An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

One of the most exciting tools that have entered the material science toolbox in recent years is machine learning. This collection of statistical methods has already proved to be capable of considerably speeding up both fundamental and applied research. At present, we are witnessing an explosion of works that develop and apply machine learning to solid-state systems. We provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the most recent research in this topic. As a starting point, we introduce machine learning principles, algorithms, descriptors, and databases in materials science. We continue with the description of different machine learning approaches for the discovery of stable materials and the prediction of their crystal structure. Then we discuss research in numerous quantitative structure–property relationships and various approaches for the replacement of first-principle methods by machine learning. We review how active learning and surrogate-based optimization can be applied to improve the rational design process and related examples of applications. Two major questions are always the interpretability of and the physical understanding gained from machine learning models. We consider therefore the different facets of interpretability and their importance in materials science. Finally, we propose solutions and future research paths for various challenges in computational materials science.

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Recent advances and applications of machine learning in solid-state materials science

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in communications and networking. Modern networks, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, become more decentralized and autonomous. In such networks, network entities need to make decisions locally to maximize the network performance under uncertainty of network environment. Reinforcement learning has been efficiently used to enable the network entities to obtain the optimal policy including, e.g., decisions or actions, given their states when the state and action spaces are small. However, in complex and large-scale networks, the state and action spaces are usually large, and the reinforcement learning may not be able to find the optimal policy in reasonable time. Therefore, DRL, a combination of reinforcement learning with deep learning, has been developed to overcome the shortcomings. In this survey, we first give a tutorial of DRL from fundamental concepts to advanced models. Then, we review DRL approaches proposed to address emerging issues in communications and networking. The issues include dynamic network access, data rate control, wireless caching, data offloading, network security, and connectivity preservation which are all important to next generation networks, such as 5G and beyond. Furthermore, we present applications of DRL for traffic routing, resource sharing, and data collection. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues, and future research directions of applying DRL.

Applications of Deep Reinforcement Learning in Communications and Networking: A Survey

The rapid uptake of mobile devices and the rising popularity of mobile applications and services pose unprecedented demands on mobile and wireless networking infrastructure. Upcoming 5G systems are evolving to support exploding mobile traffic volumes, real-time extraction of fine-grained analytics, and agile management of network resources, so as to maximize user experience. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging, as mobile environments are increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution is to resort to advanced machine learning techniques, in order to help manage the rise in data volumes and algorithm-driven applications. The recent success of deep learning underpins new and powerful tools that tackle problems in this space. In this paper, we bridge the gap between deep learning and mobile and wireless networking research, by presenting a comprehensive survey of the crossovers between the two areas. We first briefly introduce essential background and state-of-the-art in deep learning techniques with potential applications to networking. We then discuss several techniques and platforms that facilitate the efficient deployment of deep learning onto mobile systems. Subsequently, we provide an encyclopedic review of mobile and wireless networking research based on deep learning, which we categorize by different domains. Drawing from our experience, we discuss how to tailor deep learning to mobile environments. We complete this survey by pinpointing current challenges and open future directions for research.

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Deep Learning in Mobile and Wireless Networking: A Survey

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks are being deployed worldwide from 2020 and more capabilities are in the process of being standardized, such as mass connectivity, ultra-reliability, and guaranteed low latency. However, 5G will not meet all requirements of the future in 2030 and beyond, and sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks are expected to provide global coverage, enhanced spectral/energy/cost efficiency, better intelligence level and security, etc. To meet these requirements, 6G networks will rely on new enabling technologies, i.e., air interface and transmission technologies and novel network architecture, such as waveform design, multiple access, channel coding schemes, multi-antenna technologies, network slicing, cell-free architecture, and cloud/fog/edge computing. Our vision on 6G is that it will have four new paradigm shifts. First, to satisfy the requirement of global coverage, 6G will not be limited to terrestrial communication networks, which will need to be complemented with non-terrestrial networks such as satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication networks, thus achieving a space-air-ground-sea integrated communication network. Second, all spectra will be fully explored to further increase data rates and connection density, including the sub-6 GHz, millimeter wave (mmWave), terahertz (THz), and optical frequency bands. Third, facing the big datasets generated by the use of extremely heterogeneous networks, diverse communication scenarios, large numbers of antennas, wide bandwidths, and new service requirements, 6G networks will enable a new range of smart applications with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies. Fourth, network security will have to be strengthened when developing 6G networks. This article provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances and future trends in these four aspects. Clearly, 6G with additional technical requirements beyond those of 5G will enable faster and further communications to the extent that the boundary between physical and cyber worlds disappears.

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Towards 6G wireless communication networks: vision, enabling technologies, and new paradigm shifts

The emergence of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has promoted the development of synthesized high-fidelity views of the intricate real world. However, it is still a very demanding task to repaint the content in NeRF. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can take RGB images as input and alter the 3D content in neural scenes. Our work leverages existing diffusion models to guide changes in the designated 3D content. Specifically, we semantically select the target object and a pre-trained diffusion model will guide the NeRF model to generate new 3D objects, which can improve the editability, diversity, and application range of NeRF. Experiment results show that our algorithm is effective for editing 3D objects in NeRF under different text prompts, including editing appearance, shape, and more. We validate our method on both real-world datasets and synthetic-world datasets for these editing tasks. Please visit https://repaintnerf.github.io for a better view of our results.

RePaint-NeRF: NeRF Editting via Semantic Masks and Diffusion Models

In recent years, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is emerging to provide computation and storage capabilities to the Internet of things (IoT) devices to improve the quality of service (QoS) of IoT applications. In addition, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) techniques have attracted great interests from both academia and industry to improve the communication efficiency. Although existing works leverage the IRS technique in MEC networks, they mainly focus on the single-IRS single-area scenario. However, in practice, multi-IRS will be deployed in multi-area scenarios in future networks. Consequently, considering the single-IRS single-area scenario will have inferior performance. In this paper, to address the aforementioned issue, we propose an efficient resource provisioning scheme for multi-IRS multi-area scenarios in MEC networks. We first model the problem as a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning process, where each agent manages one area and all agents share the network bandwidth and computation resources. Then, we propose a multi-agent actor-critic method with an attention mechanism for resource management with latency guarantee. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Our scheme can reduce the required computation resources by up to 11.84% when compared with the benchmark works. It is also shown that our proposed scheme can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and scale well with the increasing demand from IoT devices.

When Multi-access Edge Computing Meets Multi-area Intelligent Reflecting Surface: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Both caching and interference alignment (IA) are promising techniques for next generation wireless networks. Nevertheless, most existing works on cache-enabled IA wireless networks assume that the channel is invariant, which is unrealistic considering the time-varying nature of practical wireless environments. In this chapter, we consider realistic time-varying channels. Specifically, the channel is formulated as a finite-state Markov channel (FSMC). The complexity of the system is very high when we consider realistic FSMC models. Therefore, in this chapter, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning approach, which is an advanced reinforcement learning algorithm that uses deep Q network to approximate the Q value-action function. We use Google TensorFlow to implement deep reinforcement learning in this chapter to obtain the optimal IA user selection policy in cache-enabled opportunistic IA wireless networks. Simulation results are presented to show that the performance of cache-enabled opportunistic IA networks in terms of the network’s sum rate and energy efficiency can be significantly improved by using the proposed approach.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Interference Alignment Wireless Networks

The prompt expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its wide application in smart homes and transportation has brought tremendous convenience to people’s lives. However, the increase of IoT devices has also brought huge security problems, threatening people’s information and property security. This paper designs a new anomaly detection architecture based on the concept of the “Internet of intelligence”. It is a general architecture that can be applied to different IoT anomaly detection methods. The architecture effectively combines the blockchain and the IoT anomaly detection method, which can overcome the problems of data resource sharing and collective learning. At the same time, we propose a novel method for detecting abnormal HTTP traffic in IoT. It combines clustering and Autoencoder method to efficiently and exactly detect abnormal HTTP traffic in IoT devices. In addition, we propose an optimized feature extraction method, which is favorable to enhance the detection effect. Simulation results show the proposed architecture and method can enhance the detection performance of abnormal HTTP traffic in IoT and address the challenges of existing approaches.

An HTTP Anomaly Detection Architecture Based on the Internet of Intelligence

In recent years, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is emerging to provide computation and storage resources to the Internet of things (IoT) devices to assist them in high-performance demanding tasks. Real-time task requests from the IoT devices often have strict delay constraints. However, in practice, the delay requirements of task requests often fail to be satisfied because of the inappropriate computation processing method and inefficient resource allocation in MEC networks. In this article, we present a novel framework for MEC networks with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) to facilitate computation offloading with delay constraints. In addition, we propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning method with a dynamic balance mechanism named $Q_{c}-DQN$. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Compared to the benchmark schemes, our scheme not only improves the overall network performance and reduces the task completion time, but also meets the delay constraints.

Ying He

Papers

RePaint-NeRF: NeRF Editting via Semantic Masks and Diffusion Models

When Multi-access Edge Computing Meets Multi-area Intelligent Reflecting Surface: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Interference Alignment Wireless Networks

An HTTP Anomaly Detection Architecture Based on the Internet of Intelligence

$Q_{C}-DQN$: A Novel Constrained Reinforcement Learning Method for Computation Offloading in Multi-access Edge Computing