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Accurate behavior prediction for vehicles is essential but challenging for autonomous driving. Most existing studies show satisfying performance under regular scenarios, but most neglected safety-critical scenarios. In this study, a spatio-temporal dual-encoder network named STDA for safety-critical scenarios was developed. Considering the exceptional capabilities of human drivers in terms of situational awareness and comprehending risks, driver attention was incorporated into STDA to facilitate swift identification of the critical regions, which is expected to improve both performance and interpretability. STDA contains four parts: the driver attention prediction module, which predicts driver attention; the fusion module designed to fuse the features between driver attention and raw images; the temporary encoder module used to enhance the capability to interpret dynamic scenes; and the behavior prediction module to predict the behavior. The experiment data are used to train and validate the model. The results show that STDA improves the G-mean from 0.659 to 0.719 when incorporating driver attention and adopting a temporal encoder module. In addition, extensive experimentation has been conducted to validate that the proposed module exhibits robust generalization capabilities and can be seamlessly integrated into other mainstream models.

Accurate driver attention prediction can serve as a critical reference for intelligent vehicles in understanding traffic scenes and making informed driving decisions. Though existing studies on driver attention prediction improved performance by incorporating advanced saliency detection techniques, they overlooked the opportunity to achieve human-inspired prediction by analyzing driving tasks from a cognitive science perspective. During driving, drivers' working memory and long-term memory play crucial roles in scene comprehension and experience retrieval, respectively. Together, they form situational awareness, facilitating drivers to quickly understand the current traffic situation and make optimal decisions based on past driving experiences. To explicitly integrate these two types of memory, this paper proposes an Adaptive Hybrid-Memory-Fusion (AHMF) driver attention prediction model to achieve more human-like predictions. Specifically, the model first encodes information about specific hazardous stimuli in the current scene to form working memories. Then, it adaptively retrieves similar situational experiences from the long-term memory for final prediction. Utilizing domain adaptation techniques, the model performs parallel training across multiple datasets, thereby enriching the accumulated driving experience within the long-term memory module. Compared to existing models, our model demonstrates significant improvements across various metrics on multiple public datasets, proving the effectiveness of integrating hybrid memories in driver attention prediction.

Trajectory prediction is significant for intelligent vehicles to achieve high-level autonomous driving, and a lot of relevant research achievements have been made recently. Despite the rapid development, most existing studies solely focused on normal safe scenarios while largely neglecting safety-critical scenarios, particularly those involving imminent collisions. This oversight may result in autonomous vehicles lacking the essential predictive ability in such situations, posing a significant threat to safety. To tackle these, this paper proposes a risk-aware trajectory prediction framework tailored to safety-critical scenarios. Leveraging distinctive hazardous features, we develop three core risk-aware components. First, we introduce a risk-incorporated scene encoder, which augments conventional encoders with quantitative risk information to achieve risk-aware encoding of hazardous scene contexts. Next, we incorporate endpoint-risk-combined intention queries as prediction priors in the decoder to ensure that the predicted multimodal trajectories cover both various spatial intentions and risk levels. Lastly, an auxiliary risk prediction task is implemented for the ultimate risk-aware prediction. Furthermore, to support model training and performance evaluation, we introduce a safety-critical trajectory prediction dataset and tailored evaluation metrics. We conduct comprehensive evaluations and compare our model with several SOTA models. Results demonstrate the superior performance of our model, with a significant improvement in most metrics. This prediction advancement enables autonomous vehicles to execute correct collision avoidance maneuvers under safety-critical scenarios, eventually enhancing road traffic safety.

Driven by the ever-increasing requirements of ultra-high spectral efficiency, ultra-low latency, and massive connectivity, the forefront of wireless research calls for the design of advanced next generation multiple access schemes to facilitate provisioning of these stringent demands. This inspires the embrace of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in future wireless communication networks. Nevertheless, the support of massive access via NOMA leads to additional security threats, due to the open nature of the air interface, the broadcast characteristic of radio propagation as well as intertwined relationship among paired NOMA users. To address this specific challenge, the superimposed transmission of NOMA can be explored as new opportunities for security aware design, for example, multiuser interference inherent in NOMA can be constructively engineered to benefit communication secrecy and privacy. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art physical layer security techniques that guarantee wireless security and privacy for NOMA networks, along with the opportunities, technical challenges, and future research trends., Comment: Invited paper by Proceedings of the IEEE

End-to-end autonomous driving has witnessed remarkable progress. However, the extensive deployment of autonomous vehicles has yet to be realized, primarily due to 1) inefficient multi-modal environment perception: how to integrate data from multi-modal sensors more efficiently; 2) non-human-like scene understanding: how to effectively locate and predict critical risky agents in traffic scenarios like an experienced driver. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Multi-Modal fusion transformer incorporating Driver Attention (M2DA) for autonomous driving. To better fuse multi-modal data and achieve higher alignment between different modalities, a novel Lidar-Vision-Attention-based Fusion (LVAFusion) module is proposed. By incorporating driver attention, we empower the human-like scene understanding ability to autonomous vehicles to identify crucial areas within complex scenarios precisely and ensure safety. We conduct experiments on the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance with less data in closed-loop benchmarks. Source codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/M2DA-4772.

Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called Graph BEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a Local Align module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a Global Align module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our Graph BEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1\%, surpassing BEV Fusion by 1.6\% on the nuscenes validation set. Importantly, our Graph BEV outperforms BEV Fusion by 8.3\% under conditions with misalignment noise.

Physical layer key generation technology which leverages channel randomness to generate secret keys has attracted extensive attentions in long range (LoRa)-based networks recently. We in this paper develop a software-defined radio (SDR) based LoRa communications platform using GNU Radio on universal software radio peripheral (USRP) to implement and evaluate typical physical layer key generation schemes. Thanks to the flexibility and configurability of GNU Radio to extract LoRa packets, we are able to obtain the fine-grained channel frequency response (CFR) through LoRa preamble based channel estimation for key generation. Besides, we propose a lowcomplexity preprocessing method to enhance the randomness of quantization while reducing the secret key disagreement ratio. The results indicate that we can achieve 367 key bits with a high level of randomness through just a single effective channel probing in an indoor environment at a distance of 2 meters under the circumstance of a spreading factor (SF) of 7, a preamble length of 8, a signal bandwidth of 250 kHz, and a sampling rate of 1 MHz., Comment: Submitted to IEEE VTC2023 Fall

Secure wireless access in ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), which is a critical aspect of 5G security, has become increasingly important due to its potential support of grant-free configuration. In grant-free URLLC, precise allocation of different pilot resources to different users that share the same time-frequency resource is essential for the next generation NodeB (gNB) to exactly identify those users under access collision and to maintain precise channel estimation required for reliable data transmission. However, this process easily suffers from attacks on pilots. We in this paper propose a quantum learning based nonrandom superimposed coding method to encode and decode pilots on multidimensional resources, such that the uncertainty of attacks can be learned quickly and eliminated precisely. Particularly, multiuser pilots for uplink access are encoded as distinguishable subcarrier activation patterns (SAPs) and gNB decodes pilots of interest from observed SAPs, a superposition of SAPs from access users, by joint design of attack mode detection and user activity detection though a quantum learning network (QLN). We found that the uncertainty lies in the identification process of codeword digits from the attacker, which can be always modelled as a black-box model, resolved by a quantum learning algorithm and quantum circuit. Novel analytical closed-form expressions of failure probability are derived to characterize the reliability of this URLLC system with short packet transmission. Simulations how that our method can bring ultra-high reliability and low latency despite attacks on pilots., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TIFS

In the envisioned 5G, uplink grant-free multiple access will become the enabler of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) services. By removing the forward scheduling request (SR) and backward scheduling grant (SG), pilot-based channel estimation and data transmission are launched in one-shot communications with the aim of maintaining the reliability of $99.999\% $ or more and latency of 1ms or less under 5G new radio (NR) numerologies. The problem is that channel estimation can easily suffer from pilot aware attack which significantly reduces the system reliability. To solve this, we proposed to apply the hierarchical 2-D feature coding (H2DF) coding on time-frequency-code domain to safeguard channel state information (CSI), which informs a fundamental rethinking of reliability, latency and accessibility. Considering uplink large-scale single-input multiple-output (SIMO) reception of short packets, we characterize the analytical closed-form expression of reliability and define the accessibility of system. We find two fundamental tradeoffs: reliability-latency and reliability-accessibility. With the the help of the two fundamental trade-offs, we demonstrate how CSI protection could be integrated into uplink grant-free multiple access to strengthen URLLC services comprehensively., Comment: Accepted in The 11th International Conference on. Wireless Communications and Signal Processing

In wireless OFDM communications systems, pilot tones, due to their publicly known and deterministic characteristic, suffer significant jamming/nulling/spoofing risks. Thus, the convectional channel training protocol using pilot tones could be attacked and paralyzed, which raises the issue of anti-attack channel training authentication (CTA), i.e., verifying the claims of identities of pilot tones and channel estimation samples. In this paper, we consider one-ring scattering scenarios with large-scale uniform linear arrays (ULA) and develop an independence-checking coding (ICC) theory to build a secure and stable CTA protocol, namely, ICC-based CTA (ICC-CTA) protocol. In this protocol, the pilot tones are not only merely randomized and inserted into subcarriers but also encoded as diversified subcarrier activation patterns (SAPs) simultaneously. Those encoded SAPs, though camouflaged by malicious signals, can be identified and decoded into original pilots for high-accuracy channel impulse response (CIR) estimation. The CTA security is first characterized by the error probability of identifying legitimate CIR estimation samples. The CTA instability is formulated as the function of probability of stably estimating CIR against all available diversified SAPs. A realistic tradeoff between the CTA security and instability under the discretely distributed AoA is identified and an optimally stable tradeoff problem is formulated, with the objective of optimizing the code rate to maximize security while maintaining maximum stability for ever. Solving this, we derive the closed-form expression of optimal code rate. Numerical results finally validate the resilience of proposed ICC-CTA protocol., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.02089

Due to the publicly known and deterministic characteristic of pilot tones, pilot authentication (PA) in multi-user multi-antenna orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems is very susceptible to the jamming/nulling/spoofing behaviors. To solve this, in this paper, we develop a hierarchical 2-D feature (H2DF) coding theory that exploits the hidden pilot signal features, i.e., the energy feature and independence feature, to secure pilot information coding which is applied between legitimate parties through a well-designed five-layer hierarchical coding model to achieve secure multiuser PA (SMPA). The reliability of SMPA is characterized using the identification error probability (IEP) of pilot encoding and decoding with the exact closed-form upper and lower bounds. However, this phenomenon of non-tight bounds brings about the risk of long-term instability in SMPA. Therefore, a reliability bound contraction theory is developed to shrink the bound interval, and practically, this is done by an easy-to-implement technique, namely, codebook partition within the H2DF code. In this process, a tradeoff between the upper and lower bounds of IEP is identified and a problem of optimal upper and lower bound tradeoff is formulated, with the objective of optimizing the cardinality of sub-codebooks such that the upper and lower bounds coincide. Solving this, we finally derive an exact closed-form expression for IEP, which realizes a stable and highly reliable SMPA. Numerical results validate the stability and resilience of H2DF coding in SMPA.

Due to the publicly-known deterministic character- istic of pilot tones, pilot-aware attack, by jamming, nulling and spoofing pilot tones, can significantly paralyze the uplink channel training in large-scale MISO-OFDM systems. To solve this, we in this paper develop an independence-checking coding based (ICCB) uplink training architecture for one-ring scattering scenarios allowing for uniform linear arrays (ULA) deployment. Here, we not only insert randomized pilots on subcarriers for channel impulse response (CIR) estimation, but also diversify and encode subcarrier activation patterns (SAPs) to convey those pilots simultaneously. The coded SAPs, though interfered by arbitrary unknown SAPs in wireless environment, are qualified to be reliably identified and decoded into the original pilots by checking the hidden channel independence existing in subcarri- ers. Specifically, an independence-checking coding (ICC) theory is formulated to support the encoding/decoding process in this architecture. The optimal ICC code is further developed for guaranteeing a well-imposed estimation of CIR while maximizing the code rate. Based on this code, the identification error probability (IEP) is characterized to evaluate the reliability of this architecture. Interestingly, we discover the principle of IEP reduction by exploiting the array spatial correlation, and prove that zero-IEP, i.e., perfect reliability, can be guaranteed under continuously-distributed mean angle of arrival (AoA). Besides this, a novel closed form of IEP expression is derived in discretely- distributed case. Simulation results finally verify the effectiveness of the proposed architecture., Comment: accepted in IEEE International Conference on Communications 2018

We in this paper introduce an advanced eavesdropper that aims to paralyze the artificial-noise-aided secure communications. We consider the M-1-2 Gaussian MISO wiretap channel, which consists of a M-antenna transmitter, a single-antenna receiver, and a two-antenna eavesdropper. This type of eavesdropper, by adopting an optimal Grassmann manifold (OGM) filtering structure, can reduce the maximum achievable secrecy rate (MASR) to be zero by using only two receive antennas, regardless of the number of antennas at the transmitter. Specifically, the eavesdropper exploits linear filters to serially recover the legitimate information symbols and intends to find the optimal filter that minimizes the meansquare error (MSE) in estimating the symbols. During the process, a convex semidefinite programming (SDP) problem with constraints on the filter matrix can be formulated and solved. Interestingly, the resulted optimal filters constitute a complex Grassmann manifold on the matrix space. Based on the filters, a novel expression of MASR is derived and further verified to be zero under the noiseless environment. Besides this, an achievable variable region (AVR) that induces zero MASR is presented analytically in the noisy case. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the huge disaster in the respect of secrecy rate., Comment: accepted in IEEE GOLBECOM 2017

A pilot spoofer can paralyze the channel estimation in multi-user orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFD- M) systems by using the same publicly-known pilot tones as legitimate nodes. This causes the problem of pilot authentication (PA). To solve this, we propose, for a two-user multi-antenna OFDM system, a code-frequency block group (CFBG) coding based PA mechanism. Here multi-user pilot information, after being randomized independently to avoid being spoofed, are converted into activation patterns of subcarrier-block groups on code-frequency domain. Those patterns, though overlapped and interfered mutually in the wireless transmission environment, are qualified to be separated and identified as the original pilots with high accuracy, by exploiting CFBG coding theory and channel characteristic. Particularly, we develop the CFBG code through two steps, i.e., 1) devising an ordered signal detection technique to recognize the number of signals coexisting on each subcarrier block, and encoding each subcarrier block with the detected number; 2) constructing a zero-false-drop (ZFD) code and block detection based (BD) code via k-dimensional Latin hypercubes and integrating those two codes into the CFBG code. This code can bring a desirable pilot separation error probability (SEP), inversely proportional to the number of occupied subcarriers and antennas with a power of k. To apply the code to PA, a scheme of pilot conveying, separation and identification is proposed. Based on this novel PA, a joint channel estimation and identification mechanism is proposed to achieve high-precision channel recovery and simultaneously enhance PA without occupying extra resources. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism., Comment: accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Jan. 2018