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    arXiv Paper Daily: Fri, 30 Sep 2016

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2016-09-30 00:00:00
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    Neural and Evolutionary Computing

    Proposal for a Leaky-Integrate-Fire Spiking Neuron based on Magneto-Electric Switching of Ferro-magnets

    Akhilesh Jaiswal, Sourjya Roy, Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan, Kaushik Roy
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    The efficiency of the human brain in performing classification tasks has
    attracted considerable research interest in brain-inspired neuromorphic
    computing. Hardware implementations of a neuromorphic system aims to mimic the
    computations in the brain through interconnection of neurons and synaptic
    weights. A leaky-integrate-fire (LIF) spiking model is widely used to emulate
    the dynamics of neuronal action potentials. In this work, we propose a spin
    based LIF spiking neuron using the magneto-electric (ME) switching of
    ferro-magnets. The voltage across the ME oxide exhibits a typical
    leaky-integrate behavior, which in turn switches an underlying ferro-magnet.
    Due to the effect of thermal noise, the ferro-magnet exhibits probabilistic
    switching dynamics, which is reminiscent of the stochasticity exhibited by
    biological neurons. The energy-efficiency of the ME switching mechanism coupled
    with the intrinsic non-volatility of ferro-magnets result in lower energy
    consumption, when compared to a CMOS LIF neuron. A device to system-level
    simulation framework has been developed to investigate the feasibility of the
    proposed LIF neuron for a hand-written digit recognition problem

    Semantic Parsing with Semi-Supervised Sequential Autoencoders

    Tomáš Kočiský, Gábor Melis, Edward Grefenstette, Chris Dyer, Wang Ling, Phil Blunsom, Karl Moritz Hermann
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We present a novel semi-supervised approach for sequence transduction and
    apply it to semantic parsing. The unsupervised component is based on a
    generative model in which latent sentences generate the unpaired logical forms.
    We apply this method to a number of semantic parsing tasks focusing on domains
    with limited access to labelled training data and extend those datasets with
    synthetically generated logical forms.

    Analysis of Massive Heterogeneous Temporal-Spatial Data with 3D Self-Organizing Map and Time Vector

    Yu Ding
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Self-organizing map(SOM) have been widely applied in clustering, this paper
    focused on centroids of clusters and what they reveal. When the input vectors
    consists of time, latitude and longitude, the map can be strongly linked to
    physical world, providing valuable information. Beyond basic clustering, a
    novel approach to address the temporal element is developed, enabling 3D SOM to
    track behaviors in multiple periods concurrently. Combined with adaptations
    targeting to process heterogeneous data relating to distribution in time and
    space, the paper offers a fresh scope for business and services based on
    temporal-spatial pattern.


    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    Multi-view Self-supervised Deep Learning for 6D Pose Estimation in the Amazon Picking Challenge

    Andy Zeng, Kuan-Ting Yu, Shuran Song, Daniel Suo, Ed Walker Jr., Alberto Rodriguez, Jianxiong Xiao
    Comments: Under review at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2017. Project webpage: this http URL
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent
    years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC). A fully
    autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably
    recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions,
    sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an
    approach that leverages multi-view RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven
    learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the
    MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th- place in the stowing and
    picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment
    and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network,
    and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get
    the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically
    requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method
    to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We
    demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under
    a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at
    this http URL

    Reconstructing Vechicles from a Single Image: Shape Priors for Road Scene Understanding

    J. Krishna Murthy, G.V. Sai Krishna, Falak Chhaya, K. Madhava Krishna
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Robotics (cs.RO)

    We present an approach for reconstructing vehicles from a single (RGB) image,
    in the context of autonomous driving. Though the problem appears to be
    ill-posed, we demonstrate that prior knowledge about how 3D shapes of vehicles
    project to an image can be used to reason about the reverse process, i.e., how
    shapes (back-)project from 2D to 3D. We encode this knowledge in emph{shape
    priors}, which are learnt over a small keypoint-annotated dataset. We then
    formulate a shape-aware adjustment problem that uses the learnt shape priors to
    recover the 3D pose and shape of a query object from an image. For shape
    representation and inference, we leverage recent successes of Convolutional
    Neural Networks (CNNs) for the task of object and keypoint localization, and
    train a novel cascaded fully-convolutional architecture to localize vehicle
    emph{keypoints} in images. The shape-aware adjustment then robustly recovers
    shape (3D locations of the detected keypoints) while simultaneously filling in
    occluded keypoints. To tackle estimation errors incurred due to erroneously
    detected keypoints, we use an Iteratively Re-weighted Least Squares (IRLS)
    scheme for robust optimization, and as a by-product characterize noise models
    for each predicted keypoint. We evaluate our approach on autonomous driving
    benchmarks, and present superior results to existing monocular, as well as
    stereo approaches.

    Redefining Binarization and the Visual Archetype

    Anguelos Nicolaou, Liwicki Marcus
    Comments: Short paper presented at the 12th IEEE workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS)
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Although binarization is considered passe, it still remains a highly popular
    research topic. In this paper we propose a rethinking of what binarization is.
    We introduce the notion of the visual archetype as the ideal form of any one
    document. Binarization can be defined as the restoration of the visual
    archetype for a class of images. This definition broadens the scope of what
    binarization means but also suggests ground-truth should focus on the
    foreground.

    Contextual RNN-GANs for Abstract Reasoning Diagram Generation

    Arnab Ghosh, Viveka Kulharia, Amitabha Mukerjee, Vinay Namboodiri, Mohit Bansal
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding, predicting, and generating object motions and transformations
    is a core problem in artificial intelligence. Modeling sequences of evolving
    images may provide better representations and models of motion and may
    ultimately be used for forecasting, simulation, or video generation.
    Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning is an avenue in which diagrams evolve in
    complex patterns and one needs to infer the underlying pattern sequence and
    generate the next image in the sequence. For this, we develop a novel
    Contextual Generative Adversarial Network based on Recurrent Neural Networks
    (Context-RNN-GANs), where both the generator and the discriminator modules are
    based on contextual history (modeled as RNNs) and the adversarial discriminator
    guides the generator to produce realistic images for the particular time step
    in the image sequence. We evaluate the Context-RNN-GAN model (and its variants)
    on a novel dataset of Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning, where it performs
    competitively with 10th-grade human performance but there is still scope for
    interesting improvements as compared to college-grade human performance. We
    also evaluate our model on a standard video next-frame prediction task,
    achieving improved performance over comparable state-of-the-art.

    Deep Tracking on the Move: Learning to Track the World from a Moving Vehicle using Recurrent Neural Networks

    Julie Dequaire, Dushyant Rao, Peter Ondruska, Dominic Wang, Ingmar Posner
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    This paper presents an end-to-end approach for tracking static and dynamic
    objects for an autonomous vehicle driving through crowded urban environments.
    Unlike traditional approaches to tracking, this method is learned end-to-end,
    and is able to directly predict a full unoccluded occupancy grid map from raw
    laser input data. Inspired by the recently presented DeepTracking approach
    [Ondruska, 2016], we employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) to capture the
    temporal evolution of the state of the environment, and propose to use Spatial
    Transformer modules to exploit estimates of the egomotion of the vehicle. Our
    results demonstrate the ability to track a range of objects, including cars,
    buses, pedestrians, and cyclists through occlusion, from both moving and
    stationary platforms, using a single learned model. Experimental results
    demonstrate that the model can also predict the future states of objects from
    current inputs, with greater accuracy than previous work.

    Comprehensive Evaluation of OpenCL-based Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs

    R. Tapiador, A. Rios-Navarro, A. Linares-Barranco, Minkyu Kim, Deepak Kadetotad, Jae-sun Seo
    Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures. Robotic and Technology of Computers Lab report
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Deep learning has significantly advanced the state of the art in artificial
    intelligence, gaining wide popularity from both industry and academia. Special
    interest is around Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which take inspiration
    from the hierarchical structure of the visual cortex, to form deep layers of
    convolutional operations, along with fully connected classifiers. Hardware
    implementations of these deep CNN architectures are challenged with memory
    bottlenecks that require many convolution and fully-connected layers demanding
    large amount of communication for parallel computation. Multi-core CPU based
    solutions have demonstrated their inadequacy for this problem due to the memory
    wall and low parallelism. Many-core GPU architectures show superior performance
    but they consume high power and also have memory constraints due to
    inconsistencies between cache and main memory. FPGA design solutions are also
    actively being explored, which allow implementing the memory hierarchy using
    embedded BlockRAM. This boosts the parallel use of shared memory elements
    between multiple processing units, avoiding data replicability and
    inconsistencies. This makes FPGAs potentially powerful solutions for real-time
    classification of CNNs. Both Altera and Xilinx have adopted OpenCL co-design
    framework from GPU for FPGA designs as a pseudo-automatic development solution.
    In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of Altera and Xilinx
    OpenCL frameworks for a 5-layer deep CNN is presented. Hardware resources,
    temporal performance and the OpenCL architecture for CNNs are discussed. Xilinx
    demonstrates faster synthesis, better FPGA resource utilization and more
    compact boards. Altera provides multi-platforms tools, mature design community
    and better execution times.

    Pano2CAD: Room Layout From A Single Panorama Image

    Jiu Xu, Bjorn Stenger, Tommi Kerola, Tony Tung
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper presents a method of estimating the geometry of a room and the 3D
    pose of objects from a single 360-degree panorama image. Assuming Manhattan
    World geometry, we formulate the task as a Bayesian inference problem in which
    we estimate positions and orientations of walls and objects. The method
    combines surface normal estimation, 2D object detection and 3D object pose
    estimation. Quantitative results are presented on a dataset of synthetically
    generated 3D rooms containing objects, as well as on a subset of hand-labeled
    images from the public SUN360 dataset.

    Kernel Methods on Approximate Infinite-Dimensional Covariance Operators for Image Classification

    Hà Quang Minh, Marco San Biagio, Loris Bazzani, Vittorio Murino
    Comments: 18 double-column pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper presents a novel framework for visual object recognition using
    infinite-dimensional covariance operators of input features in the paradigm of
    kernel methods on infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. Our formulation
    provides in particular a rich representation of image features by exploiting
    their non-linear correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-dimensional
    approximation of the Log-Hilbert-Schmidt (Log-HS) distance between covariance
    operators that is scalable to large datasets, while maintaining an effective
    discriminating capability. This allows us to efficiently approximate any
    continuous shift-invariant kernel defined using the Log-HS distance. At the
    same time, we prove that the Log-HS inner product between covariance operators
    is only approximable by its finite-dimensional counterpart in a very limited
    scenario. Consequently, kernels defined using the Log-HS inner product, such as
    polynomial kernels, are not scalable in the same way as shift-invariant
    kernels. Computationally, we apply the approximate Log-HS distance formulation
    to covariance operators of both handcrafted and convolutional features,
    exploiting both the expressiveness of these features and the power of the
    covariance representation. Empirically, we tested our framework on the task of
    image classification on twelve challenging datasets. In almost all cases, the
    results obtained outperform other state of the art methods, demonstrating the
    competitiveness and potential of our framework.

    Modelling depth for nonparametric foreground segmentation using RGBD devices

    Gabriel Moyà-Alcover, Ahmed Elgammal, Antoni Jaume-i-Capó, Javier Varona
    Comments: Accepted in Pattern Recognition Letters. Will update the info
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    The problem of detecting changes in a scene and segmenting the foreground
    from background is still challenging, despite previous work. Moreover, new RGBD
    capturing devices include depth cues, which could be incorporated to improve
    foreground segmentation. In this work, we present a new nonparametric approach
    where a unified model mixes the device multiple information cues. In order to
    unify all the device channel cues, a new probabilistic depth data model is also
    proposed where we show how handle the inaccurate data to improve foreground
    segmentation. A new RGBD video dataset is presented in order to introduce a new
    standard for comparison purposes of this kind of algorithms. Results show that
    the proposed approach can handle several practical situations and obtain good
    results in all cases.

    A comparative study of complexity of handwritten Bharati characters with that of major Indian scripts

    Manali Naik, V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy
    Comments: 22 pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We present Bharati, a simple, novel script that can represent the characters
    of a majority of contemporary Indian scripts. The shapes/motifs of Bharati
    characters are drawn from some of the simplest characters of existing Indian
    scripts. Bharati characters are designed such that they strictly reflect the
    underlying phonetic organization, thereby attributing to the script qualities
    of simplicity, familiarity, ease of acquisition and use. Thus, employing
    Bharati script as a common script for a majority of Indian languages can
    ameliorate several existing communication bottlenecks in India. We perform a
    complexity analysis of handwritten Bharati script and compare its complexity
    with that of 9 major Indian scripts. The measures of complexity are derived
    from a theory of handwritten characters based on Catastrophe theory. Bharati
    script is shown to be simpler than the 9 major Indian scripts in most measures
    of complexity.

    CNN-aware Binary Map for General Semantic Segmentation

    Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh, Hossein Mousavi, Moin Nabi, Mohammad Rastegari, Carlo Regazzoni
    Comments: ICIP 2016 Best Paper / Student Paper Finalist
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper we introduce a novel method for general semantic segmentation
    that can benefit from general semantics of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).
    Our segmentation proposes visually and semantically coherent image segments. We
    use binary encoding of CNN features to overcome the difficulty of the
    clustering on the high-dimensional CNN feature space. These binary codes are
    very robust against noise and non-semantic changes in the image. These binary
    encoding can be embedded into the CNN as an extra layer at the end of the
    network. This results in real-time segmentation. To the best of our knowledge
    our method is the first attempt on general semantic image segmentation using
    CNN. All the previous papers were limited to few number of category of the
    images (e.g. PASCAL VOC). Experiments show that our segmentation algorithm
    outperform the state-of-the-art non-semantic segmentation methods by large
    margin.

    Similarity Mapping with Enhanced Siamese Network for Multi-Object Tracking

    Minyoung Kim, Stefano Alletto, Luca Rigazio
    Comments: accepted as a poster presentation for WiML 2016, colocated with NIPS 2016, Barcelona, Spain
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    Multi-object tracking has recently become an important area of computer
    vision, especially for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Despite
    growing attention, achieving high performance tracking is still challenging,
    with state-of-the- art systems resulting in high complexity with a large number
    of hyper parameters. In this paper, we focus on reducing overall system
    complexity and the number hyper parameters that need to be tuned to a specific
    environment. We introduce a novel tracking system based on similarity mapping
    by Enhanced Siamese Neural Network (ESNN), which accounts for both appearance
    and geometric information, and is trainable end-to-end. Our system achieves
    competitive performance in both speed and accuracy on MOT16 challenge, compared
    to known state-of-the-art methods.

    A Searchlight Factor Model Approach for Locating Shared Information in Multi-Subject fMRI Analysis

    Hejia Zhang, Po-Hsuan Chen, Janice Chen, Xia Zhu, Javier S. Turek, Theodore L. Willke, Uri Hasson, Peter J. Ramadge
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC)

    There is a growing interest in joint multi-subject fMRI analysis. The
    challenge of such analysis comes from inherent anatomical and functional
    variability across subjects. One approach to resolving this is a shared
    response factor model. This assumes a shared and time synchronized stimulus
    across subjects. Such a model can often identify shared information, but it may
    not be able to pinpoint with high resolution the spatial location of this
    information. In this work, we examine a searchlight based shared response model
    to identify shared information in small contiguous regions (searchlights)
    across the whole brain. Validation using classification tasks demonstrates that
    we can pinpoint informative local regions.

    Cooperative Training of Descriptor and Generator Networks

    Jianwen Xie, Yang Lu, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper studies the cooperative training of two probabilistic models of
    signals such as images. Both models are parametrized by convolutional neural
    networks (ConvNets). The first network is a descriptor network, which is an
    exponential family model or an energy-based model, whose feature statistics or
    energy function are defined by a bottom-up ConvNet, which maps the observed
    signal to the feature statistics. The second network is a generator network,
    which is a non-linear version of factor analysis. It is defined by a top-down
    ConvNet, which maps the latent factors to the observed signal. The maximum
    likelihood training algorithms of both the descriptor net and the generator net
    are in the form of alternating back-propagation, and both algorithms involve
    Langevin sampling. %In the training of the descriptor net, the Langevin
    sampling is used to sample synthesized examples from the model. In the training
    of the generator net, the Langevin sampling is used to sample the latent
    factors from the posterior distribution. The Langevin sampling in both
    algorithms can be time consuming. We observe that the two training algorithms
    can cooperate with each other by jumpstarting each other’s Langevin sampling,
    and they can be naturally and seamlessly interwoven into a CoopNets algorithm
    that can train both nets simultaneously.

    Robust Moving Objects Detection in Lidar Data Exploiting Visual Cues

    Gheorghii Postica, Andrea Romanoni, Matteo Matteucci
    Comments: 6 pages, to appear in IROS 2016
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Detecting moving objects in dynamic scenes from sequences of lidar scans is
    an important task in object tracking, mapping, localization, and navigation.
    Many works focus on changes detection in previously observed scenes, while a
    very limited amount of literature addresses moving objects detection. The
    state-of-the-art method exploits Dempster-Shafer Theory to evaluate the
    occupancy of a lidar scan and to discriminate points belonging to the static
    scene from moving ones. In this paper we improve both speed and accuracy of
    this method by discretizing the occupancy representation, and by removing false
    positives through visual cues. Many false positives lying on the ground plane
    are also removed thanks to a novel ground plane removal algorithm. Efficiency
    is improved through an octree indexing strategy. Experimental evaluation
    against the KITTI public dataset shows the effectiveness of our approach, both
    qualitatively and quantitatively with respect to the state- of-the-art.

    Structure-Aware Classification using Supervised Dictionary Learning

    Yael Yankelevsky, Michael Elad
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a supervised dictionary learning algorithm that
    aims to preserve the local geometry in both dimensions of the data. A
    graph-based regularization explicitly takes into account the local manifold
    structure of the data points. A second graph regularization gives similar
    treatment to the feature domain and helps in learning a more robust dictionary.
    Both graphs can be constructed from the training data or learned and adapted
    along the dictionary learning process. The combination of these two terms
    promotes the discriminative power of the learned sparse representations and
    leads to improved classification accuracy. The proposed method was evaluated on
    several different datasets, representing both single-label and multi-label
    classification problems, and demonstrated better performance compared with
    other dictionary based approaches.

    OPML: A One-Pass Closed-Form Solution for Online Metric Learning

    Wenbin Li, Yang Gao, Lei Wang, Luping Zhou, Jing Huo, Yinghuan Shi
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    To achieve a low computational cost when performing online metric learning
    for large-scale data, we present a one-pass closed-form solution namely OPML in
    this paper. Typically, the proposed OPML first adopts a one-pass triplet
    construction strategy, which aims to use only a very small number of triplets
    to approximate the representation ability of whole original triplets obtained
    by batch-manner methods. Then, OPML employs a closed-form solution to update
    the metric for new coming samples, which leads to a low space (i.e., $O(d)$)
    and time (i.e., $O(d^2)$) complexity, where $d$ is the feature dimensionality.
    In addition, an extension of OPML (namely COPML) is further proposed to enhance
    the robustness when in real case the first several samples come from the same
    class (i.e., cold start problem). In the experiments, we have systematically
    evaluated our methods (OPML and COPML) on three typical tasks, including UCI
    data classification, face verification, and abnormal event detection in videos,
    which aims to fully evaluate the proposed methods on different sample number,
    different feature dimensionalities and different feature extraction ways (i.e.,
    hand-crafted and deeply-learned). The results show that OPML and COPML can
    obtain the promising performance with a very low computational cost. Also, the
    effectiveness of COPML under the cold start setting is experimentally verified.

    Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Pulmonary Nodule Detection in CT Imaging

    Petros-Pavlos Ypsilantis, Giovanni Montana
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Computed tomography (CT) generates a stack of cross-sectional images covering
    a region of the body. The visual assessment of these images for the
    identification of potential abnormalities is a challenging and time consuming
    task due to the large amount of information that needs to be processed. In this
    article we propose a deep artificial neural network architecture, ReCTnet, for
    the fully-automated detection of pulmonary nodules in CT scans. The
    architecture learns to distinguish nodules and normal structures at the pixel
    level and generates three-dimensional probability maps highlighting areas that
    are likely to harbour the objects of interest. Convolutional and recurrent
    layers are combined to learn expressive image representations exploiting the
    spatial dependencies across axial slices. We demonstrate that leveraging
    intra-slice dependencies substantially increases the sensitivity to detect
    pulmonary nodules without inflating the false positive rate. On the publicly
    available LIDC/IDRI dataset consisting of 1,018 annotated CT scans, ReCTnet
    reaches a detection sensitivity of 90.5% with an average of 4.5 false positives
    per scan. Comparisons with a competing multi-channel convolutional neural
    network for multi-slice segmentation and other published methodologies using
    the same dataset provide evidence that ReCTnet offers significant performance
    gains.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Heuristic with elements of tabu search for Truck and Trailer Routing Problem

    Ivan S. Grechikhin
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    Vehicle Routing Problem is a well-known problem in logistics and
    transportation, and the variety of such problems is explained by the fact that
    it occurs in many real-life situations. It is an NP-hard combinatorial
    optimization problem and finding an exact optimal solution is practically
    impossible. In this work, Site-Dependent Truck and Trailer Routing Problem with
    hard and soft Time Windows and Split Deliveries is considered (SDTTRPTWSD). In
    this article, we develop a heuristic with the elements of Tabu Search for
    solving SDTTRPTWSD. The heuristic uses the concept of neighborhoods and visits
    infeasible solutions during the search. A greedy heuristic is applied to
    construct an initial solution.

    Contextual RNN-GANs for Abstract Reasoning Diagram Generation

    Arnab Ghosh, Viveka Kulharia, Amitabha Mukerjee, Vinay Namboodiri, Mohit Bansal
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding, predicting, and generating object motions and transformations
    is a core problem in artificial intelligence. Modeling sequences of evolving
    images may provide better representations and models of motion and may
    ultimately be used for forecasting, simulation, or video generation.
    Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning is an avenue in which diagrams evolve in
    complex patterns and one needs to infer the underlying pattern sequence and
    generate the next image in the sequence. For this, we develop a novel
    Contextual Generative Adversarial Network based on Recurrent Neural Networks
    (Context-RNN-GANs), where both the generator and the discriminator modules are
    based on contextual history (modeled as RNNs) and the adversarial discriminator
    guides the generator to produce realistic images for the particular time step
    in the image sequence. We evaluate the Context-RNN-GAN model (and its variants)
    on a novel dataset of Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning, where it performs
    competitively with 10th-grade human performance but there is still scope for
    interesting improvements as compared to college-grade human performance. We
    also evaluate our model on a standard video next-frame prediction task,
    achieving improved performance over comparable state-of-the-art.

    Evaluating Induced CCG Parsers on Grounded Semantic Parsing

    Yonatan Bisk, Siva Reddy, John Blitzer, Julia Hockenmaier, Mark Steedman
    Comments: 6 pages, short paper, EMNLP 2016
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    We compare the effectiveness of four different syntactic CCG parsers for a
    semantic slot-filling task to explore how much syntactic supervision is
    required for downstream semantic analysis. This extrinsic, task-based
    evaluation also provides a unique window into the semantics captured (or
    missed) by unsupervised grammar induction systems.

    Deep Tracking on the Move: Learning to Track the World from a Moving Vehicle using Recurrent Neural Networks

    Julie Dequaire, Dushyant Rao, Peter Ondruska, Dominic Wang, Ingmar Posner
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    This paper presents an end-to-end approach for tracking static and dynamic
    objects for an autonomous vehicle driving through crowded urban environments.
    Unlike traditional approaches to tracking, this method is learned end-to-end,
    and is able to directly predict a full unoccluded occupancy grid map from raw
    laser input data. Inspired by the recently presented DeepTracking approach
    [Ondruska, 2016], we employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) to capture the
    temporal evolution of the state of the environment, and propose to use Spatial
    Transformer modules to exploit estimates of the egomotion of the vehicle. Our
    results demonstrate the ability to track a range of objects, including cars,
    buses, pedestrians, and cyclists through occlusion, from both moving and
    stationary platforms, using a single learned model. Experimental results
    demonstrate that the model can also predict the future states of objects from
    current inputs, with greater accuracy than previous work.

    Semantic Parsing with Semi-Supervised Sequential Autoencoders

    Tomáš Kočiský, Gábor Melis, Edward Grefenstette, Chris Dyer, Wang Ling, Phil Blunsom, Karl Moritz Hermann
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We present a novel semi-supervised approach for sequence transduction and
    apply it to semantic parsing. The unsupervised component is based on a
    generative model in which latent sentences generate the unpaired logical forms.
    We apply this method to a number of semantic parsing tasks focusing on domains
    with limited access to labelled training data and extend those datasets with
    synthetically generated logical forms.

    ICE: Information Credibility Evaluation on Social Media via Representation Learning

    Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Feng Yu, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan
    Comments: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), under review
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    With the rapid growth of social media, rumors are also spreading widely on
    social media and bring harm to people’s daily life. Nowadays, information
    credibility evaluation has drawn attention from academic and industrial
    communities. Current methods mainly focus on feature engineering and achieve
    some success. However, feature engineering based methods require a lot of labor
    and cannot fully reveal the underlying relations among data. In our viewpoint,
    the key elements of user behaviors for evaluating credibility are concluded as
    “who”, “what”, “when”, and “how”. These existing methods cannot model the
    correlation among different key elements during the spreading of microblogs. In
    this paper, we propose a novel representation learning method, Information
    Credibility Evaluation (ICE), to learn representations of information
    credibility on social media. In ICE, latent representations are learnt for
    modeling user credibility, behavior types, temporal properties, and comment
    attitudes. The aggregation of these factors in the microblog spreading process
    yields the representation of a user’s behavior, and the aggregation of these
    dynamic representations generates the credibility representation of an event
    spreading on social media. Moreover, a pairwise learning method is applied to
    maximize the credibility difference between rumors and non-rumors. To evaluate
    the performance of ICE, we conduct experiments on a Sina Weibo data set, and
    the experimental results show that our ICE model outperforms the
    state-of-the-art methods.


    Information Retrieval

    Fusing Similarity Models with Markov Chains for Sparse Sequential Recommendation

    Ruining He, Julian McAuley
    Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Predicting personalized sequential behavior is a key task for recommender
    systems. In order to predict user actions such as the next product to purchase,
    movie to watch, or place to visit, it is essential to take into account both
    long-term user preferences and sequential patterns (i.e., short-term dynamics).
    Matrix Factorization and Markov Chain methods have emerged as two separate but
    powerful paradigms for modeling the two respectively. Combining these ideas has
    led to unified methods that accommodate long- and short-term dynamics
    simultaneously by modeling pairwise user-item and item-item interactions.

    In spite of the success of such methods for tackling dense data, they are
    challenged by sparsity issues, which are prevalent in real-world datasets. In
    recent years, similarity-based methods have been proposed for
    (sequentially-unaware) item recommendation with promising results on sparse
    datasets. In this paper, we propose to fuse such methods with Markov Chains to
    make personalized sequential recommendations. We evaluate our method, Fossil,
    on a variety of large, real-world datasets. We show quantitatively that Fossil
    outperforms alternative algorithms, especially on sparse datasets, and
    qualitatively that it captures personalized dynamics and is able to make
    meaningful recommendations.

    Topic Browsing for Research Papers with Hierarchical Latent Tree Analysis

    Leonard K.M. Poon, Nevin L. Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Learning (cs.LG)

    Academic researchers often need to face with a large collection of research
    papers in the literature. This problem may be even worse for postgraduate
    students who are new to a field and may not know where to start. To address
    this problem, we have developed an online catalog of research papers where the
    papers have been automatically categorized by a topic model. The catalog
    contains 7719 papers from the proceedings of two artificial intelligence
    conferences from 2000 to 2015. Rather than the commonly used Latent Dirichlet
    Allocation, we use a recently proposed method called hierarchical latent tree
    analysis for topic modeling. The resulting topic model contains a hierarchy of
    topics so that users can browse the topics from the top level to the bottom
    level. The topic model contains a manageable number of general topics at the
    top level and allows thousands of fine-grained topics at the bottom level. It
    also can detect topics that have emerged recently.


    Computation and Language

    Evaluating Induced CCG Parsers on Grounded Semantic Parsing

    Yonatan Bisk, Siva Reddy, John Blitzer, Julia Hockenmaier, Mark Steedman
    Comments: 6 pages, short paper, EMNLP 2016
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    We compare the effectiveness of four different syntactic CCG parsers for a
    semantic slot-filling task to explore how much syntactic supervision is
    required for downstream semantic analysis. This extrinsic, task-based
    evaluation also provides a unique window into the semantics captured (or
    missed) by unsupervised grammar induction systems.

    Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools Using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

    Othman Zennaki, Nasredine Semmar, Laurent Besacier
    Comments: accepted to COLING 2016
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This work focuses on the rapid development of linguistic annotation tools for
    resource-poor languages. We experiment several cross-lingual annotation
    projection methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models. The
    distinctive feature of our approach is that our multilingual word
    representation requires only a parallel corpus between the source and target
    language. More precisely, our method has the following characteristics: (a) it
    does not use word alignment information, (b) it does not assume any knowledge
    about foreign languages, which makes it applicable to a wide range of
    resource-poor languages, (c) it provides truly multilingual taggers. We
    investigate both uni- and bi-directional RNN models and propose a method to
    include external information (for instance low level information from POS) in
    the RNN to train higher level taggers (for instance, super sense taggers). We
    demonstrate the validity and genericity of our model by using parallel corpora
    (obtained by manual or automatic translation). Our experiments are conducted to
    induce cross-lingual POS and super sense taggers.

    Semantic Parsing with Semi-Supervised Sequential Autoencoders

    Tomáš Kočiský, Gábor Melis, Edward Grefenstette, Chris Dyer, Wang Ling, Phil Blunsom, Karl Moritz Hermann
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We present a novel semi-supervised approach for sequence transduction and
    apply it to semantic parsing. The unsupervised component is based on a
    generative model in which latent sentences generate the unpaired logical forms.
    We apply this method to a number of semantic parsing tasks focusing on domains
    with limited access to labelled training data and extend those datasets with
    synthetically generated logical forms.

    Training Dependency Parsers with Partial Annotation

    Zhenghua Li, Yue Zhang, Jiayuan Chao, Min Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Recently, these has been a surge on studying how to obtain partially
    annotated data for model supervision. However, there still lacks a systematic
    study on how to train statistical models with partial annotation (PA). Taking
    dependency parsing as our case study, this paper describes and compares two
    straightforward approaches for three mainstream dependency parsers. The first
    approach is previously proposed to directly train a log-linear graph-based
    parser (LLGPar) with PA based on a forest-based objective. This work for the
    first time proposes the second approach to directly training a linear
    graph-based parse (LGPar) and a linear transition-based parser (LTPar) with PA
    based on the idea of constrained decoding. We conduct extensive experiments on
    Penn Treebank under three different settings for simulating PA, i.e., random
    dependencies, most uncertain dependencies, and dependencies with divergent
    outputs from the three parsers. The results show that LLGPar is most effective
    in learning from PA and LTPar lags behind the graph-based counterparts by large
    margin. Moreover, LGPar and LTPar can achieve best performance by using LLGPar
    to complete PA into full annotation (FA).

    Learning Sentence Representation with Guidance of Human Attention

    Shaonan Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Chengqing Zong
    Comments: submitted to AAAI 2017
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    The most existing sentence representation models typically treat each word in
    sentences equally. However, extensive studies have proven that human read
    sentences by making a sequence of fixation and saccades (Rayner 1998), which is
    extremely efficient. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches, using
    significant predictors of human reading time, e.g., surprisal and word classes,
    implemented as attention models to improve representation capability of
    sentence embeddings. One approach utilizes surprisal directly as the attention
    weight over baseline models. The other one builds attention model with the help
    of POS tag and CCG supertag vectors which are trained together with word
    embeddings in the process of sentence representation learning. In experiments,
    we have evaluated our models on 24 textual semantic similarity datasets and the
    results demonstrate that the proposed models significantly outperform the
    state-of-the-art sentence representation models.

    Topic Browsing for Research Papers with Hierarchical Latent Tree Analysis

    Leonard K.M. Poon, Nevin L. Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Learning (cs.LG)

    Academic researchers often need to face with a large collection of research
    papers in the literature. This problem may be even worse for postgraduate
    students who are new to a field and may not know where to start. To address
    this problem, we have developed an online catalog of research papers where the
    papers have been automatically categorized by a topic model. The catalog
    contains 7719 papers from the proceedings of two artificial intelligence
    conferences from 2000 to 2015. Rather than the commonly used Latent Dirichlet
    Allocation, we use a recently proposed method called hierarchical latent tree
    analysis for topic modeling. The resulting topic model contains a hierarchy of
    topics so that users can browse the topics from the top level to the bottom
    level. The topic model contains a manageable number of general topics at the
    top level and allows thousands of fine-grained topics at the bottom level. It
    also can detect topics that have emerged recently.

    Empirical Evaluation of RNN Architectures on Sentence Classification Task

    Lei Shen, Junlin Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Recurrent Neural Networks have achieved state-of-the-art results for many
    problems in NLP and two most popular RNN architectures are Tail Model and
    Pooling Model. In this paper, a hybrid architecture is proposed and we present
    the first empirical study using LSTMs to compare performance of the three RNN
    structures on sentence classification task. Experimental results show that the
    Tail Model and Hybrid Model consistently get a better performance over Pooling
    Model, and Hybrid Model is comparable with Tail Model.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    Towards performance portability through locality-awareness for applications using one-sided communication primitives

    Huan Zhou, Jose Gracia
    Comments: 7 pages, accepted for publication in International Workshop on Legacy HPC Application Migration (LHAM16) held in conjunction with CANDAR16
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    MPI is the most widely used data transfer and communication model in High
    Performance Computing. The latest version of the standard, MPI-3, allows
    skilled programmers to exploit all hardware capabilities of the latest and
    future supercomputing systems. The revised asynchronous remote-memory-access
    model in combination with the shared-memory window extension, in particular,
    allow writing code that hides communication latencies and optimizes
    communication paths according to the locality of data origin and destination.
    The latter is particularly important for today’s multi- and many-core systems.
    However, writing such efficient code is highly complex and error-prone. In this
    paper we evaluate a recent remote-memory-access model, namely DART-MPI. This
    model claims to hide the aforementioned complexities from the programmer, but
    deliver locality-aware remote-memory-access semantics which outperforms MPI-3
    one-sided communication primitives on multi-core systems. Conceptually, the
    DART-MPI interface is simple; at the same time it takes care of the
    complexities of the underlying MPI-3 and system topology. This makes DART-MPI
    an interesting candidate for porting legacy applications. We evaluate these
    claims using a realistic scientific application, specifically a
    finite-difference stencil code which solves the heat diffusion equation, on a
    large-scale Cray XC40 installation.

    Self-stabilizing Byzantine Clock Synchronization with Optimal Precision

    Pankaj Khanchandani, Christoph Lenzen
    Comments: 35 pages, 3 figures, full version of the paper in proceedings of SSS 2016
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    We revisit the approach to Byzantine fault-tolerant clock synchronization
    based on approximate agreement introduced by Lynch and Welch. Our contribution
    is threefold:

    (1) We provide a slightly refined variant of the algorithm yielding improved
    bounds on the skew that can be achieved and the sustainable frequency offsets.

    (2) We show how to extend the technique to also synchronize clock rates. This
    permits less frequent communication without significant loss of precision,
    provided that clock rates change sufficiently slowly.

    (3) We present a coupling scheme that allows to make these algorithms
    self-stabilizing while preserving their high precision. The scheme utilizes a
    low-precision, but self-stabilizing algorithm for the purpose of recovery.

    Auto-scaling Web Applications in Clouds: A Taxonomy and Survey

    Chenhao Qu, Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Rajkumar Buyya
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Web application providers have been migrating their applications to cloud
    data centers, attracted by the emerging cloud computing paradigm. One of the
    appealing features of cloud is elasticity. It allows cloud users to acquire or
    release computing resources on demand, which enables web application providers
    to auto-scale the resources provisioned to their applications under dynamic
    workload in order to minimize resource cost while satisfying Quality of Service
    (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the challenges
    remain in auto-scaling web applications in clouds and review the developments
    in this field. We present a taxonomy of auto-scaling systems according to the
    identified challenges and key properties. We analyze the surveyed works and map
    them to the taxonomy to identify the weakness in this field. Moreover, based on
    the analysis, we propose new future directions.

    A Dynamic Web Service Registry Framework for Mobile Environments

    Rohit Verma, Abhishek Srivastava
    Comments: Preprint Submitted to Arxiv
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Advancements in technology have transformed mobile devices from being mere
    communication widgets to versatile computing devices. Proliferation of these
    hand held devices has made them a common means to access and process digital
    information. Most web based applications are today available in a form that can
    conveniently be accessed over mobile devices. However, webservices
    (applications meant for consumption by other applications rather than humans)
    are not as commonly provided and consumed over mobile devices. Facilitating
    this and in effect realizing a service-oriented system over mobile devices has
    the potential to further enhance the potential of mobile devices. One of the
    major challenges in this integration is the lack of an efficient service
    registry system that caters to issues associated with the dynamic and volatile
    mobile environments. Existing service registry technologies designed for
    traditional systems fall short of accommodating such issues. In this paper, we
    propose a novel approach to manage service registry systems provided ‘solely’
    over mobile devices, and thus realising an SOA without the need for high-end
    computing systems. The approach manages a dynamic service registry system in
    the form of light weight and distributed registries. We assess the feasibility
    of our approach by engineering and deploying a working prototype of the
    proposed registry system over actual mobile devices. A comparative study of the
    proposed approach and the traditional UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery,
    and Integration) registry is also included. The evaluation of our framework has
    shown propitious results in terms of battery cost, scalability, hindrance with
    native applications.

    MPI-FAUN: An MPI-Based Framework for Alternating-Updating Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

    Ramakrishnan Kannan, Grey Ballard, Haesun Park
    Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1509.09313
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Numerical Analysis (cs.NA); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is the problem of determining two
    non-negative low rank factors $W$ and $H$, for the given input matrix $A$, such
    that $A approx W H$. NMF is a useful tool for many applications in different
    domains such as topic modeling in text mining, background separation in video
    analysis, and community detection in social networks. Despite its popularity in
    the data mining community, there is a lack of efficient parallel algorithms to
    solve the problem for big data sets.

    The main contribution of this work is a new, high-performance parallel
    computational framework for a broad class of NMF algorithms that iteratively
    solves alternating non-negative least squares (NLS) subproblems for $W$ and
    $H$. It maintains the data and factor matrices in memory (distributed across
    processors), uses MPI for interprocessor communication, and, in the dense case,
    provably minimizes communication costs (under mild assumptions). The framework
    is flexible and able to leverage a variety of NMF and NLS algorithms, including
    Multiplicative Update, Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares, and Block
    Principal Pivoting. Our implementation allows us to benchmark and compare
    different algorithms on massive dense and sparse data matrices of size that
    spans for few hundreds of millions to billions. We demonstrate the scalability
    of our algorithm and compare it with baseline implementations, showing
    significant performance improvements. The code and the datasets used for
    conducting the experiments are available online.

    Comprehensive Evaluation of OpenCL-based Convolutional Neural Network Accelerators in Xilinx and Altera FPGAs

    R. Tapiador, A. Rios-Navarro, A. Linares-Barranco, Minkyu Kim, Deepak Kadetotad, Jae-sun Seo
    Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures. Robotic and Technology of Computers Lab report
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Deep learning has significantly advanced the state of the art in artificial
    intelligence, gaining wide popularity from both industry and academia. Special
    interest is around Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which take inspiration
    from the hierarchical structure of the visual cortex, to form deep layers of
    convolutional operations, along with fully connected classifiers. Hardware
    implementations of these deep CNN architectures are challenged with memory
    bottlenecks that require many convolution and fully-connected layers demanding
    large amount of communication for parallel computation. Multi-core CPU based
    solutions have demonstrated their inadequacy for this problem due to the memory
    wall and low parallelism. Many-core GPU architectures show superior performance
    but they consume high power and also have memory constraints due to
    inconsistencies between cache and main memory. FPGA design solutions are also
    actively being explored, which allow implementing the memory hierarchy using
    embedded BlockRAM. This boosts the parallel use of shared memory elements
    between multiple processing units, avoiding data replicability and
    inconsistencies. This makes FPGAs potentially powerful solutions for real-time
    classification of CNNs. Both Altera and Xilinx have adopted OpenCL co-design
    framework from GPU for FPGA designs as a pseudo-automatic development solution.
    In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation and comparison of Altera and Xilinx
    OpenCL frameworks for a 5-layer deep CNN is presented. Hardware resources,
    temporal performance and the OpenCL architecture for CNNs are discussed. Xilinx
    demonstrates faster synthesis, better FPGA resource utilization and more
    compact boards. Altera provides multi-platforms tools, mature design community
    and better execution times.

    DynIMS: A Dynamic Memory Controller for In-memory Storage on HPC Systems

    Pengfei Xuan, Feng Luo, Rong Ge, Pradip K Srimani
    Comments: 5 pages, 8 figures, short paper
    Subjects: Performance (cs.PF); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    In order to boost the performance of data-intensive computing on HPC systems,
    in-memory computing frameworks, such as Apache Spark and Flink, use local DRAM
    for data storage. Optimizing the memory allocation to data storage is critical
    to delivering performance to traditional HPC compute jobs and throughput to
    data-intensive applications sharing the HPC resources. Current practices that
    statically configure in-memory storage may leave inadequate space for compute
    jobs or lose the opportunity to utilize more available space for data-intensive
    applications. In this paper, we explore techniques to dynamically adjust
    in-memory storage and make the right amount of space for compute jobs. We have
    developed a dynamic memory controller, DynIMS, which infers memory demands of
    compute tasks online and employs a feedback-based control model to adapt the
    capacity of in-memory storage. We test DynIMS using mixed HPCC and Spark
    workloads on a HPC cluster. Experimental results show that DynIMS can achieve
    up to 5X performance improvement compared to systems with static memory
    allocations.

    Data Rate for Distributed Consensus of Multi-agent Systems with High Order Oscillator Dynamics

    Zhirong Qiu, Lihua Xie, Yiguang Hong
    Subjects: Systems and Control (cs.SY); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Distributed consensus with data rate constraint is an important research
    topic of multi-agent systems. Some results have been obtained for consensus of
    multi-agent systems with integrator dynamics, but it remains challenging for
    general high-order systems, especially in the presence of unmeasurable states.
    In this paper, we study the quantized consensus problem for a special kind of
    high-order systems and investigate the corresponding data rate required for
    achieving consensus. The state matrix of each agent is a 2m-th order real
    Jordan block admitting m identical pairs of conjugate poles on the unit circle;
    each agent has a single input, and only the first state variable can be
    measured. The case of harmonic oscillators corresponding to m=1 is first
    investigated under a directed communication topology which contains a spanning
    tree, while the general case of m >= 2 is considered for a connected and
    undirected network. In both cases it is concluded that the sufficient number of
    communication bits to guarantee the consensus at an exponential convergence
    rate is an integer between $m$ and $2m$, depending on the location of the
    poles.


    Learning

    Classifier comparison using precision

    Lovedeep Gondara
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    New proposed models are often compared to state-of-the-art using statistical
    significance testing. Literature is scarce for classifier comparison using
    metrics other than accuracy. We present a survey of statistical methods that
    can be used for classifier comparison using precision, accounting for
    inter-precision correlation arising from use of same dataset. Comparisons are
    made using per-class precision and methods presented to test global null
    hypothesis of an overall model comparison. Comparisons are extended to multiple
    multi-class classifiers and to models using cross validation or its variants.
    Partial Bayesian update to precision is introduced when population prevalence
    of a class is known. Applications to compare deep architectures are studied.

    Deep Multi-Species Embedding

    Di Chen, Yexiang Xue, Shuo Chen, Daniel Fink, Carla Gomes
    Comments: 7pages, aaai2017
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Understanding how species are distributed across landscapes over time is a
    fundamental question in biodiversity research. Unfortunately, most species
    distribution models only target a single species at a time, despite the fact
    that there is strong evidence that species are not independently distributed.
    We propose Deep Multi-Species Embedding (DMSE), which jointly embed vectors
    corresponding to multiple species as well as vectors representing environmental
    covariates into a common high dimensional feature space via a deep neural
    network. Applied to extit{eBird} bird watching data, our single-species DMSE
    model outperforms commonly used random forest models in terms of accuracy. Our
    multi-species DMSE model further improves the single species version. Through
    this model, we are able to confirm quantitatively many species-species
    interactions, which are only understood qualitatively among ecologists. As an
    additional contribution, we provide a graphical embedding of hundreds of bird
    species in the Northeast US.

    Structure-Aware Classification using Supervised Dictionary Learning

    Yael Yankelevsky, Michael Elad
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper, we propose a supervised dictionary learning algorithm that
    aims to preserve the local geometry in both dimensions of the data. A
    graph-based regularization explicitly takes into account the local manifold
    structure of the data points. A second graph regularization gives similar
    treatment to the feature domain and helps in learning a more robust dictionary.
    Both graphs can be constructed from the training data or learned and adapted
    along the dictionary learning process. The combination of these two terms
    promotes the discriminative power of the learned sparse representations and
    leads to improved classification accuracy. The proposed method was evaluated on
    several different datasets, representing both single-label and multi-label
    classification problems, and demonstrated better performance compared with
    other dictionary based approaches.

    Multi Model Data mining approach for Heart failure prediction

    Priyanka H U, Vivek R
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

    Developing predictive modelling solutions for risk estimation is extremely
    challenging in health-care informatics. Risk estimation involves integration of
    heterogeneous clinical sources having different representation from different
    health-care provider making the task increasingly complex. Such sources are
    typically voluminous, diverse, and significantly change over the time.
    Therefore, distributed and parallel computing tools collectively termed big
    data tools are in need which can synthesize and assist the physician to make
    right clinical decisions. In this work we propose multi-model predictive
    architecture, a novel approach for combining the predictive ability of multiple
    models for better prediction accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness and
    efficiency of the proposed work on data from Framingham Heart study. Results
    show that the proposed multi-model predictive architecture is able to provide
    better accuracy than best model approach. By modelling the error of predictive
    models we are able to choose sub set of models which yields accurate results.
    More information was modelled into system by multi-level mining which has
    resulted in enhanced predictive accuracy.

    OPML: A One-Pass Closed-Form Solution for Online Metric Learning

    Wenbin Li, Yang Gao, Lei Wang, Luping Zhou, Jing Huo, Yinghuan Shi
    Comments: 12 pages
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    To achieve a low computational cost when performing online metric learning
    for large-scale data, we present a one-pass closed-form solution namely OPML in
    this paper. Typically, the proposed OPML first adopts a one-pass triplet
    construction strategy, which aims to use only a very small number of triplets
    to approximate the representation ability of whole original triplets obtained
    by batch-manner methods. Then, OPML employs a closed-form solution to update
    the metric for new coming samples, which leads to a low space (i.e., $O(d)$)
    and time (i.e., $O(d^2)$) complexity, where $d$ is the feature dimensionality.
    In addition, an extension of OPML (namely COPML) is further proposed to enhance
    the robustness when in real case the first several samples come from the same
    class (i.e., cold start problem). In the experiments, we have systematically
    evaluated our methods (OPML and COPML) on three typical tasks, including UCI
    data classification, face verification, and abnormal event detection in videos,
    which aims to fully evaluate the proposed methods on different sample number,
    different feature dimensionalities and different feature extraction ways (i.e.,
    hand-crafted and deeply-learned). The results show that OPML and COPML can
    obtain the promising performance with a very low computational cost. Also, the
    effectiveness of COPML under the cold start setting is experimentally verified.

    Universum Learning for Multiclass SVM

    Sauptik Dhar, Naveen Ramakrishnan, Vladimir Cherkassky, Mohak Shah
    Comments: 14 pages, 12 figures
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    We introduce Universum learning for multiclass problems and propose a novel
    formulation for multiclass universum SVM (MU-SVM). We also propose a span bound
    for MU-SVM that can be used for model selection thereby avoiding resampling.
    Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of MU-SVM and the proposed
    bound.

    Analysis of Massive Heterogeneous Temporal-Spatial Data with 3D Self-Organizing Map and Time Vector

    Yu Ding
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Self-organizing map(SOM) have been widely applied in clustering, this paper
    focused on centroids of clusters and what they reveal. When the input vectors
    consists of time, latitude and longitude, the map can be strongly linked to
    physical world, providing valuable information. Beyond basic clustering, a
    novel approach to address the temporal element is developed, enabling 3D SOM to
    track behaviors in multiple periods concurrently. Combined with adaptations
    targeting to process heterogeneous data relating to distribution in time and
    space, the paper offers a fresh scope for business and services based on
    temporal-spatial pattern.

    HyperNetworks

    David Ha, Andrew Dai, Quoc V. Le
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    This work explores hypernetworks: an approach of using a small network, also
    known as a hypernetwork, to generate the weights for a larger network.
    Hypernetworks provide an abstraction that is similar to what is found in
    nature: the relationship between a genotype – the hypernetwork – and a
    phenotype – the main network. Though they are also reminiscent of HyperNEAT in
    evolution, our hypernetworks are trained end-to-end with backpropagation and
    thus are usually faster. The focus of this work is to make hypernetworks useful
    for deep convolutional networks and long recurrent networks, where
    hypernetworks can be viewed as relaxed form of weight-sharing across layers.
    Our main result is that hypernetworks can generate non-shared weights for LSTM
    and achieve state-of-art results on a variety of language modeling tasks with
    Character-Level Penn Treebank and Hutter Prize Wikipedia datasets, challenging
    the weight-sharing paradigm for recurrent networks. Our results also show that
    hypernetworks applied to convolutional networks still achieve respectable
    results for image recognition tasks compared to state-of-the-art baseline
    models while requiring fewer learnable parameters.

    Fast learning rates with heavy-tailed losses

    Vu Dinh, Lam Si Tung Ho, Duy Nguyen, Binh T. Nguyen
    Comments: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016): 11 pages
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    We study fast learning rates when the losses are not necessarily bounded and
    may have a distribution with heavy tails. To enable such analyses, we introduce
    two new conditions: (i) the envelope function $sup_{f in mathcal{F}}|ell
    circ f|$, where $ell$ is the loss function and $mathcal{F}$ is the
    hypothesis class, exists and is $L^r$-integrable, and (ii) $ell$ satisfies the
    multi-scale Bernstein’s condition on $mathcal{F}$. Under these assumptions, we
    prove that learning rate faster than $O(n^{-1/2})$ can be obtained and,
    depending on $r$ and the multi-scale Bernstein’s powers, can be arbitrarily
    close to $O(n^{-1})$. We then verify these assumptions and derive fast learning
    rates for the problem of vector quantization by $k$-means clustering with
    heavy-tailed distributions. The analyses enable us to obtain novel learning
    rates that extend and complement existing results in the literature from both
    theoretical and practical viewpoints.

    Multi-view Self-supervised Deep Learning for 6D Pose Estimation in the Amazon Picking Challenge

    Andy Zeng, Kuan-Ting Yu, Shuran Song, Daniel Suo, Ed Walker Jr., Alberto Rodriguez, Jianxiong Xiao
    Comments: Under review at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2017. Project webpage: this http URL
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent
    years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC). A fully
    autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably
    recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions,
    sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an
    approach that leverages multi-view RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven
    learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the
    MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th- place in the stowing and
    picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment
    and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network,
    and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get
    the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically
    requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method
    to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We
    demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under
    a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at
    this http URL

    Contextual RNN-GANs for Abstract Reasoning Diagram Generation

    Arnab Ghosh, Viveka Kulharia, Amitabha Mukerjee, Vinay Namboodiri, Mohit Bansal
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding, predicting, and generating object motions and transformations
    is a core problem in artificial intelligence. Modeling sequences of evolving
    images may provide better representations and models of motion and may
    ultimately be used for forecasting, simulation, or video generation.
    Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning is an avenue in which diagrams evolve in
    complex patterns and one needs to infer the underlying pattern sequence and
    generate the next image in the sequence. For this, we develop a novel
    Contextual Generative Adversarial Network based on Recurrent Neural Networks
    (Context-RNN-GANs), where both the generator and the discriminator modules are
    based on contextual history (modeled as RNNs) and the adversarial discriminator
    guides the generator to produce realistic images for the particular time step
    in the image sequence. We evaluate the Context-RNN-GAN model (and its variants)
    on a novel dataset of Diagrammatic Abstract Reasoning, where it performs
    competitively with 10th-grade human performance but there is still scope for
    interesting improvements as compared to college-grade human performance. We
    also evaluate our model on a standard video next-frame prediction task,
    achieving improved performance over comparable state-of-the-art.

    CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification

    Shawn Hershey, Sourish Chaudhuri, Daniel P. W. Ellis, Jort F. Gemmeke, Aren Jansen, R. Channing Moore, Manoj Plakal, Devin Platt, Rif A. Saurous, Bryan Seybold, Malcolm Slaney, Ron J. Weiss, Kevin Wilson
    Subjects: Sound (cs.SD); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven very effective in image
    classification and have shown promise for audio classification. We apply
    various CNN architectures to audio and investigate their ability to classify
    videos with a very large data set of 70M training videos (5.24 million hours)
    with 30,871 labels. We examine fully connected Deep Neural Networks (DNNs),
    AlexNet, VGG, Inception, and ResNet. We explore the effects of training with
    different sized subsets of the training videos. Additionally we report the
    effect of training using different subsets of the labels. While our dataset
    contains video-level labels, we are also interested in Acoustic Event Detection
    (AED) and train a classifier on embeddings learned from the video-level task on
    Audio Set [5]. We find that derivatives of image classification networks do
    well on our audio classification task, that increasing the number of labels we
    train on provides some improved performance over subsets of labels, that
    performance of models improves as we increase training set size, and that a
    model using embeddings learned from the video-level task does much better than
    a baseline on the Audio Set classification task.

    Deep Tracking on the Move: Learning to Track the World from a Moving Vehicle using Recurrent Neural Networks

    Julie Dequaire, Dushyant Rao, Peter Ondruska, Dominic Wang, Ingmar Posner
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    This paper presents an end-to-end approach for tracking static and dynamic
    objects for an autonomous vehicle driving through crowded urban environments.
    Unlike traditional approaches to tracking, this method is learned end-to-end,
    and is able to directly predict a full unoccluded occupancy grid map from raw
    laser input data. Inspired by the recently presented DeepTracking approach
    [Ondruska, 2016], we employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) to capture the
    temporal evolution of the state of the environment, and propose to use Spatial
    Transformer modules to exploit estimates of the egomotion of the vehicle. Our
    results demonstrate the ability to track a range of objects, including cars,
    buses, pedestrians, and cyclists through occlusion, from both moving and
    stationary platforms, using a single learned model. Experimental results
    demonstrate that the model can also predict the future states of objects from
    current inputs, with greater accuracy than previous work.

    Machine Learning Techniques for Stackelberg Security Games: a Survey

    Giuseppe De Nittis, Francesco Trovò
    Subjects: Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Learning (cs.LG)

    The present survey aims at presenting the current machine learning techniques
    employed in security games domains. Specifically, we focused on papers and
    works developed by the Teamcore of University of Southern California, which
    deepened different directions in this field. After a brief introduction on
    Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs) and the poaching setting, the rest of the
    work presents how to model a boundedly rational attacker taking into account
    her human behavior, then describes how to face the problem of having attacker’s
    payoffs not defined and how to estimate them and, finally, presents how online
    learning techniques have been exploited to learn a model of the attacker.

    Training Dependency Parsers with Partial Annotation

    Zhenghua Li, Yue Zhang, Jiayuan Chao, Min Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Recently, these has been a surge on studying how to obtain partially
    annotated data for model supervision. However, there still lacks a systematic
    study on how to train statistical models with partial annotation (PA). Taking
    dependency parsing as our case study, this paper describes and compares two
    straightforward approaches for three mainstream dependency parsers. The first
    approach is previously proposed to directly train a log-linear graph-based
    parser (LLGPar) with PA based on a forest-based objective. This work for the
    first time proposes the second approach to directly training a linear
    graph-based parse (LGPar) and a linear transition-based parser (LTPar) with PA
    based on the idea of constrained decoding. We conduct extensive experiments on
    Penn Treebank under three different settings for simulating PA, i.e., random
    dependencies, most uncertain dependencies, and dependencies with divergent
    outputs from the three parsers. The results show that LLGPar is most effective
    in learning from PA and LTPar lags behind the graph-based counterparts by large
    margin. Moreover, LGPar and LTPar can achieve best performance by using LLGPar
    to complete PA into full annotation (FA).

    EXTRACT: Strong Examples from Weakly-Labeled Sensor Data

    Davis W. Blalock, John V. Guttag
    Comments: To appear in IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2016
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Databases (cs.DB); Learning (cs.LG)

    Thanks to the rise of wearable and connected devices, sensor-generated time
    series comprise a large and growing fraction of the world’s data.
    Unfortunately, extracting value from this data can be challenging, since
    sensors report low-level signals (e.g., acceleration), not the high-level
    events that are typically of interest (e.g., gestures). We introduce a
    technique to bridge this gap by automatically extracting examples of real-world
    events in low-level data, given only a rough estimate of when these events have
    taken place.

    By identifying sets of features that repeat in the same temporal arrangement,
    we isolate examples of such diverse events as human actions, power consumption
    patterns, and spoken words with up to 96% precision and recall. Our method is
    fast enough to run in real time and assumes only minimal knowledge of which
    variables are relevant or the lengths of events. Our evaluation uses numerous
    publicly available datasets and over 1 million samples of manually labeled
    sensor data.

    Topic Browsing for Research Papers with Hierarchical Latent Tree Analysis

    Leonard K.M. Poon, Nevin L. Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Learning (cs.LG)

    Academic researchers often need to face with a large collection of research
    papers in the literature. This problem may be even worse for postgraduate
    students who are new to a field and may not know where to start. To address
    this problem, we have developed an online catalog of research papers where the
    papers have been automatically categorized by a topic model. The catalog
    contains 7719 papers from the proceedings of two artificial intelligence
    conferences from 2000 to 2015. Rather than the commonly used Latent Dirichlet
    Allocation, we use a recently proposed method called hierarchical latent tree
    analysis for topic modeling. The resulting topic model contains a hierarchy of
    topics so that users can browse the topics from the top level to the bottom
    level. The topic model contains a manageable number of general topics at the
    top level and allows thousands of fine-grained topics at the bottom level. It
    also can detect topics that have emerged recently.

    Similarity Mapping with Enhanced Siamese Network for Multi-Object Tracking

    Minyoung Kim, Stefano Alletto, Luca Rigazio
    Comments: accepted as a poster presentation for WiML 2016, colocated with NIPS 2016, Barcelona, Spain
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    Multi-object tracking has recently become an important area of computer
    vision, especially for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Despite
    growing attention, achieving high performance tracking is still challenging,
    with state-of-the- art systems resulting in high complexity with a large number
    of hyper parameters. In this paper, we focus on reducing overall system
    complexity and the number hyper parameters that need to be tuned to a specific
    environment. We introduce a novel tracking system based on similarity mapping
    by Enhanced Siamese Neural Network (ESNN), which accounts for both appearance
    and geometric information, and is trainable end-to-end. Our system achieves
    competitive performance in both speed and accuracy on MOT16 challenge, compared
    to known state-of-the-art methods.


    Information Theory

    Keyless authentication in the presence of a simultaneously transmitting adversary

    Eric Graves, Paul Yu, Predrag Spasojevic
    Comments: Pre-print. Paper presented at ITW 2016 Cambridge
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    If Alice must communicate with Bob over a channel shared with the adversarial
    Eve, then Bob must be able to validate the authenticity of the message. In
    particular we consider the model where Alice and Eve share a discrete
    memoryless multiple access channel with Bob, thus allowing simultaneous
    transmissions from Alice and Eve. By traditional random coding arguments, we
    demonstrate an inner bound on the rate at which Alice may transmit, while still
    granting Bob the ability to authenticate. Furthermore this is accomplished in
    spite of Alice and Bob lacking a pre-shared key, as well as allowing Eve prior
    knowledge of both the codebook Alice and Bob share and the messages Alice
    transmits.

    Unified Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis of Cellular Networks in LOS/NLOS and Shadowed Fading

    Imène Trigui, Sofiène Affes, Ben Liang
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Statistical characterization of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio
    (SINR) via its cumulative distribution function (CDF) is ubiquitous in a vast
    majority of technical contributions in the area of cellular networks since it
    boils down to averaging the Laplace transform of the aggregate interference, a
    benefit accorded at the expense of confinement to the simplistic Rayleigh
    fading. In this work, to capture diverse fading channels that appear in
    realistic outdoor/indoor wireless communication scenarios, we tackle the
    problem differently. By exploting the moment generating function (MGF) of the
    SINR, we succeed in analytically assessing cellular networks performance over
    the shadowed {kappa}-{mu}, {kappa}-{mu} and {eta}-{mu} fading models. The
    latter offer high flexibility by capturing diverse fading channels including
    Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Rician, and Rician shadow fading distributions. These
    channel models have been recently praised for their capability to accurately
    model dense urban environments, future femtocells and device-to-device (D2D)
    shadowed channels. In addition to unifying the analysis for different channel
    models, this work integrates, for the first time, the coverage, the achievable
    rate, and the bit error probability (BEP), which are largely treated separately
    in the literature. The developed model and analysis are validated over a broad
    range of simulation setups and parameters.

    Combining Belief Propagation and Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes on a GPU Platform

    Sebastian Cammerer, Benedikt Leible, Matthias Stahl, Jakob Hoydis, Stephan ten Brink
    Comments: submitted to ICASSP’17
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The decoding performance of polar codes strongly depends on the decoding
    algorithm used, while also the decoder throughput and its latency mainly depend
    on the decoding algorithm. In this work, we implement the powerful successive
    cancellation list (SCL) decoder on a GPU and identify the bottlenecks of this
    algorithm with respect to parallel computing and its difficulties. The inherent
    serial decoding property of the SCL algorithm naturally limits the achievable
    speed-up gains on GPUs when compared to CPU implementations. In order to
    increase the decoding throughput, we use a hybrid decoding scheme based on the
    belief propagation (BP) decoder, which can be intraand inter-frame
    parallelized. The proposed scheme combines excellent decoding performance and
    high throughput within the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region of interest.

    Permutations via linear translators

    Nastja Cepak, Pascale Charpin, Enes Pasalic
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We show that many infinite classes of permutations over finite fields can be
    constructed via translators with a large choice of parameters. We first charac-
    terize some functions having linear translators, based on which several
    families of permutations are then derived. Extending the results of [10], we
    give in several cases the compositional inverse of these permutations. The
    connection with complete permutations is also utilized to provide further
    infinite classes of permutations. Moreover, we propose new tools to study
    permutations of the form x is mapped to x+(x^(p^m) – x+ lambda)^s and a few
    infinite classes of permutations of this form are proposed.

    Maximum Distance Separable Codes for $b$-Symbol Read Channels

    Baokun Ding, Tao Zhang, Gennian Ge
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Recently, Yaakobi et al. introduced codes for $b$-symbol read channels, where
    the read operation is performed as a consecutive sequence of $b>2$ symbols. In
    this paper, we establish a Singleton-type bound on $b$-symbol codes. Codes
    meeting the Singleton-type bound are called maximum distance separable (MDS)
    codes, and they are optimal in the sense they attain the maximal minimum
    $b$-distance. Based on projective geometry and constacyclic codes, we construct
    new families of linear MDS $b$-symbol codes over finite fields. And in some
    sense, we completely determine the existence of linear MDS $b$-symbol codes
    over finite fields for certain parameters.

    On private information retrieval array codes

    Yiwei Zhang, Xin Wang, Hengjia Wei, Gennian Ge
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Given a database, the private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a
    user to make queries to several servers and retrieve a certain item of the
    database via the feedbacks, without revealing the privacy of the specific item
    to any single server. Classical models of PIR protocols require that each
    server stores a whole copy of the database. Recently new PIR models are
    proposed with coding techniques arising from distributed storage system. In
    these new models each server only stores a fraction $1/s$ of the whole
    database, where $s>1$ is a given rational number. PIR array codes are recently
    proposed by Fazeli, Vardy and Yaakobi to characterize the new models. Consider
    a PIR array code with $m$ servers and the $k$-PIR property (which indicates
    that these $m$ servers may emulate any efficient $k$-PIR protocol). The central
    problem is to design PIR array codes with optimal rate $k/m$. Our contribution
    to this problem is three-fold. First, for the case $1<sle 2$, although PIR
    array codes with optimal rate have been constructed recently by Blackburn and
    Etzion, the number of servers in their construction is impractically large. We
    determine the minimum number of servers admitting the existence of a PIR array
    code with optimal rate for a certain range of parameters. Second, for the case
    $s>2$, we derive a new upper bound on the rate of a PIR array code. Finally,
    for the case $s>2$, we analyze a new construction by Blackburn and Etzion and
    show that its rate is better than all the other existing constructions.

    Exploiting Energy Accumulation Against Co-channel Interference in Wireless Energy Harvesting MIMO Relaying

    Yifan Gu, He Chen, Yonghui Li, Branka Vucetic
    Comments: An invited paper to appear in WPMC 2016
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper investigates a three-node multiple-input multiple-output relay
    system suffering from co-channel interference (CCI) at the multi-antenna relay.
    Contrary to the conventional relay networks, we consider the scenario that the
    relay is an energy harvesting (EH) node and has no embedded energy supply. But
    it is equipped with a rechargeable battery such that it can harvest and
    accumulate the harvested energy from RF signals sent by the source and
    co-channel interferers to support its operation. Leveraging the inherent
    feature of the considered system, we develop a novel accumulate-then-forward
    (ATF) protocol to eliminate the harmful effect of CCI. In the proposed ATF
    scheme, at the beginning of each transmission block, the relay can choose
    either EH operation to harvest energy from source and CCI or information
    decoding (ID) operation to decode and forward source’s information while
    suffering from CCI. Specifically, ID operation is activated only when the
    accumulated energy at the relay can support an outage-free transmission in the
    second hop. Otherwise, EH operation is invoked at the relay to harvest and
    accumulate energy. By modeling the finite-capacity battery of relay as a
    finite-state Markov Chain (MC), we derive a closed-form expression for the
    system throughput of the proposed ATF scheme over mixed Nakagami-m and Rayleigh
    fading channels. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis, and show
    that the proposed ATF scheme with energy accumulation significantly outperforms
    the existing one without energy accumulation.

    Determination of signal-to-noise ratio on the base of information-entropic analysis

    Z. Zh. Zhanabaev, S.N. Akhtanov, E.T. Kozhagulov, B.A Karibayev
    Subjects: Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper we suggest a new algorithm for determination of signal-to-noise
    ratio (SNR). SNR is a quantitative measure widely used in science and
    engineering. Generally, methods for determination of SNR are based on using of
    experimentally defined power of noise level, or some conditional noise
    criterion which can be specified for signal processing. In the present work we
    describe method for determination of SNR of chaotic and stochastic signals at
    unknown power levels of signal and noise. For this aim we use information as
    difference between unconditional and conditional entropy. Our theoretical
    results are confirmed by results of analysis of signals which can be described
    by nonlinear maps and presented as overlapping of harmonic and stochastic
    signals.




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