OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Obtaining Reliable Feedback for Sanctioning Reputation Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

Reputation mechanisms offer an effective alternative to verification authorities for building trust in electronic markets with moral hazard. Future clients guide their business decisions by considering the feedback from past transactions; if truthfully exposed, cheating behavior is sanctioned and thus becomes irrational. It therefore becomes important to ensure that rational clients have the right incentives to report honestly. As an alternative to side-payment schemes that explicitly reward truthful reports, we show that honesty can emerge as a rational behavior when clients have a repeated presence in the market. To this end we describe a mechanism that supports an equilibrium where truthful feedback is obtained. Then we characterize the set of pareto-optimal equilibria of the mechanism, and derive an upper bound on the percentage of false reports that can be recorded by the mechanism. An important role in the existence of this bound is played by the fact that rational clients can establish a reputation for reporting honestly.
Multi-level Contextual Type Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2011
Year: 2011

Contextual type theory distinguishes between bound variables and meta-variables to write potentially incomplete terms in the presence of binders. It has found good use as a framework for concise explanations of higher-order unification, characterize holes in proofs, and in developing a foundation for programming with higher-order abstract syntax, as embodied by the programming and reasoning environment Beluga. However, to reason about these applications, we need to introduce meta^2-variables to characterize the dependency on meta-variables and bound variables. In other words, we must go beyond a two-level system granting only bound variables and meta-variables. In this paper we generalize contextual type theory to n levels for arbitrary n, so as to obtain a formal system offering bound variables, meta-variables and so on all the way to meta^n-variables. We obtain a uniform account by collapsing all these different kinds of variables into a single notion of variabe indexed by some level k. We give a decidable bi-directional type system which characterizes beta-eta-normal forms together with a generalized substitution operation.
Generalization of a few results in Integer Partitions
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2011
Year: 2011

In this paper, we generalize a few important results in Integer Partitions; namely the results known as Stanley's theorem and Elder's theorem, and the congruence results proposed by Ramanujan for the partition function. We generalize the results of Stanley and Elder from a fixed integer to an array of subsequent integers, and propose an analogue of Ramanujan's congruence relations for the `number of parts' function instead of the partition function. We also deduce the generating function for the `number of parts', and relate the technical results with their graphical interpretations through a novel use of the Ferrer's diagrams.
A secure additive protocol for card players
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2011
Year: 2011

Consider three players Alice, Bob and Cath who hold a, b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of d=a+b+c cards. The cards are all different and players only know their own cards. Suppose Alice and Bob wish to communicate their cards to each other without Cath learning whether Alice or Bob holds a specific card. Considering the cards as consecutive natural numbers 0,1,..., we investigate general conditions for when Alice or Bob can safely announce the sum of the cards they hold modulo an appropriately chosen integer. We demonstrate that this holds whenever a,b>2 and c=1. Because Cath holds a single card, this also implies that Alice and Bob will learn the card deal from the other player's announcement.
Distributed Parametric and Statistical Model Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2011
Year: 2011

Statistical Model Checking (SMC) is a trade-off between testing and formal verification. The core idea of the approach is to conduct some simulations of the system and verify if they satisfy some given property. In this paper we show that SMC is easily parallelizable on a master/slaves architecture by introducing a series of algorithms that scale almost linearly with respect to the number of slave computers. Our approach has been implemented in the UPPAAL SMC toolset and applied on non-trivial case studies.
Lazy Decomposition for Distributed Decision Procedures
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2011
Year: 2011

The increasing popularity of automated tools for software and hardware verification puts ever increasing demands on the underlying decision procedures. This paper presents a framework for distributed decision procedures (for first-order problems) based on Craig interpolation. Formulas are distributed in a lazy fashion, i.e., without the use of costly decomposition algorithms. Potential models which are shown to be incorrect are reconciled through the use of Craig interpolants. Experimental results on challenging propositional satisfiability problems indicate that our method is able to outperform traditional solving techniques even without the use of additional resources.
CoInDiVinE: Parallel Distributed Model Checker for Component-Based Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2011
Year: 2011

CoInDiVinE is a tool for parallel distributed model checking of interactions among components in hierarchical component-based systems. The tool extends the DiVinE framework with a new input language (component-interaction automata) and a property specification logic (CI-LTL). As the language differs from the input language of DiVinE, our tool employs a new state space generation algorithm that also supports partial order reduction. Experiments indicate that the tool has good scaling properties when run in parallel setting.
The HIVE Tool for Informed Swarm State Space Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2011
Year: 2011

Swarm verification and parallel randomised depth-first search are very effective parallel techniques to hunt bugs in large state spaces. In case bugs are absent, however, scalability of the parallelisation is completely lost. In recent work, we proposed a mechanism to inform the workers which parts of the state space to explore. This mechanism is compatible with any action-based formalism, where a state space can be represented by a labelled transition system. With this extension, each worker can be strictly bounded to explore only a small fraction of the state space at a time. In this paper, we present the HIVE tool together with two search algorithms which were added to the LTSmin tool suite to both perform a preprocessing step, and execute a bounded worker search. The new tool is used to coordinate informed swarm explorations, and the two new LTSmin algorithms are employed for preprocessing a model and performing the individual searches.
Outlier Detection for DNA Fragment Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

Given $n$ length-$\ell$ strings $S =\{s_1, ..., s_n\}$ over a constant size alphabet $Σ$ together with parameters $d$ and $k$, the objective in the {\em Consensus String with Outliers} problem is to find a subset $S^*$ of $S$ of size $n-k$ and a string $s$ such that $\sum_{s_i \in S^*} d(s_i, s) \leq d$. Here $d(x, y)$ denotes the Hamming distance between the two strings $x$ and $y$. We prove 1. a variant of {\em Consensus String with Outliers} where the number of outliers $k$ is fixed and the objective is to minimize the total distance $\sum_{s_i \in S^*} d(s_i, s)$ admits a simple PTAS. (ii) Under the natural assumption that the number of outliers $k$ is small, the PTAS for the distance minimization version of {\em Consensus String with Outliers} performs well. In particular, as long as $k\leq cn$ for a fixed constant $c < 1$, the algorithm provides a $(1+ε)$-approximate solution in time $f(1/ε)(n\ell)^{O(1)}$ and thus, is an EPTAS. 2. In order to improve the PTAS for {\em Consensus String with Outliers} to an EPTAS, the assumption that $k$ is small is necessary. Specifically, when $k$ is allowed to be arbitrary the {\em Consensus String with Outliers} problem does not admit an EPTAS unless FPT=W[1]. This hardness result holds even for binary alphabets. 3. The decision version of {\em Consensus String with Outliers} is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by $\frac{d}{n-k}$. and thus, also when parameterized by just $d$. To the best of our knowledge, {\em Consensus String with Outliers} is the first problem that admits a PTAS, and is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the value of the objective function but does not admit an EPTAS under plausible complexity assumptions.
A Mechanism for Detection of Cooperative Black Hole Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2011
Year: 2011

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connections in a decentralized manner. Security remains a major challenge for these networks due to their features of open medium, dynamically changing topologies, reliance on cooperative algorithms,absence of centralized monitoring points, and lack of clear lines of defense. Most of the routing protocols for MANETs are thus vulnerable to various types of attacks. Ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) is a very popular routing algorithm. However, it is vulnerable to the well-known black hole attack, where a malicious node falsely advertises good paths to a destination node during the route discovery process. This attack becomes more sever when a group of malicious nodes cooperate each other. In this paper, a defense mechanism is presented against a coordinated attack by multiple black hole nodes in a MANET. The simulation carried out on the proposed scheme has produced results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism in detection of the attack while maintaining a reasonable level of throughput in the network.
Kernel diff-hash
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2011
Year: 2011

This paper presents a kernel formulation of the recently introduced diff-hash algorithm for the construction of similarity-sensitive hash functions. Our kernel diff-hash algorithm that shows superior performance on the problem of image feature descriptor matching.
Evaluating geometric queries using few arithmetic operations
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

Let $\cp:=(P_1,...,P_s)$ be a given family of $n$-variate polynomials with integer coefficients and suppose that the degrees and logarithmic heights of these polynomials are bounded by $d$ and $h$, respectively. Suppose furthermore that for each $1\leq i\leq s$ the polynomial $P_i$ can be evaluated using $L$ arithmetic operations (additions, subtractions, multiplications and the constants 0 and 1). Assume that the family $\cp$ is in a suitable sense \emph{generic}. We construct a database $\cal D$, supported by an algebraic computation tree, such that for each $x\in [0,1]^n$ the query for the signs of $P_1(x),...,P_s(x)$ can be answered using $h d^{\cO(n^2)}$ comparisons and $nL$ arithmetic operations between real numbers. The arithmetic-geometric tools developed for the construction of $\cal D$ are then employed to exhibit example classes of systems of $n$ polynomial equations in $n$ unknowns whose consistency may be checked using only few arithmetic operations, admitting however an exponential number of comparisons.
Development of a Cost-efficient Autonomous MAV for an Unstructured Indoor Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2011
Year: 2011

Performing rescuing and surveillance operations with autonomous ground and aerial vehicles become more and more apparent task. Involving unmanned robot systems allows making these operations more efficient, safe and reliable especially in hazardous areas. This work is devoted to the development of a cost-efficient micro aerial vehicle in a quadrocopter shape for developmental purposes within indoor scenarios. It has been constructed with off-the-shelf components available for mini helicopters. Additional sensors and electronics are incorporated into this aerial vehicle to stabilize its flight behavior and to provide a capability of an autonomous navigation in a partially unstructured indoor environment.
Hierarchical and High-Girth QC LDPC Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

We present a general approach to designing capacity-approaching high-girth low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes that are friendly to hardware implementation. Our methodology starts by defining a new class of "hierarchical" quasi-cyclic (HQC) LDPC codes that generalizes the structure of quasi-cyclic (QC) LDPC codes. Whereas the parity check matrices of QC LDPC codes are composed of circulant sub-matrices, those of HQC LDPC codes are composed of a hierarchy of circulant sub-matrices that are in turn constructed from circulant sub-matrices, and so on, through some number of levels. We show how to map any class of codes defined using a protograph into a family of HQC LDPC codes. Next, we present a girth-maximizing algorithm that optimizes the degrees of freedom within the family of codes to yield a high-girth HQC LDPC code. Finally, we discuss how certain characteristics of a code protograph will lead to inevitable short cycles, and show that these short cycles can be eliminated using a "squashing" procedure that results in a high-girth QC LDPC code, although not a hierarchical one. We illustrate our approach with designed examples of girth-10 QC LDPC codes obtained from protographs of one-sided spatially-coupled codes.
OSERENA, an Optimized Coloring Algorithm for Dense or Large Scale Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2011
Year: 2011

The goal of this research report is to present OSERENA "Optimized SchEduling RoutEr Node Activity", a distributed coloring algorithm optimized for dense wireless networks. Network density has an extremely reduced impact on the size of the messages exchanged to color the network. Furthermore, the number of colors used to color the network is not impacted by this optimization. We describe in this research report the properties of the algorithm and prove its correctness and termination. Simulation results point out the considerable gains in bandwidth.
Clause/Term Resolution and Learning in the Evaluation of Quantified Boolean Formulas
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

Resolution is the rule of inference at the basis of most procedures for automated reasoning. In these procedures, the input formula is first translated into an equisatisfiable formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF) and then represented as a set of clauses. Deduction starts by inferring new clauses by resolution, and goes on until the empty clause is generated or satisfiability of the set of clauses is proven, e.g., because no new clauses can be generated. In this paper, we restrict our attention to the problem of evaluating Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). In this setting, the above outlined deduction process is known to be sound and complete if given a formula in CNF and if a form of resolution, called Q-resolution, is used. We introduce Q-resolution on terms, to be used for formulas in disjunctive normal form. We show that the computation performed by most of the available procedures for QBFs --based on the Davis-Logemann-Loveland procedure (DLL) for propositional satisfiability-- corresponds to a tree in which Q-resolution on terms and clauses alternate. This poses the theoretical bases for the introduction of learning, corresponding to recording Q-resolution formulas associated with the nodes of the tree. We discuss the problems related to the introduction of learning in DLL based procedures, and present solutions extending state-of-the-art proposals coming from the literature on propositional satisfiability. Finally, we show that our DLL based solver extended with learning, performs significantly better on benchmarks used in the 2003 QBF solvers comparative evaluation.
Computing a Nonnegative Matrix Factorization -- Provably
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

In the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem we are given an $n \times m$ nonnegative matrix $M$ and an integer $r > 0$. Our goal is to express $M$ as $A W$ where $A$ and $W$ are nonnegative matrices of size $n \times r$ and $r \times m$ respectively. In some applications, it makes sense to ask instead for the product $AW$ to approximate $M$ -- i.e. (approximately) minimize $\norm{M - AW}_F$ where $\norm{}_F$ denotes the Frobenius norm; we refer to this as Approximate NMF. This problem has a rich history spanning quantum mechanics, probability theory, data analysis, polyhedral combinatorics, communication complexity, demography, chemometrics, etc. In the past decade NMF has become enormously popular in machine learning, where $A$ and $W$ are computed using a variety of local search heuristics. Vavasis proved that this problem is NP-complete. We initiate a study of when this problem is solvable in polynomial time: 1. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for exact and approximate NMF for every constant $r$. Indeed NMF is most interesting in applications precisely when $r$ is small. 2. We complement this with a hardness result, that if exact NMF can be solved in time $(nm)^{o(r)}$, 3-SAT has a sub-exponential time algorithm. This rules out substantial improvements to the above algorithm. 3. We give an algorithm that runs in time polynomial in $n$, $m$ and $r$ under the separablity condition identified by Donoho and Stodden in 2003. The algorithm may be practical since it is simple and noise tolerant (under benign assumptions). Separability is believed to hold in many practical settings. To the best of our knowledge, this last result is the first example of a polynomial-time algorithm that provably works under a non-trivial condition on the input and we believe that this will be an interesting and important direction for future work.
Constant Envelope Precoding for Power-Efficient Downlink Wireless Communication in Multi-User MIMO Systems Using Large Antenna Arrays
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

We consider downlink cellular multi-user communication between a base station (BS) having N antennas and M single-antenna users, i.e., an N X M Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC). Under an average only total transmit power constraint (APC), large antenna arrays at the BS (having tens to a few hundred antennas) have been recently shown to achieve remarkable multi-user interference (MUI) suppression with simple precoding techniques. However, building large arrays in practice, would require cheap/power-efficient Radio-Frequency(RF) electronic components. The type of transmitted signal that facilitates the use of most power-efficient RF components is a constant envelope (CE) signal. Under certain mild channel conditions (including i.i.d. fading), we analytically show that, even under the stringent per-antenna CE transmission constraint (compared to APC), MUI suppression can still be achieved with large antenna arrays. Our analysis also reveals that, with a fixed M and increasing N, the total transmitted power can be reduced while maintaining a constant signal-to-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) level at each user. We also propose a novel low-complexity CE precoding scheme, using which, we confirm our analytical observations for the i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel, through Monte-Carlo simulations. Simulation of the information sum-rate under the per-antenna CE constraint, shows that, for a fixed M and a fixed desired sum-rate, the required total transmit power decreases linearly with increasing N, i.e., an O(N) array power gain. Also, in terms of the total transmit power required to achieve a fixed desired information sum-rate, despite the stringent per-antenna CE constraint, the proposed CE precoding scheme performs close to the GBC sum-capacity (under APC) achieving scheme.
MIVAR: Transition from Productions to Bipartite Graphs MIVAR Nets and Practical Realization of Automated Constructor of Algorithms Handling More than Three Million Production Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2011
Year: 2011

The theoretical transition from the graphs of production systems to the bipartite graphs of the MIVAR nets is shown. Examples of the implementation of the MIVAR nets in the formalisms of matrixes and graphs are given. The linear computational complexity of algorithms for automated building of objects and rules of the MIVAR nets is theoretically proved. On the basis of the MIVAR nets the UDAV software complex is developed, handling more than 1.17 million objects and more than 3.5 million rules on ordinary computers. The results of experiments that confirm a linear computational complexity of the MIVAR method of information processing are given. Keywords: MIVAR, MIVAR net, logical inference, computational complexity, artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, expert systems, General Problem Solver.
Wyner-Ziv Coding Based on Multidimensional Nested Lattices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

Distributed source coding (DSC) addresses the compression of correlated sources without communication links among them. This paper is concerned with the Wyner-Ziv problem: coding of an information source with side information available only at the decoder in the form of a noisy version of the source. Both the theoretical analysis and code design are addressed in the framework of multi-dimensional nested lattice coding (NLC). For theoretical analysis, accurate computation of the rate-distortion function is given under the high-resolution assumption, and a new upper bound using the derivative of the theta series is derived. For practical code design, several techniques with low complexity are proposed. Compared to the existing Slepian-Wolf coded nested quantization (SWC-NQ) for Wyner-Ziv coding based on one or two-dimensional lattices, our proposed multi-dimensional NLC can offer better performance at arguably lower complexity, since it does not require the second stage of Slepian-Wolf coding.
Approximating the Exponential, the Lanczos Method and an \tilde{O}(m)-Time Spectral Algorithm for Balanced Separator
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

We give a novel spectral approximation algorithm for the balanced separator problem that, given a graph G, a constant balance b \in (0,1/2], and a parameter γ, either finds an Ω(b)-balanced cut of conductance O(\sqrt(γ)) in G, or outputs a certificate that all b-balanced cuts in G have conductance at least γ, and runs in time \tilde{O}(m). This settles the question of designing asymptotically optimal spectral algorithms for balanced separator. Our algorithm relies on a variant of the heat kernel random walk and requires, as a subroutine, an algorithm to compute \exp(-L)v where L is the Laplacian of a graph related to G and v is a vector. Algorithms for computing the matrix-exponential-vector product efficiently comprise our next set of results. Our main result here is a new algorithm which computes a good approximation to \exp(-A)v for a class of PSD matrices A and a given vector u, in time roughly \tilde{O}(m_A), where m_A is the number of non-zero entries of A. This uses, in a non-trivial way, the result of Spielman and Teng on inverting SDD matrices in \tilde{O}(m_A) time. Finally, we prove e^{-x} can be uniformly approximated up to a small additive error, in a non-negative interval [a,b] with a polynomial of degree roughly \sqrt{b-a}. While this result is of independent interest in approximation theory, we show that, via the Lanczos method from numerical analysis, it yields a simple algorithm to compute \exp(-A)v for PSD matrices that runs in time roughly O(t_A \sqrt{||A||}), where t_A is the time required for computation of the vector Aw for given vector w. As an application, we obtain a simple and practical algorithm, with output conductance O(\sqrt(γ)), for balanced separator that runs in time \tilde{O}(m/\sqrt(γ)). This latter algorithm matches the running time, but improves on the approximation guarantee of the algorithm by Andersen and Peres.