A Probabilistic Approach to Pose Synchronization for Multi-Reference Alignment with applications to MIMO wireless communication systems

Rob Romijnders, Gabriele Cesa, Christos Louizos, Kumar Pratik, Arash Behboodi

Keywords: MIMO communications, multi-reference alignment, structured probabilistic models

TL;DR: Structured approach to multi-reference alignment enables scalable MIMO synchronization through cycle-consistent relative pose estimation

Abstract:

From molecular imaging to wireless communications, the ability to align and reconstruct signals from multiple misaligned observations is crucial for system performance.
We study the problem of multi-reference alignment (MRA), which arises in many real world problems, such as cryo-EM, computer vision and, in particular, wireless communication systems.
Using a probabilistic approach to model MRA, we find a new algorithm that uses relative poses as nuisance variables to marginalize out -- thereby removing the global symmetries of the problem and allowing for more direct solutions and improved convergence.
The decentralization of this approach enables significant computational savings by avoiding the cubic scaling of centralized methods through cycle consistency. Both proposed algorithms achieve lower reconstruction error across experimental settings.

Submission Number: 26