This paper proposes a method to optimize communication code rates via the application of neural polar decoders (NPDs). Employing this approach enables simultaneous optimization of code rates over input distributions while providing a practical coding scheme within the framework of polar codes. The proposed approach is designed for scenarios where the channel model is unknown, treating the channel as a black box that produces output samples from input samples. We employ polar codes to achieve our objectives, using NPDs to estimate mutual information (MI) between the channel inputs and outputs, and optimize a parametric model of the input distribution. The methodology involves a two-phase process: a training phase and an inference phase. In the training phase, two steps are repeated interchangeably. First, the estimation step estimates the MI of the channel inputs and outputs via NPDs. Second, the improvement step optimizes the input distribution parameters to maximize the MI estimate obtained by the NPDs. In the inference phase, the optimized model is used to construct polar codes. This involves incorporating the Honda-Yamamoto (HY) scheme to accommodate the optimized input distributions and list decoding to enhance decoding performance. Experimental results on memoryless and finite-state channels (FSCs) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, particularly in cases where the channel's capacity-achieving input distribution is non-uniform. For these cases, we show significant improvements in MI and bit error rates (BERs) over those achieved by uniform and independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) input distributions, validating our method for block lengths up to 1024. This scalable approach has potential applications in real-world communication systems, bridging theoretical capacity estimation and practical coding performance.
We study the decentralized multi-player multi-armed bandits (MMAB) problem under a no-sensing setting, where each player receives only their own reward and obtains no information about collisions. Each arm has an unknown capacity, and if the number of players pulling an arm exceeds its capacity, all players involved receive zero reward. This setting generalizes the classical unit-capacity model and introduces new challenges in coordination and capacity discovery under severe feedback limitations. We propose A-CAPELLA (Algorithm for Capacity-Aware Parallel Elimination for Learning and Allocation), a decentralized algorithm that achieves logarithmic regret in this generalized regime. Our main contribution is a collaborative hypothesis testing protocol that enables synchronized successive elimination and capacity estimation through carefully structured collision patterns. This represents a provably efficient learning result in decentralized no-sensing MMAB with unknown arm capacities.
Incremental learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model learns from a sequential stream of tasks. This setting poses a key challenge: balancing plasticity (learning new tasks) and stability (preserving past knowledge). Neural Architecture Search (NAS), a branch of AutoML, automates the design of the architecture of Deep Neural Networks and has shown success in static settings. However, existing NAS-based approaches to incremental learning often rely on expanding the model at every task, making them impractical in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we introduce SEAL, a NAS-based framework tailored for data-incremental learning, a scenario where disjoint data samples arrive sequentially and are not stored for future access. SEAL adapts the model structure dynamically by expanding it only when necessary, based on a capacity estimation metric. Stability is preserved through cross-distillation training after each expansion step. The NAS component jointly searches for both the architecture and the optimal expansion policy. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SEAL effectively reduces forgetting and enhances accuracy while maintaining a lower model size compared to prior methods. These results highlight the promise of combining NAS and selective expansion for efficient, adaptive learning in incremental scenarios.
Gaussian process (GP) models have been used in a wide range of battery applications, in which different kernels were manually selected with considerable expertise. However, to capture complex relationships in the ever-growing amount of real-world data, selecting a suitable kernel for the GP model in battery applications is increasingly challenging. In this work, we first review existing GP kernels used in battery applications and then extend an automatic kernel search method with a new base kernel and model selection criteria. The GP models with composite kernels outperform the baseline kernel in two numerical examples of battery applications, i.e., battery capacity estimation and residual load prediction. Particularly, the results indicate that the Bayesian Information Criterion may be the best model selection criterion as it achieves a good trade-off between kernel performance and computational complexity. This work should, therefore, be of value to practitioners wishing to automate their kernel search process in battery applications.
Data-driven methods have shown potential in electric-vehicle battery management tasks such as capacity estimation, but their deployment is bottlenecked by poor performance in data-limited scenarios. Sharing battery data among algorithm developers can enable accurate and generalizable data-driven models. However, an effective battery management framework that simultaneously ensures data privacy and fault tolerance is still lacking. This paper proposes a swarm battery management system that unites a decentralized swarm learning (SL) framework and credibility weight-based model merging mechanism to enhance battery capacity estimation in data-limited scenarios while ensuring data privacy and security. The effectiveness of the SL framework is validated on a dataset comprising 66 commercial LiNiCoAlO2 cells cycled under various operating conditions. Specifically, the capacity estimation performance is validated in four cases, including data-balanced, volume-biased, feature-biased, and quality-biased scenarios. Our results show that SL can enhance the estimation accuracy in all data-limited cases and achieve a similar level of accuracy with central learning where large amounts of data are available.
Accurate estimation of battery state of health is crucial for effective electric vehicle battery management. Here, we propose five health indicators that can be extracted online from real-world electric vehicle operation and develop a machine learning-based method to estimate the battery state of health. The proposed indicators provide physical insights into the energy and power fade of the battery and enable accurate capacity estimation even with partially missing data. Moreover, they can be computed for portions of the charging profile and real-world driving discharging conditions, facilitating real-time battery degradation estimation. The indicators are computed using experimental data from five cells aged under electric vehicle conditions, and a linear regression model is used to estimate the state of health. The results show that models trained with power autocorrelation and energy-based features achieve capacity estimation with maximum absolute percentage error within 1.5% to 2.5% .
In wireless communication systems, the accurate and reliable evaluation of channel capacity is believed to be a fundamental and critical issue for terminals. However, with the rapid development of wireless technology, large-scale communication networks with significant random interference have emerged, resulting in extremely high computational costs for capacity calculation. In ultra-dense wireless networks with extremely large numbers of base stations (BSs) and users, we provide fast estimation methods for determining the capacity. We consider two scenarios according to the ratio of the number of users to the number of BSs, $\beta_m$. First, when $\beta_m\leq1$, the FIsher-Spiked Estimation (FISE) algorithm is proposed to determine the capacity by modeling the channel matrix with random interference as a Fisher matrix. Second, when $\beta_m>1$, based on a closed-form expression for capacity estimation requiring solely simple computations, we prove that this estimation stabilizes and remains invariant with increasing $\beta_m$. Our methods can guarantee high accuracy on capacity estimation with low complexity, which is faster than the existing methods. Furthermore, our approaches exhibit excellent generality, free of network area shapes, BS and user distributions, and sub-network locations. Extensive simulation experiments across various scenarios demonstrate the high accuracy and robustness of our methods.
This work focuses on optimizing the hybrid quantum noise model to improve the capacity of Gaussian quantum channels using Machine Learning (ML) generated clusters. The work specifically leverages Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to model the complex noise characteristics of quantum channels. Hybrid quantum noise, which includes both quantum shot noise and classical Additive-White-Gaussian Noise (AWGN), is modeled as an infinite mixture of Gaussian distributions weighted by Poissonian parameters. The study proposes a method to reduce the number of clusters within this noise model, simplifying visualization and improving the accuracy of channel capacity estimations without compromising essential noise characteristics. Key contributions include the reduction of Gaussian clusters while maintaining error tolerances and using the EM algorithm to update quantum channel parameters, leading to more accurate channel capacity. The approach is validated through simulations, demonstrating that ML-enhanced quantum noise clustering significantly improves the channels performance in satellite-based quantum communication systems, specifically for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). The work demonstrates that GMM and EM algorithms provide a practical solution for modeling quantum noise in real-time applications, advancing the optimization of quantum communication networks.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel in zero-shot image classification by pairing images with textual category names. The expanding variety of Pre-Trained VLMs enhances the likelihood of identifying a suitable VLM for specific tasks. To better reuse the VLM resource and fully leverage its potential on different zero-shot image classification tasks, a promising strategy is selecting appropriate Pre-Trained VLMs from the VLM Zoo, relying solely on the text data of the target dataset without access to the dataset's images. In this paper, we analyze two inherent challenges in assessing the ability of a VLM in this Language-Only VLM selection: the "Modality Gap" - the disparity in VLM's embeddings across two different modalities, making text a less reliable substitute for images; and the "Capability Gap" - the discrepancy between the VLM's overall ranking and its ranking for target dataset, hindering direct prediction of a model's dataset-specific performance from its general performance. We propose VLM Selection With gAp Bridging (SWAB) to mitigate the negative impact of two gaps. SWAB first adopts optimal transport to capture the relevance between open-source and target datasets with a transportation matrix. It then uses this matrix to transfer useful statistics of VLMs from open-source datasets to the target dataset for bridging two gaps. By bridging two gaps to obtain better substitutes for test images, SWAB can accurately predict the performance ranking of different VLMs on the target task without the need for the dataset's images. Experiments across various VLMs and image classification datasets validate SWAB's effectiveness.
Addressing the large distribution gap between training and testing data has long been a challenge in machine learning, giving rise to fields such as transfer learning and domain adaptation. Recently, Continuous Domain Adaptation (CDA) has emerged as an effective technique, closing this gap by utilizing a series of intermediate domains. This paper contributes a novel CDA method, W-MPOT, which rigorously addresses the domain ordering and error accumulation problems overlooked by previous studies. Specifically, we construct a transfer curriculum over the source and intermediate domains based on Wasserstein distance, motivated by theoretical analysis of CDA. Then we transfer the source model to the target domain through multiple valid paths in the curriculum using a modified version of continuous optimal transport. A bidirectional path consistency constraint is introduced to mitigate the impact of accumulated mapping errors during continuous transfer. We extensively evaluate W-MPOT on multiple datasets, achieving up to 54.1\% accuracy improvement on multi-session Alzheimer MR image classification and 94.7\% MSE reduction on battery capacity estimation.
Hosting capacity analysis is essential for effective integration of distributed energy resources into distribution systems. This paper discusses hosting capacity analysis with emphasis on various aspects affecting the process. This paper addresses key research gaps, aiming to improve the accuracy, scalability, and practicality of hosting capacity estimation. Standardized methodologies are highlighted as a need to ensure consistent hosting capacity estimation across distribution systems. Validation and benchmarking frameworks are emphasized for evaluating various estimation approaches. The potential of data-driven techniques, is also discussed for enhancing hosting capacity analysis. Real-time and dynamic estimation techniques which account for changing system conditions are explored, as well as the integration of hosting capacity analysis with distribution planning and operations. Uncertainty quantification and risk assessment in hosting capacity analysis are identified as crucial areas, advocating for probabilistic and stochastic modelling. This study also emphasizes the importance of considering multiple DER interactions and synergies in hosting capacity analysis, enabling a comprehensive understanding of system performance. This survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, providing insights into advancements made and guiding future research efforts to address identified gaps.
The open circuit voltage to the state of charge (OCVSOC) characteristic is crucial for battery management systems. Using the OCV-SOC curve, the SOC and the battery capacity can be estimated in real-time. Accurate SOC and capacity information are important to carry out the majority of battery management functionalities that ensure a safe, efficient, and reliable battery pack power system. Numerous approaches have been reported in the literature for improved SOC estimation and battery capacity estimation. These approaches focus on various estimation and filtering techniques to reduce the effect of measurement noise and uncertainties due to hysteresis and relaxation effects. Even though all the existing approaches to SOC estimation rely on the OCV-SOC characterization, little attention was paid to investigating the possibility of errors in the OCV-SOC characterization and the effect of uncertainty in the OCV-SOC curve on SOC and capacity estimates. In this paper, which is the first part of a series of three papers, the effect of OCV-SOC modeling error in the overall battery management system is discussed. The different sources of uncertainties in the OCV-SOC curve include cell-to-cell variation, temperature variation, aging drift, cycle rate effect, curve-fitting error, and measurement/estimation error. The proposed uncertainty models can be incorporated into battery management systems to improve their safety, performance, and reliability.
Iris is an established modality in biometric recognition applications including consumer electronics, e-commerce, border security, forensics, and de-duplication of identity at a national scale. In light of the expanding usage of biometric recognition, identity clash (when templates from two different people match) is an imperative factor of consideration for a system's deployment. This study explores system capacity estimation by empirically estimating the constrained capacity of an end-to-end iris recognition system (NIR systems with Daugman-based feature extraction) operating at an acceptable error rate i.e. the number of subjects a system can resolve before encountering an error. We study the impact of six system parameters on an iris recognition system's constrained capacity -- number of enrolled identities, image quality, template dimension, random feature elimination, filter resolution, and system operating point. In our assessment, we analyzed 13.2 million comparisons from 5158 unique identities for each of 24 different system configurations. This work provides a framework to better understand iris recognition system capacity as a function of biometric system configurations beyond the operating point, for large-scale applications.
Capacity is one of the most important performance metrics for wireless communication networks. It describes the maximum rate at which the information can be transmitted of a wireless communication system. To support the growing demand for wireless traffic, wireless networks are becoming more dense and complicated, leading to a higher difficulty to derive the capacity. Unfortunately, most existing methods for the capacity calculation take a polynomial time complexity. This will become unaffordable for future ultra-dense networks, where both the number of base stations (BSs) and the number of users are extremely large. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm TOSE to estimate the capacity for ultra-dense wireless networks. Based on the spiked model of random matrix theory (RMT), our algorithm can avoid the exact eigenvalue derivations of large dimensional matrices, which are complicated and inevitable in conventional capacity calculation methods. Instead, fast eigenvalue estimations can be realized based on the spike approximations in our TOSE algorithm. Our simulation results show that TOSE is an accurate and fast capacity approximation algorithm. Its estimation error is below 5%, and it runs in linear time, which is much lower than the polynomial time complexity of existing methods. In addition, TOSE has superior generality, since it is independent of the distributions of BSs and users, and the shape of network areas.
Recently, several methods have been proposed for estimating the mutual information from sample data using deep neural networks. These estimators ar referred to as neural mutual information estimation (NMIE)s. NMIEs differ from other approaches as they are data-driven estimators. As such, they have the potential to perform well on a large class of capacity problems. In order to test the performance across various NMIEs, it is desirable to establish a benchmark encompassing the different challenges of capacity estimation. This is the objective of this paper. In particular, we consider three scenarios for benchmarking:i the classic AWGN channel, ii channels continuous inputs optical intensity and peak-power constrained AWGN channel iii channels with a discrete output, i.e., Poisson channel. We also consider the extension to the multi-terminal case with iv the AWGN and optical MAC models. We argue that benchmarking a certain NMIE across these four scenarios provides a substantive test of performance. In this paper we study the performance of mutual information neural estimator (MINE), smoothed mutual information lower-bound estimator (SMILE), and directed information neural estimator (DINE). and provide insights on the performance of other methods as well. To summarize our benchmarking results, MINE provides the most reliable performance.
With the large scale penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) and the advent of bidirectional chargers, EV aggregators will become a major player in the voltage regulation market. This paper proposes a novel false data injection attack (FDIA) against the voltage regulation capacity estimation of EV charging stations, the process that underpins voltage regulation in distribution system. The proposed FDIA takes into account the uncertainty in EV mobility and network conditions. The attack vector with the largest expected adverse impact is the solution of a stochastic optimization problem subject to a constraint that ensures it can bypass bad data detection. We show that this attack vector can be determined by solving a sequence of convex quadratically constrained linear programs. The case studies examined in a co-simulation platform, based on two standard test feeders, reveal the vulnerability of the voltage regulation capacity estimation.
Battery discharge capacity forecasting is critically essential for the applications of lithium-ion batteries. The capacity degeneration can be treated as the memory of the initial battery state of charge from the data point of view. The streaming sensor data collected by battery management systems (BMS) reflect the usable battery capacity degradation rates under various operational working conditions. The battery capacity in different cycles can be measured with the temporal patterns extracted from the streaming sensor data based on the attention mechanism. The attention-based similarity regarding the first cycle can describe the battery capacity degradation in the following cycles. The deep degradation network (DDN) is developed with the attention mechanism to measure similarity and predict battery capacity. The DDN model can extract the degeneration-related temporal patterns from the streaming sensor data and perform the battery capacity prediction efficiently online in real-time. Based on the MIT-Stanford open-access battery aging dataset, the root-mean-square error of the capacity estimation is 1.3 mAh. The mean absolute percentage error of the proposed DDN model is 0.06{\%}. The DDN model also performance well in the Oxford Battery Degradation Dataset with dynamic load profiles. Therefore, the high accuracy and strong robustness of the proposed algorithm are verified.
Electric vehicles (EVs) play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. As EV adoption accelerates, safety issues caused by EV batteries have become an important research topic. In order to benchmark and develop data-driven methods for this task, we introduce a large and comprehensive dataset of EV batteries. Our dataset includes charging records collected from hundreds of EVs from three manufacturers over several years. Our dataset is the first large-scale public dataset on real-world battery data, as existing data either include only several vehicles or is collected in the lab environment. Meanwhile, our dataset features two types of labels, corresponding to two key tasks - battery health estimation and battery capacity estimation. In addition to demonstrating how existing deep learning algorithms can be applied to this task, we further develop an algorithm that exploits the data structure of battery systems. Our algorithm achieves better results and shows that a customized method can improve model performances. We hope that this public dataset provides valuable resources for researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals to better understand the dynamics of EV battery aging and support the transition toward a sustainable transportation system.
Recently, several methods have been proposed for estimating the mutual information from sample data using deep neural networks and without the knowing closed form distribution of the data. This class of estimators is referred to as neural mutual information estimators. Although very promising, such techniques have yet to be rigorously bench-marked so as to establish their efficacy, ease of implementation, and stability for capacity estimation which is joint maximization frame-work. In this paper, we compare the different techniques proposed in the literature for estimating capacity and provide a practitioner perspective on their effectiveness. In particular, we study the performance of mutual information neural estimator (MINE), smoothed mutual information lower-bound estimator (SMILE), and directed information neural estimator (DINE) and provide insights on InfoNCE. We evaluated these algorithms in terms of their ability to learn the input distributions that are capacity approaching for the AWGN channel, the optical intensity channel, and peak power-constrained AWGN channel. For both scenarios, we provide insightful comments on various aspects of the training process, such as stability, sensitivity to initialization.
Purpose: To estimate the total lung volume (TLV) from real and synthetic frontal chest radiographs (CXR) on a pixel level using lung thickness maps generated by a U-Net deep learning model. Methods: This retrospective study included 5,959 chest CT scans from two public datasets: the lung nodule analysis 2016 (n=656) and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) pulmonary embolism detection challenge 2020 (n=5,303). Additionally, 72 participants were selected from the Klinikum Rechts der Isar dataset (October 2018 to December 2019), each with a corresponding chest radiograph taken within seven days. Synthetic radiographs and lung thickness maps were generated using forward projection of CT scans and their lung segmentations. A U-Net model was trained on synthetic radiographs to predict lung thickness maps and estimate TLV. Model performance was assessed using mean squared error (MSE), Pearson correlation coefficient (r), and two-sided Student's t-distribution. Results: The study included 72 participants (45 male, 27 female, 33 healthy: mean age 62 years [range 34-80]; 39 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: mean age 69 years [range 47-91]). TLV predictions showed low error rates ($MSE_{Public-Synthetic}$=0.16 $L^2$, $MSE_{KRI-Synthetic}$=0.20 $L^2$, $MSE_{KRI-Real}$=0.35 $L^2$) and strong correlations with CT-derived reference standard TLV ($n_{Public-Synthetic}$=1,191, r=0.99, P<0.001; $n_{KRI-Synthetic}$=72, r=0.97, P<0.001; $n_{KRI-Real}$=72, r=0.91, P<0.001). The Luna16 test data demonstrated the highest performance, with the lowest mean squared error (MSE = 0.09 $L^2$) and strongest correlation (r = 0.99, P <0.001) for TLV estimation. Conclusion: The U-Net-generated pixel-level lung thickness maps successfully estimated TLV for both synthetic and real radiographs.