Machine Learning Model for EDFA Predicting SHB Effects

Experiments show that machine learning model of an EDFA is capable of modelling spectral hole burning effects accurately. As a result, it significantly outperforms black-box models that neglect inhomogeneous effects. Model achieves a record average RMSE of 0.0165 dB between the model predictions and measurements.

First Field Demonstration of Hollow-Core Fibre Supporting Distributed Acoustic Sensing and DWDM Transmission

We demonstrate a method for measuring the backscatter coefficient of hollow-core fibre (HCF), and show the feasibility of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) with simultaneous 9.6-Tb/s DWDM transmission over a 1.6-km field-deployed HCF cable.

Extension of the Local-Optimization Global-Optimization (LOGO) Launch Power Strategy to Multi-Band Optical Networks

We propose extending the LOGO strategy for launch power settings to multi-band scenarios, maintaining low complexity while addressing key inter-band nonlinear effects and accurate amplifier models. This methodology simplifies multi-band optical multiplex section control, providing an immediate, descriptive estimation of optimized launch power.

NEC Labs America Team Attends the 2024 European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Frankfurt, Germany

Our optical networking & sending team has arrived in Frankfurt for the 2024 European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC)  and is excited to present many papers and tutorials this week. Please follow this page and on our social media channels for updates.

Predicting Spatially Resolved Gene Expression via Tissue Morphology using Adaptive Spatial GNNs (ECCB)

Spatial transcriptomics technologies, which generate a spatial map of gene activity, can deepen the understanding of tissue architecture and its molecular underpinnings in health and disease. However, the high cost makes these technologies difficult to use in practice. Histological images co-registered with targeted tissues are more affordable and routinely generated in many research and clinical studies. Hence, predicting spatial gene expression from the morphological clues embedded in tissue histological images provides a scalable alternative approach to decoding tissue complexity.

OPENCAM: Lensless Optical Encryption Camera

Lensless cameras multiplex the incoming light before it is recorded by the sensor. This ability to multiplex the incoming light has led to the development of ultra-thin, high-speed, and single-shot 3D imagers. Recently, there have been various attempts at demonstrating another useful aspect of lensless cameras – their ability to preserve the privacy of a scene by capturing encrypted measurements. However, existing lensless camera designs suffer numerous inherent privacy vulnerabilities. To demonstrate this, we develop the first comprehensive attack model for encryption cameras, and propose OpEnCam – a novel lensless optical en cryption ca mera design that overcomes these vulnerabilities. OpEnCam encrypts the incoming light before capturing it using the modulating ability of optical masks. Recovery of the original scene from an OpEnCam measurement is possible only if one has access to the camera’s encryption key, defined by the unique optical elements of each camera. Our OpEnCam design introduces two major improvements over existing lensless camera designs – (a) the use of two co-axially located optical masks, one stuck to the sensor and the other a few millimeters above the sensor and (b) the design of mask patterns, which are derived heuristically from signal processing ideas. We show, through experiments, that OpEnCam is robust against a range of attack types while still maintaining the imaging capabilities of existing lensless cameras. We validate the efficacy of OpEnCam using simulated and real data. Finally, we built and tested a prototype in the lab for proof-of-concept.

MCTR: Multi Camera Tracking Transformer

Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera Tracking tRansformer (MCTR), a novel end-to-end approach tailored for multi-object detection and tracking across multiple cameras with overlapping fields of view. MCTR leverages end-to-end detectors like DEtector TRansformer (DETR) to produce detections and detection embeddings independently for each camera view. The framework maintains set of track embeddings that encaplusate global information about the tracked objects, and updates them at every frame by integrating the local information from the view-specific detection embeddings. The track embeddings are probabilistically associated with detections in every camera view and frame to generate consistent object tracks. The soft probabilistic association facilitates the design of differentiable losses that enable end-to-end training of the entire system. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on MMPTrack and AI City Challenge, two recently introduced large-scale multi-camera multi-object tracking datasets.

PAIL: Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning Engine for Carbon Neutral Optimization

Achieving carbon neutrality within industrial operations has become increasingly imperative for sustainable development. It is both a significant challenge and a key opportunity for operational optimization in industry 4.0. In recent years, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based methods offer promising enhancements for sequential optimization processes and can be used for reducing car-bon emissions. However, existing DRL methods need a pre-defined reward function to assess the impact of each action on the final sustainable development goals (SDG). In many real applications, such a reward function cannot be given in advance. To address the problem, this study proposes a Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning (PAIL) engine. It is a novel method to acquire optimal operational policies for carbon neutrality without any pre-defined action rewards. Specifically, PAIL employs a Transformer-based policy generator to encode historical information and predict fol-lowing actions within a multi-dimensional space. The entire action sequence will be iteratively updated by an environmental simulator. Then PAIL uses a discriminator to minimize the discrepancy be-tween generated sequences and real-world samples of high SDG. In parallel, a Q-learning framework based performance estimator is de-signed to estimate the impact of each action on SDG. Based on these estimations, PAIL refines generated policies with the rewards from both discriminator and performance estimator. PAIL is evaluated on multiple real-world application cases and datasets. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of PAIL comparing to other state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, PAIL offers meaningful interpretability for the optimization in carbon neutrality.

Mastering Long-Tail Complexity on Graphs: Characterization, Learning, and Generalization

In the context of long-tail classification on graphs, the vast majority of existing work primarily revolves around the development of model debiasing strategies, intending to mitigate class imbalances and enhance the overall performance. Despite the notable success, there is very limited literature that provides a theoretical tool for characterizing the behaviors of long-tail classes in graphs and gaining insight into generalization performance in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose a generalization bound for long-tail classification on graphs by formulating the problem in the fashion of multi-task learning, i.e., each task corresponds to the prediction of one particular class. Our theoretical results show that the generalization performance of long-tail classification is dominated by the overall loss range and the task complexity. Building upon the theoretical findings, we propose a novel generic framework Hier-Tail for long-tail classification on graphs. In particular, we start with a hierarchical task grouping module that allows us to assign related tasks into hypertasks and thus control the complexity of the task space; then, we further design a balanced contrastive learning module to adaptively balance the gradients of both head and tail classes to control the loss range across all tasks in a unified fashion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HierTail in characterizing long-tail classes on real graphs, which achieves up to 12.9% improvement over the leading baseline method in balanced accuracy.

InfuserKI: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs via Infuser-Guided Knowledge Integration (VLDB 2024)

Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable open-generation capabilities across diverse domains, they struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks. To alleviate this issue, knowledge integration methods have been proposed to enhance LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs using external modules. However, they suffer from data inefficiency as they require both known and unknown knowledge for fine-tuning. Thus, we study a novel problem of integrating unknown knowledge into LLMs efficiently without unnecessary overlap of known knowledge. Injecting new knowledge poses the risk of forgetting previously acquired knowledge. To tackle this, we propose a novel Infuser-Guided Knowledge Integration (InfuserKI) framework that utilizes transformer internal states to determine whether to enhance the original LLM output with additional information, thereby effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting. Evaluations on the UMLS-2.5k and MetaQA domain knowledge graphs demonstrate that InfuserKI can effectively acquire new knowledge and outperform state-of-the-art baselines by 9% and 6%, respectively, in reducing knowledge forgetting.