OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Minimization of Transformed $L_1$ Penalty: Closed Form Representation and Iterative Thresholding Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

The transformed $l_1$ penalty (TL1) functions are a one parameter family of bilinear transformations composed with the absolute value function. When acting on vectors, the TL1 penalty interpolates $l_0$ and $l_1$ similar to $l_p$ norm ($p \in (0,1)$). In our companion paper, we showed that TL1 is a robust sparsity promoting penalty in compressed sensing (CS) problems for a broad range of incoherent and coherent sensing matrices. Here we develop an explicit fixed point representation for the TL1 regularized minimization problem. The TL1 thresholding functions are in closed form for all parameter values. In contrast, the $l_p$ thresholding functions ($p \in [0,1]$) are in closed form only for $p=0,1,1/2,2/3$, known as hard, soft, half, and 2/3 thresholding respectively. The TL1 threshold values differ in subcritical (supercritical) parameter regime where the TL1 threshold functions are continuous (discontinuous) similar to soft-thresholding (half-thresholding) functions. We propose TL1 iterative thresholding algorithms and compare them with hard and half thresholding algorithms in CS test problems. For both incoherent and coherent sensing matrices, a proposed TL1 iterative thresholding algorithm with adaptive subcritical and supercritical thresholds consistently performs the best in sparse signal recovery with and without measurement noise.
Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance in high level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection. This work brings together methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models for addressing the task of pixel-level classification (also called "semantic image segmentation"). We show that responses at the final layer of DCNNs are not sufficiently localized for accurate object segmentation. This is due to the very invariance properties that make DCNNs good for high level tasks. We overcome this poor localization property of deep networks by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF). Qualitatively, our "DeepLab" system is able to localize segment boundaries at a level of accuracy which is beyond previous methods. Quantitatively, our method sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 71.6% IOU accuracy in the test set. We show how these results can be obtained efficiently: Careful network re-purposing and a novel application of the 'hole' algorithm from the wavelet community allow dense computation of neural net responses at 8 frames per second on a modern GPU.
On the Combinatorics of Locally Repairable Codes via Matroid Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper provides a link between matroid theory and locally repairable codes (LRCs) that are either linear or more generally almost affine. Using this link, new results on both LRCs and matroid theory are derived. The parameters $(n,k,d,r,δ)$ of LRCs are generalized to matroids, and the matroid analogue of the generalized Singleton bound in [P. Gopalan et al., "On the locality of codeword symbols," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory] for linear LRCs is given for matroids. It is shown that the given bound is not tight for certain classes of parameters, implying a nonexistence result for the corresponding locally repairable almost affine codes, that are coined perfect in this paper. Constructions of classes of matroids with a large span of the parameters $(n,k,d,r,δ)$ and the corresponding local repair sets are given. Using these matroid constructions, new LRCs are constructed with prescribed parameters. The existence results on linear LRCs and the nonexistence results on almost affine LRCs given in this paper strengthen the nonexistence and existence results on perfect linear LRCs given in [W. Song et al., "Optimal locally repairable codes," IEEE J. Sel. Areas Comm.].
A Polynomial Time Algorithm to Compute an Approximate Weighted Shortest Path
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

We devise a polynomial-time approximation scheme for the classical geometric problem of finding an approximate short path amid weighted regions. In this problem, a triangulated region P comprising of n vertices, a positive weight associated with each triangle, and two points s and t that belong to P are given as the input. The objective is to find a path whose cost is at most (1+epsilon)OPT where OPT is the cost of an optimal path between s and t. Our algorithm initiates a discretized-Dijkstra wavefront from source s and progresses the wavefront till it strikes t. This result is about a cubic factor (in n) improvement over the Mitchell and Papadimitriou '91 result, which is the only known polynomial time algorithm for this problem to date. Further, with polynomial time preprocessing of P, a set of data structures are computed which allow answering approximate weighted shortest path queries in polynomial time.
A General Design Framework for MIMO Wireless Energy Transfer with Limited Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Multi-antenna or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique can significantly improve the efficiency of radio frequency (RF) signal enabled wireless energy transfer (WET). To fully exploit the energy beamforming gain at the energy transmitter (ET), the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) is essential, which, however, is difficult to be obtained in practice due to the hardware limitation of the energy receiver (ER). To overcome this difficulty, under a point-to-point MIMO WET setup, this paper proposes a general design framework for a new type of channel learning method based on the ER's energy measurement and feedback. Specifically, the ER measures and encodes the harvested energy levels over different training intervals into bits, and sends them to the ET via a feedback link of limited rate. Based on the energy-level feedback, the ET adjusts transmit beamforming in subsequent training intervals and obtains refined estimates of the MIMO channel by leveraging the technique of analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM) in convex optimization. Under this general design framework, we further propose two specific feedback schemes termed energy quantization and energy comparison, where the feedback bits at each interval are generated at the ER by quantizing the measured energy level at the current interval and comparing it with those in the previous intervals, respectively. Numerical results are provided to compare the performance of the two feedback schemes. It is shown that energy quantization performs better when the number of feedback bits per interval is large, while energy comparison is more effective with small number of feedback bits.
Consensus Labeled Random Finite Set Filtering for Distributed Multi-Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

This paper addresses distributed multi-object tracking over a network of heterogeneous and geographically dispersed nodes with sensing, communication and processing capabilities. The main contribution is an approach to distributed multi-object estimation based on labeled Random Finite Sets (RFSs) and dynamic Bayesian inference, which enables the development of two novel consensus tracking filters, namely a Consensus Marginalized $δ$-Generalized Labeled Multi-Bernoulli and Consensus Labeled Multi-Bernoulli tracking filter. The proposed algorithms provide fully distributed, scalable and computationally efficient solutions for multi-object tracking. Simulation experiments via Gaussian mixture implementations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach on challenging scenarios.
Unified Scaling of Polar Codes: Error Exponent, Scaling Exponent, Moderate Deviations, and Error Floors
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Consider the transmission of a polar code of block length $N$ and rate $R$ over a binary memoryless symmetric channel $W$ and let $P_e$ be the block error probability under successive cancellation decoding. In this paper, we develop new bounds that characterize the relationship of the parameters $R$, $N$, $P_e$, and the quality of the channel $W$ quantified by its capacity $I(W)$ and its Bhattacharyya parameter $Z(W)$. In previous work, two main regimes were studied. In the error exponent regime, the channel $W$ and the rate $R<I(W)$ are fixed, and it was proved that the error probability $P_e$ scales roughly as $2^{-\sqrt{N}}$. In the scaling exponent approach, the channel $W$ and the error probability $P_e$ are fixed and it was proved that the gap to capacity $I(W)-R$ scales as $N^{-1/μ}$. Here, $μ$ is called scaling exponent and this scaling exponent depends on the channel $W$. A heuristic computation for the binary erasure channel (BEC) gives $μ=3.627$ and it was shown that, for any channel $W$, $3.579 \le μ\le 5.702$. Our contributions are as follows. First, we provide the tighter upper bound $μ\le 4.714$ valid for any $W$. With the same technique, we obtain $μ\le 3.639$ for the case of the BEC, which approaches very closely its heuristically derived value. Second, we develop a trade-off between the gap to capacity $I(W)-R$ and the error probability $P_e$ as functions of the block length $N$. In other words, we consider a moderate deviations regime in which we study how fast both quantities, as functions of the block length $N$, simultaneously go to $0$. Third, we prove that polar codes are not affected by error floors. To do so, we fix a polar code of block length $N$ and rate $R$. Then, we vary the channel $W$ and we show that the error probability $P_e$ scales as the Bhattacharyya parameter $Z(W)$ raised to a power that scales roughly like $\sqrt{N}$.
Evolutionary Stable Strategies in Games with Fuzzy Payoffs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a key concept in evolutionary game theory. ESS provides an evolutionary stability criterion for biological, social and economical behaviors. In this paper, we develop a new approach to evaluate ESS in symmetric two player games with fuzzy payoffs. Particularly, every strategy is assigned a fuzzy membership that describes to what degree it is an ESS in presence of uncertainty. The fuzzy set of ESS characterize the nature of ESS. The proposed approach avoids loss of any information that happens by the defuzzification method in games and handles uncertainty of payoffs through all steps of finding an ESS. We use the satisfaction function to compare fuzzy payoffs, and adopts the fuzzy decision rule to obtain the membership function of the fuzzy set of ESS. The theorem shows the relation between fuzzy ESS and fuzzy Nash quilibrium. The numerical results illustrate the proposed method is an appropriate generalization of ESS to fuzzy payoff games.
On The Capacity of Broadcast Channels With Degraded Message Sets and Message Cognition Under Different Secrecy Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper considers a three-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets and message cognition. The model consists of a common message for all three receivers, a private common message for only two receivers and two additional private messages for these two receivers, such that each receiver is only interested in one message, while being fully cognizant of the other one. First, this model is investigated without any secrecy constraints, where the capacity region is established, showing that the straightforward extension of the Körner and Marton inner bound to the investigated scenario is optimal. In particular, this agrees with Nair and Wang's result, which states that the idea of indirect decoding - introduced to improve the Körner and Marton inner bound - does not provide a better region for this scenario. Further, some secrecy constraints are introduced by letting the private messages to be confidential ones. Two different secrecy criteria are considered: joint secrecy and individual secrecy. For both criteria, a general achievable rate region is provided. Moreover, the joint and individual secrecy capacity regions are established, if the two legitimate receivers are more capable than the eavesdropper. The established capacity regions indicate that the individual secrecy criterion can provide a larger capacity region as compared to the joint one, because each cognizant message can be used as a secret key for the other individual message. Further, the joint secrecy capacity is established for a more general class of more capable channels, where only one of the two legitimate receivers is more capable than the eavesdropper. This was done by showing that principle of indirect decoding introduced by Nair and El Gamal is optimal for this class of channels. This result is in contrast with the nonsecrecy case, where the indirect decoding does not provide any gain.
Coupled Depth Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper we propose a method for estimating depth from a single image using a coarse to fine approach. We argue that modeling the fine depth details is easier after a coarse depth map has been computed. We express a global (coarse) depth map of an image as a linear combination of a depth basis learned from training examples. The depth basis captures spatial and statistical regularities and reduces the problem of global depth estimation to the task of predicting the input-specific coefficients in the linear combination. This is formulated as a regression problem from a holistic representation of the image. Crucially, the depth basis and the regression function are {\bf coupled} and jointly optimized by our learning scheme. We demonstrate that this results in a significant improvement in accuracy compared to direct regression of depth pixel values or approaches learning the depth basis disjointly from the regression function. The global depth estimate is then used as a guidance by a local refinement method that introduces depth details that were not captured at the global level. Experiments on the NYUv2 and KITTI datasets show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art at a considerably lower computational cost for both training and testing.
A practical index for approximate dictionary matching with few mismatches
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

Approximate dictionary matching is a classic string matching problem (checking if a query string occurs in a collection of strings) with applications in, e.g., spellchecking, online catalogs, geolocation, and web searchers. We present a surprisingly simple solution called a split index, which is based on the Dirichlet principle, for matching a keyword with few mismatches, and experimentally show that it offers competitive space-time tradeoffs. Our implementation in the C++ language is focused mostly on data compaction, which is beneficial for the search speed (e.g., by being cache friendly). We compare our solution with other algorithms and we show that it performs better for the Hamming distance. Query times in the order of 1 microsecond were reported for one mismatch for the dictionary size of a few megabytes on a medium-end PC. We also demonstrate that a basic compression technique consisting in $q$-gram substitution can significantly reduce the index size (up to 50% of the input text size for the DNA), while still keeping the query time relatively low.
Multi-resource Energy-efficient Routing in Cloud Data Centers with Networks-as-a-Service
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

With the rapid development of software defined networking and network function virtualization, researchers have proposed a new cloud networking model called Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) which enables both in-network packet processing and application-specific network control. In this paper, we revisit the problem of achieving network energy efficiency in data centers and identify some new optimization challenges under the NaaS model. Particularly, we extend the energy-efficient routing optimization from single-resource to multi-resource settings. We characterize the problem through a detailed model and provide a formal problem definition. Due to the high complexity of direct solutions, we propose a greedy routing scheme to approximate the optimum, where flows are selected progressively to exhaust residual capacities of active nodes, and routing paths are assigned based on the distributions of both node residual capacities and flow demands. By leveraging the structural regularity of data center networks, we also provide a fast topology-aware heuristic method based on hierarchically solving a series of vector bin packing instances. Our simulations show that the proposed routing scheme can achieve significant gain on energy savings and the topology-aware heuristic can produce comparably good results while reducing the computation time to a large extent.
Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs have been two significant challenges for developing a programmable high-performance graph library. "Gunrock", our graph-processing system designed specifically for the GPU, uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size and minimal GPU programming knowledge. We evaluate Gunrock on five key graph primitives and show that Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives, and better performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.
The Stability Region of the Two-User Broadcast Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we characterize the stability region of the two-user broadcast channel. First, we obtain the stability region in the general case. Second, we consider the particular case where each receiver treats the interfering signal as noise, as well as the case in which the packets are transmitted using superposition coding and successive decoding is employed at the strong receiver.
Sparsity based Efficient Cross-Correlation Techniques in Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2016
Year: 2016

Cross-correlation is a popular signal processing technique used in numerous location tracking systems for obtaining reliable range information. However, its efficient design and practical implementation has not yet been achieved on mote platforms that are typical in wireless sensor network due to resource constrains. In this paper, we propose SparseS-XCorr: cross-correlation via structured sparse representation, a new computing framework for ranging based on L1-minimization and structured sparsity. The key idea is to compress the ranging signal samples on the mote by efficient random projections and transfer them to a central device; where a convex optimization process estimates the range by exploiting the sparse signal structure in the proposed correlation dictionary. Through theoretical validation, extensive empirical studies and experiments on an end-to-end acoustic ranging system implemented on resource limited off-the-shelf sensor nodes, we show that the proposed framework can achieve up to two orders of magnitude better performance compared to other approaches such as working on DCT domain and downsampling. Compared to the standard cross-correlation, it is able to obtain range estimates with a bias of 2-6cm with 30% and approximately 100cm with 5% compressed measurements. Its structured sparsity model is able to improve the ranging accuracy by 40% under challenging recovery conditions (such as high compression factor and low signal-to-noise ratio) by overcoming limitations due to dictionary coherence.
Limits on Support Recovery with Probabilistic Models: An Information-Theoretic Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

The support recovery problem consists of determining a sparse subset of a set of variables that is relevant in generating a set of observations, and arises in a diverse range of settings such as compressive sensing, and subset selection in regression, and group testing. In this paper, we take a unified approach to support recovery problems, considering general probabilistic models relating a sparse data vector to an observation vector. We study the information-theoretic limits of both exact and partial support recovery, taking a novel approach motivated by thresholding techniques in channel coding. We provide general achievability and converse bounds characterizing the trade-off between the error probability and number of measurements, and we specialize these to the linear, 1-bit, and group testing models. In several cases, our bounds not only provide matching scaling laws in the necessary and sufficient number of measurements, but also sharp thresholds with matching constant factors. Our approach has several advantages over previous approaches: For the achievability part, we obtain sharp thresholds under broader scalings of the sparsity level and other parameters (e.g., signal-to-noise ratio) compared to several previous works, and for the converse part, we not only provide conditions under which the error probability fails to vanish, but also conditions under which it tends to one.
Further Properties of Wireless Channel Capacity
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Future wireless communication calls for exploration of more efficient use of wireless channel capacity to meet the increasing demand on higher data rate and less latency. However, while the ergodic capacity and instantaneous capacity of a wireless channel have been extensively studied, they are in many cases not sufficient for use in assessing if data transmission over the channel meets the quality of service (QoS) requirements. To address this limitation, we advocate a set of wireless channel capacity concepts, namely "cumulative capacity", "maximum cumulative capacity", "minimum cumulative capacity", and "range of cumulative capacity", and for each, study its properties by taking into consideration the impact of the underlying dependence structure of the corresponding stochastic process. Specifically, their cumulative distribution function (CDFs) are investigated extensively, where copula is adopted to express the dependence structures. Results considering both generic and specific dependence structures are derived. In particular, in addition to i.i.d., a specially investigated dependence structure is comonotonicity, i.e, the time series of wireless channel capacity are increasing functions of a common random variable. Appealingly, copula can serve as a unifying technique for obtaining results under various dependence assumptions, e.g. i.i.d. and Markov dependence, which are widely seen in stochastic network calculus. Moreover, some other characterizations of cumulative capacity are also studied, including moment generating function, Mellin transform, and stochastic service curve. With these properties, we believe QoS assessment of data transmission over the channel can be further performed, e.g. by applying analytical techniques and results of the stochastic network calculus theory.