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Mixture of experts (MoE) is a popular technique to improve capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) with conditionally-activated parallel experts. However, serving MoE models on memory-constrained devices is challenging due to the large parameter size. Typical solutions such as memory swapping or expert pruning may lead to significantly higher latency or severe accuracy loss. In this paper, we introduce SwapMoE, a framework for efficient serving of MoE-based large language models with tunable memory budgets. The main idea of SwapMoE is to keep a small dynamic set of important experts, namely Virtual Experts, in the main memory for inference, while seamlessly maintaining how the Virtual Experts map to the actual experts. Experiments have shown that SwapMoE can reduce the memory footprint while maintaining reasonable accuracy. For example, on text summarization tasks with Switch Transformer, SwapMoE can reduce the memory consumption from 14.2 GiB to 4.7 GiB, together with 50\% latency reduction and a slight Rouge-2 score drop of 0.041., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2024

In the global craze of GPT, people have deeply realized that AI, as a transformative technology and key force in economic and social development, will bring great leaps and breakthroughs to the global industry and profoundly influence the future world competition pattern. As the builder and operator of information and communication infrastructure, the telecom sector provides infrastructure support for the development of AI, and even takes the lead in the implementation of AI applications. How to enable the application of AIGC (GPT) and implement AIGC in the telecom sector are questions that telecom practitioners must ponder and answer. Through the study of GPT, a typical representative of AIGC, the authors have analyzed how GPT empowers the telecom sector in the form of scenarios, discussed the gap between the current GPT general model and telecom services, proposed for the first time a Telco Augmented Cognition capability system, provided answers to how to construct a telecom service GPT in the telecom sector, and carried out various practices. Our counterparts in the industry are expected to focus on collaborative innovation around telecom and AI, build an open and shared innovation ecosystem, promote the deep integration of AI and telecom sector, and accelerate the construction of next-generation information infrastructure, in an effort to facilitate the digital transformation of the economy and society.

6G is the next-generation intelligent and integrated digital information infrastructure, characterized by ubiquitous interconnection, native intelligence, multi-dimensional perception, global coverage, green and low-carbon, native network security, etc. 6G will realize the transition from serving people and people-things communication to supporting the efficient connection of intelligent agents, and comprehensively leading the digital, intelligent and green transformation of the economy and the society. As the core support system for mobile communication network, 6 6G BSS need to integrate with new business models brought about by the development of the next-generation Internet and IT, upgrade from "network-centric" to "business and service centric" and "customer-centric". 6G OSS and BSS systems need to strengthen their integration to improve the operational efficiency and benefits of customers by connecting the digital intelligence support capabilities on both sides of supply and demand. This paper provides a detailed introduction to the overall vision, potential key technologies, and functional architecture of 6G BSS systems. It also presents an evolutionary roadmap and technological prospects for the BSS systems from 5G to 6G.

6G is the next-generation intelligent and integrated digital information infrastructure, characterized by ubiquitous interconnection, native intelligence, multi-dimensional perception, global coverage, green and low-carbon, native network security, etc. 6G will realize the transition from serving people and people-things communication to supporting the efficient connection of intelligent agents, and comprehensively leading the digital, intelligent and green transformation of the economy and the society. As the core support system for mobile communication network, 6G OSS needs to achieve high-level network automation, intelligence and digital twinning capabilities to achieve end-to-end autonomous network operation and maintenance, support the operation of typical 6G business scenarios and play a greater social responsibility in the fields of environment, society, and governance (ESG).This paper provides a detailed introduction to the overall vision, potential key technologies, and functional architecture of 6G OSS . It also presents an evolutionary roadmap and technological prospects for the OSS from 5G to 6G., Comment: 103 pages, 20 figures, 52 references (chinese version)

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed to edge devices for real-time applications. To ensure stable service quality across diverse edge environments, it is highly desirable to generate tailored model architectures for different conditions. However, conventional pre-deployment model generation approaches are not satisfactory due to the difficulty of handling the diversity of edge environments and the demand for edge information. In this paper, we propose to adapt the model architecture after deployment in the target environment, where the model quality can be precisely measured and private edge data can be retained. To achieve efficient and effective edge model generation, we introduce a pretraining-assisted on-cloud model elastification method and an edge-friendly on-device architecture search method. Model elastification generates a high-quality search space of model architectures with the guidance of a developer-specified oracle model. Each subnet in the space is a valid model with different environment affinity, and each device efficiently finds and maintains the most suitable subnet based on a series of edge-tailored optimizations. Extensive experiments on various edge devices demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve significantly better accuracy-latency tradeoffs (e.g. 46.74\% higher on average accuracy with a 60\% latency budget) than strong baselines with minimal overhead (13 GPU hours in the cloud and 2 minutes on the edge server).

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a federated learning setting where multiple parties with different features about the same set of users jointly train machine learning models without exposing their raw data or model parameters. Motivated by the rapid growth in VFL research and real-world applications, we provide a comprehensive review of the concept and algorithms of VFL, as well as current advances and challenges in various aspects, including effectiveness, efficiency, and privacy. We provide an exhaustive categorization for VFL settings and privacy-preserving protocols and comprehensively analyze the privacy attacks and defense strategies for each protocol. In the end, we propose a unified framework, termed VFLow, which considers the VFL problem under communication, computation, privacy, as well as effectiveness and fairness constraints. Finally, we review the most recent advances in industrial applications, highlighting open challenges and future directions for VFL., Comment: We added new works and revised the manuscript

As computing power is becoming the core productivity of the digital economy era, the concept of Computing and Network Convergence (CNC), under which network and computing resources can be dynamically scheduled and allocated according to users' needs, has been proposed and attracted wide attention. Based on the tasks' properties, the network orchestration plane needs to flexibly deploy tasks to appropriate computing nodes and arrange paths to the computing nodes. This is a orchestration problem that involves resource scheduling and path arrangement. Since CNC is relatively new, in this paper, we review some researches and applications on CNC. Then, we design a CNC orchestration method using reinforcement learning (RL), which is the first attempt, that can flexibly allocate and schedule computing resources and network resources. Which aims at high profit and low latency. Meanwhile, we use multi-factors to determine the optimization objective so that the orchestration strategy is optimized in terms of total performance from different aspects, such as cost, profit, latency and system overload in our experiment. The experiments shows that the proposed RL-based method can achieve higher profit and lower latency than the greedy method, random selection and balanced-resource method. We demonstrate RL is suitable for CNC orchestration. This paper enlightens the RL application on CNC orchestration.

In the traditional distributed machine learning scenario, the user's private data is transmitted between clients and a central server, which results in significant potential privacy risks. In order to balance the issues of data privacy and joint training of models, federated learning (FL) is proposed as a particular distributed machine learning procedure with privacy protection mechanisms, which can achieve multi-party collaborative computing without revealing the original data. However, in practice, FL faces a variety of challenging communication problems. This review seeks to elucidate the relationship between these communication issues by methodically assessing the development of FL communication research from three perspectives: communication efficiency, communication environment, and communication resource allocation. Firstly, we sort out the current challenges existing in the communications of FL. Second, we have collated FL communications-related papers and described the overall development trend of the field based on their logical relationship. Ultimately, we discuss the future directions of research for communications in FL.

With the development of 4G/5G, the rapid growth of traffic has caused a large number of cell indicators to exceed the warning threshold, and network quality has deteriorated. It is necessary for operators to solve the congestion in advance and effectively to guarantee the quality of user experience. Cell-level multi-indicator forecasting is the foundation task for proactive complex network optimization. In this paper, we propose the 4G/5G Cell-level multi-indicator forecasting method based on the dense-Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, which adds additional fully-connected layers between non-adjacent layers in an MLP network. The model forecasted the following week's traffic indicators of 13000 cells according to the six-month historical indicators of 65000 cells in the 4G&5G network, which got the highest weighted MAPE score (0.2484) in the China Mobile problem statement in the ITU-T AI/ML in 5G Challenge 2021. Furthermore, the proposed model has been integrated into the AsiaInfo 4G/5G energy-saving system and deployed in Jiangsu Province of China., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Published at ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, viewable at https://www.itu.int/pub/S-JNL-VOL3.ISSUE3-2022-A03

Beamforming is an essential technology in the 5G massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MMIMO) communications, which are subject to many impairments due to the nature of wireless transmission channel, i.e. the air. The inter-cell interference (ICI) is one of the main impairments faced by 5G communications due to frequency-reuse technologies. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) assisted full dynamic beamforming for ICI mitigation in 5G downlink. The proposed algorithm is a joint of beamforming and full dynamic Q-learning technology to minimize the ICI, and results in a low-complexity method without channel estimation. Performance analysis shows the quality of service improvement in terms of signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and computational complexity compared to other algorithms., Comment: There is an error in section 4 about what are the definitions of states and actions, which will affect the performance of the algorithm

It has been an exciting journey since the mobile communications and artificial intelligence were conceived 37 years and 64 years ago. While both fields evolved independently and profoundly changed communications and computing industries, the rapid convergence of 5G and deep learning is beginning to significantly transform the core communication infrastructure, network management and vertical applications. The paper first outlines the individual roadmaps of mobile communications and artificial intelligence in the early stage, with a concentration to review the era from 3G to 5G when AI and mobile communications started to converge. With regard to telecommunications artificial intelligence, the paper further introduces in detail the progress of artificial intelligence in the ecosystem of mobile communications. The paper then summarizes the classifications of AI in telecom ecosystems along with its evolution paths specified by various international telecommunications standardization bodies. Towards the next decade, the paper forecasts the prospective roadmap of telecommunications artificial intelligence. In line with 3GPP and ITU-R timeline of 5G & 6G, the paper further explores the network intelligence following 3GPP and ORAN routes respectively, experience and intention driven network management and operation, network AI signalling system, intelligent middle-office based BSS, intelligent customer experience management and policy control driven by BSS and OSS convergence, evolution from SLA to ELA, and intelligent private network for verticals. The paper is concluded with the vision that AI will reshape the future B5G or 6G landscape and we need pivot our R&D, standardizations, and ecosystem to fully take the unprecedented opportunities., Comment: 50 pages in English 24 figures. (Note version 5 is 19 pages, in Chinese, with 24 figures)

Mobile operators currently prefer optimizing their radio networks via re-homing or cutting over the cell sites in 2G or 3G networks. The core network, as the parental part of radio network, is inevitably impacted by the re-homing in radio domain. This paper introduces the cell site re-homing in radio network and analyzes its impact on the performance of GSM/UMTS core network. The possible re-homing models are created and analyzed for core networks. The paper concludes that appropriate re-homing in radio domain, using correct algorithms, not only optimizes the radio network but also helps improve the QoS of the core network and saves the carriers' OPEX and CAPEX on their core networks., Comment: 14 Pages, IJNGN Journal

Mobile data services are penetrating mobile markets rapidly. The mobile industry relies heavily on data service to replace the traditional voice services with the evolution of the wireless technology and market. A reliable packet service network is critical to the mobile operators to maintain their core competence in data service market. Furthermore, mobile operators need to develop effective operational models to manage the varying mix of voice, data and video traffic on a single network. Application of statistical models could prove to be an effective approach. This paper first introduces the architecture of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) packet switched (PS) network and then applies multivariate statistical analysis to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) monitored from network entities in UMTS PS network to guide the long term capacity planning for the network. The approach proposed in this paper could be helpful to mobile operators in operating and maintaining their 3G packet switched networks for the long run., Comment: 15 Pages, IJNGN Journal