Information Theory (cs.IT)

Abstract: We consider the problem of how a platform designer, owner, or operator can improve the design and operation of a digital platform by leveraging a computational cognitive model that represents users's folk theories about a platform as a sociotechnical system. We do so in the context of Reddit, a social media platform whose owners and administrators make extensive use of shadowbanning, a non-transparent content moderation mechanism that filters a user's posts and comments so that they cannot be seen by fellow community members or the public. After demonstrating that the design and operation of Reddit have led to an abundance of spurious suspicions of shadowbanning in case the mechanism was not in fact invoked, we develop a computational cognitive model of users's folk theories about the antecedents and consequences of shadowbanning that predicts when users will attribute their on-platform observations to a shadowban. The model is then used to evaluate the capacity of interventions available to a platform designer, owner, and operator to reduce the incidence of these false suspicions. We conclude by considering the implications of this approach for the design and operation of digital platforms at large.

Abstract: We consider a joint sampling and compression system for timely status updates. Samples are taken, quantized and encoded into binary sequences, which are sent to the destination. We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design sampler, quantizer and encoder, minimizing the age of information (AoI) on the basis of satisfying a mean-squared error (MSE) distortion constraint of the samples. We prove that the zero-wait sampling, the uniform quantization, and the real-valued AoI-optimal coding policies together provide an asymptotically optimal solution to this problem, i.e., as the average distortion approaches zero, the combination achieves the minimum AoI asymptotically. Furthermore, we prove that the AoI of this solution is asymptotically linear with respect to the log MSE distortion with a slope of $-\frac{3}{4}$. We also show that the real-valued Shannon coding policy suffices to achieve the optimal performance asymptotically. Numerical simulations corroborate the analysis.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the use of quaternary reliability statistics for ordered statistics decoding (OSD) of quantum codes. OSD can be used to improve the performance of belief propagation (BP) decoding when it fails to correct the error syndrome. We propose an approach that leverages quaternary reliability information and the hard-decision history output by BP to perform reliability sorting for OSD. This approach improves upon previous methods that separately treat X and Z errors, by preserving the X/Z correlations during the sorting step. Our simulations show that the refined BP with scalar messages and the proposed OSD outperforms previous BP-OSD combinations. We achieve thresholds of 17.5% for toric, surface, and XZZX codes, and 14.8% for hexagonal planar color codes.

Abstract: Recently, a versatile limited feedback scheme based on a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) was proposed for frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. This scheme provides high flexibility regarding various system parameters and is applicable to both point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) communications. The GMM is learned to cover the operation of all mobile terminals (MTs) located inside the base station (BS) cell, and each MT only needs to evaluate its strongest mixture component as feedback, eliminating the need for channel estimation at the MT. In this work, we extend the GMM-based feedback scheme to variable feedback lengths by leveraging a single learned GMM through merging or pruning of dispensable mixture components. Additionally, the GMM covariances are restricted to Toeplitz or circulant structure through model-based insights. These extensions significantly reduce the offloading amount and enhance the clustering ability of the GMM which, in turn, leads to an improved system performance. Simulation results for both point-to-point and multi-user systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed extensions.

Abstract: We consider the repair scheme of Guruswami-Wootters for the Reed-Solomon code and ask: can we correctly repair a failed node in the presence of erroneous nodes? Equivalently, we consider the collection of downloaded traces as a code and investigate its code-distance properties. We propose three lower bounds on its minimum distance and study methods to efficiently correct errors close to these bounds.

Abstract: We present Modular Polynomial (MP) Codes for Secure Distributed Matrix Multiplication (SDMM). The construction is based on the observation that one can decode certain proper subsets of the coefficients of a polynomial with fewer evaluations than is necessary to interpolate the entire polynomial. These codes are proven to outperform, in terms of recovery threshold, the currently best-known polynomial codes for the inner product partition. We also present Generalized Gap Additive Secure Polynomial (GGASP) codes for the grid partition. These two families of codes are shown experimentally to perform favorably in terms of recovery threshold when compared to other comparable polynomials codes for SDMM. Both MP and GGASP codes achieve the recovery threshold of Entangled Polynomial Codes for robustness against stragglers, but MP codes can decode below this recovery threshold depending on the set of worker nodes which fails. The decoding complexity of MP codes is shown to be lower than other approaches in the literature, due to the user not being tasked with interpolating an entire polynomial.

Abstract: In this paper, we study optical simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems, where a photovoltaic optical receiver (RX) is illuminated by ambient light and an intensity-modulated free space optical (FSO) signal. To facilitate simultaneous information reception and energy harvesting (EH) at the RX, the received optical signal is first converted to an electrical signal, and then, its alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) components are separated and utilized for information decoding and EH, respectively. By accurately analysing the equivalent electrical circuit of the photovoltaic RX, we model the current flow through the photovoltaic p-n junction in both the low and high input power regimes using a two-diode model of the p-n junction and we derive a closed-form non-linear EH model that characterizes the harvested power at the RX. Furthermore, taking into account the non-linear behaviour of the photovoltaic RX on information reception, we derive the optimal distribution of the transmit information signal that maximizes the achievable information rate. The proposed EH model is validated by circuit simulation results. Furthermore, we compare with two baseline models based on maximum power point (MPP) tracking at the RX and a single-diode p-n junction model, respectively, and demonstrate that in contrast to the proposed EH model, they are not able to fully capture the non-linearity of photovoltaic optical RXs. Finally, our numerical results highlight that the proposed optimal distribution of the transmit signal yields significantly higher achievable information rates compared to uniformly distributed transmit signals, which are optimal for linear optical information RXs.

Abstract: In this paper, we study terahertz (THz) simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems. Since coherent information detection is challenging at THz frequencies and Schottky diodes are not usable for THz energy harvesting (EH), we employ unipolar amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation at the transmitter (TX) and a resonant tunnelling diode (RTD)- based EH circuit at the receiver (RX) to extract both information and power from the received signal. However, the electrical properties of Schottky diodes and RTDs are different, and unlike EH receivers based on a single Schottky diode, an accurate closed-form EH model for RTD-based RXs is not available, yet. In this paper, we model the dependency of the instantaneous RX output power on the instantaneous received power by a non-linear piecewise function, whose parameters are adjusted to fit circuit simulation results. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the mutual information between the TX and RX signals subject to constraints on the peak amplitude of the transmitted signal and the required average harvested power at the RX. Furthermore, we determine a feasibility condition for the formulated problem, and for high and low required average harvested powers, we derive the achievable information rate numerically and in closed form, respectively. Our simulation results highlight a tradeoff between the information rate and the average harvested power. Finally, we show that this tradeoff is determined by the peak amplitude of the transmitted signal and the maximum instantaneous harvested power for low and high received signal powers, respectively.