Pub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344760
Chris Ferguson;Leonard Kleinrock
In this paper we examine the general problem of determining when to update information that can go out-of-date. Not updating frequently enough results in poor decision making based on stale information. Updating too often results in excessive update costs. We study the tradeoff between having stale information and the cost of updating that information. We use a general model, some versions of which match an idealized version of the Age of Information (AoI) model. We first present the assumptions, and a novel methodology for solving problems of this sort. Then we solve the case where the update cost is fixed and the time-value of the information is well understood. Our results provide simple and powerful insights regarding optimal update times. We further look at cases where there are delays associated with sending a request for an update and receiving the update, cases where the update source may be stale, cases where the information cannot be used during the update process, and cases where update costs can change randomly.
{"title":"Optimal Update Times for Stale Information Metrics Including the Age of Information","authors":"Chris Ferguson;Leonard Kleinrock","doi":"10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344760","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we examine the general problem of determining when to update information that can go out-of-date. Not updating frequently enough results in poor decision making based on stale information. Updating too often results in excessive update costs. We study the tradeoff between having stale information and the cost of updating that information. We use a general model, some versions of which match an idealized version of the Age of Information (AoI) model. We first present the assumptions, and a novel methodology for solving problems of this sort. Then we solve the case where the update cost is fixed and the time-value of the information is well understood. Our results provide simple and powerful insights regarding optimal update times. We further look at cases where there are delays associated with sending a request for an update and receiving the update, cases where the update source may be stale, cases where the information cannot be used during the update process, and cases where update costs can change randomly.","PeriodicalId":73295,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal on selected areas in information theory","volume":"4 ","pages":"734-746"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10371395","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139060086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3342569
Song Wei;Yao Xie;Christopher S. Josef;Rishikesan Kamaleswaran
We present a generalized linear structural causal model, coupled with a novel data-adaptive linear regularization, to recover causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from time series. By leveraging a recently developed stochastic monotone Variational Inequality (VI) formulation, we cast the causal discovery problem as a general convex optimization. Furthermore, we develop a non-asymptotic recovery guarantee and quantifiable uncertainty by solving a linear program to establish confidence intervals for a wide range of non-linear monotone link functions. We validate our theoretical results and show the competitive performance of our method via extensive numerical experiments. Most importantly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in recovering highly interpretable causal DAGs over Sepsis Associated Derangements (SADs) while achieving comparable prediction performance to powerful “black-box” models such as XGBoost.
我们提出了一种广义线性结构因果模型,并结合新颖的数据适应性线性正则化,从时间序列中恢复因果有向无环图(DAG)。通过利用最近开发的随机单调变式不等式(VI)公式,我们将因果发现问题视为一般凸优化问题。此外,我们还通过求解线性程序,为各种非线性单调联系函数建立置信区间,从而开发出一种非渐近恢复保证和可量化的不确定性。我们通过大量数值实验验证了我们的理论结果,并展示了我们的方法具有竞争力的性能。最重要的是,我们证明了我们的方法在恢复败血症相关变异 (SAD) 的高度可解释因果 DAG 方面的有效性,同时实现了与 XGBoost 等强大 "黑盒 "模型相当的预测性能。
{"title":"Causal Graph Discovery From Self and Mutually Exciting Time Series","authors":"Song Wei;Yao Xie;Christopher S. Josef;Rishikesan Kamaleswaran","doi":"10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3342569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3342569","url":null,"abstract":"We present a generalized linear structural causal model, coupled with a novel data-adaptive linear regularization, to recover causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from time series. By leveraging a recently developed stochastic monotone Variational Inequality (VI) formulation, we cast the causal discovery problem as a general convex optimization. Furthermore, we develop a non-asymptotic recovery guarantee and quantifiable uncertainty by solving a linear program to establish confidence intervals for a wide range of non-linear monotone link functions. We validate our theoretical results and show the competitive performance of our method via extensive numerical experiments. Most importantly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in recovering highly interpretable causal DAGs over Sepsis Associated Derangements (SADs) while achieving comparable prediction performance to powerful “black-box” models such as XGBoost.","PeriodicalId":73295,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal on selected areas in information theory","volume":"4 ","pages":"747-761"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139090401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344586
Siqi Meng;Shaohua Wu;Aimin Li;Qinyu Zhang
In the past decade, the emergence of beyond fifth generation (B5G) wireless networks has necessitated the timely updating of system states in Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems, where Age of Information (AoI) has been a well-concentrated metric. However, the content-agnostic nature of AoI reflects its limitation of characterizing the significance of status update messages, which induces various variants for AoI including Age of Incorrect Information (AoII). AoII is a goal-oriented significance (etymological meaning of “semantics”) metric that could overcome such shortcomings, and thus analyzing AoII performance can be a potential approach of realizing semantic communications. Nevertheless, AoII analysis of practical coded status update system under finite blocklength (FBL) regime is still in its nascent stages. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first analysis of AoII for FBL regime. We explicitly obtain the average AoII expressions for different transmission schemes including Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), Hybrid ARQ (HARQ), and non-ARQ transmission schemes. Moreover, we theoretically prove that non-ARQ scheme outperforms ARQ schemes in terms of AoII, and numerically compare AoII performance between non-ARQ and HARQ schemes by formulating and solving the AoII-optimal block assignment problem. Extensive simulation results show the superiority of AoII-optimal transmission schemes.
{"title":"Toward Goal-Oriented Semantic Communications: AoII Analysis of Coded Status Update System Under FBL Regime","authors":"Siqi Meng;Shaohua Wu;Aimin Li;Qinyu Zhang","doi":"10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3344586","url":null,"abstract":"In the past decade, the emergence of beyond fifth generation (B5G) wireless networks has necessitated the timely updating of system states in Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems, where Age of Information (AoI) has been a well-concentrated metric. However, the content-agnostic nature of AoI reflects its limitation of characterizing the significance of status update messages, which induces various variants for AoI including Age of Incorrect Information (AoII). AoII is a goal-oriented significance (etymological meaning of “semantics”) metric that could overcome such shortcomings, and thus analyzing AoII performance can be a potential approach of realizing semantic communications. Nevertheless, AoII analysis of practical coded status update system under finite blocklength (FBL) regime is still in its nascent stages. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first analysis of AoII for FBL regime. We explicitly obtain the average AoII expressions for different transmission schemes including Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), Hybrid ARQ (HARQ), and non-ARQ transmission schemes. Moreover, we theoretically prove that non-ARQ scheme outperforms ARQ schemes in terms of AoII, and numerically compare AoII performance between non-ARQ and HARQ schemes by formulating and solving the AoII-optimal block assignment problem. Extensive simulation results show the superiority of AoII-optimal transmission schemes.","PeriodicalId":73295,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal on selected areas in information theory","volume":"4 ","pages":"718-733"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139050591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A digital twin (DT) leverages a virtual representation of the physical world, along with communication (e.g., 6G), computing (e.g., edge computing), and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable many connected intelligence services. In order to handle the large amounts of network data based on digital twins (DTs), wireless systems can exploit the paradigm of semantic communication (SC) for facilitating informed decision-making under strict communication constraints by utilizing AI techniques such as causal reasoning. In this paper, a novel framework called causal semantic communication (CSC) is proposed for DT-based wireless systems. The CSC system is posed as an imitation learning (IL) problem, where the transmitter, with access to optimal network control policies using a DT, teaches the receiver using SC over a bandwidth-limited wireless channel how to improve its knowledge to perform optimal control actions. The causal structure in the transmitter’s data is extracted using novel approaches from the framework of deep end-to-end causal inference, thereby enabling the creation of a semantic representation that is causally invariant, which in turn helps generalize the learned knowledge of the system to new and unseen situations. The CSC decoder at the receiver is designed to extract and estimate semantic information while ensuring high semantic reliability. The receiver control policies, semantic decoder, and causal inference are formulated as a bi-level optimization problem within a variational inference framework. This problem is solved using a novel concept called network state models, inspired from world models in generative AI, that faithfully represents the environment dynamics leading to data generation. Furthermore, the proposed framework includes an analytical characterization of the performance gap that results from employing a suboptimal policy learned by the receiver that uses the transmitted semantic information to construct a model of the physical environment. The CSC system utilizes two concepts, namely the integrated information theory principle in the theory of consciousness and the abstract cell complex concept in topology, to precisely express the information content conveyed by the causal states and their relationships. Through this analysis, novel formulations of semantic information, semantic reliability, distortion, and similarity metrics are proposed, which extend beyond Shannon’s concept of uncertainty. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CSC system outperforms conventional wireless and state-of-the-art SC systems by achieving better semantic reliability with reduced bits and enabling better control policies over time thanks to the generative AI architecture.
{"title":"Causal Semantic Communication for Digital Twins: A Generalizable Imitation Learning Approach","authors":"Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas;Walid Saad;Yong Xiao","doi":"10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3336538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3336538","url":null,"abstract":"A digital twin (DT) leverages a virtual representation of the physical world, along with communication (e.g., 6G), computing (e.g., edge computing), and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable many connected intelligence services. In order to handle the large amounts of network data based on digital twins (DTs), wireless systems can exploit the paradigm of semantic communication (SC) for facilitating informed decision-making under strict communication constraints by utilizing AI techniques such as causal reasoning. In this paper, a novel framework called causal semantic communication (CSC) is proposed for DT-based wireless systems. The CSC system is posed as an imitation learning (IL) problem, where the transmitter, with access to optimal network control policies using a DT, teaches the receiver using SC over a bandwidth-limited wireless channel how to improve its knowledge to perform optimal control actions. The causal structure in the transmitter’s data is extracted using novel approaches from the framework of deep end-to-end causal inference, thereby enabling the creation of a semantic representation that is causally invariant, which in turn helps generalize the learned knowledge of the system to new and unseen situations. The CSC decoder at the receiver is designed to extract and estimate semantic information while ensuring high semantic reliability. The receiver control policies, semantic decoder, and causal inference are formulated as a bi-level optimization problem within a variational inference framework. This problem is solved using a novel concept called network state models, inspired from world models in generative AI, that faithfully represents the environment dynamics leading to data generation. Furthermore, the proposed framework includes an analytical characterization of the performance gap that results from employing a suboptimal policy learned by the receiver that uses the transmitted semantic information to construct a model of the physical environment. The CSC system utilizes two concepts, namely the integrated information theory principle in the theory of consciousness and the abstract cell complex concept in topology, to precisely express the information content conveyed by the causal states and their relationships. Through this analysis, novel formulations of semantic information, semantic reliability, distortion, and similarity metrics are proposed, which extend beyond Shannon’s concept of uncertainty. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CSC system outperforms conventional wireless and state-of-the-art SC systems by achieving better semantic reliability with reduced bits and enabling better control policies over time thanks to the generative AI architecture.","PeriodicalId":73295,"journal":{"name":"IEEE journal on selected areas in information theory","volume":"4 ","pages":"698-717"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138822192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-30DOI: 10.1109/JSAIT.2023.3337203
Ali Maatouk;Mohamad Assaad;Anthony Ephremides
In this paper, we analyze status update systems modeled through the Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHSs) tool. Contrary to previous works, we allow the system’s transition dynamics to be polynomial functions of the Age of Information (AoI). This dependence allows us to encapsulate many applications and opens the door for more sophisticated systems to be studied. However, this same dependence on the AoI engenders technical and analytical difficulties that we address in this paper. Specifically, we first showcase several characteristics of the age processes modeled through the SHSs tool. Then, we provide a framework to establish the Lagrange stability and positive recurrence of these processes. Building on this, we provide an approach to compute the $m$