the optimal solution, but also faster than some best known suboptimal methods. Besides, we show that our algorithm can be readily adapted to output a list of $L$ best candidate vectors for use in the compute-and-forward design. The estimated average complexity of the resultant list-output algorithm is $\bigO\left(n^{1.5}P^{0.5}\log L + nL\right)$ flops for i.i.d. Gaussian channel entries.

preprint2016arXiv

Success probability of the Babai estimators for box-constrained integer linear models

In many applications including communications, one may encounter a linear model where the parameter vector $\hbx$ is an integer vector in a box. To estimate $\hbx$, a typical method is to solve a box-constrained integer least squares (BILS) problem. However, due to its high complexity, the box-constrained Babai integer point $\x^\sBB$ is commonly used as a suboptimal solution. In this paper, we first derive formulas for the success probability $P^\sBB$ of $\x^\sBB$ and the success probability $P^\sOB$ of the ordinary Babai integer point $\x^\sOB$ when $\hbx$ is uniformly distributed over the constraint box. Some properties of $P^\sBB$ and $P^\sOB$ and the relationship between them are studied. Then, we investigate the effects of some column permutation strategies on $¶^\sBB$. In addition to V-BLAST and SQRD, we also consider the permutation strategy involved in the LLL lattice reduction, to be referred to as LLL-P. On the one hand, we show that when the noise is relatively small, LLL-P always increases $P^\sBB$ and argue why both V-BLAST and SQRD often increase $P^\sBB$; and on the other hand, we show that when the noise is relatively large, LLL-P always decreases $P^\sBB$ and argue why both V-BLAST and SQRD often decrease $P^\sBB$. We also derive a column permutation invariant bound on $P^\sBB$, which is an upper bound and a lower bound under these two opposite conditions, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate our findings. Finally, we consider a conjecture concerning $\x^\sOB$ proposed by Ma et al. We first construct an example to show that the conjecture does not hold in general, and then show that it does hold under some conditions.

preprint2014arXiv

A Joint Localization and Clock Bias Estimation Technique Using Time-of-Arrival at Multiple Antenna Receivers

In this work, a system scheme is proposed for tracking a radio emitting target moving in two-dimensional space. The localization is based on the use of biased time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements obtained at two asynchronous receivers, each equipped with two closely spaced antennas. By exploiting the multi-antenna configuration and using all the TOA measurements up to current time step, the relative clock bias at each receiver and the target position are jointly estimated by solving a nonlinear least-squares (NLS) problem. To this end, a novel time recursive algorithm is proposed which fully takes advantage of the problem structure to achieve computational efficiency while using orthogonal transformations to ensure numerical reliability. Simulations show that the mean-squared error (MSE) of the proposed method is much smaller than that of existing methods with the same antenna scheme, and approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) closely.

preprint2014arXiv

Distributed Cooperative Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks without NLOS Identification

In this paper, a 2-stage robust distributed algorithm is proposed for cooperative sensor network localization using time of arrival (TOA) data without identification of non-line of sight (NLOS) links. In the first stage, to overcome the effect of outliers, a convex relaxation of the Huber loss function is applied so that by using iterative optimization techniques, good estimates of the true sensor locations can be obtained. In the second stage, the original (non-relaxed) Huber cost function is further optimized to obtain refined location estimates based on those obtained in the first stage. In both stages, a simple gradient descent technique is used to carry out the optimization. Through simulations and real data analysis, it is shown that the proposed convex relaxation generally achieves a lower root mean squared error (RMSE) compared to other convex relaxation techniques in the literature. Also by doing the second stage, the position estimates are improved and we can achieve an RMSE close to that of the other distributed algorithms which know \textit{a priori} which links are in NLOS.

preprint2014arXiv

Effects of the LLL reduction on the success probability of the Babai point and on the complexity of sphere decoding

The common method to estimate an unknown integer parameter vector in a linear model is to solve an integer least squares (ILS) problem. A typical approach to solving an ILS problem is sphere decoding. To make a sphere decoder faster, the well-known LLL reduction is often used as preprocessing. The Babai point produced by the Babai nearest plan algorithm is a suboptimal solution of the ILS problem. First we prove that the success probability of the Babai point as a lower bound on the success probability of the ILS estimator is sharper than the lower bound given by Hassibi and Boyd [1]. Then we show rigorously that applying the LLL reduction algorithm will increase the success probability of the Babai point. Finally we show rigorously that applying the LLL reduction algorithm will also reduce the computational complexity of sphere decoders, which is measured approximately by the number of nodes in the search tree in the literature

preprint2014arXiv

Mobile Localization in Non-Line-of-Sight Using Constrained Square-Root Unscented Kalman Filter

Localization and tracking of a mobile node (MN) in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios, based on time of arrival (TOA) measurements, is considered in this work. To this end, we develop a constrained form of square root unscented Kalman filter (SRUKF), where the sigma points of the unscented transformation are projected onto the feasible region by solving constrained optimization problems. The feasible region is the intersection of several discs formed by the NLOS measurements. We show how we can reduce the size of the optimization problem and formulate it as a convex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP), which depends on the Cholesky factor of the \textit{a posteriori} error covariance matrix of SRUKF. As a result of these modifications, the proposed constrained SRUKF (CSRUKF) is more efficient and has better numerical stability compared to the constrained UKF. Through simulations, we also show that the CSRUKF achieves a smaller localization error compared to other techniques and that its performance is robust under different NLOS conditions.

preprint2012arXiv

Column Reordering for Box-Constrained Integer Least Squares Problems

The box-constrained integer least squares problem (BILS) arises in MIMO wireless communications applications. Typically a sphere decoding algorithm (a tree search algorithm) is used to solve the problem. In order to make the search algorithm more efficient, the columns of the channel matrix in the BILS problem have to be reordered. To our knowledge, there are currently two algorithms for column reordering that provide the best known results. Both use all available information, but they were derived respectively from geometric and algebraic points of view and look different. In this paper we modify one to make it more computationally efficient and easier to comprehend. Then we prove the modified one and the other actually give the same column reordering in theory. Finally we propose a new mathematically equivalent algorithm, which is more computationally efficient and is still easy to understand.

preprint2012arXiv

Partial LLL Reduction

The Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz (LLL) reduction has wide applications in digital communications. It can greatly improve the speed of the sphere decoding (SD) algorithms for solving an integer least squares (ILS) problem and the performance of the Babai integer point, a suboptimal solution to the ILS problem. Recently Ling and Howgrave-Graham proposed the so-called effective LLL (ELLL) reduction. It has less computational complexity than LLL, while it has the same effect on the performance of the Babai integer point as LLL. In this paper we propose a partial LLL (PLLL) reduction. PLLL avoids the numerical stability problem with ELLL, which may result in very poor performance of the Babai integer point. Furthermore, numerical simulations indicated that it is faster than ELLL. We also show that in theory PLLL and ELLL have the same effect on the search speed of a typical SD algorithm as LLL.