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    arXiv Paper Daily: Thu, 9 Feb 2017

    我爱机器学习(52ml.net)发表于 2017-02-09 00:00:00
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    Neural and Evolutionary Computing

    A Historical Review of Forty Years of Research on CMAC

    Frank Z. Xing
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    The Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) is an influential
    brain-inspired computing model in many relevant fields. Since its inception in
    the 1970s, the model has been intensively studied and many variants of the
    prototype, such as Kernel-CMAC, Self-Organizing Map CMAC, and Linguistic CMAC,
    have been proposed. This review article focus on how the CMAC model is
    gradually developed and refined to meet the demand of fast, adaptive, and
    robust control. Two perspective, CMAC as a neural network and CMAC as a table
    look-up technique are presented. Three aspects of the model: the architecture,
    learning algorithms and applications are discussed. In the end, some potential
    future research directions on this model are suggested.

    Multitask Evolution with Cartesian Genetic Programming

    Eric O. Scott, Kenneth A. De Jong
    Comments: 2 pages
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    We introduce a genetic programming method for solving multiple Boolean
    circuit synthesis tasks simultaneously. This allows us to solve a set of
    elementary logic functions twice as easily as with a direct, single-task
    approach.

    Deep Learning with Dynamic Computation Graphs

    Moshe Looks, Marcello Herreshoff, DeLesley Hutchins, Peter Norvig
    Comments: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Neural networks that compute over graph structures are a natural fit for
    problems in a variety of domains, including natural language (parse trees) and
    cheminformatics (molecular graphs). However, since the computation graph has a
    different shape and size for every input, such networks do not directly support
    batched training or inference. They are also difficult to implement in popular
    deep learning libraries, which are based on static data-flow graphs. We
    introduce a technique called dynamic batching, which not only batches together
    operations between different input graphs of dissimilar shape, but also between
    different nodes within a single input graph. The technique allows us to create
    static graphs, using popular libraries, that emulate dynamic computation graphs
    of arbitrary shape and size. We further present a high-level library of
    compositional blocks that simplifies the creation of dynamic graph models.
    Using the library, we demonstrate concise and batch-wise parallel
    implementations for a variety of models from the literature.

    Automatic Rule Extraction from Long Short Term Memory Networks

    W. James Murdoch, Arthur Szlam
    Comments: ICLR 2017 accepted paper
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Although deep learning models have proven effective at solving problems in
    natural language processing, the mechanism by which they come to their
    conclusions is often unclear. As a result, these models are generally treated
    as black boxes, yielding no insight of the underlying learned patterns. In this
    paper we consider Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and demonstrate a new
    approach for tracking the importance of a given input to the LSTM for a given
    output. By identifying consistently important patterns of words, we are able to
    distill state of the art LSTMs on sentiment analysis and question answering
    into a set of representative phrases. This representation is then
    quantitatively validated by using the extracted phrases to construct a simple,
    rule-based classifier which approximates the output of the LSTM.

    Deep Kernelized Autoencoders

    Michael Kampffmeyer, Sigurd Løkse, Filippo Maria Bianchi, Robert Jenssen, Lorenzo Livi
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    In this paper we introduce the deep kernelized autoencoder, a neural network
    model that allows an explicit approximation of (i) the mapping from an input
    space to an arbitrary, user-specified kernel space and (ii) the back-projection
    from such a kernel space to input space. The proposed method is based on
    traditional autoencoders and is trained through a new unsupervised loss
    function. During training, we optimize both the reconstruction accuracy of
    input samples and the alignment between a kernel matrix given as prior and the
    inner products of the hidden representations computed by the autoencoder.
    Kernel alignment provides control over the hidden representation learned by the
    autoencoder. Experiments have been performed to evaluate both reconstruction
    and kernel alignment performance. Additionally, we applied our method to
    emulate kPCA on a denoising task obtaining promising results.

    Stable and Controllable Neural Texture Synthesis and Style Transfer Using Histogram Losses

    Eric Risser, Pierre Wilmot, Connelly Barnes
    Subjects: Graphics (cs.GR); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Recently, methods have been proposed that perform texture synthesis and style
    transfer by using convolutional neural networks (e.g. Gatys et al.
    [2015,2016]). These methods are exciting because they can in some cases create
    results with state-of-the-art quality. However, in this paper, we show these
    methods also have limitations in texture quality, stability, requisite
    parameter tuning, and lack of user controls. This paper presents a multiscale
    synthesis pipeline based on convolutional neural networks that ameliorates
    these issues. We first give a mathematical explanation of the source of
    instabilities in many previous approaches. We then improve these instabilities
    by using histogram losses to synthesize textures that better statistically
    match the exemplar. We also show how to integrate localized style losses in our
    multiscale framework. These losses can improve the quality of large features,
    improve the separation of content and style, and offer artistic controls such
    as paint by numbers. We demonstrate that our approach offers improved quality,
    convergence in fewer iterations, and more stability over the optimization.


    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

    Backpropagation Training for Fisher Vectors within Neural Networks

    Patrick Wieschollek, Fabian Groh, Hendrik P.A. Lensch
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Fisher-Vectors (FV) encode higher-order statistics of a set of multiple local
    descriptors like SIFT features. They already show good performance in
    combination with shallow learning architectures on visual recognitions tasks.
    Current methods using FV as a feature descriptor in deep architectures assume
    that all original input features are static. We propose a framework to jointly
    learn the representation of original features, FV parameters and parameters of
    the classifier in the style of traditional neural networks. Our proof of
    concept implementation improves the performance of FV on the Pascal Voc 2007
    challenge in a multi-GPU setting in comparison to a default SVM setting. We
    demonstrate that FV can be embedded into neural networks at arbitrary
    positions, allowing end-to-end training with back-propagation.

    Soft Biometrics: Gender Recognition from Unconstrained Face Images using Local Feature Descriptor

    Olasimbo Ayodeji Arigbabu, Sharifah Mumtazah Syed Ahmad, Wan Azizun Wan Adnan, Salman Yussof, Saif Mahmood
    Journal-ref: Journal of Information and Communication Technology (JICT), 2015
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Gender recognition from unconstrained face images is a challenging task due
    to the high degree of misalignment, pose, expression, and illumination
    variation. In previous works, the recognition of gender from unconstrained face
    images is approached by utilizing image alignment, exploiting multiple samples
    per individual to improve the learning ability of the classifier, or learning
    gender based on prior knowledge about pose and demographic distributions of the
    dataset. However, image alignment increases the complexity and time of
    computation, while the use of multiple samples or having prior knowledge about
    data distribution is unrealistic in practical applications. This paper presents
    an approach for gender recognition from unconstrained face images. Our
    technique exploits the robustness of local feature descriptor to photometric
    variations to extract the shape description of the 2D face image using a single
    sample image per individual. The results obtained from experiments on Labeled
    Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset describe the effectiveness of the proposed
    method. The essence of this study is to investigate the most suitable functions
    and parameter settings for recognizing gender from unconstrained face images.

    Monocular LSD-SLAM Integration within AR System

    Markus Höll, Vincent Lepetit
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR); Software Engineering (cs.SE)

    In this paper, we cover the process of integrating Large-Scale Direct
    Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (LSD-SLAM) algorithm into our existing AR
    stereo engine, developed for our modified “Augmented Reality Oculus Rift”. With
    that, we are able to track one of our realworld cameras which are mounted on
    the rift, within a complete unknown environment. This makes it possible to
    achieve a constant and full augmentation, synchronizing our 3D movement (x, y,
    z) in both worlds, the real world and the virtual world. The development for
    the basic AR setup using the Oculus Rift DK1 and two fisheye cameras is fully
    documented in our previous paper. After an introduction to image-based
    registration, we detail the LSD-SLAM algorithm and document our code
    implementing our integration. The AR stereo engine with Oculus Rift support can
    be accessed via the GIT repository this https URL and
    the modified LSD-SLAM project used for the integration is available here
    this https URL

    Semi-Dense Visual Odometry for RGB-D Cameras Using Approximate Nearest Neighbour Fields

    Yi Zhou, Laurent Kneip, Hongdong Li
    Comments: ICRA 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper presents a robust and efficient semi-dense visual odometry
    solution for RGB-D cameras. The core of our method is a 2D-3D ICP pipeline
    which estimates the pose of the sensor by registering the projection of a 3D
    semi-dense map of the reference frame with the 2D semi-dense region extracted
    in the current frame. The processing is speeded up by efficiently implemented
    approximate nearest neighbour fields under the Euclidean distance criterion,
    which permits the use of compact Gauss-Newton updates in the optimization. The
    registration is formulated as a maximum a posterior problem to deal with
    outliers and sensor noises, and consequently the equivalent weighted least
    squares problem is solved by iteratively reweighted least squares method. A
    variety of robust weight functions are tested and the optimum is determined
    based on the characteristics of the sensor model. Extensive evaluation on
    publicly available RGB-D datasets shows that the proposed method predominantly
    outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

    Computational Techniques in Multispectral Image Processing: Application to the Syriac Galen Palimpsest

    Corneliu Arsene, Peter Pormann, William Sellers, Siam Bhayro
    Comments: 29 February – 2 March 2016, Second International Conference on Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis, Centre for the study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg, Germany
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Multispectral and hyperspectral image analysis has experienced much
    development in the last decade. The application of these methods to palimpsests
    has produced significant results, enabling researchers to recover texts that
    would be otherwise lost under the visible overtext, by improving the contrast
    between the undertext and the overtext. In this paper we explore an extended
    number of multispectral and hyperspectral image analysis methods, consisting of
    supervised and unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques, on a part of
    the Syriac Galen Palimpsest dataset (www.digitalgalen.net). Of this extended
    set of methods, eight methods gave good results: three were supervised methods
    Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA),
    and Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA); and the other five methods were
    unsupervised methods (but still used in a supervised way) Gaussian Process
    Latent Variable Model (GPLVM), Isomap, Landmark Isomap, Principal Component
    Analysis (PCA), and Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA). The
    relative success of these methods was determined visually, using color
    pictures, on the basis of whether the undertext was distinguishable from the
    overtext, resulting in the following ranking of the methods: LDA, NCA, GDA,
    Isomap, Landmark Isomap, PPCA, PCA, and GPLVM. These results were compared with
    those obtained using the Canonical Variates Analysis (CVA) method on the same
    dataset, which showed remarkably accuracy (LDA is a particular case of CVA
    where the objects are classified to two classes).

    Video Frame Synthesis using Deep Voxel Flow

    Ziwei Liu, Raymond Yeh, Xiaoou Tang, Yiming Liu, Aseem Agarwala
    Comments: Project page: this https URL
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR); Learning (cs.LG)

    We address the problem of synthesizing new video frames in an existing video,
    either in-between existing frames (interpolation), or subsequent to them
    (extrapolation). This problem is challenging because video appearance and
    motion can be highly complex. Traditional optical-flow-based solutions often
    fail where flow estimation is challenging, while newer neural-network-based
    methods that hallucinate pixel values directly often produce blurry results. We
    combine the advantages of these two methods by training a deep network that
    learns to synthesize video frames by flowing pixel values from existing ones,
    which we call deep voxel flow. Our method requires no human supervision, and
    any video can be used as training data by dropping, and then learning to
    predict, existing frames. The technique is efficient, and can be applied at any
    video resolution. We demonstrate that our method produces results that both
    quantitatively and qualitatively improve upon the state-of-the-art.

    Region Ensemble Network: Improving Convolutional Network for Hand Pose Estimation

    Hengkai Guo, Guijin Wang, Xinghao Chen, Cairong Zhang, Fei Qiao, Huazhong Yang
    Comments: Submitted to ICIP 2017
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Hand pose estimation from monocular depth images is an important and
    challenging problem for human-computer interaction. Recently deep convolutional
    networks (ConvNet) with sophisticated design have been employed to address it,
    but the improvement over traditional methods is not so apparent. To promote the
    performance of directly 3D coordinate regression, we propose a tree-structured
    Region Ensemble Network (REN), which partitions the convolution outputs into
    regions and integrates the results from multiple regressors on each regions.
    Compared with multi-model ensemble, our model is completely end-to-end
    training. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves the
    best performance among state-of-the-arts on two public datasets.

    Hyperspectral Sharpening using Scene-adapted Gaussian Mixture Priors

    Afonso M. Teodoro, José M. Bioucas-Dias, Mário A. T. Figueiredo
    Comments: submitted
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    This paper tackles a hyperspectral data fusion problem, using the so-called
    plug-and-play approach, which combines an ADMM algorithm with a denoiser based
    on a Gaussian mixture prior. We build upon the concept of scene-adapted prior
    where, as the name suggests, we learn a model that is targeted to the specific
    scene being imaged, and show state-of-the-art results on several hyperspectral
    sharpening experiments. Additionally, we prove that the algorithm is guaranteed
    to converge.

    An Adversarial Regularisation for Semi-Supervised Training of Structured Output Neural Networks

    Mateusz Koziński, Loïc Simon, Frédéric Jurie
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We propose a method for semi-supervised training of structured-output neural
    networks. Inspired by the framework of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN),
    we train a discriminator network to capture the notion of a quality of network
    output. To this end, we leverage the qualitative difference between outputs
    obtained on the labelled training data and unannotated data. We then use the
    discriminator as a source of error signal for unlabelled data. This effectively
    boosts the performance of a network on a held out test set. Initial experiments
    in image segmentation demonstrate that the proposed framework enables achieving
    the same network performance as in a fully supervised scenario, while using two
    times less annotations.

    Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Networks for Crowd Counting

    Lingke Zeng, Xiangmin Xu, Bolun Cai, Suo Qiu, Tong Zhang
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Crowd counting on static images is a challenging problem due to scale
    variations. Recently deep neural networks have been shown to be effective in
    this task. However, existing neural-networks-based methods often use the
    multi-column or multi-network model to extract the scale-relevant features,
    which is more complicated for optimization and computation wasting. To this
    end, we propose a novel multi-scale convolutional neural network (MSCNN) for
    single image crowd counting. Based on the multi-scale blobs, the network is
    able to generate scale-relevant features for higher crowd counting performances
    in a single-column architecture, which is both accuracy and cost effective for
    practical applications. Complemental results show that our method outperforms
    the state-of-the-art methods on both accuracy and robustness with far less
    number of parameters.

    Guided Optical Flow Learning

    Yi Zhu, Zhenzhong Lan, Shawn Newsam, Alexander G. Hauptmann
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    We study the unsupervised learning of CNNs for optical flow estimation using
    proxy ground truth data. Supervised CNNs, due to their immense learning
    capacity, have shown superior performance on a range of computer vision
    problems including optical flow prediction. They however require the ground
    truth flow which is usually not accessible except on limited synthetic data.
    Without the guidance of ground truth optical flow, unsupervised CNNs often
    perform worse as they are naturally ill-conditioned. We therefore propose a
    novel framework in which proxy ground truth data generated from classical
    approaches is used to guide the CNN learning. The models are further refined in
    an unsupervised fashion using an image reconstruction loss. Our guided learning
    approach is competitive with or superior to state-of-the-art approaches on
    three standard benchmark datasets yet is completely unsupervised and can run in
    real time.

    Generating Multiple Hypotheses for Human 3D Pose Consistent with 2D Joint Detections

    Ehsan Jahangiri, Alan L. Yuille
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multimedia (cs.MM); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We propose a method to generate multiple hypotheses for human 3D pose all of
    them consistent with the 2D detection of joints in a monocular RGB image. To
    generate these pose hypotheses we use a novel generative model defined in the
    space of anatomically plausible 3D poses satisfying the joint angle limits and
    limb length ratios. The proposed generative model is uniform in the space of
    anatomically valid poses and as a result, does not suffer from the dataset bias
    in existing motion capture datasets such as Human3.6M (H36M), HumanEva, and CMU
    MoCap. A good model that spans the full variability of human pose and
    generalizes to unseen poses must be compositional i.e., produce a pose by
    combining parts. Our model is flexible and compositional and consequently can
    generalize to every plausible human 3D pose since it is only limited by
    physical constraints. We discuss sampling from this model and use these samples
    to generate multiple diverse human 3D pose hypotheses given the 2D detection of
    joints. We argue that generating multiple pose hypotheses from a monocular RGB
    image is more reasonable than generating only a single 3D pose given the depth
    ambiguity and the uncertainty caused by occlusion and imperfect 2D joint
    detection. To support this argument, we have performed empirical evaluation on
    the popular Human3.6M dataset that confirms that most often, at least one of
    our pose hypotheses is closer to the true 3D pose compared to the estimated
    pose by other recent baseline methods for 3D pose reconstruction from monocular
    RGB images. The idea of generating multiple consistent and valid pose
    hypotheses can give rise to a new line of future work that has not previously
    been addressed in the literature.

    Automated Low-cost Terrestrial Laser Scanner for Measuring Diameters at Breast Height and Heights of Forest Trees

    Pei Wang, Guochao Bu, Ronghao Li, Rui Zhao
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Terrestrial laser scanner is a kind of fast, high-precision data acquisition
    device, which had been more and more applied to the research areas of forest
    inventory. In this study, a kind of automated low-cost terrestrial laser
    scanner was designed and implemented based on a two-dimensional laser radar
    sensor SICK LMS-511 and a stepper motor. The new scanner was named as BEE,
    which can scan the forest trees in three dimension. The BEE scanner and its
    supporting software are specifically designed for forest inventory. The
    experiments have been performed by using the BEE scanner in an artificial
    ginkgo forest which was located in Haidian district of Beijing. Four square
    plots were selected to do the experiments. The BEE scanner scanned in the four
    plots and acquired the single scan data respectively. The DBH, tree height and
    tree position of trees in the four plots were estimated and analyzed. For
    comparison, the manual measured data was also collected in the four plots. The
    tree stem detection rate for all four plots was 92.75%; the root mean square
    error of the DBH estimation was 1.27cm; the root mean square error of the tree
    height estimation was 0.24m; the tree position estimation was in line with the
    actual position. Experimental results show that the BEE scanner can efficiently
    estimate the structure parameters of forest trees and has a good potential in
    practical application of forest inventory.

    Comparison of machine learning methods for classifying mediastinal lymph node metastasis of non-small cell lung cancer from 18F-FDG PET/CT images

    Hongkai Wang, Zongwei Zhou, Yingci Li, Zhonghua Chen, Peiou Lu, Wenzhi Wang, Wanyu Liu, Lijuan Yu
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Medical Physics (physics.med-ph)

    The present study shows that the performance of CNN is not significantly
    different from the best classical methods and human doctors for classifying
    mediastinal lymph node metastasis of NSCLC from PET/CT images. Because CNN does
    not need tumor segmentation or feature calculation, it is more convenient and
    more objective than the classical methods. However, CNN does not make use of
    the import diagnostic features, which have been proved more discriminative than
    the texture features for classifying small-sized lymph nodes. Therefore,
    incorporating the diagnostic features into CNN is a promising direction for
    future research.

    Keyframe-Based Visual-Inertial Online SLAM with Relocalization

    Anton Kasyanov, Francis Engelmann, Jörg Stückler, Bastian Leibe
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

    Complementing images with inertial measurements has become one of the most
    popular approaches to achieve highly accurate and robust real-time camera pose
    tracking. In this paper, we present a keyframe-based approach to
    visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for monocular and
    stereo cameras. Our method is based on a real-time capable visual-inertial
    odometry method that provides locally consistent trajectory and map estimates.
    We achieve global consistency in the estimate through online loop-closing and
    non-linear optimization. Furthermore, our approach supports relocalization in a
    map that has been previously obtained and allows for continued SLAM operation.
    We evaluate our approach in terms of accuracy, relocalization capability and
    run-time efficiency on public benchmark datasets and on newly recorded
    sequences. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our approach towards
    a visual-inertial odometry method in recovering the trajectory of the camera.

    Stable and Controllable Neural Texture Synthesis and Style Transfer Using Histogram Losses

    Eric Risser, Pierre Wilmot, Connelly Barnes
    Subjects: Graphics (cs.GR); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    Recently, methods have been proposed that perform texture synthesis and style
    transfer by using convolutional neural networks (e.g. Gatys et al.
    [2015,2016]). These methods are exciting because they can in some cases create
    results with state-of-the-art quality. However, in this paper, we show these
    methods also have limitations in texture quality, stability, requisite
    parameter tuning, and lack of user controls. This paper presents a multiscale
    synthesis pipeline based on convolutional neural networks that ameliorates
    these issues. We first give a mathematical explanation of the source of
    instabilities in many previous approaches. We then improve these instabilities
    by using histogram losses to synthesize textures that better statistically
    match the exemplar. We also show how to integrate localized style losses in our
    multiscale framework. These losses can improve the quality of large features,
    improve the separation of content and style, and offer artistic controls such
    as paint by numbers. We demonstrate that our approach offers improved quality,
    convergence in fewer iterations, and more stability over the optimization.


    Artificial Intelligence

    Propagation via Kernelization: The Vertex Cover Constraint

    Clément Carbonnel (LAAS-ROC), Emmanuel Hébrard (LAAS-ROC)
    Journal-ref: Michel Rueher. The 22nd International Conference on Principles and
    Practice of Constraint Programming, Sep 2016, Toulouse, France. Lecture Notes
    in Computer Science, 9892, pp.147 – 156, 2016, Principles and Practice of
    Constraint Programming
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    The technique of kernelization consists in extracting, from an instance of a
    problem, an essentially equivalent instance whose size is bounded in a
    parameter k. Besides being the basis for efficient param-eterized algorithms,
    this method also provides a wealth of information to reason about in the
    context of constraint programming. We study the use of kernelization for
    designing propagators through the example of the Vertex Cover constraint. Since
    the classic kernelization rules often correspond to dominance rather than
    consistency, we introduce the notion of “loss-less” kernel. While our
    preliminary experimental results show the potential of the approach, they also
    show some of its limits. In particular, this method is more effective for
    vertex covers of large and sparse graphs, as they tend to have, relatively,
    smaller kernels.

    Autonomous Braking System via Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Hyunmin Chae, Chang Mook Kang, ByeoungDo Kim, Jaekyum Kim, Chung Choo Chung, Jun Won Choi
    Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    In this paper, we propose a new autonomous braking system based on deep
    reinforcement learning. The proposed autonomous braking system automatically
    decides whether to apply the brake at each time step when confronting the risk
    of collision using the information on the obstacle obtained by the sensors. The
    problem of designing brake control is formulated as searching for the optimal
    policy in Markov decision process (MDP) model where the state is given by the
    relative position of the obstacle and the vehicle’s speed, and the action space
    is defined as whether brake is stepped or not. The policy used for brake
    control is learned through computer simulations using the deep reinforcement
    learning method called deep Q-network (DQN). In order to derive desirable
    braking policy, we propose the reward function which balances the damage
    imposed to the obstacle in case of accident and the reward achieved when the
    vehicle runs out of risk as soon as possible. DQN is trained for the scenario
    where a vehicle is encountered with a pedestrian crossing the urban road.
    Experiments show that the control agent exhibits desirable control behavior and
    avoids collision without any mistake in various uncertain environments.

    Automatic Rule Extraction from Long Short Term Memory Networks

    W. James Murdoch, Arthur Szlam
    Comments: ICLR 2017 accepted paper
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Although deep learning models have proven effective at solving problems in
    natural language processing, the mechanism by which they come to their
    conclusions is often unclear. As a result, these models are generally treated
    as black boxes, yielding no insight of the underlying learned patterns. In this
    paper we consider Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and demonstrate a new
    approach for tracking the importance of a given input to the LSTM for a given
    output. By identifying consistently important patterns of words, we are able to
    distill state of the art LSTMs on sentiment analysis and question answering
    into a set of representative phrases. This representation is then
    quantitatively validated by using the extracted phrases to construct a simple,
    rule-based classifier which approximates the output of the LSTM.

    Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis

    Adrian Benton, Huda Khayrallah, Biman Gujral, Drew Reisinger, Sheng Zhang, Raman Arora
    Comments: 14 pages, 6 figures
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We present Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DGCCA) — a
    method for learning nonlinear transformations of arbitrarily many views of
    data, such that the resulting transformations are maximally informative of each
    other. While methods for nonlinear two-view representation learning (Deep CCA,
    (Andrew et al., 2013)) and linear many-view representation learning
    (Generalized CCA (Horst, 1961)) exist, DGCCA is the first CCA-style multiview
    representation learning technique that combines the flexibility of nonlinear
    (deep) representation learning with the statistical power of incorporating
    information from many independent sources, or views. We present the DGCCA
    formulation as well as an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm for
    solving it. We learn DGCCA repre- sentations on two distinct datasets for three
    downstream tasks: phonetic transcrip- tion from acoustic and articulatory
    measurements, and recommending hashtags and friends on a dataset of Twitter
    users. We find that DGCCA representations soundly beat existing methods at
    phonetic transcription and hashtag recommendation, and in general perform no
    worse than standard linear many-view techniques.

    A Historical Review of Forty Years of Research on CMAC

    Frank Z. Xing
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

    The Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) is an influential
    brain-inspired computing model in many relevant fields. Since its inception in
    the 1970s, the model has been intensively studied and many variants of the
    prototype, such as Kernel-CMAC, Self-Organizing Map CMAC, and Linguistic CMAC,
    have been proposed. This review article focus on how the CMAC model is
    gradually developed and refined to meet the demand of fast, adaptive, and
    robust control. Two perspective, CMAC as a neural network and CMAC as a table
    look-up technique are presented. Three aspects of the model: the architecture,
    learning algorithms and applications are discussed. In the end, some potential
    future research directions on this model are suggested.

    Generating Multiple Hypotheses for Human 3D Pose Consistent with 2D Joint Detections

    Ehsan Jahangiri, Alan L. Yuille
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multimedia (cs.MM); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We propose a method to generate multiple hypotheses for human 3D pose all of
    them consistent with the 2D detection of joints in a monocular RGB image. To
    generate these pose hypotheses we use a novel generative model defined in the
    space of anatomically plausible 3D poses satisfying the joint angle limits and
    limb length ratios. The proposed generative model is uniform in the space of
    anatomically valid poses and as a result, does not suffer from the dataset bias
    in existing motion capture datasets such as Human3.6M (H36M), HumanEva, and CMU
    MoCap. A good model that spans the full variability of human pose and
    generalizes to unseen poses must be compositional i.e., produce a pose by
    combining parts. Our model is flexible and compositional and consequently can
    generalize to every plausible human 3D pose since it is only limited by
    physical constraints. We discuss sampling from this model and use these samples
    to generate multiple diverse human 3D pose hypotheses given the 2D detection of
    joints. We argue that generating multiple pose hypotheses from a monocular RGB
    image is more reasonable than generating only a single 3D pose given the depth
    ambiguity and the uncertainty caused by occlusion and imperfect 2D joint
    detection. To support this argument, we have performed empirical evaluation on
    the popular Human3.6M dataset that confirms that most often, at least one of
    our pose hypotheses is closer to the true 3D pose compared to the estimated
    pose by other recent baseline methods for 3D pose reconstruction from monocular
    RGB images. The idea of generating multiple consistent and valid pose
    hypotheses can give rise to a new line of future work that has not previously
    been addressed in the literature.


    Information Retrieval

    Name Entity Disambiguation in Anonymized Graphs using Link Analysis: A Network Embedding based Solution

    Baichuan Zhang, Mohammad Al Hasan
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    In real-world, our DNA is unique but many people share same names. This
    phenomenon often causes erroneous aggregation of documents of multiple persons
    who are namesake of one another. Such mistakes deteriorate the performance of
    document retrieval, web search, and more seriously, cause improper attribution
    of credit or blame in digital forensic. To resolve this issue, the name entity
    disambiguation task is designed which aims to partition the documents
    associated with a name reference such that each partition contains documents
    pertaining to a unique real-life person. Existing solutions to this task
    substantially rely on feature engineering, such as biographical feature
    extraction, or construction of auxiliary features from Wikipedia. However, for
    many scenarios, such features may be costly to obtain or unavailable due to the
    risk of privacy violation. In this work, we propose a novel name disambiguation
    method. Our proposed method is non-intrusive of privacy because instead of
    using attributes pertaining to a real-life person, our method leverages only
    relational data in the form of anonymized graphs. In the aspect of
    methodological novelty, the proposed method uses a representation learning
    strategy to embed each document in a low dimensional vector space where name
    disambiguation can be solved by a hierarchical agglomerative clustering
    algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is
    significantly better than the existing name entity disambiguation methods
    working in a similar setting.


    Computation and Language

    Automatic Rule Extraction from Long Short Term Memory Networks

    W. James Murdoch, Arthur Szlam
    Comments: ICLR 2017 accepted paper
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Although deep learning models have proven effective at solving problems in
    natural language processing, the mechanism by which they come to their
    conclusions is often unclear. As a result, these models are generally treated
    as black boxes, yielding no insight of the underlying learned patterns. In this
    paper we consider Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and demonstrate a new
    approach for tracking the importance of a given input to the LSTM for a given
    output. By identifying consistently important patterns of words, we are able to
    distill state of the art LSTMs on sentiment analysis and question answering
    into a set of representative phrases. This representation is then
    quantitatively validated by using the extracted phrases to construct a simple,
    rule-based classifier which approximates the output of the LSTM.

    Exploiting Domain Knowledge via Grouped Weight Sharing with Application to Text Categorization

    Ye Zhang, Matthew Lease, Byron C. Wallace
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    A fundamental advantage of neural models for NLP is their ability to learn
    representations from scratch. However, in practice this often means ignoring
    existing external linguistic resources, e.g., WordNet or domain specific
    ontologies such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We propose a
    general, novel method for exploiting such resources via weight sharing. Prior
    work on weight sharing in neural networks has considered it largely as a means
    of model compression. In contrast, we treat weight sharing as a flexible
    mechanism for incorporating prior knowledge into neural models. We show that
    this approach consistently yields improved performance on classification tasks
    compared to baseline strategies that do not exploit weight sharing.

    Trainable Greedy Decoding for Neural Machine Translation

    Jiatao Gu, Kyunghyun Cho, Victor O.K. Li
    Comments: 10 pages
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Recent research in neural machine translation has largely focused on two
    aspects; neural network architectures and end-to-end learning algorithms. The
    problem of decoding, however, has received relatively little attention from the
    research community. In this paper, we solely focus on the problem of decoding
    given a trained neural machine translation model. Instead of trying to build a
    new decoding algorithm for any specific decoding objective, we propose the idea
    of trainable decoding algorithm in which we train a decoding algorithm to find
    a translation that maximizes an arbitrary decoding objective. More
    specifically, we design an actor that observes and manipulates the hidden state
    of the neural machine translation decoder and propose to train it using a
    variant of deterministic policy gradient. We extensively evaluate the proposed
    algorithm using four language pairs and two decoding objectives and show that
    we can indeed train a trainable greedy decoder that generates a better
    translation (in terms of a target decoding objective) with minimal
    computational overhead.

    Data Selection Strategies for Multi-Domain Sentiment Analysis

    Sebastian Ruder, Parsa Ghaffari, John G. Breslin
    Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Domain adaptation is important in sentiment analysis as sentiment-indicating
    words vary between domains. Recently, multi-domain adaptation has become more
    pervasive, but existing approaches train on all available source domains
    including dissimilar ones. However, the selection of appropriate training data
    is as important as the choice of algorithm. We undertake — to our knowledge
    for the first time — an extensive study of domain similarity metrics in the
    context of sentiment analysis and propose novel representations, metrics, and a
    new scope for data selection. We evaluate the proposed methods on two
    large-scale multi-domain adaptation settings on tweets and reviews and
    demonstrate that they consistently outperform strong random and balanced
    baselines, while our proposed selection strategy outperforms instance-level
    selection and yields the best score on a large reviews corpus.

    A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text Generation

    Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, Erhardt Barth
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    In this paper we explore the effect of architectural choices on learning a
    Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for text generation. In contrast to the
    previously introduced VAE model for text where both the encoder and decoder are
    RNNs, we propose a novel hybrid architecture that blends fully feed-forward
    convolutional and deconvolutional components with a recurrent language model.
    Our architecture exhibits several attractive properties such as faster run time
    and convergence, ability to better handle long sequences and, more importantly,
    it helps to avoid some of the major difficulties posed by training VAE models
    on textual data.

    Iterative Multi-document Neural Attention for Multiple Answer Prediction

    Claudio Greco, Alessandro Suglia, Pierpaolo Basile, Gaetano Rossiello, Giovanni Semeraro
    Comments: Paper accepted and presented at the Deep Understanding and Reasoning: A challenge for Next-generation Intelligent Agents (URANIA) workshop, held in the context of the AI*IA 2016 conference
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    People have information needs of varying complexity, which can be solved by
    an intelligent agent able to answer questions formulated in a proper way,
    eventually considering user context and preferences. In a scenario in which the
    user profile can be considered as a question, intelligent agents able to answer
    questions can be used to find the most relevant answers for a given user. In
    this work we propose a novel model based on Artificial Neural Networks to
    answer questions with multiple answers by exploiting multiple facts retrieved
    from a knowledge base. The model is evaluated on the factoid Question Answering
    and top-n recommendation tasks of the bAbI Movie Dialog dataset. After
    assessing the performance of the model on both tasks, we try to define the
    long-term goal of a conversational recommender system able to interact using
    natural language and to support users in their information seeking processes in
    a personalized way.

    Automatically Annotated Turkish Corpus for Named Entity Recognition and Text Categorization using Large-Scale Gazetteers

    H. Bahadir Sahin, Caglar Tirkaz, Eray Yildiz, Mustafa Tolga Eren, Ozan Sonmez
    Comments: 10 page, 1 figure, white paper
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Turkish Wikipedia Named-Entity Recognition and Text Categorization (TWNERTC)
    dataset is a collection of automatically categorized and annotated sentences
    obtained from Wikipedia. We constructed large-scale gazetteers by using a graph
    crawler algorithm to extract relevant entity and domain information from a
    semantic knowledge base, Freebase. The constructed gazetteers contains
    approximately 300K entities with thousands of fine-grained entity types under
    77 different domains. Since automated processes are prone to ambiguity, we also
    introduce two new content specific noise reduction methodologies. Moreover, we
    map fine-grained entity types to the equivalent four coarse-grained types:
    person, loc, org, misc. Eventually, we construct six different dataset versions
    and evaluate the quality of annotations by comparing ground truths from human
    annotators. We make these datasets publicly available to support studies on
    Turkish named-entity recognition (NER) and text categorization (TC).

    Neural Machine Translation with Source-Side Latent Graph Parsing

    Kazuma Hashimoto, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    This paper presents a novel neural machine translation model which jointly
    learns translation and source-side latent graph representations of sentences.
    Unlike existing pipelined approaches using syntactic parsers, our end-to-end
    model learns a latent graph parser as part of the encoder of an attention-based
    neural machine translation model, so the parser is optimized according to the
    translation objective. Experimental results show that our model significantly
    outperforms the previous best results on the standard English-to-Japanese
    translation dataset.

    Social media mining for identification and exploration of health-related information from pregnant women

    Pramod Bharadwaj Chandrashekar (1), Arjun Magge (1), Abeed Sarker (2), Graciela Gonzalez (2) ((1) Arizona State University, (2) University of Pennsylvania)
    Comments: 9 pages
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Widespread use of social media has led to the generation of substantial
    amounts of information about individuals, including health-related information.
    Social media provides the opportunity to study health-related information about
    selected population groups who may be of interest for a particular study. In
    this paper, we explore the possibility of utilizing social media to perform
    targeted data collection and analysis from a particular population group —
    pregnant women. We hypothesize that we can use social media to identify cohorts
    of pregnant women and follow them over time to analyze crucial health-related
    information. To identify potentially pregnant women, we employ simple
    rule-based searches that attempt to detect pregnancy announcements with
    moderate precision. To further filter out false positives and noise, we employ
    a supervised classifier using a small number of hand-annotated data. We then
    collect their posts over time to create longitudinal health timelines and
    attempt to divide the timelines into different pregnancy trimesters. Finally,
    we assess the usefulness of the timelines by performing a preliminary analysis
    to estimate drug intake patterns of our cohort at different trimesters. Our
    rule-based cohort identification technique collected 53,820 users over thirty
    months from Twitter. Our pregnancy announcement classification technique
    achieved an F-measure of 0.81 for the pregnancy class, resulting in 34,895 user
    timelines. Analysis of the timelines revealed that pertinent health-related
    information, such as drug-intake and adverse reactions can be mined from the
    data. Our approach to using user timelines in this fashion has produced very
    encouraging results and can be employed for other important tasks where
    cohorts, for which health-related information may not be available from other
    sources, are required to be followed over time to derive population-based
    estimates.

    MORSE: Semantic-ally Drive-n MORpheme SEgment-er

    Tarek Sakakini, Suma Bhat, Pramod Viswanath
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We present in this paper a novel framework for morpheme segmentation which
    uses the morpho-syntactic regularities preserved by word representations, in
    addition to orthographic features, to segment words into morphemes. This
    framework is the first to consider vocabulary-wide syntactico-semantic
    information for this task. We also analyze the deficiencies of available
    benchmarking datasets and introduce our own dataset that was created on the
    basis of compositionality. We validate our algorithm across datasets and
    present state-of-the-art results.

    Fixing the Infix: Unsupervised Discovery of Root-and-Pattern Morphology

    Tarek Sakakini, Suma Bhat, Pramod Viswanath
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We present an unsupervised and language-agnostic method for learning
    root-and-pattern morphology in Semitic languages. This form of morphology,
    abundant in Semitic languages, has not been handled in prior unsupervised
    approaches. We harness the syntactico-semantic information in distributed word
    representations to solve the long standing problem of root-and-pattern
    discovery in Semitic languages. Moreover, we construct an unsupervised root
    extractor based on the learned rules. We prove the validity of learned rules
    across Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic, alongside showing that our root extractor
    compares favorably with a widely used, carefully engineered root extractor:
    ISRI.

    Semi-Supervised QA with Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets

    Zhilin Yang, Junjie Hu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, William W. Cohen
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    We study the problem of semi-supervised question answering—-utilizing
    unlabeled text to boost the performance of question answering models. We
    propose a novel training framework, the Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets. In
    this framework, we train a generative model to generate questions based on the
    unlabeled text, and combine model-generated questions with human-generated
    questions for training question answering models. We develop novel domain
    adaptation algorithms, based on reinforcement learning, to alleviate the
    discrepancy between the model-generated data distribution and the
    human-generated data distribution. Experiments show that our proposed framework
    obtains substantial improvement from unlabeled text.

    Question Answering through Transfer Learning from Large Fine-grained Supervision Data

    Sewon Min, Minjoon Seo, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    We show that the task of question answering (QA) can significantly benefit
    from the transfer learning of models trained on a different large, fine-grained
    QA dataset. We achieve the state of the art in two well-studied QA datasets,
    WikiQA and SemEval-2016 (Task 3A), through a basic transfer learning technique
    from SQuAD. For WikiQA, our model outperforms the previous best model by more
    than 8%. We demonstrate that finer supervision provides better guidance for
    learning lexical and syntactic information than coarser supervision, through
    quantitative results and visual analysis. We also show that a similar transfer
    learning procedure achieves the state of the art on an entailment task.

    How to evaluate word embeddings? On importance of data efficiency and simple supervised tasks

    Stanisław Jastrzebski, Damian Leśniak, Wojciech Marian Czarnecki
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

    Maybe the single most important goal of representation learning is making
    subsequent learning faster. Surprisingly, this fact is not well reflected in
    the way embeddings are evaluated. In addition, recent practice in word
    embeddings points towards importance of learning specialized representations.
    We argue that focus of word representation evaluation should reflect those
    trends and shift towards evaluating what useful information is easily
    accessible. Specifically, we propose that evaluation should focus on data
    efficiency and simple supervised tasks, where the amount of available data is
    varied and scores of a supervised model are reported for each subset (as
    commonly done in transfer learning).

    In order to illustrate significance of such analysis, a comprehensive
    evaluation of selected word embeddings is presented. Proposed approach yields a
    more complete picture and brings new insight into performance characteristics,
    for instance information about word similarity or analogy tends to be
    non–linearly encoded in the embedding space, which questions the cosine-based,
    unsupervised, evaluation methods. All results and analysis scripts are
    available online.

    Name Entity Disambiguation in Anonymized Graphs using Link Analysis: A Network Embedding based Solution

    Baichuan Zhang, Mohammad Al Hasan
    Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

    In real-world, our DNA is unique but many people share same names. This
    phenomenon often causes erroneous aggregation of documents of multiple persons
    who are namesake of one another. Such mistakes deteriorate the performance of
    document retrieval, web search, and more seriously, cause improper attribution
    of credit or blame in digital forensic. To resolve this issue, the name entity
    disambiguation task is designed which aims to partition the documents
    associated with a name reference such that each partition contains documents
    pertaining to a unique real-life person. Existing solutions to this task
    substantially rely on feature engineering, such as biographical feature
    extraction, or construction of auxiliary features from Wikipedia. However, for
    many scenarios, such features may be costly to obtain or unavailable due to the
    risk of privacy violation. In this work, we propose a novel name disambiguation
    method. Our proposed method is non-intrusive of privacy because instead of
    using attributes pertaining to a real-life person, our method leverages only
    relational data in the form of anonymized graphs. In the aspect of
    methodological novelty, the proposed method uses a representation learning
    strategy to embed each document in a low dimensional vector space where name
    disambiguation can be solved by a hierarchical agglomerative clustering
    algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is
    significantly better than the existing name entity disambiguation methods
    working in a similar setting.


    Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

    A study on implementing a multithreaded version of the SIRENE detector simulation software for high energy neutrinos

    Petros Giannakopoulos, Michail Gkoumas, Ioannis Diplas, Georgios Voularinos, Theofanis Vlachos, Konstantia Balasi, Ekaterini Tzamariudaki, Christos Filippidis, Yiannis Cotronis, Christos Markou
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    The primary objective of SIRENE is to simulate the response to neutrino
    events of any type of high energy neutrino telescope. Additionally, it
    implements different geometries for a neutrino detector and different
    configurations and characteristics of photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs) inside the
    optical modules of the detector through a library of C+ + classes. This could
    be considered a massive statistical analysis of photo-electrons. Aim of this
    work is the development of a multithreaded version of the SIRENE detector
    simulation software for high energy neutrinos. This approach allows utilization
    of multiple CPU cores leading to a potentially significant decrease in the
    required execution time compared to the sequential code. We are making use of
    the OpenMP framework for the production of multithreaded code running on the
    CPU. Finally, we analyze the feasibility of a GPU-accelerated implementation.

    Deterministic Backbone Creation in an SINR Network without Knowledge of Location

    Dariusz R. Kowalski, William K. Moses Jr., Shailesh Vaya
    Comments: 12 pages, 1 table
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    For a given network, a backbone is an overlay network consisting of a
    connected dominating set with additional accessibility properties. Once a
    backbone is created for a network, it can be utilized for fast communication
    amongst the nodes of the network.

    The Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) model has become the
    standard for modeling communication among devices in wireless networks. For
    this model, the community has pondered what the most realistic solutions for
    communication problems in wireless networks would look like. Such solutions
    would have the characteristic that they would make the least number of
    assumptions about the availability of information about the participating
    nodes. Solving problems when nothing at all is known about the network and
    having nodes just start participating would be ideal. However, this is quite
    challenging and most likely not feasible. The pragmatic approach is then to
    make meaningful assumptions about the available information and present
    efficient solutions based on this information.

    We present a solution for creation of backbone in the SINR model, when nodes
    do not have access to their physical coordinates or the coordinates of other
    nodes in the network. This restriction models the deployment of nodes in
    various situations for sensing hurricanes, cyclones, and so on, where only
    information about nodes prior to their deployment may be known but not their
    actual locations post deployment. We assume that nodes have access to knowledge
    of their label, the labels of nodes within their neighborhood, the range from
    which labels are taken ([N]) and the total number of participating nodes (n).
    We also assume that nodes wake up spontaneously. We present an efficient
    deterministic protocol to create a backbone with a round complexity of
    (O(Delta lg^2 N)).

    Deterministic Protocols in the SINR Model without Knowledge of Coordinates

    William K. Moses Jr., Shailesh Vaya
    Comments: 37 pages, 1 table, 4 figures
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    Much work has been developed for studying the classical broadcasting problem
    in the SINR (Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio) model for wireless device
    transmission. The setting typically studied is when all radio nodes transmit a
    signal of the same strength. This work studies the challenging problem of
    devising a distributed algorithm for multi-broadcasting, assuming a subset of
    nodes are initially awake, for the SINR model when each device only has access
    to knowledge about the total number of nodes in the network (n), the range from
    which each node’s label is taken ([1,dots,N]), and the label of the device
    itself. Specifically, we assume no knowledge of the physical coordinates of
    devices and also no knowledge of neighborhood of each node.

    We present a deterministic protocol for the multi-broadcast problem in (O(n
    lg^2 N lg n)) rounds, for this setting, assuming that only a subset of all
    (n) nodes are initially awake. A lower bound of (Omega(n lg N)) rounds is
    known for this, but even that assumes knowledge of physical coordinates. All
    previous results in the literature are either randomized or intensively use the
    physical coordinates of the nodes and/or knowledge of the labels of nodes’
    neighbors.

    In addition to the above result, we present algorithms to achieve
    multi-broadcast in (O(n lg^2 N)) rounds and create a backbone in (O(n lg^2
    N)) rounds, assuming that all nodes are initially awake. For a given backbone,
    messages can be exchanged between every pair of connected nodes in the backbone
    in (O(lg N)) rounds and between any node and its leader in the backbone in
    (O(Delta lg N)) rounds.

    An Executable Sequential Specification for Spark Aggregation

    Yu-Fang Chen, Chih-Duo Hong, Ondřej Lengál, Shin-Cheng Mu, Nishant Sinha, Bow-Yaw Wang
    Comments: an extended version of a paper accepted at NETYS’17
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

    Spark is a new promising platform for scalable data-parallel computation. It
    provides several high-level application programming interfaces (APIs) to
    perform parallel data aggregation. Since execution of parallel aggregation in
    Spark is inherently non-deterministic, a natural requirement for Spark programs
    is to give the same result for any execution on the same data set. We present
    PureSpark, an executable formal Haskell specification for Spark aggregate
    combinators. Our specification allows us to deduce the precise condition for
    deterministic outcomes from Spark aggregation. We report case studies analyzing
    deterministic outcomes and correctness of Spark programs.

    Parallel implementation of a vehicle rail dynamical model for multi-core systems

    Anas M. Al-Oraiqat
    Comments: 8 pages, 9 Figures
    Journal-ref: International Journal of advanced studies in Computer Science and
    Engineering (IJASCSE) 2012
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    This research presents a model of a complex dynamic object running on a
    multi-core system. Discretization and numerical integration for multibody
    models of vehicle rail elements in the vertical longitudinal plane fluctuations
    is considered. The implemented model and solution of the motion differential
    equations allow estimating the basic processes occurring in the system with
    various external influences. Hence the developed programming model can be used
    for performing analysis and comparing new vehicle designs.

    Keywords-dynamic model; multi-core system; SMP system; rolling stock.

    Parallel implementation of the coupled harmonic oscillator

    Anas M. Al-Oraiqat
    Comments: 7 pages, 5 Figures, International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology 2009
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    This article presents the parallel implementation of the coupled harmonic
    oscillator. From the analytical solution of the coupled harmonic oscillator,
    the design parameters are obtained. After that, a numerical integration of the
    system with MATLAB, which is used as a tool of benchmark evaluation, is
    performed. Next, parallel implementation is performed using a well-known
    approach like OpenMP and WinAPI. Taking into account the errors of basic
    parameters of the simulated process, the generated oscillations of the proposed
    parallel realization are almost identical to the actual solution of the
    harmonic oscillator model. Test ways to optimize the parallel architecture of
    computing processes for software implementations of the considered application
    is carried out. The developed model is used to study a fixed priority
    scheduling algorithm for real-time parallel threads execution. The proposed
    parallel implementation of the considered dynamic system has an independent
    value and can be considered as a test for determining the characteristics of
    multi-core systems for time-critical simulation problems. Keywords: Harmonic
    oscillator, model, SMP, parallel programming, OpenMP;

    A Robust Asynchronous Newton Method for Massive Scale Computing Systems

    Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Lee A. Newberg, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Carlos A. Varela
    Subjects: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Volunteer computing grids offer super-computing levels of computing power at
    the relatively low cost of operating a server. In previous work, the authors
    have shown that it is possible to take traditionally iterative evolutionary
    algorithms and execute them on volunteer computing grids by performing them
    asynchronously. The asynchronous implementations dramatically increase
    scalability and decrease the time taken to converge to a solution. Iterative
    and asynchronous optimization algorithms implemented using MPI on clusters and
    supercomputers, and BOINC on volunteer computing grids have been packaged
    together in a framework for generic distributed optimization (FGDO). This paper
    presents a new extension to FGDO for an asynchronous Newton method (ANM) for
    local optimization. ANM is resilient to heterogeneous, faulty and unreliable
    computing nodes and is extremely scalable. Preliminary results show that it can
    converge to a local optimum significantly faster than conjugate gradient
    descent does.

    Acceleration of low-latency gravitational wave searches using Maxwell-microarchitecture GPUs

    Xiangyu Guo, Qi Chu, Shin Kee Chung, Zhihui Du, Linqing Wen
    Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

    Low-latency detections of gravitational waves (GWs) are crucial to enable
    prompt follow-up observations to astrophysical transients by conventional
    telescopes. We have developed a low-latency pipeline using a technique called
    Summed Parallel Infinite Impulse Response (SPIIR) filtering, realized by a
    Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). In this paper, we exploit the new
    extit{Maxwell} memory access architecture in NVIDIA GPUs, namely the
    read-only data cache, warp-shuffle, and cross-warp atomic techniques. We report
    a 3-fold speed-up over our previous implementation of this filtering technique.
    To tackle SPIIR with relatively few filters, we develop a new GPU thread
    configuration with a nearly 10-fold speedup. In addition, we implement a
    multi-rate scheme of SPIIR filtering using Maxwell GPUs. We achieve more than
    100-fold speed-up over a single core CPU for the multi-rate filtering scheme.
    This results in an overall of 21-fold CPU usage reduction for the entire SPIIR
    pipeline.


    Learning

    Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis

    Adrian Benton, Huda Khayrallah, Biman Gujral, Drew Reisinger, Sheng Zhang, Raman Arora
    Comments: 14 pages, 6 figures
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    We present Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DGCCA) — a
    method for learning nonlinear transformations of arbitrarily many views of
    data, such that the resulting transformations are maximally informative of each
    other. While methods for nonlinear two-view representation learning (Deep CCA,
    (Andrew et al., 2013)) and linear many-view representation learning
    (Generalized CCA (Horst, 1961)) exist, DGCCA is the first CCA-style multiview
    representation learning technique that combines the flexibility of nonlinear
    (deep) representation learning with the statistical power of incorporating
    information from many independent sources, or views. We present the DGCCA
    formulation as well as an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm for
    solving it. We learn DGCCA repre- sentations on two distinct datasets for three
    downstream tasks: phonetic transcrip- tion from acoustic and articulatory
    measurements, and recommending hashtags and friends on a dataset of Twitter
    users. We find that DGCCA representations soundly beat existing methods at
    phonetic transcription and hashtag recommendation, and in general perform no
    worse than standard linear many-view techniques.

    Preparing for the Unknown: Learning a Universal Policy with Online System Identification

    Wenhao Yu, C. Karen Liu, Greg Turk
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (cs.SY)

    We present a new method of learning control policies that successfully
    operate under unknown dynamic models. We create such policies by leveraging a
    large number of training examples that are generated using a physical
    simulator. Our system is made of two components: a Universal Policy (UP) and a
    function for Online System Identification (OSI). We describe our control policy
    as universal because it is trained over a wide array of dynamic models. These
    variations in the dynamic model may include differences in mass and inertia of
    the robots’ components, variable friction coefficients, or unknown mass of an
    object to be manipulated. By training the Universal Policy with this variation,
    the control policy is prepared for a wider array of possible conditions when
    executed in an unknown environment. The second part of our system uses the
    recent state and action history of the system to predict the dynamics model
    parameters mu. The value of mu from the Online System Identification is then
    provided as input to the control policy (along with the system state).
    Together, UP-OSI is a robust control policy that can be used across a wide
    range of dynamic models, and that is also responsive to sudden changes in the
    environment. We have evaluated the performance of this system on a variety of
    tasks, including the problem of cart-pole swing-up, the double inverted
    pendulum, locomotion of a hopper, and block-throwing of a manipulator. UP-OSI
    is effective at these tasks across a wide range of dynamic models. Moreover,
    when tested with dynamic models outside of the training range, UP-OSI
    outperforms the Universal Policy alone, even when UP is given the actual value
    of the model dynamics. In addition to the benefits of creating more robust
    controllers, UP-OSI also holds out promise of narrowing the Reality Gap between
    simulated and real physical systems.

    Adversarial Attacks on Neural Network Policies

    Sandy Huang, Nicolas Papernot, Ian Goodfellow, Yan Duan, Pieter Abbeel
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Machine learning classifiers are known to be vulnerable to inputs maliciously
    constructed by adversaries to force misclassification. Such adversarial
    examples have been extensively studied in the context of computer vision
    applications. In this work, we show adversarial attacks are also effective when
    targeting neural network policies in reinforcement learning. Specifically, we
    show existing adversarial example crafting techniques can be used to
    significantly degrade test-time performance of trained policies. Our threat
    model considers adversaries capable of introducing small perturbations to the
    raw input of the policy. We characterize the degree of vulnerability across
    tasks and training algorithms, for a subclass of adversarial-example attacks in
    white-box and black-box settings. Regardless of the learned task or training
    algorithm, we observe a significant drop in performance, even with small
    adversarial perturbations that do not interfere with human perception. Videos
    are available at this http URL

    Clustering For Point Pattern Data

    Quang N. Tran, Ba-Ngu Vo, Dinh Phung, Ba-Tuong Vo
    Comments: Preprint: 23rd Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition (ICPR). Cancun, Mexico, December 2016
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Clustering is one of the most common unsupervised learning tasks in machine
    learning and data mining. Clustering algorithms have been used in a plethora of
    applications across several scientific fields. However, there has been limited
    research in the clustering of point patterns – sets or multi-sets of unordered
    elements – that are found in numerous applications and data sources. In this
    paper, we propose two approaches for clustering point patterns. The first is a
    non-parametric method based on novel distances for sets. The second is a
    model-based approach, formulated via random finite set theory, and solved by
    the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the
    proposed methods perform well on both simulated and real data.

    Transfer from Multiple Linear Predictive State Representations (PSR)

    Sri Ramana Sekharan, Ramkumar Natarajan, Siddharthan Rajasekaran
    Comments: 8 pages, 3 algorithms, 3 figures
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    In this paper, we tackle the problem of transferring policy from multiple
    partially observable source environments to a partially observable target
    environment modeled as predictive state representation. This is an entirely new
    approach with no previous work, other than the case of transfer in fully
    observable domains. We develop algorithms to successfully achieve policy
    transfer when we have the model of both the source and target tasks and discuss
    in detail their performance and shortcomings. These algorithms could be a
    starting point for the field of transfer learning in partial observability.

    Rapid parametric density estimation

    Jarek Duda
    Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures
    Subjects: Learning (cs.LG)

    Parametric density estimation, for example as Gaussian distribution, is the
    base of the field of statistics. Machine learning requires inexpensive
    estimation of much more complex densities, and the basic approach is relatively
    costly maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). There will be discussed inexpensive
    density estimators, for example literally fitting polynomial to the sample,
    which coefficients are calculated from just averaging monomials over the sample
    (estimators of moments). Another discussed basic application is fitting
    distortion to some standard distribution like Gaussian. The estimated
    parameters are approaching the optimal values with error dropping like
    (1/sqrt{n}), where (n) is the sample size.

    A Modified Construction for a Support Vector Classifier to Accommodate Class Imbalances

    Matt Parker, Colin Parker
    Comments: 6 pages
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    The classical construction of a Support Vector Classifier as the classifier
    which iden- tifies a hyperplane maximizing the margin between two classes,
    given some constraint on slack variables, works well in many common situations.
    However when there is a difference between classes in their respective
    variances perpendicular to this hyper- plane, the SVC ends up giving the class
    with lower variance perpendicular to it an unjustifiably wide berth, while
    comparatively tightening up on the high-variance class, resulting in a loss to
    predictive performance. This paper outlines an alternate con- struction, which
    seeks to adjust the identified hyperplane in such a way that it agrees with the
    SVC in the event of a class variance balance along the direction perpendicular
    to the optimal hyperplane, and to examine the impact to the dual representation
    of the modified constraint equations.

    Learning detectors of malicious web requests for intrusion detection in network traffic

    Lukas Machlica, Karel Bartos, Michal Sofka
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG)

    This paper proposes a generic classification system designed to detect
    security threats based on the behavior of malware samples. The system relies on
    statistical features computed from proxy log fields to train detectors using a
    database of malware samples. The behavior detectors serve as basic reusable
    building blocks of the multi-level detection architecture. The detectors
    identify malicious communication exploiting encrypted URL strings and domains
    generated by a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) which are frequently used in
    Command and Control (C&C), phishing, and click fraud. Surprisingly, very
    precise detectors can be built given only a limited amount of information
    extracted from a single proxy log. This way, the computational requirements of
    the detectors are kept low which allows for deployment on a wide range of
    security devices and without depending on traffic context such as DNS logs,
    Whois records, webpage content, etc. Results on several weeks of live traffic
    from 100+ companies having 350k+ hosts show correct detection with a precision
    exceeding 95% of malicious flows, 95% of malicious URLs and 90% of infected
    hosts. In addition, a comparison with a signature and rule-based solution shows
    that our system is able to detect significant amount of new threats.

    Deep Kernelized Autoencoders

    Michael Kampffmeyer, Sigurd Løkse, Filippo Maria Bianchi, Robert Jenssen, Lorenzo Livi
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)

    In this paper we introduce the deep kernelized autoencoder, a neural network
    model that allows an explicit approximation of (i) the mapping from an input
    space to an arbitrary, user-specified kernel space and (ii) the back-projection
    from such a kernel space to input space. The proposed method is based on
    traditional autoencoders and is trained through a new unsupervised loss
    function. During training, we optimize both the reconstruction accuracy of
    input samples and the alignment between a kernel matrix given as prior and the
    inner products of the hidden representations computed by the autoencoder.
    Kernel alignment provides control over the hidden representation learned by the
    autoencoder. Experiments have been performed to evaluate both reconstruction
    and kernel alignment performance. Additionally, we applied our method to
    emulate kPCA on a denoising task obtaining promising results.

    Video Frame Synthesis using Deep Voxel Flow

    Ziwei Liu, Raymond Yeh, Xiaoou Tang, Yiming Liu, Aseem Agarwala
    Comments: Project page: this https URL
    Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR); Learning (cs.LG)

    We address the problem of synthesizing new video frames in an existing video,
    either in-between existing frames (interpolation), or subsequent to them
    (extrapolation). This problem is challenging because video appearance and
    motion can be highly complex. Traditional optical-flow-based solutions often
    fail where flow estimation is challenging, while newer neural-network-based
    methods that hallucinate pixel values directly often produce blurry results. We
    combine the advantages of these two methods by training a deep network that
    learns to synthesize video frames by flowing pixel values from existing ones,
    which we call deep voxel flow. Our method requires no human supervision, and
    any video can be used as training data by dropping, and then learning to
    predict, existing frames. The technique is efficient, and can be applied at any
    video resolution. We demonstrate that our method produces results that both
    quantitatively and qualitatively improve upon the state-of-the-art.

    Trainable Greedy Decoding for Neural Machine Translation

    Jiatao Gu, Kyunghyun Cho, Victor O.K. Li
    Comments: 10 pages
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Recent research in neural machine translation has largely focused on two
    aspects; neural network architectures and end-to-end learning algorithms. The
    problem of decoding, however, has received relatively little attention from the
    research community. In this paper, we solely focus on the problem of decoding
    given a trained neural machine translation model. Instead of trying to build a
    new decoding algorithm for any specific decoding objective, we propose the idea
    of trainable decoding algorithm in which we train a decoding algorithm to find
    a translation that maximizes an arbitrary decoding objective. More
    specifically, we design an actor that observes and manipulates the hidden state
    of the neural machine translation decoder and propose to train it using a
    variant of deterministic policy gradient. We extensively evaluate the proposed
    algorithm using four language pairs and two decoding objectives and show that
    we can indeed train a trainable greedy decoder that generates a better
    translation (in terms of a target decoding objective) with minimal
    computational overhead.

    Data Selection Strategies for Multi-Domain Sentiment Analysis

    Sebastian Ruder, Parsa Ghaffari, John G. Breslin
    Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    Domain adaptation is important in sentiment analysis as sentiment-indicating
    words vary between domains. Recently, multi-domain adaptation has become more
    pervasive, but existing approaches train on all available source domains
    including dissimilar ones. However, the selection of appropriate training data
    is as important as the choice of algorithm. We undertake — to our knowledge
    for the first time — an extensive study of domain similarity metrics in the
    context of sentiment analysis and propose novel representations, metrics, and a
    new scope for data selection. We evaluate the proposed methods on two
    large-scale multi-domain adaptation settings on tweets and reviews and
    demonstrate that they consistently outperform strong random and balanced
    baselines, while our proposed selection strategy outperforms instance-level
    selection and yields the best score on a large reviews corpus.

    Matrix Completion from (O(n)) Samples in Linear Time

    David Gamarnik, Quan Li, Hongyi Zhang
    Comments: 43 pages, 1 figure
    Subjects: Machine Learning (stat.ML); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS); Learning (cs.LG); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

    We consider the problem of reconstructing a rank-(k) (n imes n) matrix (M)
    from a sampling of its entries. Under a certain incoherence assumption on (M)
    and for the case when both the rank and the condition number of (M) are
    bounded, it was shown in cite{CandesRecht2009, CandesTao2010, keshavan2010,
    Recht2011, Jain2012, Hardt2014} that (M) can be recovered exactly or
    approximately (depending on some trade-off between accuracy and computational
    complexity) using (O(n , ext{poly}(log n))) samples in super-linear time
    (O(n^{a} , ext{poly}(log n))) for some constant (a geq 1).

    In this paper, we propose a new matrix completion algorithm using a novel
    sampling scheme based on a union of independent sparse random regular bipartite
    graphs. We show that under the same conditions w.h.p. our algorithm recovers an
    (epsilon)-approximation of (M) in terms of the Frobenius norm using (O(n
    log^2(1/epsilon))) samples and in linear time (O(n log^2(1/epsilon))). This
    provides the best known bound on the sample complexity and computational cost
    for reconstructing an unknown low-rank matrix.

    The novelty of our algorithm is a new step of thresholding singular values
    and rescaling singular vectors in the application of the “vanilla” alternating
    minimization algorithm. The structure of sparse random regular graphs is used
    heavily for controlling the impact of these regularization steps.

    Integration of Machine Learning Techniques to Evaluate Dynamic Customer Segmentation Analysis for Mobile Customers

    Cormac Dullaghan, Eleni Rozaki
    Comments: 12 pages
    Journal-ref: International Journal of Data Mining & Knowledge Management
    Process (IJDKP) Vol.7, No.1, January 2017
    Subjects: Computers and Society (cs.CY); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    The telecommunications industry is highly competitive, which means that the
    mobile providers need a business intelligence model that can be used to achieve
    an optimal level of churners, as well as a minimal level of cost in marketing
    activities. Machine learning applications can be used to provide guidance on
    marketing strategies. Furthermore, data mining techniques can be used in the
    process of customer segmentation. The purpose of this paper is to provide a
    detailed analysis of the C.5 algorithm, within naive Bayesian modelling for the
    task of segmenting telecommunication customers behavioural profiling according
    to their billing and socio-demographic aspects. Results have been
    experimentally implemented.

    Semi-Supervised QA with Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets

    Zhilin Yang, Junjie Hu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, William W. Cohen
    Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Learning (cs.LG)

    We study the problem of semi-supervised question answering—-utilizing
    unlabeled text to boost the performance of question answering models. We
    propose a novel training framework, the Generative Domain-Adaptive Nets. In
    this framework, we train a generative model to generate questions based on the
    unlabeled text, and combine model-generated questions with human-generated
    questions for training question answering models. We develop novel domain
    adaptation algorithms, based on reinforcement learning, to alleviate the
    discrepancy between the model-generated data distribution and the
    human-generated data distribution. Experiments show that our proposed framework
    obtains substantial improvement from unlabeled text.

    Deep Learning with Dynamic Computation Graphs

    Moshe Looks, Marcello Herreshoff, DeLesley Hutchins, Peter Norvig
    Comments: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2017
    Subjects: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

    Neural networks that compute over graph structures are a natural fit for
    problems in a variety of domains, including natural language (parse trees) and
    cheminformatics (molecular graphs). However, since the computation graph has a
    different shape and size for every input, such networks do not directly support
    batched training or inference. They are also difficult to implement in popular
    deep learning libraries, which are based on static data-flow graphs. We
    introduce a technique called dynamic batching, which not only batches together
    operations between different input graphs of dissimilar shape, but also between
    different nodes within a single input graph. The technique allows us to create
    static graphs, using popular libraries, that emulate dynamic computation graphs
    of arbitrary shape and size. We further present a high-level library of
    compositional blocks that simplifies the creation of dynamic graph models.
    Using the library, we demonstrate concise and batch-wise parallel
    implementations for a variety of models from the literature.

    A spectral method for community detection in moderately-sparse 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)

    We consider community detection in Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Models
    (DC-SBM). We propose a spectral clustering algorithm based on a suitably
    normalized adjacency matrix. We show that this algorithm consistently recovers
    the block-membership of all but a vanishing fraction of nodes, in the regime
    where the lowest degree is of order log((n)) or higher. Recovery succeeds even
    for very heterogeneous degree-distributions. The used algorithm does not rely
    on parameters as input. In particular, it does not need to know the number of
    communities.


    Information Theory

    Pilot Reuse Factor with Large Scale Fading Precoding for Massive MIMO

    Tedros Salih, Elijah Mwangi, Kibet Langat
    Comments: 18 pages, 6 figures
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The fundamental limitation of massive MIMO technology is pilot contamination
    effect. This effect occurs during uplink training when terminals use the same
    orthogonal signals. In this paper, a pilot reuse factor with large scale fading
    precoding is proposed to mitigate the pilot contamination effect. The pilot
    reuse factor is designed to assign unique orthogonal signals to the adjacent
    cells. These unique orthogonal signals are reused only within the cell and
    hence, intra-pilot contamination is the only concern. Large scale fading
    precoding is then used to mitigate the intra-pilot contamination effect. The
    average achievable sum rate is computed for different pilot reuse factors.
    Experimental results through MATLAB simulation show that a higher pilot reuse
    factor gives better average achievable sum rates.

    Two-Dimensional AoD and AoA Acquisition for Wideband mmWave Systems with Cross-Polarized MIMO

    Dalin Zhu, Junil Choi, Robert W. Heath Jr
    Comments: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper, a novel two-dimensional super-resolution angle-of-departure
    (AoD) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation technique is proposed for wideband
    millimeter-wave multiple-input multiple-output systems with cross-polarized
    antenna elements. The key ingredient of the proposed method is to form custom
    designed beam pairs, and devise an invertible function of the AoD/AoA to be
    estimated from the corresponding beam pairs. Further, a new multi-layer
    reference signal structure is developed for the proposed method to facilitate
    angle estimation for wideband channels with cross-polarized antenna elements.
    To facilitate feedback in closed-loop frequency division duplexing systems, a
    novel differential feedback strategy is proposed aiming at feedback reduction
    for the two-dimensional angle estimation. Numerical results demonstrate that by
    using the proposed method, good azimuth/elevation AoD and AoA estimation
    performance can be achieved under different levels of signal-to-noise ratio,
    channel conditions, and antenna array configurations.

    Constructing Receiver Signal Points using Constrained Massive MIMO Arrays

    Markus Staudacher, Gerhard Kramer, Wolfgang Zirwas, Berthold Panzner, Rakash Sivasiva Ganesan
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    A low cost solution for constructing receiver signal points is investigated
    that combines a large number of constrained radio frequency (RF) frontends with
    a limited number of full RF chains. The constrained RF front ends have low cost
    and are limited to on/off switching of antenna elements and a small number of
    phases. Severe degradations are typically observed for multi-user MIMO for
    these simple on/off antenna arrays. A few full RF frontends are shown to
    compensate for the signal errors of the high number of constrained RF frontends
    for various scenarios. An algorithm for such a hybrid RF (HRF) system is
    developed that achieves performance close to that of exhaustive search with
    respect to the mean square error of the constructed receiver signals for
    Rayleigh fading and the WINNER 2 Urban Macro channel model.

    Smooth min-max relative entropy based bounds for one-shot classical and quantum state redistribution

    Anurag Anshu, Rahul Jain, Naqueeb Ahmad Warsi
    Comments: 21 pages, version 1. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1410.3031
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

    We study the problem of state redistribution both in the classical (shared
    randomness assisted) and quantum (entanglement assisted) one-shot settings and
    provide new upper bounds on the communication required. Our bounds are in terms
    of smooth-min and max relative entropies. We also consider a special case of
    this problem in the classical setting, previously studied by Braverman and Rao
    (2011). We show that their upper bound is optimal. In addition we provide an
    alternate protocol achieving a priory different looking upper bound. However,
    we show that our upper bound is essentially the same as their upper bound and
    hence also optimal.

    On Multilevel Coding Schemes Based on Non-Binary LDPC Codes

    Valeriya Potapova, Alexey Frolov
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We address the problem of constructing of coding schemes for the channels
    with high-order modulations. It is known, that non-binary LDPC codes are
    especially good for such channels and significantly outperform their binary
    counterparts. Unfortunately, their decoding complexity is still large. In order
    to reduce the decoding complexity we consider multilevel coding schemes based
    on non-binary LDPC codes (NB-LDPC-MLC schemes) over smaller fields. The use of
    such schemes gives us a reasonable gain in complexity. At the same time the
    performance of NB-LDPC-MLC schemes is practically the same as the performance
    of LDPC codes over the field matching the modulation order. In particular by
    means of simulations we showed that the performance of NB-LDPC-MLC schemes over
    GF(16) is the same as the performance of non-binary LDPC codes over GF(64) and
    GF(256) in AWGN channel with QAM64 and QAM256 accordingly. We also perform a
    comparison with binary LDPC codes.

    On the Spectral Efficiency of Blind Channel Estimation and Synchronization Techniques

    A. Saci, A. Al-Dweik, A. Shami
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In the literature, channel estimation and synchronization (CE/SY) algorithms
    are classified as blind, and hence spectrally efficient, if they do not require
    pilot symbols. However, we show in this letter that such classification is not
    accurate and can be misleading. Consequently, this letter presents a more
    reliable and accurate approach to evaluate the spectral efficiency of
    communications systems with various CE/SY algorithms. The proposed approach
    allows fair spectral efficiency comparison between various systems with blind
    or non-blind CE/SY algorithms. In particular, we evaluate the spectral
    efficiency of communications systems that incorporates blind CE/SY algorithms
    and compare it to other blind and pilot-based algorithms. The obtained results
    reveal that, on the contrary to what is widely accepted, blind CE/SY algorithms
    with modulation-type constrain do not necessarily improve the spectral
    efficiency as compared to pilot-based techniques. Consequently, such techniques
    are classified as conditionally blind, to distinguish them from fully blind
    techniques.

    The Necessity of Scheduling in Compute-and-Forward

    Ori Shmuel, Asaf Cohen, Omer Gurewitz
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Compute and Forward (CF) is a promising relaying scheme which, instead of
    decoding single messages or forwarding/amplifying information at the relay,
    decodes linear combinations of the simultaneously transmitted messages. The
    current literature includes several coding schemes and results on the degrees
    of freedom in CF, yet for systems with a fixed number of transmitters and
    receivers.

    It is unclear, however, how CF behaves at the limit of a large number of
    transmitters. In this paper, we investigate the performance of CF in that
    regime. Specifically, we show that as the number of transmitters grows, CF
    becomes degenerated, in the sense that a relay prefers to decode only one
    (strongest) user instead of any other linear combination of the transmitted
    codewords, treating the other users as noise. Moreover, the sum-rate tends to
    zero as well. This makes scheduling necessary in order to maintain the superior
    abilities CF provides. Indeed, under scheduling, we show that non-trivial
    linear combinations are chosen, and the sum-rate does not decay, even without
    state information at the transmitters and without interference alignment.

    A New Achievable Rate Region for Multiple-Access Channel with States

    Mohsen Heidari, Farhad Shirani, S. Sandeep Pradhan
    Comments: 13 pages, ISIT 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    The problem of reliable communication over the multiple-access channel (MAC)
    with states is investigated. We propose a new coding scheme for this problem
    which uses quasi-group codes (QGC). We derive a new computable single-letter
    characterization of the achievable rate region. As an example, we investigate
    the problem of doubly-dirty MAC with modulo-(4) addition. It is shown that the
    sum-rate (R_1+R_2=1) bits per channel use is achievable using the new scheme.
    Whereas, the natural extension of the Gel’fand-Pinsker scheme, sum-rates
    greater than (0.32) are not achievable.

    Decoding from Pooled Data: Phase Transitions of Message Passing

    Ahmed El Alaoui, Aaditya Ramdas, Florent krzakala, Lenka Zdeborova, Michael I. Jordan
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS)

    We consider the problem of decoding a discrete signal of categorical
    variables from the observation of several histograms of pooled subsets of it.
    We present an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm for recovering the
    signal in the random dense setting where each observed histogram involves a
    random subset of entries of size proportional to n. We characterize the
    performance of the algorithm in the asymptotic regime where the number of
    observations (m) tends to infinity proportionally to n, by deriving the
    corresponding State Evolution (SE) equations and studying their dynamics. We
    initiate the analysis of the multi-dimensional SE dynamics by proving their
    convergence to a fixed point, along with some further properties of the
    iterates. The analysis reveals sharp phase transition phenomena where the
    behavior of AMP changes from exact recovery to weak correlation with the signal
    as m/n crosses a threshold. We derive formulae for the threshold in some
    special cases and show that they accurately match experimental behavior.

    Opportunistic Content Delivery in Fading Broadcast Channels

    Asma Ghorbel, Khac-Hoang Ngo, Richard Combes, Mari Kobayashi, Sheng Yang
    Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, extended version of a paper submitted to ISIT 2017
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    We consider content delivery over fading broadcast channels. A server wants
    to transmit K files to K users, each equipped with a cache of finite size.
    Using the coded caching scheme of Maddah-Ali and Niesen, we design an
    opportunistic delivery scheme where the long-term sum content delivery rate
    scales with K the number of users in the system. The proposed delivery scheme
    combines superposition coding together with appropriate power allocation across
    sub-files intended to different subsets of users. We analyze the long-term
    average sum content delivery rate achieved by two special cases of our scheme:
    a) a selection scheme that chooses the subset of users with the largest
    weighted rate, and b) a baseline scheme that transmits to K users using the
    scheme of Maddah-Ali and Niesen. We prove that coded caching with appropriate
    user selection is scalable since it yields a linear increase of the average sum
    content delivery rate.

    Resource Allocation and Relay Selection In Full-Duplex Cooperative Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access Networks

    Jafar Banar, S. Mohammad Razavizadeh
    Comments: 21 pages, 7 figures, Elsevier journal. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.02552
    Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT)

    This paper is on relay selection in uplink of an in-band full-duplex (IBFD)
    cooperative cellular network. Assuming an orthogonal frequency division
    multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network, we develop a relay selection and
    resource allocation algorithm for this network. The relay selection algorithms
    select the best relay based on distance between users and signal to
    interference plus noise ratio (SINR) that operate in amplify and forward (AF)
    mode. The optimization problem allocates the optimum subcarriers and powers to
    all users to maximize the average sum-rate of the network. In addition, the
    constraints of the optimization problem are quality of service (QoS) and
    transmit power of each user. Simulation results illustrate the good performance
    of the proposed method.

    Random Linear Fountain Code with Improved Decoding Success Probability

    Jalaluddin Qureshi
    Comments: This paper appears in: Communications (APCC), 2016 22nd Asia-Pacific Conference on
    Subjects: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    In this paper we study the problem of increasing the decoding success
    probability of random linear fountain code over GF(2) for small packet lengths
    used in delay-intolerant applications such as multimedia streaming. Such code
    over GF(2) are attractive as they have lower decoding complexity than codes
    over larger field size, but suffer from high transmission redundancy. In our
    proposed coding scheme we construct a codeword which is not a linear
    combination of any codewords previously transmitted to mitigate such
    transmission redundancy. We then note the observation that the probability of
    receiving a linearly dependent codeword is highest when the receiver has
    received k-1 linearly independent codewords. We propose using the BlockACK
    frame so that the codeword received after k-1 linearly independent codeword is
    always linearly independent, this reduces the expected redundancy by a factor
    of three.

    Quantum Correlations in Nonlocal BosonSampling

    Farid Shahandeh, Austin P. Lund, Timothy C. Ralph
    Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure, comments are very welcomed
    Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Information Theory (cs.IT)

    Determination of the quantum nature of correlations between two spatially
    separated systems plays a crucial role in quantum information science. Of
    particular interest is the questions of if and how these correlations enable
    quantum information protocols to be more powerful. Here, we report on a
    distributed quantum computation protocol in which the input and output quantum
    states are considered to be classically correlated in quantum informatics.
    Nevertheless, we show that the correlations between the outcomes of the
    measurements on the output state cannot be efficiently simulated using
    classical algorithms. Crucially, at the same time, local measurement outcomes
    can be efficiently simulated on classical computers. We show that the only
    known classicality criterion violated by the input and output states in our
    protocol is the one used in quantum optics, namely, phase-space
    nonclassicality. As a result, we argue that the global phase-space
    nonclassicality inherent within the output state of our protocol represents
    true quantum correlations.




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