The recurrence rebuild and retrieval method (R3M) is proposed in this paper to accelerate the electromagnetic (EM) validations of large-scale digital coding metasurfaces (DCMs). R3M aims to accelerate the EM validations of DCMs with varied codebooks, which involves the analysis of a group of similar but distinct coding patterns. The method transforms general DCMs to rigorously periodic arrays by replacing each coding unit with the macro unit, which comprises all possible coding states. The system matrix corresponding to the rigorously periodic array is globally shared for DCMs with arbitrary codebooks via implicit retrieval. The discrepancy of the interactions for edge and corner units are precluded by the basis extension of periodic boundaries. Moreover, the hierarchical pattern exploitation algorithm is leveraged to efficiently assemble the system matrix for further acceleration. Due to the fully utilization of the rigid periodicity, the computational complexity of R3M is theoretically lower than that of $\mathcal{H}$-matrix within the same paradigm. Numerical results for two types of DCMs indicate that R3M is accurate in comparison with commercial software. Besides, R3M is also compatible with the preconditioning for efficient iterative solutions. The efficiency of R3M for DCMs outperforms the conventional fast algorithms by a large margin in both the storage and CPU time cost.
The problem of finding a nonzero solution of a linear recurrence $Ly = 0$ with polynomial coefficients where $y$ has the form of a definite hypergeometric sum, related to the Inverse Creative Telescoping Problem of [14][Sec. 8], has now been open for three decades. Here we present an algorithm (implemented in a SageMath package) which, given such a recurrence and a quasi-triangular, shift-compatible factorial basis $\mathcal{B} = \langle P_k(n)\rangle_{k=0}^\infty$ of the polynomial space $\mathbb{K}[n]$ over a field $\mathbb{K}$ of characteristic zero, computes a recurrence satisfied by the coefficient sequence $c = \langle c_k\rangle_{k=0}^\infty$ of the solution $y_n = \sum_{k=0}^\infty c_kP_k(n)$ (where, thanks to the quasi-triangularity of $\mathcal{B}$, the sum on the right terminates for each $n \in \mathbb{N}$). More generally, if $\mathcal{B}$ is $m$-sieved for some $m \in \mathbb{N}$, our algorithm computes a system of $m$ recurrences satisfied by the $m$-sections of the coefficient sequence $c$. If an explicit nonzero solution of this system can be found, we obtain an explicit nonzero solution of $Ly = 0$.
Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is an emerging paradigm for efficient enabling of massive connectivity in future machine-type communications (MTC). In this letter, we conceive the uplink transmissions of the low-density parity check (LDPC) coded SCMA system. Traditional receiver design of LDPC-SCMA system, which is based on message passing algorithm (MPA) for multiuser detection followed by individual LDPC decoding, may suffer from the drawback of the high complexity and large decoding latency, especially when the system has large codebook size and/or high overloading factor. To address this problem, we introduce a novel receiver design by applying the expectation propagation algorithm (EPA) to the joint detection and decoding (JDD) involving an aggregated factor graph of LDPC code and sparse codebooks. Our numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed EPA based JDD receiver over the conventional Turbo receiver in terms of both significantly lower complexity and faster convergence rate without noticeable error rate performance degradation.
A matching $M$ is a $\mathscr{P}$-matching if the subgraph induced by the endpoints of the edges of $M$ satisfies property $\mathscr{P}$. As examples, for appropriate choices of $\mathscr{P}$, the problems Induced Matching, Uniquely Restricted Matching, Connected Matching and Disconnected Matching arise. For many of these problems, finding a maximum $\mathscr{P}$-matching is a knowingly NP-Hard problem, with few exceptions, such as connected matchings, which has the same time complexity as usual Maximum Matching problem. The weighted variant of Maximum Matching has been studied for decades, with many applications, including the well-known Assignment problem. Motivated by this fact, in addition to some recent researches in weighted versions of acyclic and induced matchings, we study the Maximum Weight Connected Matching. In this problem, we want to find a matching $M$ such that the endpoint vertices of its edges induce a connected subgraph and the sum of the edge weights of $M$ is maximum. Unlike the unweighted Connected Matching problem, which is in P for general graphs, we show that Maximum Weight Connected Matching is NP-Hard even for bounded diameter bipartite graphs, starlike graphs, planar bipartite, and bounded degree planar graphs, while solvable in linear time for trees and subcubic graphs. When we restrict edge weights to be non negative only, we show that the problem turns to be polynomially solvable for chordal graphs, while it remains NP-Hard for most of the cases when weights can be negative. Our final contributions are on parameterized complexity. On the positive side, we present a single exponential time algorithm when parameterized by treewidth. In terms of kernelization, we show that, even when restricted to binary weights, Weighted Connected Matching does not admit a polynomial kernel when parameterized by vertex cover under standard complexity-theoretical hypotheses.
In applications of remote sensing, estimation, and control, timely communication is not always ensured by high-rate communication. This work proposes distributed age-efficient transmission policies for random access channels with $M$ transmitters. In the first part of this work, we analyze the age performance of stationary randomized policies by relating the problem of finding age to the absorption time of a related Markov chain. In the second part of this work, we propose the notion of \emph{age-gain} of a packet to quantify how much the packet will reduce the instantaneous age of information at the receiver side upon successful delivery. We then utilize this notion to propose a transmission policy in which transmitters act in a distributed manner based on the age-gain of their available packets. In particular, each transmitter sends its latest packet only if its corresponding age-gain is beyond a certain threshold which could be computed adaptively using the collision feedback or found as a fixed value analytically in advance. Both methods improve age of information significantly compared to the state of the art. In the limit of large $M$, we prove that when the arrival rate is small (below $\frac{1}{eM}$), slotted ALOHA-type algorithms are asymptotically optimal. As the arrival rate increases beyond $\frac{1}{eM}$, while age increases under slotted ALOHA, it decreases significantly under the proposed age-based policies. For arrival rates $\theta$, $\theta=\frac{1}{o(M)}$, the proposed algorithms provide a multiplicative factor of at least two compared to the minimum age under slotted ALOHA (minimum over all arrival rates). We conclude that, as opposed to the common practice, it is beneficial to increase the sampling rate (and hence the arrival rate) and transmit packets selectively based on their age-gain.
Given an array of distinct integers $A[1\ldots n]$, the Range Minimum Query (RMQ) problem requires us to construct a data structure from $A$, supporting the RMQ query: given an interval $[a,b]\subseteq[1,n]$, return the index of the minimum element in subarray $A[a\ldots b]$, i.e. return $\text{argmin}_{i\in[a,b]}A[i]$. The fundamental problem has a long history. The textbook solution which uses $O(n)$ words of space and $O(1)$ time by Gabow, Bentley, Tarjan (STOC 1984) and Harel, Tarjan (SICOMP 1984) dates back to 1980s. The state-of-the-art solution is presented by Fischer, Heun (SICOMP 2011) and Navarro, Sadakane (TALG 2014). The solution uses $2n-1.5\log n+n/\left(\frac{\log n}{t}\right)^t+\tilde{O}(n^{3/4})$ bits of space and $O(t)$ query time, where the additive $\tilde{O}(n^{3/4})$ is a pre-computed lookup table used in the RAM model, assuming the word-size is $\Theta(\log n)$ bits. On the other hand, the only known lower bound is proved by Liu and Yu (STOC 2020). They show that any data structure which solves RMQ in $t$ query time must use $2n-1.5\log n+n/(\log n)^{O(t^2\log^2t)}$ bits of space, assuming the word-size is $\Theta(\log n)$ bits. In this paper, we prove nearly tight lower bound for this problem. We show that, for any data structure which solves RMQ in $t$ query time, $2n-1.5\log n+n/(\log n)^{O(t\log^2t)}$ bits of space is necessary in the cell-probe model with word-size $\Theta(\log n)$ bits. We emphasize that, in terms of time complexity, our lower bound is tight up to a polylogarithmic factor.
Let $\mathbf{X}$ be a random variable uniformly distributed on the discrete cube $\{ -1,1\} ^{n}$, and let $T_{\rho}$ be the noise operator acting on Boolean functions $f:\{ -1,1\} ^{n}\to\{ 0,1\} $, where $\rho\in[0,1]$ is the noise parameter, representing the correlation coefficient between each coordination of $\mathbf{X}$ and its noise-corrupted version. Given a convex function $\Phi$ and the mean $\mathbb{E}f(\mathbf{X})=a\in[0,1]$, which Boolean function $f$ maximizes the $\Phi$-stability $\mathbb{E}[\Phi(T_{\rho}f(\mathbf{X}))]$ of $f$? Special cases of this problem include the (symmetric and asymmetric) $\alpha$-stability problems and the "Most Informative Boolean Function" problem. In this paper, we provide several upper bounds for the maximal $\Phi$-stability. When specializing $\Phi$ to some particular forms, by these upper bounds, we partially resolve Mossel and O'Donnell's conjecture on $\alpha$-stability with $\alpha>2$, Li and M\'edard's conjecture on $\alpha$-stability with $1<\alpha<2$, and Courtade and Kumar's conjecture on the "Most Informative Boolean Function" which corresponds to a conjecture on $\alpha$-stability with $\alpha=1$. Our proofs are based on discrete Fourier analysis, optimization theory, and improvements of the Friedgut--Kalai--Naor (FKN) theorem. Our improvements of the FKN theorem are sharp or asymptotically sharp for certain cases.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used due to their outstanding performance in processing graph-structured data. However, the undirected graphs limit their application scope. In this paper, we extend spectral-based graph convolution to directed graphs by using first- and second-order proximity, which can not only retain the connection properties of the directed graph, but also expand the receptive field of the convolution operation. A new GCN model, called DGCN, is then designed to learn representations on the directed graph, leveraging both the first- and second-order proximity information. We empirically show the fact that GCNs working only with DGCNs can encode more useful information from graph and help achieve better performance when generalized to other models. Moreover, extensive experiments on citation networks and co-purchase datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art methods.
Retrieving object instances among cluttered scenes efficiently requires compact yet comprehensive regional image representations. Intuitively, object semantics can help build the index that focuses on the most relevant regions. However, due to the lack of bounding-box datasets for objects of interest among retrieval benchmarks, most recent work on regional representations has focused on either uniform or class-agnostic region selection. In this paper, we first fill the void by providing a new dataset of landmark bounding boxes, based on the Google Landmarks dataset, that includes $86k$ images with manually curated boxes from $15k$ unique landmarks. Then, we demonstrate how a trained landmark detector, using our new dataset, can be leveraged to index image regions and improve retrieval accuracy while being much more efficient than existing regional methods. In addition, we introduce a novel regional aggregated selective match kernel (R-ASMK) to effectively combine information from detected regions into an improved holistic image representation. R-ASMK boosts image retrieval accuracy substantially with no dimensionality increase, while even outperforming systems that index image regions independently. Our complete image retrieval system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art by significant margins on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets. Code and data available at the project webpage: //github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/delf.
We consider the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning and we show that an agent imbued with a risk-seeking utility function is able to explore efficiently, as measured by regret. The parameter that controls how risk-seeking the agent is can be optimized exactly, or annealed according to a schedule. We call the resulting algorithm K-learning and show that the corresponding K-values are optimistic for the expected Q-values at each state-action pair. The K-values induce a natural Boltzmann exploration policy for which the `temperature' parameter is equal to the risk-seeking parameter. This policy achieves an expected regret bound of $\tilde O(L^{3/2} \sqrt{S A T})$, where $L$ is the time horizon, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, and $T$ is the total number of elapsed time-steps. This bound is only a factor of $L$ larger than the established lower bound. K-learning can be interpreted as mirror descent in the policy space, and it is similar to other well-known methods in the literature, including Q-learning, soft-Q-learning, and maximum entropy policy gradient, and is closely related to optimism and count based exploration methods. K-learning is simple to implement, as it only requires adding a bonus to the reward at each state-action and then solving a Bellman equation. We conclude with a numerical example demonstrating that K-learning is competitive with other state-of-the-art algorithms in practice.
In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.