Telecommunications
OpenAI raises up to US 40bn in deal with SoftBank
OpenAI said it had raised US 40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at 300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and "enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further," OpenAI announced, adding it would "pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)" for which "massive computing power is essential". SoftBank said it wanted to realise "artificial super intelligence" (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal. SoftBank is to put 10bn at first into OpenAI and 30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met. Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.
Learning Beamforming Codebooks for Active Sensing with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface
--This paper explores the design of beamforming codebooks for the base station (BS) and for the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in an active sensing scheme for uplink localization, in which the mobile user transmits a sequence of pilots to the BS through reflection at the RISs, and the BS and the RISs are adaptively configured by carefully choosing BS beamforming codeword and RIS codewords from their respective codebooks in a sequential manner to progressively focus onto the user . Most existing codebook designs for RIS are not tailored for active sensing, by which we mean the choice of the next codeword should depend on the measurements made so far, and the sequence of codewords should dynamically focus reflection toward the user . Moreover, most existing codeword selection methods rely on exhaustive search in beam training to identify the codeword with the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), thus incurring substantial pilot overhead as the size of the codebook scales. This paper proposes a learning-based approach for codebook construction and for codeword selection for active sensing. The proposed learning approach aims to locate a target in the service area by recursively selecting a sequence of BS beamforming codewords and RIS codewords from the respective codebooks as more measurements become available without exhaustive beam training. The codebook design and the codeword selection fuse key ideas from the vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-V AE) and the long short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn respectively the discrete function space of the codebook and the temporal dependencies between measurements. The device is typically placed in the reflecting path between the transceivers, with its configuration wirelessly controlled by the transceivers via a control link. Manuscript submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on September 6, 2024, revised on January 12, 2025, accepted on March 5, 2025. Wei Y u is with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. This work is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada via the Canada Research Chairs program. The materials in this paper have been accepted in part at the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SP A WC), Lucca, Italy, September 2024 [1]. Codebook-based limited control link rate protocol can substantially reduce the control overhead [7], [8]. With the RIS codebook stored at the controller and at the RIS, the controller only needs to send the codeword index in order to configure the RIS.
NetworkGym: Reinforcement Learning Environments for Multi-Access Traffic Management in Network Simulation
Mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets can often connect to multiple access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G) simultaneously. Recent advancements facilitate seamless integration of these connections below the transport layer, enhancing the experience for apps that lack inherent multi-path support. This optimization hinges on dynamically determining the traffic distribution across networks for each device, a process referred to as multi-access traffic splitting. This paper introduces NetworkGym, a high-fidelity network environment simulator that facilitates generating multiple network traffic flows and multiaccess traffic splitting.
OpenAI close to finalizing 40 billion SoftBank-led funding
OpenAI is close to finalizing a 40 billion ( 6 trillion) funding round led by SoftBank Group -- with investors including Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders Fund and Altimeter Capital Management in talks to participate, according to people familiar with the matter. Magnetar Capital -- an Evanston, Illinois-based hedge fund -- could contribute up to 1 billion, according to multiple people, all of whom asked not to be identified because the information is private. The artificial intelligence developer's funding round would be the largest of all time, according to data compiled by research firm PitchBook. The deal is set to value the company at 300 billion including dollars raised -- almost double the ChatGPT maker's previous valuation of 157 billion from when it raised money in October.
A Simple yet Scalable Granger Causal Structural Learning Approach for Topological Event Sequences
Network operators need an efficient method to identify the root causes of these alarms to mitigate potential losses. This task is challenging due to the increasing scale of telecommunication networks and the interconnected nature of devices, where one fault can trigger a cascade of alarms across multiple devices within a topological network. Recent years have seen a growing focus on causal approaches to addressing this problem, emphasizing the importance of learning a Granger causal graph from topological event sequences. Such causal graphs delineate the relations among alarms and can significantly aid engineers in identifying and rectifying faults. However, existing methods either ignore the topological relationships among devices or suffer from relatively low scalability and efficiency, failing to deliver high-quality responses in a timely manner.
Stepping Forward on the Last Mile Chen Feng Qualcomm AI Research
Continuously adapting pre-trained models to local data on resource constrained edge devices is the last mile for model deployment. However, as models increase in size and depth, backpropagation requires a large amount of memory, which becomes prohibitive for edge devices. In addition, most existing low power neural processing engines (e.g., NPUs, DSPs, MCUs, etc.) are designed as fixed-point inference accelerators, without training capabilities. Forward gradients, solely based on directional derivatives computed from two forward calls, have been recently used for model training, with substantial savings in computation and memory. However, the performance of quantized training with fixed-point forward gradients remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of ondevice training using fixed-point forward gradients, by conducting comprehensive experiments across a variety of deep learning benchmark tasks in both vision and audio domains. We propose a series of algorithm enhancements that further reduce the memory footprint, and the accuracy gap compared to backpropagation. An empirical study on how training with forward gradients navigates in the loss landscape is further explored. Our results demonstrate that on the last mile of model customization on edge devices, training with fixed-point forward gradients is a feasible and practical approach.
Found Graph Data and Planted Vertex Covers
Austin R. Benson, Jon Kleinberg
A typical way in which network data is recorded is to measure all interactions involving a specified set of core nodes, which produces a graph containing this core together with a potentially larger set of fringe nodes that link to the core. Interactions between nodes in the fringe, however, are not present in the resulting graph data. For example, a phone service provider may only record calls in which at least one of the participants is a customer; this can include calls between a customer and a non-customer, but not between pairs of non-customers. Knowledge of which nodes belong to the core is crucial for interpreting the dataset, but this metadata is unavailable in many cases, either because it has been lost due to difficulties in data provenance, or because the network consists of "found data" obtained in settings such as counter-surveillance. This leads to an algorithmic problem of recovering the core set. Since the core is a vertex cover, we essentially have a planted vertex cover problem, but with an arbitrary underlying graph. We develop a framework for analyzing this planted vertex cover problem, based on the theory of fixed-parameter tractability, together with algorithms for recovering the core. Our algorithms are fast, simple to implement, and out-perform several baselines based on core-periphery structure on various real-world datasets.
Probabilistic Forecasting for Network Resource Analysis in Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks
Vaca-Rubio, Cristian J., Kasuluru, Vaishnavi, Zeydan, Engin, Blanco, Luis, Pereira, Roberto, Caus, Marius, Dev, Kapal
Efficient resource management is critical for Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) to provide consistent, high-quality service in remote and under-served regions. While traditional single-point prediction methods, such as Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), have been used in terrestrial networks, they often fall short in NTNs due to the complexity of satellite dynamics, signal latency and coverage variability. Probabilistic forecasting, which quantifies the uncertainties of the predictions, is a robust alternative. In this paper, we evaluate the application of probabilistic forecasting techniques, in particular SFF, to NTN resource allocation scenarios. Our results show their effectiveness in predicting bandwidth and capacity requirements in different NTN segments of probabilistic forecasting compared to single-point prediction techniques such as LSTM. The results show the potential of black probabilistic forecasting models to provide accurate and reliable predictions and to quantify their uncertainty, making them indispensable for optimizing NTN resource allocation. At the end of the paper, we also present application scenarios and a standardization roadmap for the use of probabilistic forecasting in integrated Terrestrial Network (TN)-NTN environments.
Energy-aware Joint Orchestration of 5G and Robots: Experimental Testbed and Field Validation
Groshev, Milan, Zanzi, Lanfranco, Delgado, Carmen, Li, Xi, de la Oliva, Antonio, Costa-Perez, Xavier
5G mobile networks introduce a new dimension for connecting and operating mobile robots in outdoor environments, leveraging cloud-native and offloading features of 5G networks to enable fully flexible and collaborative cloud robot operations. However, the limited battery life of robots remains a significant obstacle to their effective adoption in real-world exploration scenarios. This paper explores, via field experiments, the potential energy-saving gains of OROS, a joint orchestration of 5G and Robot Operating System (ROS) that coordinates multiple 5G-connected robots both in terms of navigation and sensing, as well as optimizes their cloud-native service resource utilization while minimizing total resource and energy consumption on the robots based on real-time feedback. We designed, implemented and evaluated our proposed OROS in an experimental testbed composed of commercial off-the-shelf robots and a local 5G infrastructure deployed on a campus. The experimental results demonstrated that OROS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of energy savings by offloading demanding computational tasks to the 5G edge infrastructure and dynamic energy management of on-board sensors (e.g., switching them off when they are not needed). This strategy achieves approximately 15% energy savings on the robots, thereby extending battery life, which in turn allows for longer operating times and better resource utilization.
Neural Topological Ordering for Computation Graphs Yang Yang Qualcomm AI Research
Recent works on machine learning for combinatorial optimization have shown that learning based approaches can outperform heuristic methods in terms of speed and performance. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding an optimal topological order on a directed acyclic graph with focus on the memory minimization problem which arises in compilers. We propose an end-to-end machine learning based approach for topological ordering using an encoder-decoder framework. Our encoder is a novel attention based graph neural network architecture called Topoformer which uses different topological transforms of a DAG for message passing. The node embeddings produced by the encoder are converted into node priorities which are used by the decoder to generate a probability distribution over topological orders. We train our model on a dataset of synthetically generated graphs called layered graphs. We show that our model outperforms, or is on-par, with several topological ordering baselines while being significantly faster on synthetic graphs with up to 2k nodes. We also train and test our model on a set of real-world computation graphs, showing performance improvements.