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    arXiv Paper Daily: Thu, 6 Oct 2016

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2016-10-06 00:00:00
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    Neural and Evolutionary Computing

    Nonlinear Systems Identification Using Deep Dynamic Neural Networks

    Olalekan Ogunmolu, Xuejun Gu, Steve Jiang, Nicholas Gans
    Comments: American Control Conference, 2017
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Neural networks are known to be effective function approximators. Recently,
    deep neural networks have proven to be very effective in pattern recognition,
    classification tasks and human-level control to model highly nonlinear
    realworld systems. This paper investigates the effectiveness of deep neural
    networks in the modeling of dynamical systems with complex behavior. Three deep
    neural network structures are trained on sequential data, and we investigate
    the effectiveness of these networks in modeling associated characteristics of
    the underlying dynamical systems. We carry out similar evaluations on select
    publicly available system identification datasets. We demonstrate that deep
    neural networks are effective model estimators from input-output data

    LAYERS: Yet another Neural Network toolkit

    Roberto Paredes, José-Miguel Benedí
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Layers is an open source neural network toolkit aim at providing an easy way
    to implement modern neural networks. The main user target are students and to
    this end layers provides an easy scriptting language that can be early adopted.
    The user has to focus only on design details as network totpology and parameter
    tunning.

    A Novel Representation of Neural Networks

    Anthony Caterini, Dong Eui Chang
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have become very popular for prediction in many
    areas. Their strength is in representation with a high number of parameters
    that are commonly learned via gradient descent or similar optimization methods.
    However, the representation is non-standardized, and the gradient calculation
    methods are often performed using component-based approaches that break
    parameters down into scalar units, instead of considering the parameters as
    whole entities. In this work, these problems are addressed. Standard notation
    is used to represent DNNs in a compact framework. Gradients of DNN loss
    functions are calculated directly over the inner product space on which the
    parameters are defined. This framework is general and is applied to two common
    network types: the Multilayer Perceptron and the Deep Autoencoder.

    Towards semi-episodic learning for robot damage recovery

    Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis (LORIA, LARSEN), Antoine Cully, Jean-Baptiste Mouret (LORIA, LARSEN)
    Comments: Workshop on AI for Long-Term Autonomy at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2016, Stockholm, Sweden. 2016
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    The recently introduced Intelligent Trial and Error algorithm (IT&E) enables
    robots to creatively adapt to damage in a matter of minutes by combining an
    off-line evolutionary algorithm and an on-line learning algorithm based on
    Bayesian Optimization. We extend the IT&E algorithm to allow for robots to
    learn to compensate for damages while executing their task(s). This leads to a
    semi-episodic learning scheme that increases the robot’s lifetime autonomy and
    adaptivity. Preliminary experiments on a toy simulation and a 6-legged robot
    locomotion task show promising results.

    Error bounds for approximations with deep ReLU networks

    Dmitry Yarotsky
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We study how approximation errors of neural networks with ReLU activation
    functions depend on the depth of the network. We establish rigorous error
    bounds showing that deep ReLU networks are significantly more expressive than
    shallow ones as long as approximations of smooth functions are concerned. At
    the same time, we show that on a set of functions constrained only by their
    degree of smoothness, a ReLU network architecture cannot in general achieve
    approximation accuracy with better than a power law dependence on the network
    size, regardless of its depth.


    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    A new algorithm for identity verification based on the analysis of a handwritten dynamic signature

    Krzysztof Cpalka, Marcin Zalasinski, Leszek Rutkowski
    Comments: 34 pages, 7 figures
    Journal-ref: Applied Soft Computing, vol. 43, pp. 47-56, 2016
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Identity verification based on authenticity assessment of a handwritten
    signature is an important issue in biometrics. There are many effective methods
    for signature verification taking into account dynamics of a signing process.
    Methods based on partitioning take a very important place among them. In this
    paper we propose a new approach to signature partitioning. Its most important
    feature is the possibility of selecting and processing of hybrid partitions in
    order to increase a precision of the test signature analysis. Partitions are
    formed by a combination of vertical and horizontal sections of the signature.
    Vertical sections correspond to the initial, middle, and final time moments of
    the signing process. In turn, horizontal sections correspond to the signature
    areas associated with high and low pen velocity and high and low pen pressure
    on the surface of a graphics tablet. Our previous research on vertical and
    horizontal sections of the dynamic signature (created independently) led us to
    develop the algorithm presented in this paper. Selection of sections, among
    others, allows us to define the stability of the signing process in the
    partitions, promoting signature areas of greater stability (and vice versa). In
    the test of the proposed method two databases were used: public MCYT-100 and
    paid BioSecure.

    DeepGaze II: Reading fixations from deep features trained on object recognition

    Matthias Kümmerer, Thomas S. A. Wallis, Matthias Bethge
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Applications (stat.AP)

    Here we present DeepGaze II, a model that predicts where people look in
    images. The model uses the features from the VGG-19 deep neural network trained
    to identify objects in images. Contrary to other saliency models that use deep
    features, here we use the VGG features for saliency prediction with no
    additional fine-tuning (rather, a few readout layers are trained on top of the
    VGG features to predict saliency). The model is therefore a strong test of
    transfer learning. After conservative cross-validation, DeepGaze II explains
    about 87% of the explainable information gain in the patterns of fixations and
    achieves top performance in area under the curve metrics on the MIT300 hold-out
    benchmark. These results corroborate the finding from DeepGaze I (which
    explained 56% of the explainable information gain), that deep features trained
    on object recognition provide a versatile feature space for performing related
    visual tasks. We explore the factors that contribute to this success and
    present several informative image examples. A web service is available to
    compute model predictions at this http URL

    Template shape estimation: correcting an asymptotic bias

    Nina Miolane (ASCLEPIOS), Susan Holmes, Xavier Pennec (ASCLEPIOS)
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Differential Geometry (math.DG)

    We use tools from geometric statistics to analyze the usual estimation
    procedure of a template shape. This applies to shapes from landmarks, curves,
    surfaces, images etc. We demonstrate the asymptotic bias of the template shape
    estimation using the stratified geometry of the shape space. We give a Taylor
    expansion of the bias with respect to a parameter $sigma$ describing the
    measurement error on the data. We propose two bootstrap procedures that
    quantify the bias and correct it, if needed. They are applicable for any type
    of shape data. We give a rule of thumb to provide intuition on whether the bias
    has to be corrected. This exhibits the parameters that control the bias’
    magnitude. We illustrate our results on simulated and real shape data.

    Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms, and Future Challenges

    Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a recent problem in computer vision and
    natural language processing that has garnered a large amount of interest from
    the deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing
    communities. In VQA, an algorithm needs to answer text-based questions about
    images. Since the release of the first VQA dataset in 2014, several additional
    datasets have been released and many algorithms have been proposed. In this
    review, we critically examine the current state of VQA in terms of problem
    formulation, existing datasets, evaluation metrics, and algorithms. In
    particular, we discuss the limitations of current datasets with regard to their
    ability to properly train and assess VQA algorithms. We then exhaustively
    review existing algorithms for VQA. Finally, we discuss possible future
    directions for VQA and image understanding research.

    Convex Histogram-Based Joint Image Segmentation with Regularized Optimal Transport Cost

    Nicolas Papadakis, Julien Rabin
    Comments: Technical report
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

    We investigate in this work a versatile convex framework for multiple image
    segmentation, relying on the regularized optimal mass transport theory. In this
    setting, several transport cost functions are considered and used to match
    statistical distributions of features. In practice, global multidimensional
    histograms are estimated from the segmented image regions, and are compared to
    referring models that are either fixed histograms given a priori, or directly
    inferred in the non-supervised case. The different convex problems studied are
    solved efficiently using primal-dual algorithms. The proposed approach is
    generic and enables multi-phase segmentation as well as co-segmentation of
    multiple images.

    Learning Optimal Parameters for Multi-target Tracking with Contextual Interactions

    Shaofei Wang, Charless C. Fowlkes
    Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1412.2066
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We describe an end-to-end framework for learning parameters of min-cost flow
    multi-target tracking problem with quadratic trajectory interactions including
    suppression of overlapping tracks and contextual cues about cooccurrence of
    different objects. Our approach utilizes structured prediction with a
    tracking-specific loss function to learn the complete set of model parameters.
    In this learning framework, we evaluate two different approaches to finding an
    optimal set of tracks under a quadratic model objective, one based on an LP
    relaxation and the other based on novel greedy variants of dynamic programming
    that handle pairwise interactions. We find the greedy algorithms achieve almost
    equivalent accuracy to the LP relaxation while being up to 10x faster than a
    commercial LP solver. We evaluate trained models on three challenging
    benchmarks. Surprisingly, we find that with proper parameter learning, our
    simple data association model without explicit appearance/motion reasoning is
    able to achieve comparable or better accuracy than many state-of-the-art
    methods that use far more complex motion features or appearance affinity metric
    learning.

    Reliability of PET/CT shape and heterogeneity features in functional and morphological components of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer tumors: a repeatability analysis in a prospective multi-center cohort

    Marie-Charlotte Desseroit (CHU Poitiers – Département de médecine nucléaire), Florent Tixier (CHU Poitiers – Département de médecine nucléaire), Wolfgang Weber, Barry A Siegel, Catherine Cheze Le Rest (CHU Poitiers – Département de médecine nucléaire), Dimitris Visvikis (LaTIM), Mathieu Hatt (LaTIM)
    Comments: Journal of Nuclear Medicine, Society of Nuclear Medicine, 2016
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Medical Physics (physics.med-ph)

    Purpose: The main purpose of this study was to assess the reliability of
    shape and heterogeneity features in both Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and
    low-dose Computed Tomography (CT) components of PET/CT. A secondary objective
    was to investigate the impact of image quantization.Material and methods: A
    Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act -compliant secondary
    analysis of deidentified prospectively acquired PET/CT test-retest datasets of
    74 patients from multi-center Merck and ACRIN trials was performed.
    Metabolically active volumes were automatically delineated on PET with Fuzzy
    Locally Adaptive Bayesian algorithm. 3DSlicerTM was used to semi-automatically
    delineate the anatomical volumes on low-dose CT components. Two quantization
    methods were considered: a quantization into a set number of bins
    (quantizationB) and an alternative quantization with bins of fixed width
    (quantizationW). Four shape descriptors, ten first-order metrics and 26
    textural features were computed. Bland-Altman analysis was used to quantify
    repeatability. Features were subsequently categorized as very reliable,
    reliable, moderately reliable and poorly reliable with respect to the
    corresponding volume variability. Results: Repeatability was highly variable
    amongst features. Numerous metrics were identified as poorly or moderately
    reliable. Others were (very) reliable in both modalities, and in all categories
    (shape, 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-order metrics). Image quantization played a major
    role in the features repeatability. Features were more reliable in PET with
    quantizationB, whereas quantizationW showed better results in CT.Conclusion:
    The test-retest repeatability of shape and heterogeneity features in PET and
    low-dose CT varied greatly amongst metrics. The level of repeatability also
    depended strongly on the quantization step, with different optimal choices for
    each modality. The repeatability of PET and low-dose CT features should be
    carefully taken into account when selecting metrics to build multiparametric
    models.

    Recognizing and Presenting the Storytelling Video Structure with Deep Multimodal Networks

    Lorenzo Baraldi, Costantino Grana, Rita Cucchiara
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper presents a novel approach for temporal and semantic segmentation
    of edited videos into meaningful segments, from the point of view of the
    storytelling structure. The objective is to decompose a long video into more
    manageable sequences, which can in turn be used to retrieve the most
    significant parts of it given a textual query and to provide an effective
    summarization. Previous video decomposition methods mainly employed perceptual
    cues, tackling the problem either as a story change detection, or as a
    similarity grouping task, and the lack of semantics limited their ability to
    identify story boundaries. Our proposal connects together perceptual, audio and
    semantic cues in a specialized deep network architecture designed with a
    combination of CNNs which generate an appropriate embedding, and clusters shots
    into connected sequences of semantic scenes, i.e. stories. A retrieval
    presentation strategy is also proposed, by selecting the semantically and
    aesthetically “most valuable” thumbnails to present, considering the query in
    order to improve the storytelling presentation. Finally, the subjective nature
    of the task is considered, by conducting experiments with different annotators
    and by proposing an algorithm to maximize the agreement between automatic
    results and human annotators.

    Soft-margin learning for multiple feature-kernel combinations with Domain Adaptation, for recognition in surveillance face datasets

    Samik Banerjee, Sukhendu Das
    Comments: This is an extended version of the paper accepted in CVPR Biometric Workshop, 2016. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1610.00660
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Face recognition (FR) is the most preferred mode for biometric-based
    surveillance, due to its passive nature of detecting subjects, amongst all
    different types of biometric traits. FR under surveillance scenario does not
    give satisfactory performance due to low contrast, noise and poor illumination
    conditions on probes, as compared to the training samples. A state-of-the-art
    technology, Deep Learning, even fails to perform well in these scenarios. We
    propose a novel soft-margin based learning method for multiple feature-kernel
    combinations, followed by feature transformed using Domain Adaptation, which
    outperforms many recent state-of-the-art techniques, when tested using three
    real-world surveillance face datasets.

    Feature Learning from Spectrograms for Assessment of Personality Traits

    Marc-André Carbonneau, Eric Granger, Yazid Attabi, Ghyslain Gagnon
    Comments: 12 pages, 3 figures
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Several methods have recently been proposed to analyze speech and
    automatically infer the personality of the speaker. These methods often rely on
    prosodic and other hand crafted speech processing features extracted with
    off-the-shelf toolboxes. To achieve high accuracy, numerous features are
    typically extracted using complex and highly parameterized algorithms. In this
    paper, a new method based on feature learning and spectrogram analysis is
    proposed to simplify the feature extraction process while maintaining a high
    level of accuracy. The proposed method learns a dictionary of discriminant
    features from patches extracted in the spectrogram representations of training
    speech segments. Each speech segment is then encoded using the dictionary, and
    the resulting feature set is used to perform classification of personality
    traits. Experiments indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art
    results with a significant reduction in complexity when compared to the most
    recent reference methods. The number of features, and difficulties linked to
    the feature extraction process are greatly reduced as only one type of
    descriptors is used, for which the 6 parameters can be tuned automatically. In
    contrast, the simplest reference method uses 4 types of descriptors to which 6
    functionals are applied, resulting in over 20 parameters to be tuned.

    Markov Chain Modeling and Simulation of Breathing Patterns

    Davide Alinovi, Gianluigi Ferrari, Francesco Pisani, Riccardo Raheli
    Comments: submitted for publication; 19 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables
    Subjects: Applications (stat.AP); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    The lack of large video databases obtained from real patients with
    respiratory disorders makes the design and optimization of video-based
    monitoring systems quite critical. The purpose of this study is the development
    of suitable models and simulators of breathing behaviors and disorders, such as
    respiratory pauses and apneas, in order to allow efficient design and test of
    video-based monitoring systems. More precisely, a novel Continuous-Time Markov
    Chain (CTMC) statistical model of breathing patterns is presented. The
    Respiratory Rate (RR) pattern, estimated by measured vital signs of
    hospital-monitored patients, is approximated as a CTMC, whose states and
    parameters are selected through an appropriate statistical analysis. Then, two
    simulators, software- and hardware-based, are proposed. After validation of the
    CTMC model, the proposed simulators are tested with previously developed
    video-based algorithms for the estimation of the RR and the detection of apnea
    events. Examples of application to assess the performance of systems for
    video-based RR estimation and apnea detection are presented. The results, in
    terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence, show that realistic breathing patterns,
    including specific respiratory disorders, can be accurately described by the
    proposed model; moreover, the simulators are able to reproduce practical
    breathing patterns for video analysis. The presented CTMC statistical model can
    be strategic to describe realistic breathing patterns and devise simulators
    useful to develop and test novel and effective video processing-based
    monitoring systems.

    Mobility Map Computations for Autonomous Navigation using an RGBD Sensor

    Nicolò Genesio, Tariq Abuhashim, Fabio Solari, Manuela Chessa, Lorenzo Natale
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In recent years, the numbers of life-size humanoids as well as their mobile
    capabilities have steadily grown. Stable walking motion and control for
    humanoid robots are active fields of research. In this scenario an open
    question is how to model and analyse the scene so that a motion planning
    algorithm can generate an appropriate walking pattern. This paper presents the
    current work towards scene modelling and understanding, using an RGBD sensor.
    The main objective is to provide the humanoid robot iCub with capabilities to
    navigate safely and interact with various parts of the environment. In this
    sense we address the problem of traversability analysis of the scene, focusing
    on classification of point clouds as a function of mobility, and hence walking
    safety.

    ECAT: Event Capture Annotation Tool

    Tuan Do, Nikhil Krishnaswamy, James Pustejovsky
    Comments: 4 pages, 4 figures, ISA workshop 2015
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper introduces the Event Capture Annotation Tool (ECAT), a
    user-friendly, open-source interface tool for annotating events and their
    participants in video, capable of extracting the 3D positions and orientations
    of objects in video captured by Microsoft’s Kinect(R) hardware. The modeling
    language VoxML (Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2016) underlies ECAT’s object,
    program, and attribute representations, although ECAT uses its own spec for
    explicit labeling of motion instances. The demonstration will show the tool’s
    workflow and the options available for capturing event-participant relations
    and browsing visual data. Mapping ECAT’s output to VoxML will also be
    addressed.

    Find Your Own Way: Weakly-Supervised Segmentation of Path Proposals for Urban Autonomy

    Dan Barnes, Will Maddern, Ingmar Posner
    Comments: Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2017. Video summary: this http URL
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths
    in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments.
    Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method
    generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and
    obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a
    deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment
    proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a
    monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or lane
    markings. We evaluate our method on the large-scale KITTI and Oxford RobotCar
    datasets and demonstrate reliable path proposal and obstacle segmentation in a
    wide variety of environments under a range of lighting, weather and traffic
    conditions. We illustrate how the method can generalise to multiple path
    proposals at intersections and outline plans to incorporate the system into a
    framework for autonomous urban driving.

    Multi-View Representation Learning: A Survey from Shallow Methods to Deep Methods

    Yingming Li, Ming Yang, Zhongfei Zhang
    Comments: 27 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.5538, arXiv:1304.5634 by other authors
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Recently, multi-view representation learning has become a rapidly growing
    direction in machine learning and data mining areas. This paper first reviews
    the root methods and theories on multi-view representation learning, especially
    on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and its several extensions. And then we
    investigate the advancement of multi-view representation learning that ranges
    from shallow methods including multi-modal topic learning, multi-view sparse
    coding, and multi-view latent space Markov networks, to deep methods including
    multi-modal restricted Boltzmann machines, multi-modal autoencoders, and
    multi-modal recurrent neural networks. Further, we also provide an important
    perspective from manifold alignment for multi-view representation learning.
    Overall, this survey aims to provide an insightful overview of theoretical
    basis and current developments in the field of multi-view representation
    learning and to help researchers find the most appropriate tools for particular
    applications.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Lifted Message Passing for the Generalized Belief Propagation

    Udi Apsel
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    We introduce the lifted Generalized Belief Propagation (GBP) message passing
    algorithm, for the computation of sum-product queries in Probabilistic
    Relational Models (e.g. Markov logic network). The algorithm forms a compact
    region graph and establishes a modified version of message passing, which
    mimics the GBP behavior in a corresponding ground model. The compact graph is
    obtained by exploiting a graphical representation of clusters, which reduces
    cluster symmetry detection to isomorphism tests on small local graphs. The
    framework is thus capable of handling complex models, while remaining
    domain-size independent.

    $ell_1$ Regularized Gradient Temporal-Difference Learning

    Dominik Meyer, Hao Shen, Klaus Diepold
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear
    value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms
    are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent
    development of Gradient TD (GTD) algorithms has addressed this problem
    successfully. However, the success of GTD algorithms requires a set of well
    chosen features, which are not always available. When the number of features is
    huge, the GTD algorithms might face the problem of overfitting and being
    computationally expensive. To cope with this difficulty, regularization
    techniques, in particular $ell_1$ regularization, have attracted significant
    attentions in developing TD learning algorithms. The present work combines the
    GTD algorithms with $ell_1$ regularization. We propose a family of $ell_1$
    regularized GTD algorithms, which employ the well known soft thresholding
    operator. We investigate convergence properties of the proposed algorithms, and
    depict their performance with several numerical experiments.

    The Predictive Context Tree: Predicting Contexts and Interactions

    Alasdair Thomason, Nathan Griffiths, Victor Sanchez
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    With a large proportion of people carrying location-aware smartphones, we
    have an unprecedented platform from which to understand individuals and predict
    their future actions. This work builds upon the Context Tree data structure
    that summarises the historical contexts of individuals from augmented
    geospatial trajectories, and constructs a predictive model for their likely
    future contexts. The Predictive Context Tree (PCT) is constructed as a
    hierarchical classifier, capable of predicting both the future locations that a
    user will visit and the contexts that a user will be immersed within. The PCT
    is evaluated over real-world geospatial trajectories, and compared against
    existing location extraction and prediction techniques, as well as a proposed
    hybrid approach that uses identified land usage elements in combination with
    machine learning to predict future interactions. Our results demonstrate that
    higher predictive accuracies can be achieved using this hybrid approach over
    traditional extracted location datasets, and the PCT itself matches the
    performance of the hybrid approach at predicting future interactions, while
    adding utility in the form of context predictions. Such a prediction system is
    capable of understanding not only where a user will visit, but also their
    context, in terms of what they are likely to be doing.

    A new algorithm for identity verification based on the analysis of a handwritten dynamic signature

    Krzysztof Cpalka, Marcin Zalasinski, Leszek Rutkowski
    Comments: 34 pages, 7 figures
    Journal-ref: Applied Soft Computing, vol. 43, pp. 47-56, 2016
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

    Identity verification based on authenticity assessment of a handwritten
    signature is an important issue in biometrics. There are many effective methods
    for signature verification taking into account dynamics of a signing process.
    Methods based on partitioning take a very important place among them. In this
    paper we propose a new approach to signature partitioning. Its most important
    feature is the possibility of selecting and processing of hybrid partitions in
    order to increase a precision of the test signature analysis. Partitions are
    formed by a combination of vertical and horizontal sections of the signature.
    Vertical sections correspond to the initial, middle, and final time moments of
    the signing process. In turn, horizontal sections correspond to the signature
    areas associated with high and low pen velocity and high and low pen pressure
    on the surface of a graphics tablet. Our previous research on vertical and
    horizontal sections of the dynamic signature (created independently) led us to
    develop the algorithm presented in this paper. Selection of sections, among
    others, allows us to define the stability of the signing process in the
    partitions, promoting signature areas of greater stability (and vice versa). In
    the test of the proposed method two databases were used: public MCYT-100 and
    paid BioSecure.

    A Novel Representation of Neural Networks

    Anthony Caterini, Dong Eui Chang
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have become very popular for prediction in many
    areas. Their strength is in representation with a high number of parameters
    that are commonly learned via gradient descent or similar optimization methods.
    However, the representation is non-standardized, and the gradient calculation
    methods are often performed using component-based approaches that break
    parameters down into scalar units, instead of considering the parameters as
    whole entities. In this work, these problems are addressed. Standard notation
    is used to represent DNNs in a compact framework. Gradients of DNN loss
    functions are calculated directly over the inner product space on which the
    parameters are defined. This framework is general and is applied to two common
    network types: the Multilayer Perceptron and the Deep Autoencoder.

    Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms, and Future Challenges

    Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a recent problem in computer vision and
    natural language processing that has garnered a large amount of interest from
    the deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing
    communities. In VQA, an algorithm needs to answer text-based questions about
    images. Since the release of the first VQA dataset in 2014, several additional
    datasets have been released and many algorithms have been proposed. In this
    review, we critically examine the current state of VQA in terms of problem
    formulation, existing datasets, evaluation metrics, and algorithms. In
    particular, we discuss the limitations of current datasets with regard to their
    ability to properly train and assess VQA algorithms. We then exhaustively
    review existing algorithms for VQA. Finally, we discuss possible future
    directions for VQA and image understanding research.

    Towards semi-episodic learning for robot damage recovery

    Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis (LORIA, LARSEN), Antoine Cully, Jean-Baptiste Mouret (LORIA, LARSEN)
    Comments: Workshop on AI for Long-Term Autonomy at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2016, Stockholm, Sweden. 2016
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    The recently introduced Intelligent Trial and Error algorithm (IT&E) enables
    robots to creatively adapt to damage in a matter of minutes by combining an
    off-line evolutionary algorithm and an on-line learning algorithm based on
    Bayesian Optimization. We extend the IT&E algorithm to allow for robots to
    learn to compensate for damages while executing their task(s). This leads to a
    semi-episodic learning scheme that increases the robot’s lifetime autonomy and
    adaptivity. Preliminary experiments on a toy simulation and a 6-legged robot
    locomotion task show promising results.

    Soft-margin learning for multiple feature-kernel combinations with Domain Adaptation, for recognition in surveillance face datasets

    Samik Banerjee, Sukhendu Das
    Comments: This is an extended version of the paper accepted in CVPR Biometric Workshop, 2016. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1610.00660
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Face recognition (FR) is the most preferred mode for biometric-based
    surveillance, due to its passive nature of detecting subjects, amongst all
    different types of biometric traits. FR under surveillance scenario does not
    give satisfactory performance due to low contrast, noise and poor illumination
    conditions on probes, as compared to the training samples. A state-of-the-art
    technology, Deep Learning, even fails to perform well in these scenarios. We
    propose a novel soft-margin based learning method for multiple feature-kernel
    combinations, followed by feature transformed using Domain Adaptation, which
    outperforms many recent state-of-the-art techniques, when tested using three
    real-world surveillance face datasets.

    EPOpt: Learning Robust Neural Network Policies Using Model Ensembles

    Aravind Rajeswaran, Sarvjeet Ghotra, Sergey Levine, Balaraman Ravindran
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)

    Sample complexity and safety are major challenges when learning policies with
    reinforcement learning for real-world tasks — especially when the policies are
    represented using rich function approximators like deep neural networks.
    Model-based methods where the real-world target domain is approximated using a
    simulated source domain provide an avenue to tackle the above challenges by
    augmenting real data with simulated data. However, discrepancies between the
    simulated source domain and the target domain pose a challenge for simulated
    training. We introduce the EPOpt algorithm, which uses an ensemble of simulated
    source domains and a form of adversarial training to learn policies that are
    robust and generalize to a broad range of possible target domains, including to
    unmodeled effects. Further, the probability distribution over source domains in
    the ensemble can be adapted using data from target domain and approximate
    Bayesian methods, to progressively make it a better approximation. Thus,
    learning on a model ensemble, along with source domain adaptation, provides the
    benefit of both robustness and learning/adaptation.

    Find Your Own Way: Weakly-Supervised Segmentation of Path Proposals for Urban Autonomy

    Dan Barnes, Will Maddern, Ingmar Posner
    Comments: Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2017. Video summary: this http URL
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths
    in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments.
    Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method
    generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and
    obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a
    deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment
    proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a
    monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or lane
    markings. We evaluate our method on the large-scale KITTI and Oxford RobotCar
    datasets and demonstrate reliable path proposal and obstacle segmentation in a
    wide variety of environments under a range of lighting, weather and traffic
    conditions. We illustrate how the method can generalise to multiple path
    proposals at intersections and outline plans to incorporate the system into a
    framework for autonomous urban driving.

    Seer: Empowering Software Defined Networking with Data Analytics

    Kyriakos Sideris, Reza Nejabati, Dimitra Simeonidou
    Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, Big data, data analytics, data mining, knowledge centric networking (KCN), software defined networking (SDN), Seer, 2016 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications and 2016 International Symposium on Cyberspace and Security (IUCC-CSS 2016)
    Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    Network complexity is increasing, making network control and orchestration a
    challenging task. The proliferation of network information and tools for data
    analytics can provide an important insight into resource provisioning and
    optimisation. The network knowledge incorporated in software defined networking
    can facilitate the knowledge driven control, leveraging the network
    programmability. We present Seer: a flexible, highly configurable data
    analytics platform for network intelligence based on software defined
    networking and big data principles. Seer combines a computational engine with a
    distributed messaging system to provide a scalable, fault tolerant and
    real-time platform for knowledge extraction. Our first prototype uses Apache
    Spark for streaming analytics and open network operating system (ONOS)
    controller to program a network in real-time. The first application we
    developed aims to predict the mobility pattern of mobile devices inside a smart
    city environment.


    Information Retrieval

    A cumulative approach to quantification for sentiment analysis

    Giambattista Amati, Simone Angelini, Marco Bianchi, Luca Costantini, Giuseppe Marcone
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    We estimate sentiment categories proportions for retrieval within large
    retrieval sets. In general, estimates are produced by counting the
    classification outcomes and then by adjusting such category sizes taking into
    account misclassification error matrix. However, both the accuracy of the
    classifier and the precision of the retrieval produce a large number of errors
    that makes difficult the application of an aggregative approach to sentiment
    analysis as a reliable and efficient estimation of proportions for sentiment
    categories.

    The challenge for real time analytics during retrieval is thus to overcome
    misclassification errors, and more importantly, to apply sentiment
    classification or any other similar post-processing analytics at retrieval
    time. We present a non-aggregative approach that can be applied to very large
    retrieval sets of queries.

    A Study of Factuality, Objectivity and Relevance: Three Desiderata in Large-Scale Information Retrieval?

    Christina Lioma, Birger Larsen, Wei Lu, Yong Huang
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Much of the information processed by Information Retrieval (IR) systems is
    unreliable, biased, and generally untrustworthy [1], [2], [3]. Yet, factuality
    & objectivity detection is not a standard component of IR systems, even though
    it has been possible in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last decade.
    Motivated by this, we ask if and how factuality & objectivity detection may
    benefit IR. We answer this in two parts. First, we use state-of-the-art NLP to
    compute the probability of document factuality & objectivity in two TREC
    collections, and analyse its relation to document relevance. We find that
    factuality is strongly and positively correlated to document relevance, but
    objectivity is not. Second, we study the impact of factuality & objectivity to
    retrieval effectiveness by treating them as query independent features that we
    combine with a competitive language modelling baseline. Experiments with 450
    TREC queries show that factuality improves precision >10% over strong
    baselines, especially for uncurated data used in web search; objectivity gives
    mixed results. An overall clear trend is that document factuality & objectivity
    is much more beneficial to IR when searching uncurated (e.g. web) documents vs.
    curated (e.g. state documentation and newswire articles). To our knowledge,
    this is the first study of factuality & objectivity for back-end IR,
    contributing novel findings about the relation between relevance and
    factuality/objectivity, and statistically significant gains to retrieval
    effectiveness in the competitive web search task.

    Comparative study of LSA vs Word2vec embeddings in small corpora: a case study in dreams database

    Edgar Altszyler, Mariano Sigman, Diego Fernández Slezak
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Word embeddings have been extensively studied in large text datasets.
    However, only a few studies analyze semantic representations of small corpora,
    particularly relevant in single-person text production studies. In the present
    paper, we compare Skip-gram and LSA capabilities in this scenario, and we test
    both techniques to extract relevant semantic patterns in single-series dreams
    reports. LSA showed better performance than Skip-gram in small size training
    corpus in two semantic tests. As a study case, we show that LSA can capture
    relevant words associations in dream reports series, even in cases of small
    number of dreams or low-frequency words. We propose that LSA can be used to
    explore words associations in dreams reports, which could bring new insight
    into this classic research area of psychology

    Multi-View Representation Learning: A Survey from Shallow Methods to Deep Methods

    Yingming Li, Ming Yang, Zhongfei Zhang
    Comments: 27 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.5538, arXiv:1304.5634 by other authors
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Recently, multi-view representation learning has become a rapidly growing
    direction in machine learning and data mining areas. This paper first reviews
    the root methods and theories on multi-view representation learning, especially
    on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and its several extensions. And then we
    investigate the advancement of multi-view representation learning that ranges
    from shallow methods including multi-modal topic learning, multi-view sparse
    coding, and multi-view latent space Markov networks, to deep methods including
    multi-modal restricted Boltzmann machines, multi-modal autoencoders, and
    multi-modal recurrent neural networks. Further, we also provide an important
    perspective from manifold alignment for multi-view representation learning.
    Overall, this survey aims to provide an insightful overview of theoretical
    basis and current developments in the field of multi-view representation
    learning and to help researchers find the most appropriate tools for particular
    applications.


    Computation and Language

    Neural Structural Correspondence Learning for Domain Adaptation

    Yftah Ziser, Roi Reichart
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Domain adaptation, adapting models from domains rich in labeled training data
    to domains poor in such data, is a fundamental NLP challenge. We introduce a
    neural network model that marries together ideas from two prominent strands of
    research on domain adaptation through representation learning: structural
    correspondence learning (SCL, (Blitzer et al., 2006)) and autoencoder neural
    networks. Particularly, our model is a three-layer neural network that learns
    to encode the nonpivot features of an input example into a low-dimensional
    representation, so that the existence of pivot features (features that are
    prominent in both domains and convey useful information for the NLP task) in
    the example can be decoded from that representation. The low-dimensional
    representation is then employed in a learning algorithm for the task. Moreover,
    we show how to inject pre-trained word embeddings into our model in order to
    improve generalization across examples with similar pivot features. On the task
    of cross-domain product sentiment classification (Blitzer et al., 2007),
    consisting of 12 domain pairs, our model outperforms both the SCL and the
    marginalized stacked denoising autoencoder (MSDA, (Chen et al., 2012)) methods
    by 3.77% and 2.17% respectively, on average across domain pairs.

    Conversational Recommendation System with Unsupervised Learning

    Yueming Sun, Yi Zhang, Yunfei Chen, Roger Jin
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    We will demonstrate a conversational products recommendation agent. This
    system shows how we combine research in personalized recommendation systems
    with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent. Based on new
    deep learning technologies we developed, the virtual agent is capable of
    learning how to interact with users, how to answer user questions, what is the
    next question to ask, and what to recommend when chatting with a human user.

    Normally a descent conversational agent for a particular domain requires tens
    of thousands of hand labeled conversational data or hand written rules. This is
    a major barrier when launching a conversation agent for a new domain. We will
    explore and demonstrate the effectiveness of the learning solution even when
    there is no hand written rules or hand labeled training data.

    Comparative study of LSA vs Word2vec embeddings in small corpora: a case study in dreams database

    Edgar Altszyler, Mariano Sigman, Diego Fernández Slezak
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Word embeddings have been extensively studied in large text datasets.
    However, only a few studies analyze semantic representations of small corpora,
    particularly relevant in single-person text production studies. In the present
    paper, we compare Skip-gram and LSA capabilities in this scenario, and we test
    both techniques to extract relevant semantic patterns in single-series dreams
    reports. LSA showed better performance than Skip-gram in small size training
    corpus in two semantic tests. As a study case, we show that LSA can capture
    relevant words associations in dream reports series, even in cases of small
    number of dreams or low-frequency words. We propose that LSA can be used to
    explore words associations in dreams reports, which could bring new insight
    into this classic research area of psychology

    VoxML: A Visualization Modeling Language

    James Pustejovsky, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
    Comments: 8 pages, 9 figures, proceedings of LREC 2016
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We present the specification for a modeling language, VoxML, which encodes
    semantic knowledge of real-world objects represented as three-dimensional
    models, and of events and attributes related to and enacted over these objects.
    VoxML is intended to overcome the limitations of existing 3D visual markup
    languages by allowing for the encoding of a broad range of semantic knowledge
    that can be exploited by a variety of systems and platforms, leading to
    multimodal simulations of real-world scenarios using conceptual objects that
    represent their semantic values.

    A tentative model for dimensionless phoneme distance from binary distinctive features

    Tiago Tresoldi
    Comments: draft, 1 table, 1 figure
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This work proposes a tentative model for the calculation of dimensionless
    distances between phonemes; sounds are described with binary distinctive
    features and distances show linear consistency in terms of such features. The
    model can be used as a scoring function for local and global pairwise alignment
    of phoneme sequences, and the distances can be used as prior probabilities for
    Bayesian analyses on the phylogenetic relationship between languages,
    particularly for cognate identification in cases where no empirical prior
    probability is available.

    Monaural Multi-Talker Speech Recognition using Factorial Speech Processing Models

    Mahdi Khademian, Mohammad Mehdi Homayounpour
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD)

    A Pascal challenge entitled monaural multi-talker speech recognition was
    developed, targeting the problem of robust automatic speech recognition against
    speech like noises which significantly degrades the performance of automatic
    speech recognition systems. In this challenge, two competing speakers say a
    simple command simultaneously and the objective is to recognize speech of the
    target speaker. Surprisingly during the challenge, a team from IBM research,
    could achieve a performance better than human listeners on this task. The
    proposed method of the IBM team, consist of an intermediate speech separation
    and then a single-talker speech recognition. This paper reconsiders the task of
    this challenge based on gain adapted factorial speech processing models. It
    develops a joint-token passing algorithm for direct utterance decoding of both
    target and masker speakers, simultaneously. Comparing it to the challenge
    winner, it uses maximum uncertainty during the decoding which cannot be used in
    the past two-phased method. It provides detailed derivation of inference on
    these models based on general inference procedures of probabilistic graphical
    models. As another improvement, it uses deep neural networks for joint-speaker
    identification and gain estimation which makes these two steps easier than
    before producing competitive results for these steps. The proposed method of
    this work outperforms past super-human results and even the results were
    achieved recently by Microsoft research, using deep neural networks. It
    achieved 5.5% absolute task performance improvement compared to the first
    super-human system and 2.7% absolute task performance improvement compared to
    its recent competitor.

    Word2Vec vs DBnary: Augmenting METEOR using Vector Representations or Lexical Resources?

    Christophe Servan, Alexandre Berard, Zied Elloumi, Hervé Blanchon, Laurent Besacier
    Comments: accepted to COLING 2016 conference
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This paper presents an approach combining lexico-semantic resources and
    distributed representations of words applied to the evaluation in machine
    translation (MT). This study is made through the enrichment of a well-known MT
    evaluation metric: METEOR. This metric enables an approximate match (synonymy
    or morphological similarity) between an automatic and a reference translation.
    Our experiments are made in the framework of the Metrics task of WMT 2014. We
    show that distributed representations are a good alternative to lexico-semantic
    resources for MT evaluation and they can even bring interesting additional
    information. The augmented versions of METEOR, using vector representations,
    are made available on our Github page.

    ECAT: Event Capture Annotation Tool

    Tuan Do, Nikhil Krishnaswamy, James Pustejovsky
    Comments: 4 pages, 4 figures, ISA workshop 2015
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper introduces the Event Capture Annotation Tool (ECAT), a
    user-friendly, open-source interface tool for annotating events and their
    participants in video, capable of extracting the 3D positions and orientations
    of objects in video captured by Microsoft’s Kinect(R) hardware. The modeling
    language VoxML (Pustejovsky and Krishnaswamy, 2016) underlies ECAT’s object,
    program, and attribute representations, although ECAT uses its own spec for
    explicit labeling of motion instances. The demonstration will show the tool’s
    workflow and the options available for capturing event-participant relations
    and browsing visual data. Mapping ECAT’s output to VoxML will also be
    addressed.

    Summarizing Situational and Topical Information During Crises

    Koustav Rudra, Siddhartha Banerjee, Niloy Ganguly, Pawan Goyal, Muhammad Imran, Prasenjit Mitra
    Comments: 7 pages, 9 figures, Accepted in The 4th International Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management (SWDM’16) will be co-located with CIKM 2016
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    The use of microblogging platforms such as Twitter during crises has become
    widespread. More importantly, information disseminated by affected people
    contains useful information like reports of missing and found people, requests
    for urgent needs etc. For rapid crisis response, humanitarian organizations
    look for situational awareness information to understand and assess the
    severity of the crisis. In this paper, we present a novel framework (i) to
    generate abstractive summaries useful for situational awareness, and (ii) to
    capture sub-topics and present a short informative summary for each of these
    topics. A summary is generated using a two stage framework that first extracts
    a set of important tweets from the whole set of information through an
    Integer-linear programming (ILP) based optimization technique and then follows
    a word graph and concept event based abstractive summarization technique to
    produce the final summary. High accuracies obtained for all the tasks show the
    effectiveness of the proposed framework.

    Visual Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms, and Future Challenges

    Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a recent problem in computer vision and
    natural language processing that has garnered a large amount of interest from
    the deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing
    communities. In VQA, an algorithm needs to answer text-based questions about
    images. Since the release of the first VQA dataset in 2014, several additional
    datasets have been released and many algorithms have been proposed. In this
    review, we critically examine the current state of VQA in terms of problem
    formulation, existing datasets, evaluation metrics, and algorithms. In
    particular, we discuss the limitations of current datasets with regard to their
    ability to properly train and assess VQA algorithms. We then exhaustively
    review existing algorithms for VQA. Finally, we discuss possible future
    directions for VQA and image understanding research.

    Divide-and-Conquer based Ensemble to Spot Emotions in Speech using MFCC and Random Forest

    Abdul Malik Badshah, Jamil Ahmad, Mi Young Lee, Sung Wook Baik
    Comments: 8 pages, conference paper, The 2nd International Integrated Conference & Concert on Convergence (2016)
    Subjects: Sound (cs.SD); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Besides spoken words, speech signals also carry information about speaker
    gender, age, and emotional state which can be used in a variety of speech
    analysis applications. In this paper, a divide and conquer strategy for
    ensemble classification has been proposed to recognize emotions in speech.
    Intrinsic hierarchy in emotions has been utilized to construct an emotions
    tree, which assisted in breaking down the emotion recognition task into smaller
    sub tasks. The proposed framework generates predictions in three phases.
    Firstly, emotions are detected in the input speech signal by classifying it as
    neutral or emotional. If the speech is classified as emotional, then in the
    second phase, it is further classified into positive and negative classes.
    Finally, individual positive or negative emotions are identified based on the
    outcomes of the previous stages. Several experiments have been performed on a
    widely used benchmark dataset. The proposed method was able to achieve improved
    recognition rates as compared to several other approaches.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    DASH: A C++ PGAS Library for Distributed Data Structures and Parallel Algorithms

    Karl Fürlinger, Tobias Fuchs, Roger Kowalewski
    Comments: Accepted for publication at HPCC 2016, 12-14 December 2016, Syndey Australia
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    We present DASH, a C++ template library that offers distributed data
    structures and parallel algorithms and implements a compiler-free PGAS
    (partitioned global address space) approach. DASH offers many productivity and
    performance features such as global-view data structures, efficient support for
    the owner-computes model, flexible multidimensional data distribution schemes
    and inter-operability with STL (standard template library) algorithms. DASH
    also features a flexible representation of the parallel target machine and
    allows the exploitation of several hierarchically organized levels of locality
    through a concept of Teams. We evaluate DASH on a number of benchmark
    applications and we port a scientific proxy application using the MPI two-sided
    model to DASH. We find that DASH offers excellent productivity and performance
    and demonstrate scalability up to 9800 cores.

    Read-Write Memory and k-Set Consensus as an Affine Task

    Eli Gafni, Yuan He, Petr Kuznetsov, Thibault Rieutord
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    The wait-free read-write memory model has been characterized as an iterated
    emph{Immediate Snapshot} (IS) task. The IS task is emph{affine}—it can be
    defined as a (sub)set of simplices of the standard chromatic subdivision. It is
    known that the task of emph{Weak Symmetry Breaking} (WSB) cannot be
    represented as an affine task. In this paper, we highlight the phenomenon of a
    “natural” model that can be captured by an iterated affine task and, thus, by a
    subset of runs of the iterated immediate snapshot model. We show that the
    read-write memory model in which, additionally, $k$-set-consensus objects can
    be used is, unlike WSB, “natural” by presenting the corresponding simple affine
    task captured by a subset of $2$-round IS runs. Our results imply the first
    combinatorial characterization of models equipped with abstractions other than
    read-write memory that applies to generic tasks.

    The Simulation Model Partitioning Problem: an Adaptive Solution Based on Self-Clustering (Extended Version)

    Gabriele D'Angelo
    Comments: To appear in “Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, Elsevier”
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Performance (cs.PF)

    This paper is about partitioning in parallel and distributed simulation. That
    means decomposing the simulation model into a numberof components and to
    properly allocate them on the execution units. An adaptive solution based on
    self-clustering, that considers both communication reduction and computational
    load-balancing, is proposed. The implementation of the proposed mechanism is
    tested using a simulation model that is challenging both in terms of structure
    and dynamicity. Various configurations of the simulation model and the
    execution environment have been considered. The obtained performance results
    are analyzed using a reference cost model. The results demonstrate that the
    proposed approach is promising and that it can reduce the simulation execution
    time in both parallel and distributed architectures.

    Distributed Searching of Partial Grids

    Dariusz Dereniowski, Dorota Urbańska
    Subjects: Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Combinatorics (math.CO)

    We consider the following distributed pursuit-evasion problem. A team of
    mobile agents called searchers starts at an arbitrary node of an unknown
    $n$-node network. Their goal is to execute a search strategy that guarantees
    capturing a fast and invisible intruder regardless of its movements using as
    few agents as possible. We restrict our attention to networks that are embedded
    into partial grids: nodes are placed on the plane at integer coordinates and
    only nodes at distance one can be adjacent. We give a distributed algorithm for
    the searchers that allow them to compute a connected and monotone strategy that
    guarantees searching any unknown partial grid with the use of $O(sqrt{n})$
    searchers. As for a lower bound, not only there exist partial grids that
    require $Omega(sqrt{n})$ searchers, but we prove that for each distributed
    searching algorithm there is a partial grid that forces the algorithm to use
    $Omega(sqrt{n})$ searchers but $O(log n)$ searchers are sufficient in the
    offline scenario. This gives a lower bound of $Omega(sqrt{n}/log n)$ in
    terms of achievable competitive ratio of any distributed algorithm.


    Learning

    EPOpt: Learning Robust Neural Network Policies Using Model Ensembles

    Aravind Rajeswaran, Sarvjeet Ghotra, Sergey Levine, Balaraman Ravindran
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Robotics (cs.RO)

    Sample complexity and safety are major challenges when learning policies with
    reinforcement learning for real-world tasks — especially when the policies are
    represented using rich function approximators like deep neural networks.
    Model-based methods where the real-world target domain is approximated using a
    simulated source domain provide an avenue to tackle the above challenges by
    augmenting real data with simulated data. However, discrepancies between the
    simulated source domain and the target domain pose a challenge for simulated
    training. We introduce the EPOpt algorithm, which uses an ensemble of simulated
    source domains and a form of adversarial training to learn policies that are
    robust and generalize to a broad range of possible target domains, including to
    unmodeled effects. Further, the probability distribution over source domains in
    the ensemble can be adapted using data from target domain and approximate
    Bayesian methods, to progressively make it a better approximation. Thus,
    learning on a model ensemble, along with source domain adaptation, provides the
    benefit of both robustness and learning/adaptation.

    Random Feature Nullification for Adversary Resistant Deep Architecture

    Qinglong Wang, Wenbo Guo, Kaixuan Zhang, Xinyu Xing, C. Lee Giles, Xue Liu
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Deep neural networks (DNN) have been proven to be quite effective in many
    applications such as image recognition and using software to process security
    or traffic camera footage, for example to measure traffic flows or spot
    suspicious activities. Despite the superior performance of DNN in these
    applications, it has recently been shown that a DNN is susceptible to a
    particular type of attack that exploits a fundamental flaw in its design.
    Specifically, an attacker can craft a particular synthetic example, referred to
    as an adversarial sample, causing the DNN to produce an output behavior chosen
    by attackers, such as misclassification. Addressing this flaw is critical if a
    DNN is to be used in critical applications such as those in cybersecurity.
    Previous work provided various defence mechanisms by either increasing the
    model nonlinearity or enhancing model complexity. However, after a thorough
    analysis of the fundamental flaw in the DNN, we discover that the effectiveness
    of such methods is limited. As such, we propose a new adversary resistant
    technique that obstructs attackers from constructing impactful adversarial
    samples by randomly nullifying features within samples. Using the MNIST
    dataset, we evaluate our proposed technique and empirically show our technique
    significantly boosts DNN’s robustness against adversarial samples while
    maintaining high accuracy in classification.

    Multi-View Representation Learning: A Survey from Shallow Methods to Deep Methods

    Yingming Li, Ming Yang, Zhongfei Zhang
    Comments: 27 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.5538, arXiv:1304.5634 by other authors
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Recently, multi-view representation learning has become a rapidly growing
    direction in machine learning and data mining areas. This paper first reviews
    the root methods and theories on multi-view representation learning, especially
    on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and its several extensions. And then we
    investigate the advancement of multi-view representation learning that ranges
    from shallow methods including multi-modal topic learning, multi-view sparse
    coding, and multi-view latent space Markov networks, to deep methods including
    multi-modal restricted Boltzmann machines, multi-modal autoencoders, and
    multi-modal recurrent neural networks. Further, we also provide an important
    perspective from manifold alignment for multi-view representation learning.
    Overall, this survey aims to provide an insightful overview of theoretical
    basis and current developments in the field of multi-view representation
    learning and to help researchers find the most appropriate tools for particular
    applications.

    A Tour of TensorFlow

    Peter Goldsborough
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Deep learning is a branch of artificial intelligence employing deep neural
    network architectures that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in
    computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and other
    domains. In November 2015, Google released $ extit{TensorFlow}$, an open
    source deep learning software library for defining, training and deploying
    machine learning models. In this paper, we review TensorFlow and put it in
    context of modern deep learning concepts and software. We discuss its basic
    computational paradigms and distributed execution model, its programming
    interface as well as accompanying visualization toolkits. We then compare
    TensorFlow to alternative libraries such as Theano, Torch or Caffe on a
    qualitative as well as quantitative basis and finally comment on observed
    use-cases of TensorFlow in academia and industry.

    Error bounds for approximations with deep ReLU networks

    Dmitry Yarotsky
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We study how approximation errors of neural networks with ReLU activation
    functions depend on the depth of the network. We establish rigorous error
    bounds showing that deep ReLU networks are significantly more expressive than
    shallow ones as long as approximations of smooth functions are concerned. At
    the same time, we show that on a set of functions constrained only by their
    degree of smoothness, a ReLU network architecture cannot in general achieve
    approximation accuracy with better than a power law dependence on the network
    size, regardless of its depth.

    Conversational Recommendation System with Unsupervised Learning

    Yueming Sun, Yi Zhang, Yunfei Chen, Roger Jin
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    We will demonstrate a conversational products recommendation agent. This
    system shows how we combine research in personalized recommendation systems
    with research in dialogue systems to build a virtual sales agent. Based on new
    deep learning technologies we developed, the virtual agent is capable of
    learning how to interact with users, how to answer user questions, what is the
    next question to ask, and what to recommend when chatting with a human user.

    Normally a descent conversational agent for a particular domain requires tens
    of thousands of hand labeled conversational data or hand written rules. This is
    a major barrier when launching a conversation agent for a new domain. We will
    explore and demonstrate the effectiveness of the learning solution even when
    there is no hand written rules or hand labeled training data.

    $ell_1$ Regularized Gradient Temporal-Difference Learning

    Dominik Meyer, Hao Shen, Klaus Diepold
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear
    value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms
    are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent
    development of Gradient TD (GTD) algorithms has addressed this problem
    successfully. However, the success of GTD algorithms requires a set of well
    chosen features, which are not always available. When the number of features is
    huge, the GTD algorithms might face the problem of overfitting and being
    computationally expensive. To cope with this difficulty, regularization
    techniques, in particular $ell_1$ regularization, have attracted significant
    attentions in developing TD learning algorithms. The present work combines the
    GTD algorithms with $ell_1$ regularization. We propose a family of $ell_1$
    regularized GTD algorithms, which employ the well known soft thresholding
    operator. We investigate convergence properties of the proposed algorithms, and
    depict their performance with several numerical experiments.

    Decentralized Topic Modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation

    Igor Colin, Christophe Dupuy
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    Privacy preserving networks can be modelled as decentralized networks (e.g.,
    sensors, connected objects, smartphones), where communication between nodes of
    the network is not controlled by an all-knowing, central node. For this type of
    networks, the main issue is to gather/learn global information on the network
    (e.g., by optimizing a global cost function) while keeping the (sensitive)
    information at each node. In this work, we focus on text information that
    agents do not want to share (e.g., text messages, emails, confidential
    reports). We use recent advances on decentralized optimization and topic models
    to infer topics from a graph with limited communication. We propose a method to
    adapt latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to decentralized optimization and
    show on synthetic data that we still recover similar parameters and similar
    performance at each node than with stochastic methods accessing to the whole
    information in the graph.

    Soft-margin learning for multiple feature-kernel combinations with Domain Adaptation, for recognition in surveillance face datasets

    Samik Banerjee, Sukhendu Das
    Comments: This is an extended version of the paper accepted in CVPR Biometric Workshop, 2016. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1610.00660
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Learning (cs.LG)

    Face recognition (FR) is the most preferred mode for biometric-based
    surveillance, due to its passive nature of detecting subjects, amongst all
    different types of biometric traits. FR under surveillance scenario does not
    give satisfactory performance due to low contrast, noise and poor illumination
    conditions on probes, as compared to the training samples. A state-of-the-art
    technology, Deep Learning, even fails to perform well in these scenarios. We
    propose a novel soft-margin based learning method for multiple feature-kernel
    combinations, followed by feature transformed using Domain Adaptation, which
    outperforms many recent state-of-the-art techniques, when tested using three
    real-world surveillance face datasets.

    Find Your Own Way: Weakly-Supervised Segmentation of Path Proposals for Urban Autonomy

    Dan Barnes, Will Maddern, Ingmar Posner
    Comments: Submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2017. Video summary: this http URL
    Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths
    in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments.
    Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method
    generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and
    obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a
    deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment
    proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a
    monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or lane
    markings. We evaluate our method on the large-scale KITTI and Oxford RobotCar
    datasets and demonstrate reliable path proposal and obstacle segmentation in a
    wide variety of environments under a range of lighting, weather and traffic
    conditions. We illustrate how the method can generalise to multiple path
    proposals at intersections and outline plans to incorporate the system into a
    framework for autonomous urban driving.

    Ensemble Validation: Selectivity has a Price, but Variety is Free

    Eric Bax, Farshad Kooti
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    If classifiers are selected from a hypothesis class to form an ensemble,
    bounds on average error rate over the selected classifiers include a component
    for selectivity, which grows as the fraction of hypothesis classifiers selected
    for the ensemble shrinks, and a component for variety, which grows with the
    size of the hypothesis class or in-sample data set. We show that the component
    for selectivity asymptotically dominates the component for variety, meaning
    that variety is essentially free.

    Single Image 3D Interpreter Network

    Jiajun Wu, Tianfan Xue, Joseph J. Lim, Yuandong Tian, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba, William T. Freeman
    Comments: ECCV 2016 (oral). The first two authors contributed equally to this work
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Learning (cs.LG)

    Understanding 3D object structure from a single image is an important but
    difficult task in computer vision, mostly due to the lack of 3D object
    annotations in real images. Previous work tackles this problem by either
    solving an optimization task given 2D keypoint positions, or training on
    synthetic data with ground truth 3D information. In this work, we propose 3D
    INterpreter Network (3D-INN), an end-to-end framework which sequentially
    estimates 2D keypoint heatmaps and 3D object structure, trained on both real
    2D-annotated images and synthetic 3D data. This is made possible mainly by two
    technical innovations. First, we propose a Projection Layer, which projects
    estimated 3D structure to 2D space, so that 3D-INN can be trained to predict 3D
    structural parameters supervised by 2D annotations on real images. Second,
    heatmaps of keypoints serve as an intermediate representation connecting real
    and synthetic data, enabling 3D-INN to benefit from the variation and abundance
    of synthetic 3D objects, without suffering from the difference between the
    statistics of real and synthesized images due to imperfect rendering. The
    network achieves state-of-the-art performance on both 2D keypoint estimation
    and 3D structure recovery. We also show that the recovered 3D information can
    be used in other vision applications, such as 3D rendering and image retrieval.


    Information Theory

    Learning How to Communicate in the Internet of Things: Finite Resources and Heterogeneity

    Taehyeun Park, Nof Abuzainab, Walid Saad
    Comments: 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT)

    For a seamless deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a need
    for self-organizing solutions to overcome key IoT challenges that include data
    processing, resource management, coexistence with existing wireless networks,
    and improved IoT-wide event detection. One of the most promising solutions to
    address these challenges is via the use of innovative learning frameworks that
    will enable the IoT devices to operate autonomously in a dynamic environment.
    However, developing learning mechanisms for the IoT requires coping with unique
    IoT properties in terms of resource constraints, heterogeneity, and strict
    quality-of-service requirements. In this paper, a number of emerging learning
    frameworks suitable for IoT applications are presented. In particular, the
    advantages, limitations, IoT applications, and key results pertaining to
    machine learning, sequential learning, and reinforcement learning are studied.
    For each type of learning, the computational complexity, required information,
    and learning performance are discussed. Then, to handle the heterogeneity of
    the IoT, a new framework based on the powerful tools of cognitive hierarchy
    theory is introduced. This framework is shown to efficiently capture the
    different IoT device types and varying levels of available resources among the
    IoT devices. In particular, the different resource capabilities of IoT devices
    are mapped to different levels of rationality in cognitive hierarchy theory,
    thus enabling the IoT devices to use different learning frameworks depending on
    their available resources. Finally, key results on the use of cognitive
    hierarchy theory in the IoT are presented.

    Caching in the Sky: Proactive Deployment of Cache-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Optimized Quality-of-Experience

    Mingzhe Chen, Mohammad Mozaffari, Walid Saad, Changchuan Yin, Mérouane Debbah, Choong-Seon Hong
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, the problem of proactive deployment of cache-enabled unmanned
    aerial vehicles (UAVs) for optimizing the quality-of-experience (QoE) of
    wireless devices in a cloud radio access network (CRAN) is studied. In the
    considered model, the network can leverage human-centric information such as
    users’ visited locations, requested contents, gender, job, and device type to
    predict the content request distribution and mobility pattern of each user.
    Then, given these behavior predictions, the proposed approach seeks to find the
    user-UAV associations, the optimal UAVs’ locations, and the contents to cache
    at UAVs. This problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to
    maximize the users’ QoE while minimizing the transmit power used by the UAVs.
    To solve this problem, a novel algorithm based on the machine learning
    framework of conceptor-based echo state networks (ESNs) is proposed. Using
    ESNs, the network can effectively predict each user’s content request
    distribution and its mobility pattern when limited information on the states of
    users and the network is available. Based on the predictions of the users’
    content request distribution and their mobility patterns, we derive the optimal
    user-UAV association, optimal locations of the UAVs as well as the content to
    cache at UAVs. Simulation results using real pedestrian mobility patterns from
    BUPT and actual content transmission data from Youku show that the proposed
    algorithm can yield 40% and 61% gains, respectively, in terms of the average
    transmit power and the percentage of the users with satisfied QoE compared to a
    benchmark algorithm without caching and a benchmark solution without UAVs.

    The Gray image of constacyclic codes over the finite chain ring $F_{p^m}[u]/langle u^k
    angle$

    Cao Yuan, Yonglin Cao
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Let $mathbb{F}_{p^m}$ be a finite field of cardinality $p^m$, where $p$ is a
    prime, and $k, N$ be any positive integers. We denote $R_k=F_{p^m}[u]/langle
    u^k
    angle =F_{p^m}+uF_{p^m}+ldots+u^{k-1}F_{p^m}$ ($u^k=0$) and
    $lambda=a_0+a_1u+ldots+a_{k-1}u^{k-1}$ where $a_0, a_1,ldots, a_{k-1}in
    F_{p^m}$ satisfying $a_0
    eq 0$ and $a_1=1$. Let $r$ be a positive integer
    satisfying $p^{r-1}+1leq kleq p^r$. We defined a Gray map from $R_k$ to
    $F_{p^m}^{p^r}$ first, then prove that the Gray image of any linear
    $lambda$-constacyclic code over $R_k$ of length $N$ is a distance invariant
    linear $a_0^{p^r}$-constacyclic code over $F_{p^m}$ of length $p^rN$.
    Furthermore, the generator polynomials for each linear $lambda$-constacyclic
    code over $R_k$ of length $N$ and its Gray image are given respectively.
    Finally, some optimal constacyclic codes over $F_{3}$ and $F_{5}$ are
    constructed.

    Effective Low-Complexity Optimization Methods for Joint Phase Noise and Channel Estimation in OFDM

    Zhongju Wang, Prabhu Babu, Daniel P. Palomar
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

    Phase noise correction is crucial to exploit full advantage of orthogonal
    frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in modern high-data-rate communications.
    OFDM channel estimation with simultaneous phase noise compensation has
    therefore drawn much attention and stimulated continuing efforts. Existing
    methods, however, either have not taken into account the fundamental properties
    of phase noise or are only able to provide estimates of limited applicability
    owing to considerable computational complexity. In this paper, we have
    reformulated the joint estimation problem in the time domain as opposed to
    existing frequency-domain approaches, which enables us to develop much more
    efficient algorithms using the majorization-minimization technique. In
    addition, we propose a method based on dimensionality reduction and the
    Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) that can adapt to various phase noise
    levels and accomplish much lower mean squared error than the benchmarks without
    incurring much additional computational cost. Several numerical examples with
    phase noise generated by free-running oscillators or phase-locked loops
    demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform existing methods with
    respect to both computational efficiency and mean squared error within a large
    range of signal-to-noise ratios.

    On the Joint Impact of Hardware Impairments and Imperfect CSI on Successive Decoding

    Nikolaos I. Miridakis, Theodoros A. Tsiftsis
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, a spatial multiplexing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
    system when hardware along with RF imperfections occur during the communication
    setup is analytically investigated. More specifically, the scenario of hardware
    impairments at the transceiver and imperfect channel state information (CSI) at
    the receiver is considered, when successive interference cancellation (SIC) is
    implemented. Two popular linear detection schemes are analyzed, namely, zero
    forcing SIC (ZF-SIC) and minimum mean-square error SIC (MMSE-SIC). New
    analytical expressions for the outage probability of each SIC stage are
    provided, when independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels
    are considered. In addition, the well-known error propagation effect between
    consecutive SIC stages is analyzed, while closed-form expressions are derived
    for some special cases of interest. Finally, useful engineering insights are
    manifested, such as the achievable diversity order, the performance difference
    between ZF- and MMSE-SIC, and the impact of imperfect CSI and/or the presence
    of hardware impairments to the overall system performance.

    A Probably Approximately Correct Answer to Distributed Stochastic Optimization in a Non-stationary Environment

    B. N. Bharath, Vaishali P
    Comments: A part of this work is submitted to WCNC-2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper considers a distributed stochastic optimization problem where the
    goal is to minimize the time average of a cost function subject to a set of
    constraints on the time averages of a related stochastic processes called
    penalties. We assume that a delayed information about an event in the system is
    available as a common information at every user, and the state of the system is
    evolving in an independent and non-stationary fashion. We show that an
    approximate Drift-plus-penalty (DPP) algorithm that we propose achieves a time
    average cost that is within some positive constant epsilon of the optimal cost
    with high probability. Further, we provide a condition on the waiting time for
    this result to hold. The condition is shown to be a function of the mixing
    coefficient, the number of samples (w) used to compute an estimate of the
    distribution of the state, and the delay. Unlike the existing work, the method
    used in the paper can be adapted to prove high probability results when the
    state is evolving in a non-i.i.d and non-stationary fashion. Under mild
    conditions, we show that the dependency of the error bound on w is exponential,
    which is a significant improvement compared to the exiting work.

    Sufficiently Myopic Adversaries are Blind

    Bikash Kumar Dey, Sidharth Jaggi, Michael Langberg
    Comments: 18 pages
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this work we consider a communication problem in which a sender, Alice,
    wishes to communicate with a receiver, Bob, over a channel controlled by an
    adversarial jammer, James, who is {em myopic}. Roughly speaking, for
    blocklength $n$, the codeword $X^n$ transmitted by Alice is corrupted by James
    who must base his adversarial decisions (of which locations of $X^n$ to corrupt
    and how to corrupt them) not on the codeword $X^n$ but on $Z^n$, an image of
    $X^n$ through a noisy memoryless channel. More specifically, our communication
    model may be described by two channels. A memoryless channel $p(z|x)$ from
    Alice to James, and an {it Arbitrarily Varying Channel} from Alice to Bob,
    $p(y|x,s)$ governed by a state $X^n$ determined by James. In standard
    adversarial channels the states $S^n$ may depend on the codeword $X^n$, but in
    our setting $S^n$ depends only on James’s view $Z^n$.

    The myopic channel captures a broad range of channels and bridges between the
    standard models of memoryless and adversarial (zero-error) channels. In this
    work we present upper and lower bounds on the capacity of myopic channels. For
    a number of special cases of interest we show that our bounds are tight. We
    extend our results to the setting of {em secure} communication in which we
    require that the transmitted message remain secret from James. For example, we
    show that if (i) James may flip at most a $p$ fraction of the bits communicated
    between Alice and Bob, and (ii) James views $X^n$ through a binary symmetric
    channel with parameter $q$, then once James is “sufficiently myopic” (in this
    case, when $q>p$), then the optimal communication rate is that of an adversary
    who is “blind” (that is, an adversary that does not see $X^n$ at all), which is
    $1-H(p)$ for standard communication, and $H(q)-H(p)$ for secure communication.
    A similar phenomenon exists for our general model of communication.

    Sidon Sets of Fixed Cardinality and Lattice-Packings of Simplices

    Mladen Kovačević, Vincent Y. F. Tan
    Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures
    Subjects: Combinatorics (math.CO); Computational Geometry (cs.CG); Information Theory (cs.IT); Group Theory (math.GR); Number Theory (math.NT)

    A $ B_h $ set (or Sidon set of order $ h $) in an Abelian group $ G $ is any
    subset $ {b_0, b_1, ldots,b_{n}} subset G $ with the property that all the
    sums $ b_{i_1} + cdots + b_{i_h} $ are different up to the order of the
    summands. Let $ phi(h,n) $ denote the order of the smallest Abelian group
    containing a $ B_h $ set of cardinality $ n + 1 $. It is shown that, as $ h o
    infty $ and $ n $ is kept fixed, [ phi(h,n) sim frac{1}{n!
    delta_{L}( riangle^n)} h^n , ] where $ delta_{L}( riangle^n) $ is the
    lattice-packing density of an $ n $-simplex in the Euclidean space. This
    determines the asymptotics exactly in cases where this density is known ($ n
    leq 3 $), and gives an improved upper bound on $ phi(h,n) $ in the remaining
    cases. Covering analogs of Sidon sets are also introduced and their
    characterization in terms of lattice-coverings by simplices is given.

    Hybrid Spectrum Sharing in mmWave Cellular Networks

    Mattia Rebato, Federico Boccardi, Marco Mezzavilla, Sundeep Rangan, Michele Zorzi
    Comments: Submitted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking
    Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    While spectrum at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies is less scarce than at
    traditional frequencies below 6 GHz, still it is not unlimited, in particular
    if we consider the requirements from other services using the same band and the
    need to license mmWave bands to multiple mobile operators. Therefore, an
    efficient spectrum access scheme is critical to harvest the maximum benefit
    from emerging mmWave technologies. In this paper, we introduce a new hybrid
    spectrum access scheme for mmWave networks, where data is aggregated through
    two mmWave carriers with different characteristics. In particular, we consider
    the case of a hybrid spectrum scheme between a mmWave band with exclusive
    access and a mmWave band where spectrum is pooled between multiple operators.
    To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study proposing hybrid spectrum
    access for mmWave networks and providing a quantitative assessment of its
    benefits. Our results show that this approach provides major advantages with
    respect to traditional fully licensed or fully unlicensed spectrum access
    schemes, though further work is needed to achieve a more complete understanding
    of both technical and non technical implications.

    Random access codes and non-local resources

    Anubhav Chaturvedi, Marcin Pawlowski, Karol Horodecki
    Comments: 17 pages, 6 figures
    Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    It is known that a PR-BOX (PR), a non-local resource and $(2
    ightarrow 1)$
    random access code (RAC), a functionality (wherein Alice encodes 2 bits into 1
    bit message and Bob learns one of randomly chosen Alice’s inputs) are
    equivalent under the no-signaling condition. In this work we introduce
    generalizations to PR and $(2
    ightarrow 1)$ RAC and study their
    inter-convertibility. We introduce generalizations based on the number of
    inputs provided to Alice, $B_n$-BOX and $(n
    ightarrow 1)$ RAC. We show that a
    $B_n$-BOX is equivalent to a no-signaling $(n
    ightarrow 1)$ RACBOX (RB).
    Further we introduce a signaling $(n
    ightarrow 1)$ RB which cannot simulate a
    $B_n$-BOX. Finally to quantify the same we provide a resource inequality
    between $(n
    ightarrow 1)$ RB and $B_n$-BOX, and show that it is saturated. As
    an application we prove that one requires atleast $(n-1)$ PRs supplemented with
    a bit of communication to win a $(n
    ightarrow 1)$ RAC. We further introduce
    generalizations based on the dimension of inputs provided to Alice and the
    message she sends, $B_n^d(+)$-BOX, $B_n^d(-)$-BOX and $(n
    ightarrow 1,d)$ RAC
    ($d>2$). We show that no-signaling condition is not enough to enforce strict
    equivalence in the case of $d>2$. We introduce classes of no-signaling
    $(n
    ightarrow 1,d)$ RB, one which can simulate $B_n^d(+)$-BOX, second which
    can simulate $B_n^d(-)$-BOX and third which cannot simulate either. Finally to
    quantify the same we provide a resource inequality between $(n
    ightarrow 1,d)$
    RB and $B_n^d(+)$-BOX, and show that it is saturated.




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