OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Probabilistic Analysis of Linear Programming Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2008
Year: 2008

We initiate the probabilistic analysis of linear programming (LP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Specifically, we show that for a random LDPC code ensemble, the linear programming decoder of Feldman et al. succeeds in correcting a constant fraction of errors with high probability. The fraction of correctable errors guaranteed by our analysis surpasses previous non-asymptotic results for LDPC codes, and in particular exceeds the best previous finite-length result on LP decoding by a factor greater than ten. This improvement stems in part from our analysis of probabilistic bit-flipping channels, as opposed to adversarial channels. At the core of our analysis is a novel combinatorial characterization of LP decoding success, based on the notion of a generalized matching. An interesting by-product of our analysis is to establish the existence of ``probabilistic expansion'' in random bipartite graphs, in which one requires only that almost every (as opposed to every) set of a certain size expands, for sets much larger than in the classical worst-case setting.
Maximizing Maximal Angles for Plane Straight-Line Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2009
Year: 2009

Let $G=(S, E)$ be a plane straight-line graph on a finite point set $S\subset\R^2$ in general position. The incident angles of a vertex $p \in S$ of $G$ are the angles between any two edges of $G$ that appear consecutively in the circular order of the edges incident to $p$. A plane straight-line graph is called $ϕ$-open if each vertex has an incident angle of size at least $ϕ$. In this paper we study the following type of question: What is the maximum angle $ϕ$ such that for any finite set $S\subset\R^2$ of points in general position we can find a graph from a certain class of graphs on $S$ that is $ϕ$-open? In particular, we consider the classes of triangulations, spanning trees, and paths on $S$ and give tight bounds in most cases.
Hilbert++ Manual
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2009
Year: 2009

We present here an installation guide, a hand-on mini-tutorial through examples, and the theoretical foundations of the Hilbert++ code.
Further Comments on "Residue-to-Binary Converters Based on New Chinese Remainder Theorems"
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2009
Year: 2009

Ananda Mohan suggested that the first New Chinese Remainder Theorem introduced by Wang can be derived from the constructive proof of the well-known Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and claimed that Wang's approach is the same as the one proposed earlier by Huang. Ananda Mohan's proof is however erroneous and we show here that Wang's New CRT I is a rewriting of an algorithm previously sketched by Hitz and Kaltofen.
Provenance as Dependency Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2009
Year: 2009

Provenance is information recording the source, derivation, or history of some information. Provenance tracking has been studied in a variety of settings; however, although many design points have been explored, the mathematical or semantic foundations of data provenance have received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we argue that dependency analysis techniques familiar from program analysis and program slicing provide a formal foundation for forms of provenance that are intended to show how (part of) the output of a query depends on (parts of) its input. We introduce a semantic characterization of such dependency provenance, show that this form of provenance is not computable, and provide dynamic and static approximation techniques.
Deciding security properties for cryptographic protocols. Application to key cycles
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2009
Year: 2009

There is a large amount of work dedicated to the formal verification of security protocols. In this paper, we revisit and extend the NP-complete decision procedure for a bounded number of sessions. We use a, now standard, deducibility constraints formalism for modeling security protocols. Our first contribution is to give a simple set of constraint simplification rules, that allows to reduce any deducibility constraint system to a set of solved forms, representing all solutions (within the bound on sessions). As a consequence, we prove that deciding the existence of key cycles is NP-complete for a bounded number of sessions. The problem of key-cycles has been put forward by recent works relating computational and symbolic models. The so-called soundness of the symbolic model requires indeed that no key cycle (e.g., enc(k,k)) ever occurs in the execution of the protocol. Otherwise, stronger security assumptions (such as KDM-security) are required. We show that our decision procedure can also be applied to prove again the decidability of authentication-like properties and the decidability of a significant fragment of protocols with timestamps.
Untangling a Planar Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2009
Year: 2009

A straight-line drawing $δ$ of a planar graph $G$ need not be plane, but can be made so by \emph{untangling} it, that is, by moving some of the vertices of $G$. Let shift$(G,δ)$ denote the minimum number of vertices that need to be moved to untangle $δ$. We show that shift$(G,δ)$ is NP-hard to compute and to approximate. Our hardness results extend to a version of \textsc{1BendPointSetEmbeddability}, a well-known graph-drawing problem. Further we define fix$(G,δ)=n-shift(G,δ)$ to be the maximum number of vertices of a planar $n$-vertex graph $G$ that can be fixed when untangling $δ$. We give an algorithm that fixes at least $\sqrt{((\log n)-1)/\log \log n}$ vertices when untangling a drawing of an $n$-vertex graph $G$. If $G$ is outerplanar, the same algorithm fixes at least $\sqrt{n/2}$ vertices. On the other hand we construct, for arbitrarily large $n$, an $n$-vertex planar graph $G$ and a drawing $δ_G$ of $G$ with fix$(G,δ_G) \le \sqrt{n-2}+1$ and an $n$-vertex outerplanar graph $H$ and a drawing $δ_H$ of $H$ with fix$(H,δ_H) \le 2 \sqrt{n-1}+1$. Thus our algorithm is asymptotically worst-case optimal for outerplanar graphs.
Algebraic characterization of logically defined tree languages
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2009
Year: 2009

We give an algebraic characterization of the tree languages that are defined by logical formulas using certain Lindström quantifiers. An important instance of our result concerns first-order definable tree languages. Our characterization relies on the usage of preclones, an algebraic structure introduced by the authors in a previous paper, and of the block product operation on preclones. Our results generalize analogous results on finite word languages, but it must be noted that, as they stand, they do not yield an algorithm to decide whether a given regular tree language is first-order definable.
On a Clique-Based Integer Programming Formulation of Vertex Colouring with Applications in Course Timetabling
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2009
Year: 2009

Vertex colouring is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimisation, whose alternative integer programming formulations have recently attracted considerable attention. This paper briefly surveys seven known formulations of vertex colouring and introduces a formulation of vertex colouring using a suitable clique partition of the graph. This formulation is applicable in timetabling applications, where such a clique partition of the conflict graph is given implicitly. In contrast with some alternatives, the presented formulation can also be easily extended to accommodate complex performance indicators (``soft constraints'') imposed in a number of real-life course timetabling applications. Its performance depends on the quality of the clique partition, but encouraging empirical results for the Udine Course Timetabling problem are reported.
Broadcasting Correlated Gaussians
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

We consider the transmission of a memoryless bivariate Gaussian source over an average-power-constrained one-to-two Gaussian broadcast channel. The transmitter observes the source and describes it to the two receivers by means of an average-power-constrained signal. Each receiver observes the transmitted signal corrupted by a different additive white Gaussian noise and wishes to estimate the source component intended for it. That is, Receiver~1 wishes to estimate the first source component and Receiver~2 wishes to estimate the second source component. Our interest is in the pairs of expected squared-error distortions that are simultaneously achievable at the two receivers. We prove that an uncoded transmission scheme that sends a linear combination of the source components achieves the optimal power-versus-distortion trade-off whenever the signal-to-noise ratio is below a certain threshold. The threshold is a function of the source correlation and the distortion at the receiver with the weaker noise.
Machine structure oriented control code logic
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2009
Year: 2009

Control code is a concept that is closely related to a frequently occurring practitioner's view on what is a program: code that is capable of controlling the behaviour of some machine. We present a logical approach to explain issues concerning control codes that are independent of the details of the behaviours that are controlled. Using this approach, such issues can be explained at a very abstract level. We illustrate this among other things by means of an example about the production of a new compiler from an existing one. The approach is based on abstract machine models, called machine structures. We introduce a model of systems that provide execution environments for the executable codes of machine structures and use it to go into portability of control codes.
Towards a Sound Theory of Adaptation for the Simple Genetic Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2009
Year: 2009

The pace of progress in the fields of Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning is currently limited -- in the former field, by the improbability of making advantageous extensions to evolutionary algorithms when their capacity for adaptation is poorly understood, and in the latter by the difficulty of finding effective semi-principled reductions of hard real-world problems to relatively simple optimization problems. In this paper we explain why a theory which can accurately explain the simple genetic algorithm's remarkable capacity for adaptation has the potential to address both these limitations. We describe what we believe to be the impediments -- historic and analytic -- to the discovery of such a theory and highlight the negative role that the building block hypothesis (BBH) has played. We argue based on experimental results that a fundamental limitation which is widely believed to constrain the SGA's adaptive ability (and is strongly implied by the BBH) is in fact illusionary and does not exist. The SGA therefore turns out to be more powerful than it is currently thought to be. We give conditions under which it becomes feasible to numerically approximate and study the multivariate marginals of the search distribution of an infinite population SGA over multiple generations even when its genomes are long, and explain why this analysis is relevant to the riddle of the SGA's remarkable adaptive abilities.
On the Information Rates of the Plenoptic Function
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

The {\it plenoptic function} (Adelson and Bergen, 91) describes the visual information available to an observer at any point in space and time. Samples of the plenoptic function (POF) are seen in video and in general visual content, and represent large amounts of information. In this paper we propose a stochastic model to study the compression limits of the plenoptic function. In the proposed framework, we isolate the two fundamental sources of information in the POF: the one representing the camera motion and the other representing the information complexity of the "reality" being acquired and transmitted. The sources of information are combined, generating a stochastic process that we study in detail. We first propose a model for ensembles of realities that do not change over time. The proposed model is simple in that it enables us to derive precise coding bounds in the information-theoretic sense that are sharp in a number of cases of practical interest. For this simple case of static realities and camera motion, our results indicate that coding practice is in accordance with optimal coding from an information-theoretic standpoint. The model is further extended to account for visual realities that change over time. We derive bounds on the lossless and lossy information rates for this dynamic reality model, stating conditions under which the bounds are tight. Examples with synthetic sources suggest that in the presence of scene dynamics, simple hybrid coding using motion/displacement estimation with DPCM performs considerably suboptimally relative to the true rate-distortion bound.
Approximation Algorithms for Restless Bandit Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2009
Year: 2009

The restless bandit problem is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. In its ultimate generality, the restless bandit problem is known to be PSPACE-Hard to approximate to any non-trivial factor, and little progress has been made despite its importance in modeling activity allocation under uncertainty. We consider a special case that we call Feedback MAB, where the reward obtained by playing each of n independent arms varies according to an underlying on/off Markov process whose exact state is only revealed when the arm is played. The goal is to design a policy for playing the arms in order to maximize the infinite horizon time average expected reward. This problem is also an instance of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), and is widely studied in wireless scheduling and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) routing. Unlike the stochastic MAB problem, the Feedback MAB problem does not admit to greedy index-based optimal policies. We develop a novel and general duality-based algorithmic technique that yields a surprisingly simple and intuitive 2+epsilon-approximate greedy policy to this problem. We then define a general sub-class of restless bandit problems that we term Monotone bandits, for which our policy is a 2-approximation. Our technique is robust enough to handle generalizations of these problems to incorporate various side-constraints such as blocking plays and switching costs. This technique is also of independent interest for other restless bandit problems. By presenting the first (and efficient) O(1) approximations for non-trivial instances of restless bandits as well as of POMDPs, our work initiates the study of approximation algorithms in both these contexts.
Instruction sequences with dynamically instantiated instructions
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2009
Year: 2009

We study sequential programs that are instruction sequences with dynamically instantiated instructions. We define the meaning of such programs in two different ways. In either case, we give a translation by which each program with dynamically instantiated instructions is turned into a program without them that exhibits on execution the same behaviour by interaction with some service. The complexity of the translations differ considerably, whereas the services concerned are equally simple. However, the service concerned in the case of the simpler translation is far more powerful than the service concerned in the other case.
The Impact of Hard-Decision Detection on the Energy Efficiency of Phase and Frequency Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

The central design challenge in next generation wireless systems is to have these systems operate at high bandwidths and provide high data rates while being cognizant of the energy consumption levels especially in mobile applications. Since communicating at very high data rates prohibits obtaining high bit resolutions from the analog-to-digital (A/D) converters, analysis of the energy efficiency under the assumption of hard-decision detection is called for to accurately predict the performance levels. In this paper, transmission over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, and coherent and noncoherent fading channels is considered, and the impact of hard-decision detection on the energy efficiency of phase and frequency modulations is investigated. Energy efficiency is analyzed by studying the capacity of these modulation schemes and the energy required to send one bit of information reliably in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. The capacity of hard-decision-detected phase and frequency modulations is characterized at low SNR levels through closed-form expressions for the first and second derivatives of the capacity at zero SNR. Subsequently, bit energy requirements in the low-SNR regime are identified. The increases in the bit energy incurred by hard-decision detection and channel fading are quantified. Moreover, practical design guidelines for the selection of the constellation size are drawn from the analysis of the spectral efficiency--bit energy tradeoff.
Linear Logic by Levels and Bounded Time Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2009
Year: 2009

We give a new characterization of elementary and deterministic polynomial time computation in linear logic through the proofs-as-programs correspondence. Girard's seminal results, concerning elementary and light linear logic, achieve this characterization by enforcing a stratification principle on proofs, using the notion of depth in proof nets. Here, we propose a more general form of stratification, based on inducing levels in proof nets by means of indexes, which allows us to extend Girard's systems while keeping the same complexity properties. In particular, it turns out that Girard's systems can be recovered by forcing depth and level to coincide. A consequence of the higher flexibility of levels with respect to depth is the absence of boxes for handling the paragraph modality. We use this fact to propose a variant of our polytime system in which the paragraph modality is only allowed on atoms, and which may thus serve as a basis for developing lambda-calculus type assignment systems with more efficient typing algorithms than existing ones.
Descent methods for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2009
Year: 2009

In this paper, we present several descent methods that can be applied to nonnegative matrix factorization and we analyze a recently developped fast block coordinate method called Rank-one Residue Iteration (RRI). We also give a comparison of these different methods and show that the new block coordinate method has better properties in terms of approximation error and complexity. By interpreting this method as a rank-one approximation of the residue matrix, we prove that it \emph{converges} and also extend it to the nonnegative tensor factorization and introduce some variants of the method by imposing some additional controllable constraints such as: sparsity, discreteness and smoothness.
Thread extraction for polyadic instruction sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2009
Year: 2009

In this paper, we study the phenomenon that instruction sequences are split into fragments which somehow produce a joint behaviour. In order to bring this phenomenon better into the picture, we formalize a simple mechanism by which several instruction sequence fragments can produce a joint behaviour. We also show that, even in the case of this simple mechanism, it is a non-trivial matter to explain by means of a translation into a single instruction sequence what takes place on execution of a collection of instruction sequence fragments.
Throughput-Delay Trade-off for Hierarchical Cooperation in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

Hierarchical cooperation has recently been shown to achieve better throughput scaling than classical multihop schemes under certain assumptions on the channel model in static wireless networks. However, the end-to-end delay of this scheme turns out to be significantly larger than those of multihop schemes. A modification of the scheme is proposed here that achieves a throughput-delay trade-off $D(n)=(\log n)^2 T(n)$ for T(n) between $Θ(\sqrt{n}/\log n)$ and $Θ(n/\log n)$, where D(n) and T(n) are respectively the average delay per bit and the aggregate throughput in a network of n nodes. This trade-off complements the previous results of El Gamal et al., which show that the throughput-delay trade-off for multihop schemes is given by D(n)=T(n) where T(n) lies between $Θ(1)$ and $Θ(\sqrt{n})$. Meanwhile, the present paper considers the network multiple-access problem, which may be of interest in its own right.
Self-* overload control for distributed web systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2009
Year: 2009

Unexpected increases in demand and most of all flash crowds are considered the bane of every web application as they may cause intolerable delays or even service unavailability. Proper quality of service policies must guarantee rapid reactivity and responsiveness even in such critical situations. Previous solutions fail to meet common performance requirements when the system has to face sudden and unpredictable surges of traffic. Indeed they often rely on a proper setting of key parameters which requires laborious manual tuning, preventing a fast adaptation of the control policies. We contribute an original Self-* Overload Control (SOC) policy. This allows the system to self-configure a dynamic constraint on the rate of admitted sessions in order to respect service level agreements and maximize the resource utilization at the same time. Our policy does not require any prior information on the incoming traffic or manual configuration of key parameters. We ran extensive simulations under a wide range of operating conditions, showing that SOC rapidly adapts to time varying traffic and self-optimizes the resource utilization. It admits as many new sessions as possible in observance of the agreements, even under intense workload variations. We compared our algorithm to previously proposed approaches highlighting a more stable behavior and a better performance.
Asymptotic Behaviour of Random Vandermonde Matrices with Entries on the Unit Circle
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

Analytical methods for finding moments of random Vandermonde matrices with entries on the unit circle are developed. Vandermonde Matrices play an important role in signal processing and wireless applications such as direction of arrival estimation, precoding, and sparse sampling theory, just to name a few. Within this framework, we extend classical freeness results on random matrices with independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) entries and show that Vandermonde structured matrices can be treated in the same vein with different tools. We focus on various types of matrices, such as Vandermonde matrices with and without uniform phase distributions, as well as generalized Vandermonde matrices. In each case, we provide explicit expressions of the moments of the associated Gram matrix, as well as more advanced models involving the Vandermonde matrix. Comparisons with classical i.i.d. random matrix theory are provided, and deconvolution results are discussed. We review some applications of the results to the fields of signal processing and wireless communications.
Self-Corrected Min-Sum decoding of LDPC codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2009
Year: 2009

In this paper we propose a very simple but powerful self-correction method for the Min-Sum decoding of LPDC codes. Unlike other correction methods known in the literature, our method does not try to correct the check node processing approximation, but it modifies the variable node processing by erasing unreliable messages. However, this positively affects check node messages, which become symmetric Gaussian distributed, and we show that this is sufficient to ensure a quasi-optimal decoding performance. Monte-Carlo simulations show that the proposed Self-Corrected Min-Sum decoding performs very close to the Sum-Product decoding, while preserving the main features of the Min-Sum decoding, that is low complexity and independence with respect to noise variance estimation errors.