MDS codes have diverse practical applications in communication systems, data storage, and quantum codes due to their algebraic properties and optimal error-correcting capability. In this paper, we focus on a class of linear codes and establish some sufficient and necessary conditions for them being MDS. Notably, these codes differ from Reed-Solomon codes up to monomial equivalence. Additionally, we also explore the cases in which these codes are almost MDS or near MDS. Applying our main results, we determine the covering radii and deep holes of the dual codes associated with specific Roth-Lempel codes and discover an infinite family of (almost) optimally extendable codes with dimension three.
Self-supervised learning methods based on data augmentations, such as SimCLR, BYOL, or DINO, allow obtaining semantically meaningful representations of image datasets and are widely used prior to supervised fine-tuning. A recent self-supervised learning method, $t$-SimCNE, uses contrastive learning to directly train a 2D representation suitable for visualisation. When applied to natural image datasets, $t$-SimCNE yields 2D visualisations with semantically meaningful clusters. In this work, we used $t$-SimCNE to visualise medical image datasets, including examples from dermatology, histology, and blood microscopy. We found that increasing the set of data augmentations to include arbitrary rotations improved the results in terms of class separability, compared to data augmentations used for natural images. Our 2D representations show medically relevant structures and can be used to aid data exploration and annotation, improving on common approaches for data visualisation.
The number of sampling methods could be daunting for a practitioner looking to cast powerful machine learning methods to their specific problem. This paper takes a theoretical stance to review and organize many sampling approaches in the ``generative modeling'' setting, where one wants to generate new data that are similar to some training examples. By revealing links between existing methods, it might prove useful to overcome some of the current challenges in sampling with diffusion models, such as long inference time due to diffusion simulation, or the lack of diversity in generated samples.
Data sets sampled in Lie groups are widespread, and as with multivariate data, it is important for many applications to assess the differences between the sets in terms of their distributions. Indices for this task are usually derived by considering the Lie group as a Riemannian manifold. Then, however, compatibility with the group operation is guaranteed only if a bi-invariant metric exists, which is not the case for most non-compact and non-commutative groups. We show here that if one considers an affine connection structure instead, one obtains bi-invariant generalizations of well-known dissimilarity measures: a Hotelling $T^2$ statistic, Bhattacharyya distance and Hellinger distance. Each of the dissimilarity measures matches its multivariate counterpart for Euclidean data and is translation-invariant, so that biases, e.g., through an arbitrary choice of reference, are avoided. We further derive non-parametric two-sample tests that are bi-invariant and consistent. We demonstrate the potential of these dissimilarity measures by performing group tests on data of knee configurations and epidemiological shape data. Significant differences are revealed in both cases.
Datalog is a popular and widely-used declarative logic programming language. Datalog engines apply many cross-rule optimizations; bugs in them can cause incorrect results. To detect such optimization bugs, we propose an automated testing approach called Incremental Rule Evaluation (IRE), which synergistically tackles the test oracle and test case generation problem. The core idea behind the test oracle is to compare the results of an optimized program and a program without cross-rule optimization; any difference indicates a bug in the Datalog engine. Our core insight is that, for an optimized, incrementally-generated Datalog program, we can evaluate all rules individually by constructing a reference program to disable the optimizations that are performed among multiple rules. Incrementally generating test cases not only allows us to apply the test oracle for every new rule generated-we also can ensure that every newly added rule generates a non-empty result with a given probability and eschew recomputing already-known facts. We implemented IRE as a tool named Deopt, and evaluated Deopt on four mature Datalog engines, namely Souffl\'e, CozoDB, $\mu$Z, and DDlog, and discovered a total of 30 bugs. Of these, 13 were logic bugs, while the remaining were crash and error bugs. Deopt can detect all bugs found by queryFuzz, a state-of-the-art approach. Out of the bugs identified by Deopt, queryFuzz might be unable to detect 5. Our incremental test case generation approach is efficient; for example, for test cases containing 60 rules, our incremental approach can produce 1.17$\times$ (for DDlog) to 31.02$\times$ (for Souffl\'e) as many valid test cases with non-empty results as the naive random method. We believe that the simplicity and the generality of the approach will lead to its wide adoption in practice.
Feature selection is an expensive challenging task in machine learning and data mining aimed at removing irrelevant and redundant features. This contributes to an improvement in classification accuracy, as well as the budget and memory requirements for classification, or any other post-processing task conducted after feature selection. In this regard, we define feature selection as a multi-objective binary optimization task with the objectives of maximizing classification accuracy and minimizing the number of selected features. In order to select optimal features, we have proposed a binary Compact NSGA-II (CNSGA-II) algorithm. Compactness represents the population as a probability distribution to enhance evolutionary algorithms not only to be more memory-efficient but also to reduce the number of fitness evaluations. Instead of holding two populations during the optimization process, our proposed method uses several Probability Vectors (PVs) to generate new individuals. Each PV efficiently explores a region of the search space to find non-dominated solutions instead of generating candidate solutions from a small population as is the common approach in most evolutionary algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first compact multi-objective algorithm proposed for feature selection. The reported results for expensive optimization cases with a limited budget on five datasets show that the CNSGA-II performs more efficiently than the well-known NSGA-II method in terms of the hypervolume (HV) performance metric requiring less memory. The proposed method and experimental results are explained and analyzed in detail.
A supervised feature selection method selects an appropriate but concise set of features to differentiate classes, which is highly expensive for large-scale datasets. Therefore, feature selection should aim at both minimizing the number of selected features and maximizing the accuracy of classification, or any other task. However, this crucial task is computationally highly demanding on many real-world datasets and requires a very efficient algorithm to reach a set of optimal features with a limited number of fitness evaluations. For this purpose, we have proposed the binary multi-objective coordinate search (MOCS) algorithm to solve large-scale feature selection problems. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed algorithm in this paper is the first multi-objective coordinate search algorithm. In this method, we generate new individuals by flipping a variable of the candidate solutions on the Pareto front. This enables us to investigate the effectiveness of each feature in the corresponding subset. In fact, this strategy can play the role of crossover and mutation operators to generate distinct subsets of features. The reported results indicate the significant superiority of our method over NSGA-II, on five real-world large-scale datasets, particularly when the computing budget is limited. Moreover, this simple hyper-parameter-free algorithm can solve feature selection much faster and more efficiently than NSGA-II.
Coding theory revolves around the incorporation of redundancy into transmitted symbols, computation tasks, and stored data to guard against adversarial manipulation. However, error correction in coding theory is contingent upon a strict trust assumption. In the context of computation and storage, it is required that honest nodes outnumber adversarial ones by a certain margin. However, in several emerging real-world cases, particularly, in decentralized blockchain-oriented applications, such assumptions are often unrealistic. Consequently, despite the important role of coding in addressing significant challenges within decentralized systems, its applications become constrained. Still, in decentralized platforms, a distinctive characteristic emerges, offering new avenues for secure coding beyond the constraints of conventional methods. In these scenarios, the adversary benefits when the legitimate decoder recovers the data, and preferably with a high estimation error. This incentive motivates them to act rationally, trying to maximize their gains. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic formulation for coding, called the game of coding, that captures this unique dynamic where each of the adversary and the data collector (decoder) have a utility function to optimize. The utility functions reflect the fact that both the data collector and the adversary are interested in increasing the chance of data being recoverable by the data collector. Moreover, the utility functions express the interest of the data collector to estimate the input with lower estimation error, but the opposite interest of the adversary. As a first, still highly non-trivial step, we characterize the equilibrium of the game for the repetition code with a repetition factor of 2, for a wide class of utility functions with minimal assumptions.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.