OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Selection in the Presence of Memory Faults, with Applications to In-place Resilient Sorting
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2012
Year: 2012

The selection problem, where one wishes to locate the $k^{th}$ smallest element in an unsorted array of size $n$, is one of the basic problems studied in computer science. The main focus of this work is designing algorithms for solving the selection problem in the presence of memory faults. These can happen as the result of cosmic rays, alpha particles, or hardware failures. Specifically, the computational model assumed here is a faulty variant of the RAM model (abbreviated as FRAM), which was introduced by Finocchi and Italiano. In this model, the content of memory cells might get corrupted adversarially during the execution, and the algorithm is given an upper bound $δ$ on the number of corruptions that may occur. The main contribution of this work is a deterministic resilient selection algorithm with optimal O(n) worst-case running time. Interestingly, the running time does not depend on the number of faults, and the algorithm does not need to know $δ$. The aforementioned resilient selection algorithm can be used to improve the complexity bounds for resilient $k$-d trees developed by Gieseke, Moruz and Vahrenhold. Specifically, the time complexity for constructing a $k$-d tree is improved from $O(n\log^2 n + δ^2)$ to $O(n \log n)$. Besides the deterministic algorithm, a randomized resilient selection algorithm is developed, which is simpler than the deterministic one, and has $O(n + α)$ expected time complexity and O(1) space complexity (i.e., is in-place). This algorithm is used to develop the first resilient sorting algorithm that is in-place and achieves optimal $O(n\log n + αδ)$ expected running time.
Track estimation with binary derivative observations
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

We focus in this paper in the estimation of a target trajectory defined by whether a time constant parameter in a simple stochastic process or a random walk with binary observations. The binary observation comes from binary derivative sensors, that is, the target is getting closer or moving away. Such a binary observation has a time property that will be used to ensure the quality of a max-likelihood estimation, through single index model or classification for the constant velocity movement. In the second part of this paper we present a new algorithm for target tracking within a binary sensor network when the target trajectory is assumed to be modelled by a random walk. For a given target, this algorithm provides an estimation of its velocity and its position. The greatest improvements are made through a position correction and velocity analysis.
Productivity of Non-Orthogonal Term Rewrite Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

Productivity is the property that finite prefixes of an infinite constructor term can be computed using a given term rewrite system. Hitherto, productivity has only been considered for orthogonal systems, where non-determinism is not allowed. This paper presents techniques to also prove productivity of non-orthogonal term rewrite systems. For such systems, it is desired that one does not have to guess the reduction steps to perform, instead any outermost-fair reduction should compute an infinite constructor term in the limit. As a main result, it is shown that for possibly non-orthogonal term rewrite systems this kind of productivity can be concluded from context-sensitive termination. This result can be applied to prove stabilization of digital circuits, as will be illustrated by means of an example.
SMT-based Induction Methods for Timed Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

Modeling time related aspects is important in many applications of verification methods. For precise results, it is necessary to interpret time as a dense domain, e.g. using timed automata as a formalism, even though the system's resulting infinite state space is challenging for verification methods. Furthermore, fully symbolic treatment of both timing related and non-timing related elements of the state space seems to offer an attractive approach to model checking timed systems with a large amount of non-determinism. This paper presents an SMT-based timed system extension to the IC3 algorithm, a SAT-based novel, highly efficient, complete verification method for untimed systems. Handling of the infinite state spaces of timed system in the extended IC3 algorithm is based on suitably adapting the well-known region abstraction for timed systems. Additionally, $k$-induction, another symbolic verification method for discrete time systems, is extended in a similar fashion to support timed systems. Both new methods are evaluated and experimentally compared to a booleanization-based verification approach that uses the original discrete time IC3 algorithm.
Isomorphisms of scattered automatic linear orders
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

We prove that the isomorphism of scattered tree automatic linear orders as well as the existence of automorphisms of scattered word automatic linear orders are undecidable. For the existence of automatic automorphisms of word automatic linear orders, we determine the exact level of undecidability in the arithmetical hierarchy.
Cognitive Interference Channels with Confidential Messages under Randomness Constraint
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

The cognitive interference channel with confidential messages (CICC) proposed by Liang et. al. is investigated. When the security is considered in coding systems, it is well known that the sender needs to use a stochastic encoding to avoid the information about the transmitted confidential message to be leaked to an eavesdropper. For the CICC, the trade-off between the rate of the random number to realize the stochastic encoding and the communication rates is investigated, and the optimal trade-off is completely characterized.
Information Masking and Amplification: The Source Coding Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

The complementary problems of masking and amplifying channel state information in the Gel'fand-Pinsker channel have recently been solved by Merhav and Shamai, and Kim et al., respectively. In this paper, we study a related source coding problem. Specifically, we consider the two-encoder source coding setting where one source is to be amplified, while the other source is to be masked. In general, there is a tension between these two objectives which is characterized by the amplification-masking tradeoff. In this paper, we give a single-letter description of this tradeoff. We apply this result, together with a recent theorem by Courtade and Weissman on multiterminal source coding, to solve a fundamental entropy characterization problem.
Degree two approximate Boolean #CSPs with variable weights
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2012
Year: 2012

A counting constraint satisfaction problem (#CSP) asks for the number of ways to satisfy a given list of constraints, drawn from a fixed constraint language Γ. We study how hard it is to evaluate this number approximately. There is an interesting partial classification, due to Dyer, Goldberg, Jalsenius and Richerby, of Boolean constraint languages when the degree of instances is bounded by d>=3 - every variable appears in at most d constraints - under the assumption that "pinning" is allowed as part of the instance. We study the d=2 case under the stronger assumption that "variable weights" are allowed as part of the instance. We give a dichotomy: in each case, either the #CSP is tractable, or one of two important open problems, #BIS or #PM, reduces to the #CSP.
Regret Analysis of Stochastic and Nonstochastic Multi-armed Bandit Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Multi-armed bandit problems are the most basic examples of sequential decision problems with an exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is the balance between staying with the option that gave highest payoffs in the past and exploring new options that might give higher payoffs in the future. Although the study of bandit problems dates back to the Thirties, exploration-exploitation trade-offs arise in several modern applications, such as ad placement, website optimization, and packet routing. Mathematically, a multi-armed bandit is defined by the payoff process associated with each option. In this survey, we focus on two extreme cases in which the analysis of regret is particularly simple and elegant: i.i.d. payoffs and adversarial payoffs. Besides the basic setting of finitely many actions, we also analyze some of the most important variants and extensions, such as the contextual bandit model.
Friendship, Altruism, and Reward Sharing in Stable Matching and Contribution Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2012
Year: 2012

We study stable matching problems in networks where players are embedded in a social context, and may incorporate friendship relations or altruism into their decisions. Each player is a node in a social network and strives to form a good match with a neighboring player. We consider the existence, computation, and inefficiency of stable matchings from which no pair of players wants to deviate. When the benefits from a match are the same for both players, we show that incorporating the well-being of other players into their matching decisions significantly decreases the price of stability, while the price of anarchy remains unaffected. Furthermore, a good stable matching achieving the price of stability bound always exists and can be reached in polynomial time. We extend these results to more general matching rewards, when players matched to each other may receive different utilities from the match. For this more general case, we show that incorporating social context (i.e., "caring about your friends") can make an even larger difference, and greatly reduce the price of anarchy. We show a variety of existence results, and present upper and lower bounds on the prices of anarchy and stability for various matching utility structures. Finally, we extend most of our results to network contribution games, in which players can decide how much effort to contribute to each incident edge, instead of simply choosing a single node to match with.
Quantitative Concept Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) begins from a context, given as a binary relation between some objects and some attributes, and derives a lattice of concepts, where each concept is given as a set of objects and a set of attributes, such that the first set consists of all objects that satisfy all attributes in the second, and vice versa. Many applications, though, provide contexts with quantitative information, telling not just whether an object satisfies an attribute, but also quantifying this satisfaction. Contexts in this form arise as rating matrices in recommender systems, as occurrence matrices in text analysis, as pixel intensity matrices in digital image processing, etc. Such applications have attracted a lot of attention, and several numeric extensions of FCA have been proposed. We propose the framework of proximity sets (proxets), which subsume partially ordered sets (posets) as well as metric spaces. One feature of this approach is that it extracts from quantified contexts quantified concepts, and thus allows full use of the available information. Another feature is that the categorical approach allows analyzing any universal properties that the classical FCA and the new versions may have, and thus provides structural guidance for aligning and combining the approaches.
Geometry of Online Packing Linear Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2012
Year: 2012

We consider packing LP's with $m$ rows where all constraint coefficients are normalized to be in the unit interval. The n columns arrive in random order and the goal is to set the corresponding decision variables irrevocably when they arrive so as to obtain a feasible solution maximizing the expected reward. Previous (1 - ε)-competitive algorithms require the right-hand side of the LP to be Omega((m/ε^2) log (n/ε)), a bound that worsens with the number of columns and rows. However, the dependence on the number of columns is not required in the single-row case and known lower bounds for the general case are also independent of n. Our goal is to understand whether the dependence on n is required in the multi-row case, making it fundamentally harder than the single-row version. We refute this by exhibiting an algorithm which is (1 - ε)-competitive as long as the right-hand sides are Omega((m^2/ε^2) log (m/ε)). Our techniques refine previous PAC-learning based approaches which interpret the online decisions as linear classifications of the columns based on sampled dual prices. The key ingredient of our improvement comes from a non-standard covering argument together with the realization that only when the columns of the LP belong to few 1-d subspaces we can obtain small such covers; bounding the size of the cover constructed also relies on the geometry of linear classifiers. General packing LP's are handled by perturbing the input columns, which can be seen as making the learning problem more robust.
Clustering by hypergraphs and dimensionality of cluster systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2012
Year: 2012

In the present paper we discuss the clustering procedure in the case where instead of a single metric we have a family of metrics. In this case we can obtain a partially ordered graph of clusters which is not necessarily a tree. We discuss a structure of a hypergraph above this graph. We propose two definitions of dimension for hyperedges of this hypergraph and show that for the multidimensional p-adic case both dimensions are reduced to the number of p-adic parameters. We discuss the application of the hypergraph clustering procedure to the construction of phylogenetic graphs in biology. In this case the dimension of a hyperedge will describe the number of sources of genetic diversity.
Containment, Equivalence and Coreness from CSP to QCSP and beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and its quantified extensions, whether without (QCSP) or with disjunction (QCSP_or), correspond naturally to the model checking problem for three increasingly stronger fragments of positive first-order logic. Their complexity is often studied when parameterised by a fixed model, the so-called template. It is a natural question to ask when two templates are equivalent, or more generally when one "contain" another, in the sense that a satisfied instance of the first will be necessarily satisfied in the second. One can also ask for a smallest possible equivalent template: this is known as the core for CSP. We recall and extend previous results on containment, equivalence and "coreness" for QCSP_or before initiating a preliminary study of cores for QCSP which we characterise for certain structures and which turns out to be more elusive.
Shortest Path Computation with No Information Leakage
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2012
Year: 2012

Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such queries raise serious privacy concerns. Exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's position and her destination may reveal personal information, such as social habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. The only existing method for privacy-preserving shortest path computation follows the obfuscation paradigm; it prevents the LBS from inferring the source and destination of the query with a probability higher than a threshold. This implies, however, that the LBS still deduces some information (albeit not exact) about the client's location and her destination. In this paper we aim at strong privacy, where the adversary learns nothing about the shortest path query. We achieve this via established private information retrieval techniques, which we treat as black-box building blocks. Experiments on real, large-scale road networks assess the practicality of our schemes.
Performance of Polar Codes on wireless communications Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

We discuss the performance of polar codes, the capacity-achieving channel codes, on wireless communication channel in this paper. By generalizing the definition of Bhattacharyya Parameter in discrete memoryless channel, we present the special expression of the parameter for Gaussian and Rayleigh fading the two continuous channels, including the recursive formulas and the initial values. We analyze the applications of polar codes with the defined parameter over Rayleigh fading channel by transmitting image and speech. By comparing with low density parity-check codes(LDPC) at the same cases, our simulation results show that polar codes have better performance than that of LDPC codes. Polar codes will be good candidate for wireless communication channel.
Stochastic Ordering of Interferences in Large-scale Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2012
Year: 2012

Stochastic orders are binary relations defined on probability distributions which capture intuitive notions like being larger or being more variable. This paper introduces stochastic ordering of interference distributions in large-scale networks modeled as point process. Interference is the main performance-limiting factor in most wireless networks, thus it is important to understand its statistics. Since closed-form results for the distribution of interference for such networks are only available in limited cases, interference of networks are compared using stochastic orders, even when closed form expressions for interferences are not tractable. We show that the interference from a large-scale network depends on the fading distributions with respect to the stochastic Laplace transform order. The condition for path-loss models is also established to have stochastic ordering between interferences. The stochastic ordering of interferences between different networks are also shown. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to supplement our analytical results.
A Distinguisher-Based Attack on a Variant of McEliece's Cryptosystem Based on Reed-Solomon Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2012
Year: 2012

Baldi et \textit{al.} proposed a variant of McEliece's cryptosystem. The main idea is to replace its permutation matrix by adding to it a rank 1 matrix. The motivation for this change is twofold: it would allow the use of codes that were shown to be insecure in the original McEliece's cryptosystem, and it would reduce the key size while keeping the same security against generic decoding attacks. The authors suggest to use generalized Reed-Solomon codes instead of Goppa codes. The public code built with this method is not anymore a generalized Reed-Solomon code. On the other hand, it contains a very large secret generalized Reed-Solomon code. In this paper we present an attack that is built upon a distinguisher which is able to identify elements of this secret code. The distinguisher is constructed by considering the code generated by component-wise products of codewords of the public code (the so-called "square code"). By using square-code dimension considerations, the initial generalized Reed-Solomon code can be recovered which permits to decode any ciphertext. A similar technique has already been successful for mounting an attack against a homomorphic encryption scheme suggested by Bogdanoc et \textit{al.}. This work can be viewed as another illustration of how a distinguisher of Reed-Solomon codes can be used to devise an attack on cryptosystems based on them.
Universal Factor Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2012
Year: 2012

The factor graph of an instance of a symmetric constraint satisfaction problem on n Boolean variables and m constraints (CSPs such as k-SAT, k-AND, k-LIN) is a bipartite graph describing which variables appear in which constraints. The factor graph describes the instance up to the polarity of the variables, and hence there are up to 2km instances of the CSP that share the same factor graph. It is well known that factor graphs with certain structural properties make the underlying CSP easier to either solve exactly (e.g., for tree structures) or approximately (e.g., for planar structures). We are interested in the following question: is there a factor graph for which if one can solve every instance of the CSP with this particular factor graph, then one can solve every instance of the CSP regardless of the factor graph (and similarly, for approximation)? We call such a factor graph universal. As one needs different factor graphs for different values of n and m, this gives rise to the notion of a family of universal factor graphs. We initiate a systematic study of universal factor graphs, and present some results for max-kSAT. Our work has connections with the notion of preprocessing as previously studied for closest codeword and closest lattice-vector problems, with proofs for the PCP theorem, and with tests for the long code. Many questions remain open.
An Eclipse Plugin to Support Code Smells Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2012
Year: 2012

Eradication of code smells is often pointed out as a way to improve readability, extensibility and design in existing software. However, code smell detection in large systems remains time consuming and error-prone, partly due to the inherent subjectivity of the detection processes presently available. In view of mitigating the subjectivity problem, this paper presents a tool that automates a technique for the detection and assessment of code smells in Java source code, developed as an Eclipse plug-in. The technique is based upon a Binary Logistic Regression model and calibrated by expert's knowledge. A short overview of the technique is provided and the tool is described.
Residual Belief Propagation for Topic Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2012
Year: 2012

Fast convergence speed is a desired property for training latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), especially in online and parallel topic modeling for massive data sets. This paper presents a novel residual belief propagation (RBP) algorithm to accelerate the convergence speed for training LDA. The proposed RBP uses an informed scheduling scheme for asynchronous message passing, which passes fast-convergent messages with a higher priority to influence those slow-convergent messages at each learning iteration. Extensive empirical studies confirm that RBP significantly reduces the training time until convergence while achieves a much lower predictive perplexity than other state-of-the-art training algorithms for LDA, including variational Bayes (VB), collapsed Gibbs sampling (GS), loopy belief propagation (BP), and residual VB (RVB).
Delta-Decidability over the Reals
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2012
Year: 2012

Given any collection F of computable functions over the reals, we show that there exists an algorithm that, given any L_F-sentence φcontaining only bounded quantifiers, and any positive rational number δ, decides either "φis true", or "a δ-strengthening of φis false". Under mild assumptions, for a C-computable signature F, the δ-decision problem for bounded Σ_k-sentences in L_F resides in (Σ_k^P)^C. The results stand in sharp contrast to the well-known undecidability results, and serve as a theoretical basis for the use of numerical methods in decision procedures for nonlinear first-order theories over the reals.