We study uncloneable quantum encryption schemes for classical messages as recently proposed by Broadbent and Lord. We focus on the information-theoretic setting and give several limitations on the structure and security of these schemes: Concretely, 1) We give an explicit cloning-indistinguishable attack that succeeds with probability $\frac12 + \mu/16$ where $\mu$ is related to the largest eigenvalue of the resulting quantum ciphertexts. 2) For a uniform message distribution, we partially characterize the scheme with the minimal success probability for cloning attacks. 3) Under natural symmetry conditions, we prove that the rank of the ciphertext density operators has to grow at least logarithmically in the number of messages to ensure uncloneable security. 4) The \emph{simultaneous} one-way-to-hiding (O2H) lemma is an important technique in recent works on uncloneable encryption and quantum copy protection. We give an explicit example which shatters the hope of reducing the multiplicative "security loss" constant in this lemma to below 9/8.
We present and analyze a momentum-based gradient method for training linear classifiers with an exponentially-tailed loss (e.g., the exponential or logistic loss), which maximizes the classification margin on separable data at a rate of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/t^2)$. This contrasts with a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\log(t))$ for standard gradient descent, and $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ for normalized gradient descent. This momentum-based method is derived via the convex dual of the maximum-margin problem, and specifically by applying Nesterov acceleration to this dual, which manages to result in a simple and intuitive method in the primal. This dual view can also be used to derive a stochastic variant, which performs adaptive non-uniform sampling via the dual variables.
We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews the empirical transitions and perturbs the empirical costs with an exploration bonus to guarantee both optimism and convergence of the associated value iteration scheme. We prove that EB-SSP achieves the minimax regret rate $\widetilde{O}(B_{\star} \sqrt{S A K})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions and $B_{\star}$ bounds the expected cumulative cost of the optimal policy from any state, thus closing the gap with the lower bound. Interestingly, EB-SSP obtains this result while being parameter-free, i.e., it does not require any prior knowledge of $B_{\star}$, nor of $T_{\star}$ which bounds the expected time-to-goal of the optimal policy from any state. Furthermore, we illustrate various cases (e.g., positive costs, or general costs when an order-accurate estimate of $T_{\star}$ is available) where the regret only contains a logarithmic dependence on $T_{\star}$, thus yielding the first horizon-free regret bound beyond the finite-horizon MDP setting.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
Combining clustering and representation learning is one of the most promising approaches for unsupervised learning of deep neural networks. However, doing so naively leads to ill posed learning problems with degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled learning formulation that addresses these issues. The method is obtained by maximizing the information between labels and input data indices. We show that this criterion extends standard cross-entropy minimization to an optimal transport problem, which we solve efficiently for millions of input images and thousands of labels using a fast variant of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. The resulting method is able to self-label visual data so as to train highly competitive image representations without manual labels. Compared to the best previous method in this class, namely DeepCluster, our formulation minimizes a single objective function for both representation learning and clustering; it also significantly outperforms DeepCluster in standard benchmarks and reaches state of the art for learning a ResNet-50 self-supervisedly.
Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have generated a lot of excitement. Despite their popularity, they exhibit a number of well-documented issues in practice, which apparently contradict theoretical guarantees. A number of enlightening papers have pointed out that these issues arise from unjustified assumptions that are commonly made, but the message seems to have been lost amid the optimism of recent years. We believe the identified problems deserve more attention, and highlight the implications on both the properties of GANs and the trajectory of research on probabilistic models. We recently proposed an alternative method that sidesteps these problems.
This paper implements Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique to construct a map of a given environment. A Real Time Appearance Based Mapping (RTAB-Map) approach was taken for accomplishing this task. Initially, a 2d occupancy grid and 3d octomap was created from a provided simulated environment. Next, a personal simulated environment was created for mapping as well. In this appearance based method, a process called Loop Closure is used to determine whether a robot has seen a location before or not. In this paper, it is seen that RTAB-Map is optimized for large scale and long term SLAM by using multiple strategies to allow for loop closure to be done in real time and the results depict that it can be an excellent solution for SLAM to develop robots that can map an environment in both 2d and 3d.
The piecewise constant Mumford-Shah (PCMS) model and the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model are two of the most famous variational models in image segmentation and image restoration, respectively. They have ubiquitous applications in image processing. In this paper, we explore the linkage between these two important models. We prove that for two-phase segmentation problem the optimal solution of the PCMS model can be obtained by thresholding the minimizer of the ROF model. This linkage is still valid for multiphase segmentation under mild assumptions. Thus it opens a new segmentation paradigm: image segmentation can be done via image restoration plus thresholding. This new paradigm, which circumvents the innate non-convex property of the PCMS model, therefore improves the segmentation performance in both efficiency (much faster than state-of-the-art methods based on PCMS model, particularly when the phase number is high) and effectiveness (producing segmentation results with better quality) due to the flexibility of the ROF model in tackling degraded images, such as noisy images, blurry images or images with information loss. As a by-product of the new paradigm, we derive a novel segmentation method, coined thresholded-ROF (T-ROF) method, to illustrate the virtue of manipulating image segmentation through image restoration techniques. The convergence of the T-ROF method under certain conditions is proved, and elaborate experimental results and comparisons are presented.
Image foreground extraction is a classical problem in image processing and vision, with a large range of applications. In this dissertation, we focus on the extraction of text and graphics in mixed-content images, and design novel approaches for various aspects of this problem. We first propose a sparse decomposition framework, which models the background by a subspace containing smooth basis vectors, and foreground as a sparse and connected component. We then formulate an optimization framework to solve this problem, by adding suitable regularizations to the cost function to promote the desired characteristics of each component. We present two techniques to solve the proposed optimization problem, one based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and the other one based on robust regression. Promising results are obtained for screen content image segmentation using the proposed algorithm. We then propose a robust subspace learning algorithm for the representation of the background component using training images that could contain both background and foreground components, as well as noise. With the learnt subspace for the background, we can further improve the segmentation results, compared to using a fixed subspace. Lastly, we investigate a different class of signal/image decomposition problem, where only one signal component is active at each signal element. In this case, besides estimating each component, we need to find their supports, which can be specified by a binary mask. We propose a mixed-integer programming problem, that jointly estimates the two components and their supports through an alternating optimization scheme. We show the application of this algorithm on various problems, including image segmentation, video motion segmentation, and also separation of text from textured images.
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it is possible to robustly estimate the mean and covariance with polynomial time algorithms that can tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions, independent of the dimension. However, the sample and time complexity of these algorithms is prohibitively large for high-dimensional applications. In this work, we address both of these issues by establishing sample complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic factors, as well as giving various refinements that allow the algorithms to tolerate a much larger fraction of corruptions. Finally, we show on both synthetic and real data that our algorithms have state-of-the-art performance and suddenly make high-dimensional robust estimation a realistic possibility.
Cloud Robotics is one of the emerging area of robotics. It has created a lot of attention due to its direct practical implications on Robotics. In Cloud Robotics, the concept of cloud computing is used to offload computational extensive jobs of the robots to the cloud. Apart from this, additional functionalities can also be offered on run to the robots on demand. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the computational intensive algorithm in robotics used by robots for navigation and map building in an unknown environment. Several Cloud based frameworks are proposed specifically to address the problem of SLAM, DAvinCi, Rapyuta and C2TAM are some of those framework. In this paper, we presented a detailed review of all these framework implementation for SLAM problem.