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    arXiv Paper Daily: Tue, 7 Feb 2017

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2017-02-07 00:00:00
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    Neural and Evolutionary Computing

    Distributed Evolutionary k-way Node Separators

    Peter Sanders, Christian Schulz, Darren Strash, Robert Williger
    Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1509.01190, arXiv:1110.0477
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    Computing high quality node separators in large graphs is necessary for a
    variety of applications, ranging from divide-and-conquer algorithms to VLSI
    design. In this work, we present a novel distributed evolutionary algorithm
    tackling the k-way node separator problem. A key component of our contribution
    includes new k-way local search algorithms based on maximum flows. We combine
    our local search with a multilevel approach to compute an initial population
    for our evolutionary algorithm, and further show how to modify the coarsening
    stage of our multilevel algorithm to create effective combine and mutation
    operations. Lastly, we combine these techniques with a scalable communication
    protocol, producing a system that is able to compute high quality solutions in
    a short amount of time. Our experiments against competing algorithms show that
    our advanced evolutionary algorithm computes the best result on 94% of the
    chosen benchmark instances.


    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Background Subtraction

    Mohammadreza Babaee, Duc Tung Dinh, Gerhard Rigoll
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this work, we present a novel background subtraction system that uses a
    deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to perform the segmentation. With this
    approach, feature engineering and parameter tuning become unnecessary since the
    network parameters can be learned from data by training a single CNN that can
    handle various video scenes. Additionally, we propose a new approach to
    estimate background model from video. For the training of the CNN, we employed
    randomly 5 percent video frames and their ground truth segmentations taken from
    the Change Detection challenge 2014(CDnet 2014). We also utilized
    spatial-median filtering as the post-processing of the network outputs. Our
    method is evaluated with different data-sets, and the network outperforms the
    existing algorithms with respect to the average ranking over different
    evaluation metrics. Furthermore, due to the network architecture, our CNN is
    capable of real time processing.

    View Independent Vehicle Make, Model and Color Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network

    Afshin Dehghan, Syed Zain Masood, Guang Shu, Enrique. G. Ortiz
    Comments: 7 Pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    This paper describes the details of Sighthound’s fully automated vehicle
    make, model and color recognition system. The backbone of our system is a deep
    convolutional neural network that is not only computationally inexpensive, but
    also provides state-of-the-art results on several competitive benchmarks.
    Additionally, our deep network is trained on a large dataset of several million
    images which are labeled through a semi-automated process. Finally we test our
    system on several public datasets as well as our own internal test dataset. Our
    results show that we outperform other methods on all benchmarks by significant
    margins. Our model is available to developers through the Sighthound Cloud API
    at this https URL

    Concurrent Activity Recognition with Multimodal CNN-LSTM Structure

    Xinyu Li, Yanyi Zhang, Jianyu Zhang, Shuhong Chen, Ivan Marsic, Richard A. Farneth, Randall S. Burd
    Comments: 14 pages, 12 figures, under review
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We introduce a system that recognizes concurrent activities from real-world
    data captured by multiple sensors of different types. The recognition is
    achieved in two steps. First, we extract spatial and temporal features from the
    multimodal data. We feed each datatype into a convolutional neural network that
    extracts spatial features, followed by a long-short term memory network that
    extracts temporal information in the sensory data. The extracted features are
    then fused for decision making in the second step. Second, we achieve
    concurrent activity recognition with a single classifier that encodes a binary
    output vector in which elements indicate whether the corresponding activity
    types are currently in progress. We tested our system with three datasets from
    different domains recorded using different sensors and achieved performance
    comparable to existing systems designed specifically for those domains. Our
    system is the first to address the concurrent activity recognition with
    multisensory data using a single model, which is scalable, simple to train and
    easy to deploy.

    Slice-to-volume medical image registration: a survey

    Enzo Ferrante, Nikos Paragios
    Comments: Under evaluation
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    During the last decades, the research community of medical imaging has
    witnessed continuous advances in image registration methods, which pushed the
    limits of the state-of-the-art and enabled the development of novel medical
    procedures. A particular type of image registration problem, known as
    slice-to-volume registration, played a fundamental role in areas like image
    guided surgeries and volumetric image reconstruction. However, to date, and
    despite the extensive literature available on this topic, no survey has been
    written to discuss this challenging problem. This paper introduces the first
    comprehensive survey of the literature about slice-to-volume registration,
    presenting a categorical study of the algorithms according to an ad-hoc
    taxonomy and analyzing advantages and disadvantages of every category. We draw
    some general conclusions from this analysis and present our perspectives on the
    future of the field.

    Textually Customized Video Summaries

    Jinsoo Choi, Tae-Hyun Oh, In So Kweon
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Multimedia (cs.MM)

    The best summary of a long video differs among different people due to its
    highly subjective nature. Even for the same person, the best summary may change
    with time or mood. In this paper, we introduce the task of generating
    customized video summaries through simple text. First, we train a deep
    architecture to effectively learn semantic embeddings of video frames by
    leveraging the abundance of image-caption data via a progressive and residual
    manner. Given a user-specific text description, our algorithm is able to select
    semantically relevant video segments and produce a temporally aligned video
    summary. In order to evaluate our textually customized video summaries, we
    conduct experimental comparison with baseline methods that utilize ground-truth
    information. Despite the challenging baselines, our method still manages to
    show comparable or even exceeding performance. We also show that our method is
    able to generate semantically diverse video summaries by only utilizing the
    learned visual embeddings.

    Challenge of Multi-Camera Tracking

    Yong Wang, Ke Lu
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Multi-camera tracking is quite different from single camera tracking, and it
    faces new technology and system architecture challenges. By analyzing the
    corresponding characteristics and disadvantages of the existing algorithms,
    problems in multi-camera tracking are summarized and some new directions for
    future work are also generalized.

    Designing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Continuous Object Orientation Estimation

    Kota Hara, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Rama Chellappa
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have been proven to be effective
    for various computer vision problems. In this work, we demonstrate its
    effectiveness on a continuous object orientation estimation task, which
    requires prediction of 0 to 360 degrees orientation of the objects. We do so by
    proposing and comparing three continuous orientation prediction approaches
    designed for the DCNNs. The first two approaches work by representing an
    orientation as a point on a unit circle and minimizing either L2 loss or
    angular difference loss. The third method works by first converting the
    continuous orientation estimation task into a set of discrete orientation
    estimation tasks and then converting the discrete orientation outputs back to
    the continuous orientation using a mean-shift algorithm. By evaluating on a
    vehicle orientation estimation task and a pedestrian orientation estimation
    task, we demonstrate that the discretization-based approach not only works
    better than the other two approaches but also achieves state-of-the-art
    performance. We also demonstrate that finding an appropriate feature
    representation is critical to achieve a good performance when adapting a DCNN
    trained for an image recognition task.

    Detailed Surface Geometry and Albedo Recovery from RGB-D Video Under Natural Illumination

    Xinxin Zuo, Sen Wang, Jiangbin Zheng, Ruigang Yang
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    In this paper we present a novel approach for depth map enhancement from an
    RGB-D video sequence. The basic idea is to exploit the shading information in
    the color image. Instead of making assumption about surface albedo or
    controlled object motion and lighting, we use the lighting variations
    introduced by casual object movement. We are effectively calculating
    photometric stereo from a moving object under natural illuminations. The key
    technical challenge is to establish correspondences over the entire image set.
    We therefore develop a lighting insensitive robust pixel matching technique
    that out-performs optical flow method in presence of lighting variations. In
    addition we present an expectation-maximization framework to recover the
    surface normal and albedo simultaneously, without any regularization term. We
    have validated our method on both synthetic and real datasets to show its
    superior performance on both surface details recovery and intrinsic
    decomposition.

    Attentional Network for Visual Object Detection

    Kota Hara, Ming-Yu Liu, Oncel Tuzel, Amir-massoud Farahmand
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We propose augmenting deep neural networks with an attention mechanism for
    the visual object detection task. As perceiving a scene, humans have the
    capability of multiple fixation points, each attended to scene content at
    different locations and scales. However, such a mechanism is missing in the
    current state-of-the-art visual object detection methods. Inspired by the human
    vision system, we propose a novel deep network architecture that imitates this
    attention mechanism. As detecting objects in an image, the network adaptively
    places a sequence of glimpses of different shapes at different locations in the
    image. Evidences of the presence of an object and its location are extracted
    from these glimpses, which are then fused for estimating the object class and
    bounding box coordinates. Due to lacks of ground truth annotations of the
    visual attention mechanism, we train our network using a reinforcement learning
    algorithm with policy gradients. Experiment results on standard object
    detection benchmarks show that the proposed network consistently outperforms
    the baseline networks that does not model the attention mechanism.

    Printed Arabic Text Recognition using Linear and Nonlinear Regression

    Ashraf A. Shahin
    Comments: this http URL
    Journal-ref: International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and
    Applications(IJACSA), 8(1), 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Arabic language is one of the most popular languages in the world. Hundreds
    of millions of people in many countries around the world speak Arabic as their
    native speaking. However, due to complexity of Arabic language, recognition of
    printed and handwritten Arabic text remained untouched for a very long time
    compared with English and Chinese. Although, in the last few years, significant
    number of researches has been done in recognizing printed and handwritten
    Arabic text, it stills an open research field due to cursive nature of Arabic
    script. This paper proposes automatic printed Arabic text recognition technique
    based on linear and ellipse regression techniques. After collecting all
    possible forms of each character, unique code is generated to represent each
    character form. Each code contains a sequence of lines and ellipses. To
    recognize fonts, a unique list of codes is identified to be used as a
    fingerprint of font. The proposed technique has been evaluated using over 14000
    different Arabic words with different fonts and experimental results show that
    average recognition rate of the proposed technique is 86%.

    Robust Features Face

    Nadav Israel, Lior Wolf, Ran Barzilay, Gal Shoval
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Automatic recognition of facial gestures is becoming increasingly important
    as real world AI agents become a reality. In this paper, we present an
    automated system that recognizes facial gestures by capturing local changes and
    encoding the motion into a histogram of frequencies. We evaluate the proposed
    method by demonstrating its effectiveness on spontaneous face action
    benchmarks: the FEEDTUM dataset, the Pain dataset and the HMDB51 dataset. The
    results show that, compared to known methods, the new encoding methods
    significantly improve the recognition accuracy and the robustness of analysis
    for a variety of applications.

    Relative Camera Pose Estimation Using Convolutional Neural Networks

    Iaroslav Melekhov (1), Juho Kannala (1), Esa Rahtu (2) ((1) Aalto University, (2) University of Oulu)
    Comments: Submitted to Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis (SCIA) 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We present a method for estimating relative camera pose between a pair of
    images. The goal is to propose accurate estimations the relative orientation
    vector representing by rotation matrix and translation vector of two cameras
    capturing the same scene. Our approach is based on convolutional neural
    networks and directly estimates camera motion between two RGB images by solving
    regression problem. The proposed network is trained in an end-to-end manner
    utilizing transfer learning from large scale classification data. The method is
    compared to a classical local feature based pipeline (SURF, ORB) of relative
    pose estimation and we demonstrate the cases where our deep model outperforms
    the traditional approach significantly. Finally, we evaluated experiments with
    applying Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) layer which can produce a fixed-size
    representation regardless the size of the input image. The results confirm that
    SPP further improves the performance of the proposed approach.

    Entropy-guided Retinex anisotropic diffusion algorithm based on partial differential equations (PDE) for illumination correction

    U. A. Nnolim
    Comments: 31 pages, 17 figures
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This report describes the experimental results obtained using a proposed
    variational Retinex algorithm for controlled illumination correction. Two
    colour restoration and enhancement schemes of the algorithm are presented for
    drastically improved results. The algorithm modifies the reflectance image
    using global and local contrast enhancement approaches and gradually removes
    the residual illumination to yield highly pleasing results. The proposed
    algorithms are optimized by way of simultaneous perceptual quality metric (PQM)
    stabilization and entropy maximization for fully automated processing solving
    the problem of determination of stopping time. The usage of the HSI or HSV
    colour space ensures a unique solution to the optimization problem unlike in
    the RGB space where there is none (forcing manual selection of number of
    iteration. The proposed approach preserves and enhances details in both bright
    and dark regions of underexposed images in addition to eliminating the colour
    distortion, over-exposure in bright image regions, halo effect and grey-world
    violations observed in Retinex-based approaches. Extensive experiments indicate
    consistent performance as the proposed approach exploits and augments the
    advantages of PDE-based formulation, performing illumination correction, colour
    enhancement correction and restoration, contrast enhancement and noise
    suppression. Comparisons shows that the proposed approach surpasses most of the
    other conventional algorithms found in the literature.

    An Experimental Study of Deep Convolutional Features For Iris Recognition

    Shervin Minaee, Amirali Abdolrashidi, Yao Wang
    Comments: IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium, 2016
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Iris is one of the popular biometrics that is widely used for identity
    authentication. Different features have been used to perform iris recognition
    in the past. Most of them are based on hand-crafted features designed by
    biometrics experts. Due to tremendous success of deep learning in computer
    vision problems, there has been a lot of interest in applying features learned
    by convolutional neural networks on general image recognition to other tasks
    such as segmentation, face recognition, and object detection. In this paper, we
    have investigated the application of deep features extracted from VGG-Net for
    iris recognition. The proposed scheme has been tested on two well-known iris
    databases, and has shown promising results with the best accuracy rate of
    99.4\%, which outperforms the previous best result.

    Fast and easy blind deblurring using an inverse filter and PROBE

    Naftali Zon, Rana Hanocka, Nahum Kiryati
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    PROBE (Progressive Removal of Blur Residual) is a recursive framework for
    blind deblurring. Using the elementary modified inverse filter at its core,
    PROBE’s experimental performance meets or exceeds the state of the art, both
    visually and quantitatively. Remarkably, PROBE lends itself to analysis that
    reveals its convergence properties. PROBE is motivated by recent ideas on
    progressive blind deblurring, but breaks away from previous research by its
    simplicity, speed, performance and potential for analysis. PROBE is neither a
    functional minimization approach, nor an open-loop sequential method (blur
    kernel estimation followed by non-blind deblurring). PROBE is a feedback
    scheme, deriving its unique strength from the closed-loop architecture rather
    than from the accuracy of its algorithmic components.

    Gender-From-Iris or Gender-From-Mascara?

    Andrey Kuehlkamp, Benedict Becker, Kevin Bowyer
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Predicting a person’s gender based on the iris texture has been explored by
    several researchers. This paper considers several dimensions of experimental
    work on this problem, including person-disjoint train and test, and the effect
    of cosmetics on eyelash occlusion and imperfect segmentation. We also consider
    the use of multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural networks as
    classifiers, comparing the use of data-driven and hand-crafted features. Our
    results suggest that the gender-from-iris problem is more difficult than has so
    far been appreciated. Estimating accuracy using a mean of N person-disjoint
    train and test partitions, and considering the effect of makeup – a combination
    of experimental conditions not present in any previous work – we find a much
    weaker ability to predict gender-from-iris texture than has been suggested in
    previous work.

    Using Complex Wavelet Transform and Bilateral Filtering for Image Denoising

    Seyede Mahya Hazavei, Hamid Reza Shahdoosti
    Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, conference
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    The bilateral filter is a useful nonlinear filter which without smoothing
    edges, it does spatial averaging. In the literature, the effectiveness of this
    method for image denoising is shown. In this paper, an extension of this method
    is proposed which is based on complex wavelet transform. In fact, the bilateral
    filtering is applied to the low-frequency (approximation) subbands of the
    decomposed image using complex wavelet transform, while the thresholding
    approach is applied to the high frequency subbands. Using the bilateral filter
    in the complex wavelet domain forms a new image denoising framework.
    Experimental results for real data are provided, by which one can see the
    effectiveness of the proposed method in eliminating noise.

    Towards Unsupervised Weed Scouting for Agricultural Robotics

    David Hall, Feras Dayoub, Jason Kulk, Chris McCool
    Comments: to appear in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Weed scouting is an important part of modern integrated weed management but
    can be time consuming and sparse when performed manually. Automated weed
    scouting and weed destruction has typically been performed using classification
    systems able to classify a set group of species known a priori. This greatly
    limits deployability as classification systems must be retrained for any field
    with a different set of weed species present within them. In order to overcome
    this limitation, this paper works towards developing a clustering approach to
    weed scouting which can be utilized in any field without the need for prior
    species knowledge. We demonstrate our system using challenging data collected
    in the field from an agricultural robotics platform. We show that considerable
    improvements can be made by (i) learning low-dimensional (bottleneck) features
    using a deep convolutional neural network to represent plants in general and
    (ii) tying views of the same area (plant) together. Deploying this algorithm on
    in-field data collected by AgBotII, we are able to successfully cluster cotton
    plants from grasses without prior knowledge or training for the specific plants
    in the field.

    Wide-Residual-Inception Networks for Real-time Object Detection

    Youngwan Lee, Huien Kim, Eunsoo Park, Xuenan Cui, Hakil Kim
    Comments: 8 pages, 9 figures
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Since convolutional neural network(CNN)models emerged,several tasks in
    computer vision have actively deployed CNN models for feature extraction.
    However,the conventional CNN models have a high computational cost and require
    high memory capacity, which is impractical and unaffordable for commercial
    applications such as real-time on-road object detection on embedded boards or
    mobile platforms. To tackle this limitation of CNN models, this paper proposes
    a wide-residual-inception (WR-Inception) network, which constructs the
    architecture based on a residual inception unit that captures objects of
    various sizes on the same feature map, as well as shallower and wider layers,
    compared to state-of-the-art networks like ResNet. To verify the proposed
    networks, this paper conducted two experiments; one is a classification task on
    CIFAR-10/100 and the other is an on-road object detection task using a
    Single-Shot Multi-box Detector(SSD) on the KITTI dataset.

    Large-scale Image Geo-Localization Using Dominant Sets

    Eyasu Zemene, Yonatan Tariku, Haroon Idrees, Andrea Prati, Marcello Pelillo, Mubarak Shah
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper presents a new approach for the challenging problem of
    geo-locating an image using image matching in a structured database of
    city-wide reference images with known GPS coordinates. We cast the
    geo-localization as a clustering problem on local image features. Akin to
    existing approaches on the problem, our framework builds on low-level features
    which allow partial matching between images. For each local feature in the
    query image, we find its approximate nearest neighbors in the reference set.
    Next, we cluster the features from reference images using Dominant Set
    clustering, which affords several advantages over existing approaches. First,
    it permits variable number of nodes in the cluster which we use to dynamically
    select the number of nearest neighbors (typically coming from multiple
    reference images) for each query feature based on its discrimination value.
    Second, as we also quantify in our experiments, this approach is several orders
    of magnitude faster than existing approaches. Thus, we obtain multiple clusters
    (different local maximizers) and obtain a robust final solution to the problem
    using multiple weak solutions through constrained Dominant Set clustering on
    global image features, where we enforce the constraint that the query image
    must be included in the cluster. This second level of clustering also bypasses
    heuristic approaches to voting and selecting the reference image that matches
    to the query. We evaluated the proposed framework on an existing dataset of
    102k street view images as well as a new dataset of 300k images, and show that
    it outperforms the state-of-the-art by 20% and 7%, respectively, on the two
    datasets.

    An Analysis of 1-to-First Matching in Iris Recognition

    Andrey Kuehlkamp, Kevin W. Bowyer
    Comments: 2016 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Iris recognition systems are a mature technology that is widely used
    throughout the world. In identification (as opposed to verification) mode, an
    iris to be recognized is typically matched against all N enrolled irises. This
    is the classic “1-to-N search”. In order to improve the speed of large-scale
    identification, a modified “1-to-First” search has been used in some
    operational systems. A 1-to-First search terminates with the first
    below-threshold match that is found, whereas a 1-to-N search always finds the
    best match across all enrollments. We know of no previous studies that evaluate
    how the accuracy of 1-to-First search differs from that of 1-to-N search. Using
    a dataset of over 50,000 iris images from 2,800 different irises, we perform
    experiments to evaluate the relative accuracy of 1-to-First and 1-to-N search.
    We evaluate how the accuracy difference changes with larger numbers of enrolled
    irises, and with larger ranges of rotational difference allowed between iris
    images. We find that False Match error rate for 1-to-First is higher than for
    1-to-N, and the the difference grows with larger number of enrolled irises and
    with larger range of rotation.

    Latent Hinge-Minimax Risk Minimization for Inference from a Small Number of Training Samples

    Dolev Raviv, Margarita Osadchy
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Deep Learning (DL) methods show very good performance when trained on large,
    balanced data sets. However, many practical problems involve imbalanced data
    sets, or/and classes with a small number of training samples. The performance
    of DL methods as well as more traditional classifiers drops significantly in
    such settings. Most of the existing solutions for imbalanced problems focus on
    customizing the data for training. A more principled solution is to use mixed
    Hinge-Minimax risk [19] specifically designed to solve binary problems with
    imbalanced training sets. Here we propose a Latent Hinge Minimax (LHM) risk and
    a training algorithm that generalizes this paradigm to an ensemble of
    hyperplanes that can form arbitrary complex, piecewise linear boundaries. To
    extract good features, we combine LHM model with CNN via transfer learning. To
    solve multi-class problem we map pre-trained category-specific LHM classifiers
    to a multi-class neural network and adjust the weights with very fast tuning.
    LHM classifier enables the use of unlabeled data in its training and the
    mapping allows for multi-class inference, resulting in a classifier that
    performs better than alternatives when trained on a small number of training
    samples.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Exploring the bidimensional space: A dynamic logic point of view

    Philippe Balbiani, David Fernández-Duque, Emiliano Lorini
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    We present a family of logics for reasoning about agents’ positions and
    motion in the plane which have several potential applications in the area of
    multi-agent systems (MAS), such as multi-agent planning and robotics. The most
    general logic includes (i) atomic formulas for representing the truth of a
    given fact or the presence of a given agent at a certain position of the plane,
    (ii) atomic programs corresponding to the four basic orientations in the plane
    (up, down, left, right) as well as the four program constructs of propositional
    dynamic logic (sequential composition, nondeterministic composition, iteration
    and test). As this logic is not computably enumerable, we study some
    interesting decidable and axiomatizable fragments of it. We also present a
    decidable extension of the iteration-free fragment of the logic by special
    programs representing motion of agents in the plane.

    Survey of modern Fault Diagnosis methods in networks

    Zi Jian Yang, Yong Wang
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    With the advent of modern computer networks, fault diagnosis has been a focus
    of research activity. This paper reviews the history of fault diagnosis in
    networks and discusses the main methods in information gathering section,
    information analyzing section and diagnosing and revolving section of fault
    diagnosis in networks. Emphasis will be placed upon knowledge-based methods
    with discussing the advantages and shortcomings of the different methods. The
    survey is concluded with a description of some open problems.

    Manyopt: An Extensible Tool for Mixed, Non-Linear Optimization Through SMT Solving

    Andrea Callia D'Iddio, Michael Huth
    Comments: 17 pages, 3 figures, link to open research data and code available
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Mathematical Software (cs.MS)

    Optimization of Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) supports
    important decisions in applications such as Chemical Process Engineering. But
    current solvers have limited ability for deductive reasoning or the use of
    domain-specific theories, and the management of integrality constraints does
    not yet exploit automated reasoning tools such as SMT solvers. This seems to
    limit both scalability and reach of such tools in practice. We therefore
    present a tool, ManyOpt, for MINLP optimization that enables experimentation
    with reduction techniques which transform a MINLP problem to feasibility
    checking realized by an SMT solver. ManyOpt is similar to the SAT solver
    ManySAT in that it runs a specified number of such reduction techniques in
    parallel to get the strongest result on a given MINLP problem. The tool is
    implemented in layers, which we may see as features and where reduction
    techniques are feature vectors. Some of these features are inspired by known
    MINLP techniques whereas others are novel and specific to SMT. Our experimental
    results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the benefits of this approach. The
    tool supports a variety of SMT solvers and is easily extensible with new
    features, courtesy of its layered structure. For example, logical formulas for
    deductive reasoning are easily added to constrain further the optimization of a
    MINLP problem of interest.

    Traffic Lights with Auction-Based Controllers: Algorithms and Real-World Data

    Shumeet Baluja, Michele Covell, Rahul Sukthankar
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Systems and Control (cs.SY)

    Real-time optimization of traffic flow addresses important practical
    problems: reducing a driver’s wasted time, improving city-wide efficiency,
    reducing gas emissions and improving air quality. Much of the current research
    in traffic-light optimization relies on extending the capabilities of traffic
    lights to either communicate with each other or communicate with vehicles.
    However, before such capabilities become ubiquitous, opportunities exist to
    improve traffic lights by being more responsive to current traffic situations
    within the current, already deployed, infrastructure. In this paper, we
    introduce a traffic light controller that employs bidding within micro-auctions
    to efficiently incorporate traffic sensor information; no other outside sources
    of information are assumed. We train and test traffic light controllers on
    large-scale data collected from opted-in Android cell-phone users over a period
    of several months in Mountain View, California and the River North neighborhood
    of Chicago, Illinois. The learned auction-based controllers surpass (in both
    the relevant metrics of road-capacity and mean travel time) the currently
    deployed lights, optimized static-program lights, and longer-term planning
    approaches, in both cities, measured using real user driving data.

    Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks

    Guy Katz, Clark Barrett, David Dill, Kyle Julian, Mykel Kochenderfer
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    Deep neural networks have emerged as a widely used and effective means for
    tackling complex, real-world problems. However, a major obstacle in applying
    them to safety-critical systems is the great difficulty in providing formal
    guarantees about their behavior. We present a novel, scalable, and efficient
    technique for verifying properties of deep neural networks (or providing
    counter-examples). The technique is based on the simplex method, extended to
    handle the non-convex Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function, which
    is a crucial ingredient in many modern neural networks. The verification
    procedure tackles neural networks as a whole, without making any simplifying
    assumptions. We evaluated our technique on a prototype deep neural network
    implementation of the next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System for
    unmanned aircraft (ACAS Xu). Results show that our technique can successfully
    prove properties of networks that are an order of magnitude larger than the
    largest networks verified using existing methods.

    View Independent Vehicle Make, Model and Color Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network

    Afshin Dehghan, Syed Zain Masood, Guang Shu, Enrique. G. Ortiz
    Comments: 7 Pages
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    This paper describes the details of Sighthound’s fully automated vehicle
    make, model and color recognition system. The backbone of our system is a deep
    convolutional neural network that is not only computationally inexpensive, but
    also provides state-of-the-art results on several competitive benchmarks.
    Additionally, our deep network is trained on a large dataset of several million
    images which are labeled through a semi-automated process. Finally we test our
    system on several public datasets as well as our own internal test dataset. Our
    results show that we outperform other methods on all benchmarks by significant
    margins. Our model is available to developers through the Sighthound Cloud API
    at this https URL

    Cluster-based Kriging Approximation Algorithms for Complexity Reduction

    Bas van Stein, Hao Wang, Wojtek Kowalczyk, Michael Emmerich, Thomas Bäck
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine for review
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Kriging or Gaussian Process Regression is applied in many fields as a
    non-linear regression model as well as a surrogate model in the field of
    evolutionary computation. However, the computational and space complexity of
    Kriging, that is cubic and quadratic in the number of data points respectively,
    becomes a major bottleneck with more and more data available nowadays. In this
    paper, we propose a general methodology for the complexity reduction, called
    cluster Kriging, where the whole data set is partitioned into smaller clusters
    and multiple Kriging models are built on top of them. In addition, four Kriging
    approximation algorithms are proposed as candidate algorithms within the new
    framework. Each of these algorithms can be applied to much larger data sets
    while maintaining the advantages and power of Kriging. The proposed algorithms
    are explained in detail and compared empirically against a broad set of
    existing state-of-the-art Kriging approximation methods on a well-defined
    testing framework. According to the empirical study, the proposed algorithms
    consistently outperform the existing algorithms. Moreover, some practical
    suggestions are provided for using the proposed algorithms.

    A Theoretical Analysis of First Heuristics of Crowdsourced Entity Resolution

    Arya Mazumdar, Barna Saha
    Comments: Appears in AAAI-17
    Subjects: Databases (cs.DB); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Entity resolution (ER) is the task of identifying all records in a database
    that refer to the same underlying entity, and are therefore duplicates of each
    other. Due to inherent ambiguity of data representation and poor data quality,
    ER is a challenging task for any automated process. As a remedy, human-powered
    ER via crowdsourcing has become popular in recent years. Using crowd to answer
    queries is costly and time consuming. Furthermore, crowd-answers can often be
    faulty. Therefore, crowd-based ER methods aim to minimize human participation
    without sacrificing the quality and use a computer generated similarity matrix
    actively. While, some of these methods perform well in practice, no theoretical
    analysis exists for them, and further their worst case performances do not
    reflect the experimental findings. This creates a disparity in the
    understanding of the popular heuristics for this problem. In this paper, we
    make the first attempt to close this gap. We provide a thorough analysis of the
    prominent heuristic algorithms for crowd-based ER. We justify experimental
    observations with our analysis and information theoretic lower bounds.


    Information Retrieval

    Search Intelligence: Deep Learning For Dominant Category Prediction

    Zeeshan Khawar Malik, Mo Kobrosli, Peter Maas
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Deep Neural Networks, and specifically fully-connected convolutional neural
    networks are achieving remarkable results across a wide variety of domains.
    They have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance when applied to
    problems such as speech recognition, image classification, natural language
    processing and bioinformatics. Most of these deep learning models when applied
    to classification employ the softmax activation function for prediction and aim
    to minimize cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we have proposed a supervised
    model for dominant category prediction to improve search recall across all eBay
    classifieds platforms. The dominant category label for each query in the last
    90 days is first calculated by summing the total number of collaborative clicks
    among all categories. The category having the highest number of collaborative
    clicks for the given query will be considered its dominant category. Second,
    each query is transformed to a numeric vector by mapping each unique word in
    the query document to a unique integer value; all padded to equal length based
    on the maximum document length within the pre-defined vocabulary size. A
    fully-connected deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is then applied for
    classification. The proposed model achieves very high classification accuracy
    compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.

    A dynamic multi-level collaborative filtering method for improved recommendations

    Nikolaos Polatidis, Christos K. Georgiadis
    Journal-ref: Computer Standards & Interfaces, 51, 14-21 (2017)
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    One of the most used approaches for providing recommendations in various
    online environments such as e-commerce is collaborative filtering. Although,
    this is a simple method for recommending items or services, accuracy and
    quality problems still exist. Thus, we propose a dynamic multi-level
    collaborative filtering method that improves the quality of the
    recommendations. The proposed method is based on positive and negative
    adjustments and can be used in different domains that utilize collaborative
    filtering to increase the quality of the user experience. Furthermore, the
    effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by providing an extensive
    experimental evaluation based on three real datasets and by comparisons to
    alternative methods.

    Document Visualization using Topic Clouds

    Shaohua Li, Tat-Seng Chua
    Comments: 5 pages, 6 figures
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Traditionally a document is visualized by a word cloud. Recently, distributed
    representation methods for documents have been developed, which map a document
    to a set of topic embeddings. Visualizing such a representation is useful to
    present the semantics of a document in higher granularity; it is also
    challenging, as there are multiple topics, each containing multiple words. We
    propose to visualize a set of topics using Topic Cloud, which is a pie chart
    consisting of topic slices, where each slice contains important words in this
    topic. To make important topics/words visually prominent, the sizes of topic
    slices and word fonts are proportional to their importance in the document. A
    topic cloud can help the user quickly evaluate the quality of derived document
    representations. For NLP practitioners, It can be used to qualitatively compare
    the topic quality of different document representation algorithms, or to
    inspect how model parameters impact the derived representations.

    Leveraging High-Dimensional Side Information for Top-N Recommendation

    Yifan Chen, Xiang Zhao
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Top-(N) recommender systems typically utilize side information to address the
    problem of data sparsity. As nowadays side information is growing towards high
    dimensionality, the performances of existing methods deteriorate in terms of
    both effectiveness and efficiency, which imposes a severe technical challenge.
    In order to take advantage of high-dimensional side information, we propose in
    this paper an embedded feature selection method to facilitate top-(N)
    recommendation. In particular, we propose to learn feature weights of side
    information, where zero-valued features are naturally filtered out. We also
    introduce non-negativity and sparsity to the feature weights, to facilitate
    feature selection and encourage low-rank structure. Two optimization problems
    are accordingly put forward, respectively, where the feature selection is
    tightly or loosely coupled with the learning procedure. Augmented Lagrange
    Multiplier and Alternating Direction Method are applied to efficiently solve
    the problems. Experiment results demonstrate the superior recommendation
    quality of the proposed algorithm to that of the state-of-the-art alternatives.

    On the Applicability of Delicious for Temporal Search on Web Archives

    Helge Holzmann, Wolfgang Nejdl, Avishek Anand
    Comments: SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Italy
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    Web archives are large longitudinal collections that store webpages from the
    past, which might be missing on the current live Web. Consequently, temporal
    search over such collections is essential for finding prominent missing
    webpages and tasks like historical analysis. However, this has been challenging
    due to the lack of popularity information and proper ground truth to evaluate
    temporal retrieval models. In this paper we investigate the applicability of
    external longitudinal resources to identify important and popular websites in
    the past and analyze the social bookmarking service Delicious for this purpose.

    The timestamped bookmarks on Delicious provide explicit cues about popular
    time periods in the past along with relevant descriptors. These are valuable to
    identify important documents in the past for a given temporal query. Focusing
    purely on recall, we analyzed more than 12,000 queries and find that using
    Delicious yields average recall values from 46% up to 100%, when limiting
    ourselves to the best represented queries in the considered dataset. This
    constitutes an attractive and low-overhead approach for quick access into Web
    archives by not dealing with the actual contents.

    Multi-Message Private Information Retrieval: Capacity Results and Near-Optimal Schemes

    Karim Banawan, Sennur Ulukus
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, February 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    We consider the problem of multi-message private information retrieval (MPIR)
    from (N) non-communicating replicated databases. In MPIR, the user is
    interested in retrieving (P) messages out of (M) stored messages without
    leaking the identity of the retrieved messages. The information-theoretic sum
    capacity of MPIR (C_s^P) is the maximum number of desired message symbols that
    can be retrieved privately per downloaded symbol. For the case (P geq
    frac{M}{2}), we determine the exact sum capacity of MPIR as
    (C_s^P=frac{1}{1+frac{M-P}{PN}}). The achievable scheme in this case is based
    on downloading MDS-coded mixtures of all messages. For (P leq frac{M}{2}), we
    develop lower and upper bounds for all (M,P,N). These bounds match if the total
    number of messages (M) is an integer multiple of the number of desired messages
    (P), i.e., (frac{M}{P} in mathbb{N}). In this case,
    (C_s^P=frac{1-frac{1}{N}}{1-(frac{1}{N})^{M/P}}). The achievable scheme in
    this case generalizes the single-message capacity achieving scheme to have
    unbalanced number of stages per round of download. For all the remaining cases,
    the difference between the lower and upper bound is at most (0.0082), which
    occurs for (M=5), (P=2), (N=2). Our results indicate that joint retrieval of
    desired messages is more efficient than successive use of single-message
    retrieval schemes.


    Computation and Language

    DNN adaptation by automatic quality estimation of ASR hypotheses

    Daniele Falavigna, Marco Matassoni, Shahab Jalalvand, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi
    Comments: Computer Speech & Language December 2016
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    In this paper we propose to exploit the automatic Quality Estimation (QE) of
    ASR hypotheses to perform the unsupervised adaptation of a deep neural network
    modeling acoustic probabilities. Our hypothesis is that significant
    improvements can be achieved by: i)automatically transcribing the evaluation
    data we are currently trying to recognise, and ii) selecting from it a subset
    of “good quality” instances based on the word error rate (WER) scores predicted
    by a QE component. To validate this hypothesis, we run several experiments on
    the evaluation data sets released for the CHiME-3 challenge. First, we operate
    in oracle conditions in which manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are
    available, thus allowing us to compute the “true” sentence WER. In this
    scenario, we perform the adaptation with variable amounts of data, which are
    characterised by different levels of quality. Then, we move to realistic
    conditions in which the manual transcriptions of the evaluation data are not
    available. In this case, the adaptation is performed on data selected according
    to the WER scores “predicted” by a QE component. Our results indicate that: i)
    QE predictions allow us to closely approximate the adaptation results obtained
    in oracle conditions, and ii) the overall ASR performance based on the proposed
    QE-driven adaptation method is significantly better than the strong, most
    recent, CHiME-3 baseline.

    Q-WordNet PPV: Simple, Robust and (almost) Unsupervised Generation of Polarity Lexicons for Multiple Languages

    Iñaki San Vicente, Rodrigo Agerri, German Rigau
    Comments: 8 pages plus 2 pages of references
    Journal-ref: Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the
    Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2014), pages 88-97,
    Gothenburg, Sweden, April 26-30 2014
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This paper presents a simple, robust and (almost) unsupervised
    dictionary-based method, qwn-ppv (Q-WordNet as Personalized PageRanking Vector)
    to automatically generate polarity lexicons. We show that qwn-ppv outperforms
    other automatically generated lexicons for the four extrinsic evaluations
    presented here. It also shows very competitive and robust results with respect
    to manually annotated ones. Results suggest that no single lexicon is best for
    every task and dataset and that the intrinsic evaluation of polarity lexicons
    is not a good performance indicator on a Sentiment Analysis task. The qwn-ppv
    method allows to easily create quality polarity lexicons whenever no
    domain-based annotated corpora are available for a given language.

    A Hybrid Approach For Hindi-English Machine Translation

    Omkar Dhariya, Shrikant Malviya, Uma Shanker Tiwary
    Comments: 31st International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-2017)
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    In this paper, an extended combined approach of phrase based statistical
    machine translation (SMT), example based MT (EBMT) and rule based MT (RBMT) is
    proposed to develop a novel hybrid data driven MT system capable of
    outperforming the baseline SMT, EBMT and RBMT systems from which it is derived.
    In short, the proposed hybrid MT process is guided by the rule based MT after
    getting a set of partial candidate translations provided by EBMT and SMT
    subsystems. Previous works have shown that EBMT systems are capable of
    outperforming the phrase-based SMT systems and RBMT approach has the strength
    of generating structurally and morphologically more accurate results. This
    hybrid approach increases the fluency, accuracy and grammatical precision which
    improve the quality of a machine translation system. A comparison of the
    proposed hybrid machine translation (HTM) model with renowned translators i.e.
    Google, BING and Babylonian is also presented which shows that the proposed
    model works better on sentences with ambiguity as well as comprised of idioms
    than others.

    Neural Semantic Parsing over Multiple Knowledge-bases

    Jonathan Herzig, Jonathan Berant
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    A fundamental challenge in developing semantic parsers is the paucity of
    strong supervision in the form of language utterances annotated with logical
    form. In this paper, we propose to exploit structural regularities in language
    in different domains, and train semantic parsers over multiple knowledge-bases
    (KBs), while sharing information across datasets. We find that we can
    substantially improve parsing accuracy by training a single
    sequence-to-sequence model over multiple KBs, when providing an encoding of the
    domain at decoding time. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the
    Overnight dataset (containing eight domains), improves performance over a
    single KB baseline from 75.6% to 79.6%, while obtaining a 7x reduction in the
    number of model parameters.

    Opinion Recommendation using Neural Memory Model

    Zhongqing Wang, Yue Zhang
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We present opinion recommendation, a novel task of jointly predicting a
    custom review with a rating score that a certain user would give to a certain
    product or service, given existing reviews and rating scores to the product or
    service by other users, and the reviews that the user has given to other
    products and services. A characteristic of opinion recommendation is the
    reliance of multiple data sources for multi-task joint learning, which is the
    strength of neural models. We use a single neural network to model users and
    products, capturing their correlation and generating customised product
    representations using a deep memory network, from which customised ratings and
    reviews are constructed jointly. Results show that our opinion recommendation
    system gives ratings that are closer to real user ratings on Yelp.com data
    compared with Yelp’s own ratings, and our methods give better results compared
    to several pipelines baselines using state-of-the-art sentiment rating and
    summarization systems.

    Prepositions in Context

    Hongyu Gong, Jiaqi Mu, Suma Bhat, Pramod Viswanath
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Prepositions are highly polysemous, and their variegated senses encode
    significant semantic information. In this paper we match each preposition’s
    complement and attachment and their interplay crucially to the geometry of the
    word vectors to the left and right of the preposition. Extracting such features
    from the vast number of instances of each preposition and clustering them makes
    for an efficient preposition sense disambigution (PSD) algorithm, which is
    comparable to and better than state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets. Our
    reliance on no external linguistic resource allows us to scale the PSD
    algorithm to a large WikiCorpus and learn sense-specific preposition
    representations — which we show to encode semantic relations and paraphrasing
    of verb particle compounds, via simple vector operations.

    All-but-the-Top: Simple and Effective Postprocessing for Word Representations

    Jiaqi Mu, Suma Bhat, Pramod Viswanath
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Real-valued word representations have transformed NLP applications, popular
    examples are word2vec and GloVe, recognized for their ability to capture
    linguistic regularities. In this paper, we demonstrate a very simple, and yet
    counter-intuitive, postprocessing technique — eliminate the common mean vector
    and a few top dominating directions from the word vectors — that renders
    off-the-shelf representations even stronger. The postprocessing is empirically
    validated on a variety of lexical-level intrinsic tasks (word similarity,
    concept categorization, word analogy) and sentence-level extrinsic tasks
    (semantic textual similarity) on multiple datasets and with a variety of
    representation methods and hyperparameter choices in multiple languages, in
    each case, the processed representations are consistently better than the
    original ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate quantitatively in downstream
    applications that neural network architectures “automatically learn” the
    postprocessing operation.

    An Empirical Evaluation of Zero Resource Acoustic Unit Discovery

    Chunxi Liu, Jinyi Yang, Ming Sun, Santosh Kesiraju, Alena Rott, Lucas Ondel, Pegah Ghahremani, Najim Dehak, Lukas Burget, Sanjeev Khudanpur
    Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure; Accepted for publication at ICASSP 2017
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Acoustic unit discovery (AUD) is a process of automatically identifying a
    categorical acoustic unit inventory from speech and producing corresponding
    acoustic unit tokenizations. AUD provides an important avenue for unsupervised
    acoustic model training in a zero resource setting where expert-provided
    linguistic knowledge and transcribed speech are unavailable. Therefore, to
    further facilitate zero-resource AUD process, in this paper, we demonstrate
    acoustic feature representations can be significantly improved by (i)
    performing linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in an unsupervised self-trained
    fashion, and (ii) leveraging resources of other languages through building a
    multilingual bottleneck (BN) feature extractor to give effective cross-lingual
    generalization. Moreover, we perform comprehensive evaluations of AUD efficacy
    on multiple downstream speech applications, and their correlated performance
    suggests that AUD evaluations are feasible using different alternative language
    resources when only a subset of these evaluation resources can be available in
    typical zero resource applications.

    Doubly-Attentive Decoder for Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation

    Iacer Calixto, Qun Liu, Nick Campbell
    Comments: 8 pages (11 including references), 2 figures
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We introduce a Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation model in which a
    doubly-attentive decoder naturally incorporates spatial visual features
    obtained using pre-trained convolutional neural networks, bridging the gap
    between image description and translation. Our decoder learns to attend to
    source-language words and parts of an image independently by means of two
    separate attention mechanisms as it generates words in the target language. We
    find that our model can efficiently exploit not just back-translated in-domain
    multi-modal data but also large general-domain text-only MT corpora. We also
    report state-of-the-art results on the Multi30k data set.

    Named Entity Evolution Recognition on the Blogosphere

    Helge Holzmann, Nina Tahmasebi, Thomas Risse
    Comments: IJDL 2015
    Journal-ref: International Journal on Digital Libraries 2015, Volume 15, Issue
    2, pp 209-235
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Digital Libraries (cs.DL)

    Advancements in technology and culture lead to changes in our language. These
    changes create a gap between the language known by users and the language
    stored in digital archives. It affects user’s possibility to firstly find
    content and secondly interpret that content. In previous work we introduced our
    approach for Named Entity Evolution Recognition~(NEER) in newspaper
    collections. Lately, increasing efforts in Web preservation lead to increased
    availability of Web archives covering longer time spans. However, language on
    the Web is more dynamic than in traditional media and many of the basic
    assumptions from the newspaper domain do not hold for Web data. In this paper
    we discuss the limitations of existing methodology for NEER. We approach these
    by adapting an existing NEER method to work on noisy data like the Web and the
    Blogosphere in particular. We develop novel filters that reduce the noise and
    make use of Semantic Web resources to obtain more information about terms. Our
    evaluation shows the potentials of the proposed approach.

    Extraction of Evolution Descriptions from the Web

    Helge Holzmann, Thomas Risse
    Comments: Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2014, London, UK
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Digital Libraries (cs.DL)

    The evolution of named entities affects exploration and retrieval tasks in
    digital libraries. An information retrieval system that is aware of name
    changes can actively support users in finding former occurrences of evolved
    entities. However, current structured knowledge bases, such as DBpedia or
    Freebase, do not provide enough information about evolutions, even though the
    data is available on their resources, like Wikipedia. Our emph{Evolution Base}
    prototype will demonstrate how excerpts describing name evolutions can be
    identified on these websites with a promising precision. The descriptions are
    classified by means of models that we trained based on a recent analysis of
    named entity evolutions on Wikipedia.

    Named Entity Evolution Analysis on Wikipedia

    Helge Holzmann, Thomas Risse
    Comments: WebSci 2014, Bloomington, IN, USA
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Digital Libraries (cs.DL)

    Accessing Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal
    characteristics. Additional knowledge is needed to find and understand older
    texts. Especially entities mentioned in texts are subject to change. Most
    severe in terms of information retrieval are name changes. In order to find
    entities that have changed their name over time, search engines need to be
    aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem by analyzing Wikipedia in terms
    of entity evolutions mentioned in articles. We present statistical data on
    excerpts covering name changes, which will be used to discover similar text
    passages and extract evolution knowledge in future work.

    Insights into Entity Name Evolution on Wikipedia

    Helge Holzmann, Thomas Risse
    Comments: WISE 2014, Thessaloniki, Greece
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Digital Libraries (cs.DL)

    Working with Web archives raises a number of issues caused by their temporal
    characteristics. Depending on the age of the content, additional knowledge
    might be needed to find and understand older texts. Especially facts about
    entities are subject to change. Most severe in terms of information retrieval
    are name changes. In order to find entities that have changed their name over
    time, search engines need to be aware of this evolution. We tackle this problem
    by analyzing Wikipedia in terms of entity evolutions mentioned in articles
    regardless the structural elements. We gathered statistics and automatically
    extracted minimum excerpts covering name changes by incorporating lists
    dedicated to that subject. In future work, these excerpts are going to be used
    to discover patterns and detect changes in other sources. In this work we
    investigate whether or not Wikipedia is a suitable source for extracting the
    required knowledge.

    Syntax-aware Neural Machine Translation Using CCG

    Maria Nadejde, Siva Reddy, Rico Sennrich, Tomasz Dwojak, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Philipp Koehn, Alexandra Birch
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Neural machine translation (NMT) models are able to partially learn syntactic
    information from sequential lexical information. Still, some complex syntactic
    phenomena such as prepositional phrase attachment are poorly modeled. This work
    aims to answer two questions: 1) Does explicitly modeling source or target
    language syntax help NMT? 2) Is tight integration of words and syntax better
    than multitask training? We introduce syntactic information in the form of CCG
    supertags either in the source as an extra feature in the embedding, or in the
    target, by interleaving the target supertags with the word sequence. Our
    results on WMT data show that explicitly modeling syntax improves machine
    translation quality for English-German, a high-resource pair, and for
    English-Romanian, a low-resource pair and also several syntactic phenomena
    including prepositional phrase attachment. Furthermore, a tight coupling of
    words and syntax improves translation quality more than multitask training.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    Transplantation of Data Mining Algorithms to Cloud Computing Platform when Dealing Big Data

    Yong Wang, Ya Wei Zhao
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    This paper made a short review of Cloud Computing and Big Data, and discussed
    the portability of general data mining algorithms to Cloud Computing platform.
    It revealed the Cloud Computing platform based on Map-Reduce cannot solve all
    the Big Data and data mining problems. Transplanting the general data mining
    algorithms to the real-time Cloud Computing platform will be one of the
    research focuses in Cloud Computing and Big Data.

    Enhancing Elasticity of SaaS Applications using Queuing Theory

    Ashraf A. Shahin
    Comments: this http URL
    Journal-ref: International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and
    Applications(IJACSA), 8(1), 2017
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Elasticity is one of key features of cloud computing. Elasticity allows
    Software as a Service (SaaS) applications’ provider to reduce cost of running
    applications. In large SaaS applications that are developed using
    service-oriented architecture model, each service is deployed in a separated
    virtual machine and may use one or more services to complete its task.
    Although, scaling service independently from its required services propagates
    scaling problem to other services, most of current elasticity approaches do not
    consider functional dependencies between services, which increases the
    probability of violating service level agreement. In this paper, architecture
    of SaaS application is modeled as multi-class M/M/m processor sharing queuing
    model with deadline to take into account functional dependencies between
    services during estimating required scaling resources. Experimental results
    show effectiveness of the proposed model in estimating required resources
    during scaling virtual resources.

    A Tabu Search based clustering algorithm and its parallel implementation on Spark

    Yinhao Lu, Buyang Cao, Fred Glover
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)

    The well-known K-means clustering algorithm has been employed widely in
    different application domains ranging from data analytics to logistics
    applications. However, the K-means algorithm can be affected by factors such as
    the initial choice of centroids and can readily become trapped in a local
    optimum. In this paper, we propose an improved K-means clustering algorithm
    that is augmented by a Tabu Search strategy, and which is better adapted to
    meet the needs of big data applications. Our design is further enhanced to take
    advantage of parallel processing based on the Spark framework. Computational
    experiments demonstrate the superiority of our Tabu Search based clustering
    algorithm over a widely used version of the K-means approach embodied in Spark
    MLlib, comparing the algorithms in terms of scalability, accuracy, and
    effectiveness.

    Distributed Evolutionary k-way Node Separators

    Peter Sanders, Christian Schulz, Darren Strash, Robert Williger
    Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1509.01190, arXiv:1110.0477
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    Computing high quality node separators in large graphs is necessary for a
    variety of applications, ranging from divide-and-conquer algorithms to VLSI
    design. In this work, we present a novel distributed evolutionary algorithm
    tackling the k-way node separator problem. A key component of our contribution
    includes new k-way local search algorithms based on maximum flows. We combine
    our local search with a multilevel approach to compute an initial population
    for our evolutionary algorithm, and further show how to modify the coarsening
    stage of our multilevel algorithm to create effective combine and mutation
    operations. Lastly, we combine these techniques with a scalable communication
    protocol, producing a system that is able to compute high quality solutions in
    a short amount of time. Our experiments against competing algorithms show that
    our advanced evolutionary algorithm computes the best result on 94% of the
    chosen benchmark instances.


    Learning

    Calibrating Energy-based Generative Adversarial Networks

    Zihang Dai, Amjad Almahairi, Philip Bachman, Eduard Hovy, Aaron Courville
    Comments: Accepted into ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    In this paper, we propose to equip Generative Adversarial Networks with the
    ability to produce direct energy estimates for samples.Specifically, we propose
    a flexible adversarial training framework, and prove this framework not only
    ensures the generator converges to the true data distribution, but also enables
    the discriminator to retain the density information at the global optimal. We
    derive the analytic form of the induced solution, and analyze the properties.
    In order to make the proposed framework trainable in practice, we introduce two
    effective approximation techniques. Empirically, the experiment results closely
    match our theoretical analysis, verifying the discriminator is able to recover
    the energy of data distribution.

    Optimizing Cost-Sensitive SVM for Imbalanced Data :Connecting Cluster to Classification

    Qiuyan Yan, Shixiong Xia, Fanrong Meng
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Class imbalance is one of the challenging problems for machine learning in
    many real-world applications, such as coal and gas burst accident monitoring:
    the burst premonition data is extreme smaller than the normal data, however,
    which is the highlight we truly focus on. Cost-sensitive adjustment approach is
    a typical algorithm-level method resisting the data set imbalance. For SVMs
    classifier, which is modified to incorporate varying penalty parameter(C) for
    each of considered groups of examples. However, the C value is determined
    empirically, or is calculated according to the evaluation metric, which need to
    be computed iteratively and time consuming. This paper presents a novel
    cost-sensitive SVM method whose penalty parameter C optimized on the basis of
    cluster probability density function(PDF) and the cluster PDF is estimated only
    according to similarity matrix and some predefined hyper-parameters.
    Experimental results on various standard benchmark data sets and real-world
    data with different ratios of imbalance show that the proposed method is
    effective in comparison with commonly used cost-sensitive techniques.

    A scikit-based Python environment for performing multi-label classification

    Piotr Szymański
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Mathematical Software (cs.MS)

    Scikit-multilearn is a Python library for performing multi-label
    classification. The library is compatible with the scikit/scipy ecosystem and
    uses sparse matrices for all internal operations. It provides native Python
    implementations of popular multi-label classification methods alongside novel
    framework for label space partitioning and division. It includes graph-based
    community detection methods that utilize the powerful igraph library for
    extracting label dependency information. In addition its code is well test
    covered and follows PEP8. Source code and documentation can be downloaded from
    this http URL and also via pip. The library follows scikit’s BSD licencing
    scheme.

    Cluster-based Kriging Approximation Algorithms for Complexity Reduction

    Bas van Stein, Hao Wang, Wojtek Kowalczyk, Michael Emmerich, Thomas Bäck
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine for review
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Kriging or Gaussian Process Regression is applied in many fields as a
    non-linear regression model as well as a surrogate model in the field of
    evolutionary computation. However, the computational and space complexity of
    Kriging, that is cubic and quadratic in the number of data points respectively,
    becomes a major bottleneck with more and more data available nowadays. In this
    paper, we propose a general methodology for the complexity reduction, called
    cluster Kriging, where the whole data set is partitioned into smaller clusters
    and multiple Kriging models are built on top of them. In addition, four Kriging
    approximation algorithms are proposed as candidate algorithms within the new
    framework. Each of these algorithms can be applied to much larger data sets
    while maintaining the advantages and power of Kriging. The proposed algorithms
    are explained in detail and compared empirically against a broad set of
    existing state-of-the-art Kriging approximation methods on a well-defined
    testing framework. According to the empirical study, the proposed algorithms
    consistently outperform the existing algorithms. Moreover, some practical
    suggestions are provided for using the proposed algorithms.

    Latent Hinge-Minimax Risk Minimization for Inference from a Small Number of Training Samples

    Dolev Raviv, Margarita Osadchy
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Deep Learning (DL) methods show very good performance when trained on large,
    balanced data sets. However, many practical problems involve imbalanced data
    sets, or/and classes with a small number of training samples. The performance
    of DL methods as well as more traditional classifiers drops significantly in
    such settings. Most of the existing solutions for imbalanced problems focus on
    customizing the data for training. A more principled solution is to use mixed
    Hinge-Minimax risk [19] specifically designed to solve binary problems with
    imbalanced training sets. Here we propose a Latent Hinge Minimax (LHM) risk and
    a training algorithm that generalizes this paradigm to an ensemble of
    hyperplanes that can form arbitrary complex, piecewise linear boundaries. To
    extract good features, we combine LHM model with CNN via transfer learning. To
    solve multi-class problem we map pre-trained category-specific LHM classifiers
    to a multi-class neural network and adjust the weights with very fast tuning.
    LHM classifier enables the use of unlabeled data in its training and the
    mapping allows for multi-class inference, resulting in a classifier that
    performs better than alternatives when trained on a small number of training
    samples.

    Network-based methods for outcome prediction in the "sample space"

    Jessica Gliozzo
    Comments: MSc Thesis, Advisor: G. Valentini, Co-Advisors: A. Paccanaro and M. Re, 92 pages, 36 figures, 10 tables
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    In this thesis we present the novel semi-supervised network-based algorithm
    P-Net, which is able to rank and classify patients with respect to a specific
    phenotype or clinical outcome under study. The peculiar and innovative
    characteristic of this method is that it builds a network of samples/patients,
    where the nodes represent the samples and the edges are functional or genetic
    relationships between individuals (e.g. similarity of expression profiles), to
    predict the phenotype under study. In other words, it constructs the network in
    the “sample space” and not in the “biomarker space” (where nodes represent
    biomolecules (e.g. genes, proteins) and edges represent functional or genetic
    relationships between nodes), as usual in state-of-the-art methods. To assess
    the performances of P-Net, we apply it on three different publicly available
    datasets from patients afflicted with a specific type of tumor: pancreatic
    cancer, melanoma and ovarian cancer dataset, by using the data and following
    the experimental set-up proposed in two recently published papers [Barter et
    al., 2014, Winter et al., 2012]. We show that network-based methods in the
    “sample space” can achieve results competitive with classical supervised
    inductive systems. Moreover, the graph representation of the samples can be
    easily visualized through networks and can be used to gain visual clues about
    the relationships between samples, taking into account the phenotype associated
    or predicted for each sample. To our knowledge this is one of the first works
    that proposes graph-based algorithms working in the “sample space” of the
    biomolecular profiles of the patients to predict their phenotype or outcome,
    thus contributing to a novel research line in the framework of the Network
    Medicine.

    Simple to Complex Cross-modal Learning to Rank

    Minnan Luo, Xiaojun Chang, Yi Yang, Liqiang Nie, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Qinghua Zheng
    Comments: 36 pages
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    The heterogeneity-gap between different modalities brings a significant
    challenge to multimedia information retrieval. Some studies formalize the
    cross-modal retrieval tasks as a ranking problem and learn a shared multi-modal
    embedding space to measure the cross-modality similarity. However, previous
    methods often establish the shared embedding space based on linear mapping
    functions which might not be sophisticated enough to reveal more complicated
    inter-modal correspondences. Additionally, current studies assume that the
    rankings are of equal importance, and thus all rankings are used
    simultaneously, or a small number of rankings are selected randomly to train
    the embedding space at each iteration. Such strategies, however, always suffer
    from outliers as well as reduced generalization capability due to their lack of
    insightful understanding of procedure of human cognition. In this paper, we
    involve the self-paced learning theory with diversity into the cross-modal
    learning to rank and learn an optimal multi-modal embedding space based on
    non-linear mapping functions. This strategy enhances the model’s robustness to
    outliers and achieves better generalization via training the model gradually
    from easy rankings by diverse queries to more complex ones. An efficient
    alternative algorithm is exploited to solve the proposed challenging problem
    with fast convergence in practice. Extensive experimental results on several
    benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves significant
    improvements over the state-of-the-arts in this literature.

    A Learning-Based Approach for Lane Departure Warning Systems with a Personalized Driver Model

    Wenshuo Wang, Ding Zhao, Junqiang Xi, Wei Han
    Comments: 12 pages, 13 figures, Journal
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Systems and Control (cs.SY)

    Misunderstanding of driver correction behaviors (DCB) is the primary reason
    for false warnings of lane-departure-prediction systems. We propose a
    learning-based approach to predicting unintended lane-departure behaviors (LDB)
    and the chance for drivers to bring the vehicle back to the lane. First, in
    this approach, a personalized driver model for lane-departure and lane-keeping
    behavior is established by combining the Gaussian mixture model and the hidden
    Markov model. Second, based on this model, we develop an online model-based
    prediction algorithm to predict the forthcoming vehicle trajectory and judge
    whether the driver will demonstrate an LDB or a DCB. We also develop a warning
    strategy based on the model-based prediction algorithm that allows the
    lane-departure warning system to be acceptable for drivers according to the
    predicted trajectory. In addition, the naturalistic driving data of 10 drivers
    is collected through the University of Michigan Safety Pilot Model Deployment
    program to train the personalized driver model and validate this approach. We
    compare the proposed method with a basic time-to-lane-crossing (TLC) method and
    a TLC-directional sequence of piecewise lateral slopes (TLC-DSPLS) method. The
    results show that the proposed approach can reduce the false-warning rate to
    3.07\%.

    Towards Better Analysis of Machine Learning Models: A Visual Analytics Perspective

    Shixia Liu, Xiting Wang, Mengchen Liu, Jun Zhu
    Comments: This article will be published in Visual Infomatics
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Interactive model analysis, the process of understanding, diagnosing, and
    refining a machine learning model with the help of interactive visualization,
    is very important for users to efficiently solve real-world artificial
    intelligence and data mining problems. Dramatic advances in big data analytics
    has led to a wide variety of interactive model analysis tasks. In this paper,
    we present a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of this rapidly
    developing area. Specifically, we classify the relevant work into three
    categories: understanding, diagnosis, and refinement. Each category is
    exemplified by recent influential work. Possible future research opportunities
    are also explored and discussed.

    Fuzzy Clustering Data Given on the Ordinal Scale Based on Membership and Likelihood Functions Sharing

    Zhengbing Hu, Yevgeniy V. Bodyanskiy, Oleksii K. Tyshchenko, Viktoriia O. Samitova
    Comments: International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications(IJISA), Vol. 9, No. 2, February 2017
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    A task of clustering data given in the ordinal scale under conditions of
    overlapping clusters has been considered. It’s proposed to use an approach
    based on memberhsip and likelihood functions sharing. A number of performed
    experiments proved effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method is
    characterized by robustness to outliers due to a way of ordering values while
    constructing membership functions.

    Uncertainty-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Collision Avoidance

    Gregory Kahn, Adam Villaflor, Vitchyr Pong, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)

    Reinforcement learning can enable complex, adaptive behavior to be learned
    automatically for autonomous robotic platforms. However, practical deployment
    of reinforcement learning methods must contend with the fact that the training
    process itself can be unsafe for the robot. In this paper, we consider the
    specific case of a mobile robot learning to navigate an a priori unknown
    environment while avoiding collisions. In order to learn collision avoidance,
    the robot must experience collisions at training time. However, high-speed
    collisions, even at training time, could damage the robot. A successful
    learning method must therefore proceed cautiously, experiencing only low-speed
    collisions until it gains confidence. To this end, we present an
    uncertainty-aware model-based learning algorithm that estimates the probability
    of collision together with a statistical estimate of uncertainty. By
    formulating an uncertainty-dependent cost function, we show that the algorithm
    naturally chooses to proceed cautiously in unfamiliar environments, and
    increases the velocity of the robot in settings where it has high confidence.
    Our predictive model is based on bootstrapped neural networks using dropout,
    allowing it to process raw sensory inputs from high-bandwidth sensors such as
    cameras. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method effectively
    minimizes dangerous collisions at training time in an obstacle avoidance task
    for a simulated and real-world quadrotor, and a real-world RC car. Videos of
    the experiments can be found at this https URL

    Search Intelligence: Deep Learning For Dominant Category Prediction

    Zeeshan Khawar Malik, Mo Kobrosli, Peter Maas
    Subjects: Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Deep Neural Networks, and specifically fully-connected convolutional neural
    networks are achieving remarkable results across a wide variety of domains.
    They have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance when applied to
    problems such as speech recognition, image classification, natural language
    processing and bioinformatics. Most of these deep learning models when applied
    to classification employ the softmax activation function for prediction and aim
    to minimize cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we have proposed a supervised
    model for dominant category prediction to improve search recall across all eBay
    classifieds platforms. The dominant category label for each query in the last
    90 days is first calculated by summing the total number of collaborative clicks
    among all categories. The category having the highest number of collaborative
    clicks for the given query will be considered its dominant category. Second,
    each query is transformed to a numeric vector by mapping each unique word in
    the query document to a unique integer value; all padded to equal length based
    on the maximum document length within the pre-defined vocabulary size. A
    fully-connected deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is then applied for
    classification. The proposed model achieves very high classification accuracy
    compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.

    Deep learning and the Schrödinger equation

    K. Mills, M. Spanner, I. Tamblyn
    Subjects: Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); Learning (cs.LG); Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph)

    We have trained a deep (convolutional) neural network to predict the
    ground-state energy of an electron in four classes of confining two-dimensional
    electrostatic potentials. On randomly generated potentials, for which there is
    no analytic form for either the potential or the ground-state energy, the
    neural network model was able to predict the ground-state energy to within
    chemical accuracy, with a median absolute error of 1.49 MHa. We also
    investigate the performance of the model in predicting other quantities such as
    the kinetic energy and the first excited-state energy of random potentials.
    While we demonstrated this approach on a simple, tractable problem, the
    transferability and excellent performance of the resulting model suggests
    further applications of deep neural networks to problems of electronic
    structure.

    A Theoretical Analysis of First Heuristics of Crowdsourced Entity Resolution

    Arya Mazumdar, Barna Saha
    Comments: Appears in AAAI-17
    Subjects: Databases (cs.DB); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)

    Entity resolution (ER) is the task of identifying all records in a database
    that refer to the same underlying entity, and are therefore duplicates of each
    other. Due to inherent ambiguity of data representation and poor data quality,
    ER is a challenging task for any automated process. As a remedy, human-powered
    ER via crowdsourcing has become popular in recent years. Using crowd to answer
    queries is costly and time consuming. Furthermore, crowd-answers can often be
    faulty. Therefore, crowd-based ER methods aim to minimize human participation
    without sacrificing the quality and use a computer generated similarity matrix
    actively. While, some of these methods perform well in practice, no theoretical
    analysis exists for them, and further their worst case performances do not
    reflect the experimental findings. This creates a disparity in the
    understanding of the popular heuristics for this problem. In this paper, we
    make the first attempt to close this gap. We provide a thorough analysis of the
    prominent heuristic algorithms for crowd-based ER. We justify experimental
    observations with our analysis and information theoretic lower bounds.

    Traffic Lights with Auction-Based Controllers: Algorithms and Real-World Data

    Shumeet Baluja, Michele Covell, Rahul Sukthankar
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG); Systems and Control (cs.SY)

    Real-time optimization of traffic flow addresses important practical
    problems: reducing a driver’s wasted time, improving city-wide efficiency,
    reducing gas emissions and improving air quality. Much of the current research
    in traffic-light optimization relies on extending the capabilities of traffic
    lights to either communicate with each other or communicate with vehicles.
    However, before such capabilities become ubiquitous, opportunities exist to
    improve traffic lights by being more responsive to current traffic situations
    within the current, already deployed, infrastructure. In this paper, we
    introduce a traffic light controller that employs bidding within micro-auctions
    to efficiently incorporate traffic sensor information; no other outside sources
    of information are assumed. We train and test traffic light controllers on
    large-scale data collected from opted-in Android cell-phone users over a period
    of several months in Mountain View, California and the River North neighborhood
    of Chicago, Illinois. The learned auction-based controllers surpass (in both
    the relevant metrics of road-capacity and mean travel time) the currently
    deployed lights, optimized static-program lights, and longer-term planning
    approaches, in both cities, measured using real user driving data.

    Non-Backtracking Spectrum of Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Models

    Lennart Gulikers, Marc Lelarge, Laurent Massoulié
    Subjects: Probability (math.PR); Learning (cs.LG); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Motivated by community detection, we characterise the spectrum of the
    non-backtracking matrix (B) in the Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model.

    Specifically, we consider a random graph on (n) vertices partitioned into two
    equal-sized clusters. The vertices have i.i.d. weights ({ phi_u }_{u=1}^n)
    with second moment (Phi^{(2)}). The intra-cluster connection probability for
    vertices (u) and (v) is (frac{phi_u phi_v}{n}a) and the inter-cluster
    connection probability is (frac{phi_u phi_v}{n}b).

    We show that with high probability, the following holds: The leading
    eigenvalue of the non-backtracking matrix (B) is asymptotic to (
    ho =
    frac{a+b}{2} Phi^{(2)}). The second eigenvalue is asymptotic to (mu_2 =
    frac{a-b}{2} Phi^{(2)}) when (mu_2^2 >
    ho), but asymptotically bounded by
    (sqrt{
    ho}) when (mu_2^2 leq
    ho). All the remaining eigenvalues are
    asymptotically bounded by (sqrt{
    ho}). As a result, a clustering
    positively-correlated with the true communities can be obtained based on the
    second eigenvector of (B) in the regime where (mu_2^2 >
    ho.)

    In a previous work we obtained that detection is impossible when (mu_2^2 <

    ho,) meaning that there occurs a phase-transition in the sparse regime of the
    Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model.

    As a corollary, we obtain that Degree-Corrected ErdH{o}s-R’enyi graphs
    asymptotically satisfy the graph Riemann hypothesis, a quasi-Ramanujan
    property.

    A by-product of our proof is a weak law of large numbers for
    local-functionals on Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Models, which could be
    of independent interest.


    Information Theory

    Multi-Message Private Information Retrieval: Capacity Results and Near-Optimal Schemes

    Karim Banawan, Sennur Ulukus
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, February 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    We consider the problem of multi-message private information retrieval (MPIR)
    from (N) non-communicating replicated databases. In MPIR, the user is
    interested in retrieving (P) messages out of (M) stored messages without
    leaking the identity of the retrieved messages. The information-theoretic sum
    capacity of MPIR (C_s^P) is the maximum number of desired message symbols that
    can be retrieved privately per downloaded symbol. For the case (P geq
    frac{M}{2}), we determine the exact sum capacity of MPIR as
    (C_s^P=frac{1}{1+frac{M-P}{PN}}). The achievable scheme in this case is based
    on downloading MDS-coded mixtures of all messages. For (P leq frac{M}{2}), we
    develop lower and upper bounds for all (M,P,N). These bounds match if the total
    number of messages (M) is an integer multiple of the number of desired messages
    (P), i.e., (frac{M}{P} in mathbb{N}). In this case,
    (C_s^P=frac{1-frac{1}{N}}{1-(frac{1}{N})^{M/P}}). The achievable scheme in
    this case generalizes the single-message capacity achieving scheme to have
    unbalanced number of stages per round of download. For all the remaining cases,
    the difference between the lower and upper bound is at most (0.0082), which
    occurs for (M=5), (P=2), (N=2). Our results indicate that joint retrieval of
    desired messages is more efficient than successive use of single-message
    retrieval schemes.

    An Algebraic-Combinatorial Proof Technique for the GM-MDS Conjecture

    Anoosheh Heidarzadeh, Alex Sprintson
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper considers the problem of designing maximum distance separable
    (MDS) codes over small fields with constraints on the support of their
    generator matrices. For any given (m imes n) binary matrix (M), the GM-MDS
    conjecture, proposed by Dau et al., states that if (M) satisfies the so-called
    MDS condition, then for any field (mathbb{F}) of size (qgeq n+m-1), there
    exists an ([n,m]_q) MDS code whose generator matrix (G), with entries in
    (mathbb{F}), fits the matrix (M) (i.e., (M) is the support matrix of (G)).
    Despite all the attempts by the coding theory community, this conjecture
    remains still open in general. It was shown, independently by Yan et al. and
    Dau et al., that the GM-MDS conjecture holds if the following conjecture,
    referred to as the TM-MDS conjecture, holds: if (M) satisfies the MDS
    condition, then the determinant of a transform matrix (T), such that (TV) fits
    (M), is not identically zero, where (V) is a Vandermonde matrix with distinct
    parameters. In this work, we first reformulate the TM-MDS conjecture in terms
    of the Wronskian determinant, and then present an algebraic-combinatorial
    approach based on polynomial-degree reduction for proving this conjecture. Our
    proof technique’s strength is based primarily on reducing inherent
    combinatorics in the proof. We demonstrate the strength of our technique by
    proving the TM-MDS conjecture for the cases where the number of rows ((m)) of
    (M) is upper bounded by (5). For this class of special cases of (M) where the
    only additional constraint is on (m), only cases with (mleq 4) were previously
    proven theoretically, and the previously used proof techniques are not
    applicable to cases with (m > 4).

    Downlink and Uplink Decoupling in Two-Tier Heterogeneous Networks with Multi-Antenna Base Stations

    Mudasar Bacha, Yueping Wu, Bruno Clerckx
    Comments: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In order to improve the uplink performance of future cellular networks, the
    idea to decouple the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) association has recently
    been shown to provide significant gain in terms of both coverage and rate
    performance. However, all the work is limited to SISO network. Therefore, to
    study the gain provided by the DL and UL decoupling in multi-antenna base
    stations (BSs) setup, we study a two tier heterogeneous network consisting of
    multi-antenna BSs, and single antenna user equipments (UEs). We use maximal
    ratio combining (MRC) as a linear receiver at the BSs and using tools from
    stochastic geometry, we derive tractable expressions for both signal to
    interference ratio (SIR) coverage probability and rate coverage probability. We
    observe that as the disparity in the beamforming gain of both tiers increases,
    the gain in term of SIR coverage probability provided by the decoupled
    association over non-decoupled association decreases. We further observe that
    when there is asymmetry in the number of antennas of both tier, then we need
    further biasing towards femto-tier on the top of decoupled association to
    balance the load and get optimal rate coverage probability.

    Arbitrary Beam Synthesis of Different Hybrid Beamforming Systems

    Kilian Roth, Josef A. Nossek
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    For future mmWave mobile communication systems the use of analog/hybrid
    beamforming is envisioned be a key as- pect. The synthesis of beams is a key
    technology of enable the best possible operation during beamsearch, data
    transmission and MU MIMO operation. The developed method for synthesizing beams
    is based on previous work in radar technology considering only phase array
    antennas. With this technique it is possible to generate a desired beam of any
    shape with the constraints of the desired target transceiver antenna frontend.
    It is not constraint to a certain antenna array geometry, but can handle 1d, 2d
    and even 3d antenna array geometries like cylindric arrays. The numerical
    examples show that the method can synthesize beams by considering a user
    defined tradeoff between gain, transition width and passband ripples.

    On Coded Caching in the Overloaded MISO Broadcast Channel

    Enrico Piovano, Hamdi Joudeh, Bruno Clerckx
    Comments: Submitted to ISIT 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This work investigates the interplay of coded caching and spatial
    multiplexing in an overloaded Multiple-Input-Single-Output (MISO) Broadcast
    Channel (BC), i.e. a system where the number of users is greater than the
    number of transmitting antennas. On one hand, coded caching uses the aggregate
    global cache memory of the users to create multicasting opportunities. On the
    other hand, the multiple antennas at the transmitter leverages the available
    CSIT to transmit multiple streams simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce a
    novel scheme which combines both the gain derived from coded-caching and
    spatial multiplexing and outperforms existing schemes in terms of delivery time
    and CSIT requirement.

    Single Anchor Localization and Orientation Performance Limits using Massive Arrays: MIMO vs. Beamforming

    Anna Guerra, Francesco Guidi, Davide Dardari
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Next generation cellular networks will experience the combination of
    femtocells, millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communications and massive antenna
    arrays. Thanks to the beamforming capability as well as the high angular
    resolution provided by massive arrays, only one single access point (AP) acting
    as an anchor node could be used for localization estimation, thus avoiding
    over-sized infrastructures dedicated to positioning. In this context, our paper
    aims at investigating the localization and orientation performance limits
    employing massive arrays both at the AP and mobile side. In particular, we
    propose a comparison between MIMO and beamforming in terms of array structure,
    synchronization error and multipath components. Among different array
    configurations, we consider also random beamforming as a trade-off between the
    high diversity gain of MIMO and the high directivity guaranteed by phased
    arrays. By evaluating the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for the different array
    configurations, results show the interplay between diversity and beamforming
    gain as well as the benefits achievable by varying the number of array elements
    in terms of localization accuracy.

    On the Complexity of Estimating Renyi Divergences

    Maciej Skorski
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Computational Complexity (cs.CC)

    This paper studies the complexity of estimating Renyi divergences of a
    distribution (p) observed from samples, with respect to a baseline distribution
    (q) known emph{a priori}. Extending the results of Acharya et al. (SODA’15) on
    estimating Renyi entropy, we present improved estimation techniques together
    with upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity.

    We show that, contrarily to estimating Renyi entropy where a sublinear (in
    the alphabet size) number of samples suffices, the sample complexity is heavily
    dependent on emph{events occurring unlikely} in (q), and is unbounded in
    general (no matter what an estimation technique is used). For any divergence of
    order bigger than (1), we provide upper and lower bounds on the number of
    samples dependent on probabilities of (p) and (q). We conclude that the
    worst-case sample complexity is polynomial in the alphabet size if and only if
    the probabilities of (q) are non-negligible.

    This gives theoretical insights into heuristics used in applied papers to
    handle numerical instability, which occurs for small probabilities of (q). Our
    result explains that small probabilities should be handled with care not only
    because of numerical issues, but also because of a blow up in sample
    complexity.

    Self-Sustainability of Energy Harvesting Systems: Concept, Analysis, and Design

    Sudarshan Guruacharya, Ekram Hossain
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Ambient energy harvesting is touted as a low cost solution to prolong the
    life of low-powered devices, reduce the carbon footprint, and make the system
    self-sustainable. Most research to date have focused either on the physical
    aspects of energy conversion process or on optimal consumption policy of the
    harvested energy at the system level. However, although intuitively understood,
    to the best of our knowledge, the idea of self-sustainability is yet to be made
    precise and studied as a performance metric. In this paper, we provide a
    mathematical definition of the concept of self-sustainability of an energy
    harvesting system, based on the complementary idea of eventual outage. In
    particular, we analyze the harvest-store-consume system with infinite battery
    capacity, stochastic energy arrivals, and fixed energy consumption rate. Using
    the random walk theory, we identify the necessary condition for the system to
    be self-sustainable. General formulas are given for the self-sustainability
    probability in the form of integral equations. Since these integral equations
    are difficult to solve analytically, an exponential upper bound for eventual
    outage probability is given using martingales. This bound guarantees that the
    eventual outage probability can be made arbitrarily small simply by increasing
    the initial battery energy. We also give an asymptotic formula for eventual
    outage. For the special case when the energy arrival follows a Poisson process,
    we are able to find the exact formulas for the eventual outage probability. We
    also show that the harvest-store-consume system is mathematically equivalent to
    a (GI/G/1) queueing system, which allows us to easily find the outage
    probability, in case the necessary condition for self-sustainability is
    violated. Monte-Carlo simulations verify our analysis.

    Position and Orientation Estimation through Millimeter Wave MIMO in 5G Systems

    Arash Shahmansoori, Gabriel E. Garcia, Giuseppe Destino, Gonzalo Seco-Granados, Henk Wymeersch
    Comments: 27 pages, 8 figures, journal paper
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Millimeter wave signals and large antenna arrays are considered enabling
    technologies for future 5G networks. While their benefits for achieving
    high-data rate communications are well-known, their potential advantages for
    accurate positioning are largely undiscovered. We derive the Cram'{e}r-Rao
    bound (CRB) on position and rotation angle estimation uncertainty from
    millimeter wave signals from a single transmitter, in the presence of
    scatterers. We also present a novel two-stage algorithm for position and
    rotation angle estimation that attains the CRB for average to high
    signal-to-noise ratio. The algorithm is based on multiple measurement vectors
    matching pursuit for coarse estimation, followed by a refinement stage based on
    the space-alternating generalized expectation maximization algorithm. We find
    that accurate position and rotation angle estimation is possible using signals
    from a single transmitter, in either line-of- sight, non-line-of-sight, or
    obstructed-line-of-sight conditions.

    The Partial Entropy Decomposition: Decomposing multivariate entropy and mutual information via pointwise common surprisal

    Robin A. A. Ince
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Statistics Theory (math.ST); Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM); Methodology (stat.ME)

    Obtaining meaningful quantitative descriptions of the statistical dependence
    within multivariate systems is a difficult open problem. Recently, the Partial
    Information Decomposition (PID) framework was proposed to decompose mutual
    information about a target variable within a set of predictor variables into
    components which are redundant, unique and synergistic within different subsets
    of predictors. However, the details of how to implement this framework in
    practice are still debated. Here, we propose to apply the elegant formalism of
    the PID to multivariate entropy, resulting in a Partial Entropy Decomposition
    (PED). We implement the PED with an entropy redundancy measure based on
    pointwise common surprisal; a natural definition which is closely related to
    the definition of mutual information. We show how this approach can reveal the
    dyadic vs triadic generative structure of multivariate systems that are
    indistinguishable with classical Shannon measures. The entropy perspective also
    shows that misinformation is synergistic entropy and hence that mutual
    information itself includes both redundant and synergistic effects. We show the
    relationships between the PED and mutual information in two predictors, and
    derive two alternative information decompositions, which we illustrate on
    several example systems. The new perspective provided by these developments
    helps to clarify some of the difficulties encountered with the PID approach and
    the resulting decompositions provide useful tools for practical data analysis
    across a range of application areas.

    Design and Analysis of Sparsifying Dictionaries for FIR MIMO Equalizers

    Abubakr O. Al-Abbasi, Ridha Hamila, Waheed U. Bajwa, Naofal Al-Dhahir
    Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, IEEE Trans. On Wireless Communications. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1603.00160
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, we propose a general framework that transforms the problems of
    designing sparse finite-impulseresponse linear equalizers and non-linear
    decision-feedback equalizers, for multiple antenna systems, into the problem of
    sparsestapproximation of a vector in different dictionaries. In addition, we
    investigate several choices of the sparsifying dictionaries under this
    framework. Furthermore, the worst-case coherences of these dictionaries, which
    determine their sparsifying effectiveness, are analytically and/or numerically
    evaluated. Moreover, we show how to reduce the computational complexity of the
    designed sparse equalizer filters by exploiting the asymptotic equivalence of
    Toeplitz and circulant matrices. Finally, the superiority of our proposed
    framework over conventional methods is demonstrated through numerical
    experiments.

    Compute-and-Forward for Block-Fading Channels via Algebraic Lattice Codes

    Shanxiang Lyu, Antonio Campello, Cong Ling, Jean-Claude Belfiore
    Comments: submitted to ISIT2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Previous approaches of compute and forward (C&F) are mainly based on static
    channel model, where the channel coefficients stay fixed during the whole
    transmission time span. In this work, we investigate the C&F strategy under
    block fading channels. Our technique is to design codes using construction A
    over rings, so as to allow better quantization for the channels. Advantages in
    terms of decoding error probabilities and computation rates are presented, and
    the construction is shown to strictly outperform, in this scenario, the
    compute-and-forward strategy over the integers (mathbb{Z}).

    Comparison Study between NOMA and SCMA

    Mohammad. Moltafet, Nader. Mokari, Mohammad R. Javan, Paiez. Azmi
    Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, the performance and system complexity of the candidate
    multiple access (MA) techniques for the next generation of cellular systems,
    namely, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) (in this paper, we consider power
    domain MA as NOMA) and sparse code multiple access (SCMA), are investigated. To
    this end, for each MA technique, a resource allocation problem considering
    heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNet) is formulated. We apply successive
    convex approximation (SCA) method to each problem and obtain their solutions.
    The simulation results show that SCMA-based system achieves better performance
    than NOMA-based one at the cost of more complexity.

    Joint DOA and Frequency Estimation with Sub-Nyquist Sampling for More Sources than Sensors

    Liang Liu, Ping Wei
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this letter, we apply previous array receiver architecture which employs
    time-domain sub-Nyquist sampling techniques to jointly estimate frequency and
    direction-of-arrival(DOA) of narrowband far-field signals. Herein, a more
    general situation is taken into consideration, where there may be more than one
    signal in a subband. We build time-space union model, analyze the
    identification of the model, and give the maximum signal number which can be
    classified. We also proof that the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB) is lower than that of
    which employs Nyquist sampling. Simulation results verify the capacity to
    estimate the number of sources. Meanwhile, simulations show that our estimation
    performance closely matches the CRB and is superior for more sources than
    sensors, especially when the minimum redundancy array (MRA) is employed.

    On the Sub-optimality of Single-letter Coding in Multi-terminal Communications

    Farhad Shirani, S. Sandeep Pradhan
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We investigate binary block-codes (BBC). A BBC is defined as a vector of
    Boolean functions. We consider BBCs which are generated randomly, and using
    single-letter distributions. We characterize the vector of dependency spectrums
    of these BBCs. We use this vector to upper-bound the correlation between the
    outputs of two distributed BBCs. Finally, the upper-bound is used to show that
    the large blocklength single-letter coding schemes in the literature are
    sub-optimal in some multiterminal communication settings.

    On the Correlation between Boolean Functions of Sequences of Random Variables

    Farhad Shirani, S. Sandeep Pradhan
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, we establish a new inequality tying together the effective
    length and the maximum correlation between the outputs of an arbitrary pair of
    Boolean functions which operate on two sequences of correlated random
    variables. We derive a new upper-bound on the correlation between the outputs
    of these functions. The upper-bound is useful in various disciplines which deal
    with common-information. We build upon Witsenhausen’s bound on
    maximum-correlation. The previous upper-bound did not take the effective length
    of the Boolean functions into account.

    On the Gaussianity of Kolmogorov Complexity of Mixing Sequences

    Morgane Austern, Arian Maleki
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Let ( K(X_1, ldots, X_n)) and (H(X_n | X_{n-1}, ldots, X_1)) denote the
    Kolmogorov complexity and Shannon’s entropy rate of a stationary and ergodic
    process ({X_i}_{i=-infty}^infty). It has been proved that [ frac{K(X_1,
    ldots, X_n)}{n} – H(X_n | X_{n-1}, ldots, X_1)
    ightarrow 0, ] almost
    surely. This paper studies the convergence rate of this asymptotic result. In
    particular, we show that if the process satisfies certain mixing conditions,
    then there exists (sigma<infty) such that
    ()sqrt{n}left(frac{K(X_{1:n})}{n}- H(X_0|X_1,dots,X_{-infty})
    ight)

    ightarrow_d N(0,sigma^2).() Furthermore, we show that under slightly
    stronger mixing conditions one may obtain non-asymptotic concentration bounds
    for the Kolmogorov complexity.

    Bounds and Constructions of Codes with All-Symbol Locality and Availability

    Stanislav Kruglik, Alexey Frolov
    Comments: ISIT 2017 submission, 5 pages, 3 figures
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We investigate the distance properties of linear locally recoverable codes
    (LRC codes) with all-symbol locality and availability. New upper and lower
    bounds on the minimum distance of such codes are derived. The upper bound is
    based on the shortening method and improves existing shortening bounds. To
    reduce the gap in between upper and lower bounds we do not restrict the
    alphabet size and propose explicit constructions of codes with locality and
    availability via rank-metric codes. The first construction relies on expander
    graphs and is better in low rate region, the second construction utilizes LRC
    codes developed by Wang et al. as inner codes and better in high rate region.

    Physical-layer Network Coding: A Random Coding Error Exponent Perspective

    Shakeel Salamat Ullah, Gianluigi Liva, Soung Chang Liew
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this work, we derive the random coding error exponent for the uplink phase
    of a two-way relay system where physical layer network coding (PNC) is
    employed. The error exponent is derived for the practical (yet sub-optimum) XOR
    channel decoding setting. We show that the random coding error exponent under
    optimum (i.e., maximum likelihood) PNC channel decoding can be achieved even
    under the sub-optimal XOR channel decoding. The derived achievability bounds
    provide us with valuable insight and can be used as a benchmark for the
    performance of practical channel-coded PNC systems employing low complexity
    decoders when finite-length codewords are used.

    The Weight Hierarchy of a Family of Cyclic Codes with Arbitrary Number of Nonzeroes

    Shuxing Li
    Comments: 16 pages, Finite Fields and Their Applications, Accepted
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The generalized Hamming weights (GHWs) are fundamental parameters of linear
    codes. GHWs are of great interest in many applications since they convey
    detailed information of linear codes. In this paper, we continue the work of
    [10] to study the GHWs of a family of cyclic codes with arbitrary number of
    nonzeroes. The weight hierarchy is determined by employing a number-theoretic
    approach.

    Effect of Bursty Traffic on Caching Helpers: A Simple Scenario

    Nikolaos Pappas, Zheng Chen
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)

    In this letter, we consider a simple scenario of a wireless caching system
    that consists of a caching helper in proximity to the user to be served and a
    data center with large content storage. Assuming bursty packet arrivals at the
    caching helper, its availability is affected by the packet arrival rate, which
    also affects the system throughput. We characterize the optimal transmission
    and helping probabilities of the nodes in the caching system, aiming at
    achieving the maximum weighted throughput of the system.

    On a Relationship between the Correct Probability of Estimation from Correlated Data and Mutual Information

    Yasutada Oohama
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Let (X), (Y) be two correlated discrete random variables. We consider an
    estimation of (X) from encoded data (varphi(Y)) of (Y) by some encoder
    function (varphi(Y)). We derive an inequality describing a relation of the
    correct probability of estimation and the mutual information between (X) and
    (varphi(Y)). This inequality may be useful for the secure analysis of crypto
    system when we use the success probability of estimating secret data as a
    security criterion. It also provides an intuitive meaning of the secrecy
    exponent in the strong secrecy criterion.

    Generalized piggybacking codes for distributed storage systems

    Shuai Yuan, Qin Huang, Zulin Wang
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper generalizes the piggybacking constructions for distributed storage
    systems by considering various protected instances and piggybacked instances.
    Analysis demonstrates that the proportion of protected instances determines the
    average repair bandwidth for a systematic node. By optimizing the proportion of
    protected instances, the repair ratio of generalized piggybacking codes
    approaches zero instead of 50% as the number of parity check nodes tends to
    infinity. Furthermore, the computational complexity for repairing a single
    systematic node cost by generalized piggybacking codes is less than that of the
    existing piggybacking designs.

    Spectral Efficiency of Full-Duplex Multiuser System: Beamforming Design, User Grouping, and Time Allocation

    Van-Dinh Nguyen, Hieu V. Nguyen, Chuyen T. Nguyen, Oh-Soon Shin
    Comments: 12 pages, 9 figures. To appear in IEEE ACCESS, 2017. The MATLAB codes for this paper can be downloaded from: this https URL
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Full-duplex (FD) systems have emerged as an es- sential enabling technology
    to further increase the data rate of wireless communication systems. The key
    idea of FD is to serve multiple users over the same bandwidth with a base
    station (BS) that can simultaneously transmit and receive the signals. The most
    challenging issue in designing an FD system is to address both the harmful
    effects of residual self-interference caused by the transmit-to-receive
    antennas at the BS as well as the co- channel interference from an uplink user
    (ULU) to a downlink user (DLU). An efficient solution to these problems is to
    assign the ULUs/DLUs in different groups/slots, with each user served in
    multiple groups. Hence, this paper studies the joint design of transmit
    beamformers, ULUs/DLUs group assignment, and time allocation for each group.
    The specific aim is to maximize the sum rate under the ULU/DLU minimum
    throughput constraints. The utility function of interest is a difficult
    nonconcave problem, and the involved constraints are also nonconvex, and so
    this is a computationally troublesome problem. To solve this optimization
    problem, we propose a new path-following algorithm for compu- tational
    solutions to arrive at least the local optima. Each iteration involves only a
    simple convex quadratic program. We prove that the proposed algorithm
    iteratively improves the objective while guaranteeing convergence. Simulation
    results confirm the fast convergence of the proposed algorithm with substantial
    performance improvements over existing approaches.

    QoS Analysis of Cognitive Radios Employing HARQ

    Sami Akin, Marwan Hammouda, Jürgen Peissig
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Recently, the demand for faster and more reliable data transmission has
    brought up complex communications systems. As a result, it has become more
    difficult to carry out closed-form solutions that can provide insight about
    performance levels. In this paper, different from the existing research, we
    study a cognitive radio system that employs hybrid-automatic-repeat-request
    (HARQ) protocols under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. We assume that the
    secondary users access the spectrum by utilizing a strategy that is a
    combination of underlay and interweave access techniques. Considering that the
    secondary users imperfectly perform channel sensing in order to detect the
    active primary users and that there is a transmission deadline for each data
    packet at the secondary transmitter buffer, we formulate the state-transition
    model of the system. Then, we obtain the state-transition probabilities when
    HARQ-chase combining is adopted. Subsequently, we provide the packet-loss rate
    in the channel and achieve the effective capacity. Finally, we substantiate our
    analytical derivations with numerical results.

    Intrinsic entropies of log-concave distributions

    Varun Jog, Venkat Anantharam
    Comments: 33 pages. A shorter version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of ISIT 2015
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The entropy of a random variable is well-known to equal the exponential
    growth rate of the volumes of its typical sets. In this paper, we show that for
    any log-concave random variable (X), the sequence of the (lfloor n heta

    floor^{ ext{th}}) intrinsic volumes of the typical sets of (X) in dimensions
    (n geq 1) grows exponentially with a well-defined rate. We denote this rate by
    (h_X( heta)), and call it the ( heta^{ ext{th}}) intrinsic entropy of (X).
    We show that (h_X( heta)) is a continuous function of ( heta) over the range
    ([0,1]), thereby providing a smooth interpolation between the values 0 and
    (h(X)) at the endpoints 0 and 1, respectively.

    Achievable Rate Regions Using Novel Location Assisted Coding (LAC)

    Thuan Nguyen, Thinh Nguyen
    Comments: journal
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The recent increase in number of wireless devices has been driven by the
    growing markets of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result,
    expanding and/or efficient utilization of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum is
    critical to accommodate such an increase in wireless bandwidth. Alternatively,
    recent free-space optical (FSO) communication technologies have demonstrated
    the feasibility of building WiFO, a high capacity indoor wireless network using
    the femtocell architecture. Since FSO transmission does not interfere with the
    RF signals, such a system can be integrated with the current WiFi systems to
    provide orders of magnitude improvement in bandwidth. A novel component of WiFO
    is its ability to jointly encode bits from different flows for optimal
    transmissions. In this paper, we introduce the WiFO architecture and a novel
    cooperative transmission framework using location assisted coding (LAC)
    technique to increase the overall wireless capacity. Specifically, achievable
    rate regions for WiFO using LAC will be characterized. Both numerical and
    theoretical analyses are given to validate the proposed coding schemes.

    Mitigation of Phase Noise in Massive MIMO Systems: A Rate-Splitting Approach

    Anastasios Papazafeiropoulos, Bruno Clerckx, Tharm Ratnarajah
    Comments: accepted in IEEE ICC 2017 Wireless Communications Symposium
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This work encompasses Rate-Splitting (RS), providing significant benefits in
    multi-user settings in the context of huge degrees of freedom promised by
    massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO). However, the requirement of
    massive MIMO for cost-efficient implementation makes them more prone to
    hardware imperfections such as phase noise (PN). As a result, we focus on a
    realistic broadcast channel with a large number of antennas and hampered by the
    unavoidable PN. Moreover, we employ the RS transmission strategy, and we show
    its robustness against PN, since the sum-rate does not saturate at high
    signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Although, the analytical results are obtained by
    means of the deterministic equivalent analysis, they coincide with simulation
    results even for finite system dimensions.

    Quickest Localization of Anomalies in Power Grids: A Stochastic Graphical Framework

    Javad Heydari, Ali Tajer
    Comments: 31 pages, 7 figures
    Subjects: Applications (stat.AP); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Agile localization of anomalous events plays a pivotal role in enhancing the
    overall reliability of the grid and avoiding cascading failures. This is
    especially of paramount significance in the large-scale grids due to their
    geographical expansions and the large volume of data generated. This paper
    proposes a stochastic graphical framework, by leveraging which it aims to
    localize the anomalies with the minimum amount of data. This framework
    capitalizes on the strong correlation structures observed among the
    measurements collected from different buses. The proposed approach, at its
    core, collects the measurements sequentially and progressively updates its
    decision about the location of the anomaly. The process resumes until the
    location of the anomaly can be identified with desired reliability. We provide
    a general theory for the quickest anomaly localization and also investigate its
    application for quickest line outage localization. Simulations in the IEEE
    118-bus model are provided to establish the gains of the proposed approach.

    Uniqueness and characterization theorems for generalized entropies

    Alberto Enciso, Piergiulio Tempesta
    Comments: 15 pages, no figures
    Subjects: Mathematical Physics (math-ph); Information Theory (cs.IT); High Energy Physics – Theory (hep-th); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

    The requirement that an entropy function be composable is key: it means that
    the entropy of a compound system can be calculated in terms of the entropy of
    its independent components. We prove that, under mild regularity assumptions,
    the only composable generalized entropy in trace form is the Tsallis
    one-parameter family (which contains Boltzmann-Gibbs as a particular case).

    This result leads to the use of generalized entropies that are not of trace
    form, such as R’enyi’s entropy, in the study of complex systems. In this
    direction, we also present a characterization theorem for a large class of
    composable non-trace-form entropy functions with features akin to those of
    R’enyi’s entropy.

    Quickest Hub Discovery in Correlation Graphs

    Taposh Banerjee, Alfred O. Hero III
    Comments: Asilomar 2016
    Subjects: Statistics Theory (math.ST); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    A sequential test is proposed for detection and isolation of hubs in a
    correlation graph. Hubs in a correlation graph of a random vector are variables
    (nodes) that have a strong correlation edge. It is assumed that the random
    vectors are high-dimensional and are multivariate Gaussian distributed. The
    test employs a family of novel local and global summary statistics generated
    from small samples of the random vectors. Delay and false alarm analysis of the
    test is obtained and numerical results are provided to show that the test is
    consistent in identifying hubs, as the false alarm rate goes to zero.




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