Low precision arithmetic, in particular half precision floating point arithmetic, is now available in commercial hardware. Using lower precision can offer significant savings in computation and communication costs with proportional savings in energy. Motivated by this, there has been a renewed interest in mixed precision iterative refinement for solving linear systems $Ax=b$, and new variants of GMRES-based iterative refinement have been developed. Each particular variant with a given combination of precisions leads to different condition number-based constraints for convergence of the backward and forward errors, and each has different performance costs. The constraints for convergence given in the literature are, as an artifact of the analyses, often overly strict in practice, and thus could lead a user to select a more expensive variant when a less expensive one would have sufficed. In this work, we develop a multistage mixed precision iterative refinement solver which aims to combine existing mixed precision approaches to balance performance and accuracy and improve usability. For an initial combination of precisions, the algorithm begins with the least expensive approach and convergence is monitored via inexpensive computations with quantities produced during the iteration. If slow convergence or divergence is detected using particular stopping criteria, the algorithm switches to use a more expensive, but more reliable variant. A novel aspect of our approach is that, unlike existing implementations, our algorithm first attempts to use ``stronger'' solvers for the solution update before resorting to increasing the precision(s). In some scenarios, this can avoid the need to refactorize the matrix in higher precision. We perform extensive numerical experiments on random dense problems and problems from real applications which confirm the benefits of the multistage approach.
In this paper, we introduce a deep multi-view stereo (MVS) system that jointly predicts depths, surface normals and per-view confidence maps. The key to our approach is a novel solver that iteratively solves for per-view depth map and normal map by optimizing an energy potential based on the locally planar assumption. Specifically, the algorithm updates depth map by propagating from neighboring pixels with slanted planes, and updates normal map with local probabilistic plane fitting. Both two steps are monitored by a customized confidence map. This solver is not only effective as a post-processing tool for plane-based depth refinement and completion, but also differentiable such that it can be efficiently integrated into deep learning pipelines. Our multi-view stereo system employs multiple optimization steps of the solver over the initial prediction of depths and surface normals. The whole system can be trained end-to-end, decoupling the challenging problem of matching pixels within poorly textured regions from the cost-volume based neural network. Experimental results on ScanNet and RGB-D Scenes V2 demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed deep MVS system on multi-view depth estimation, with our proposed solver consistently improving the depth quality over both conventional and deep learning based MVS pipelines. Code is available at //github.com/thuzhaowang/idn-solver.
This paper proposes a novel mission planning platform, capable of efficiently deploying a team of UAVs to cover complex-shaped areas, in various remote sensing applications. Under the hood lies a novel optimization scheme for grid-based methods, utilizing Simulated Annealing algorithm, that significantly increases the achieved percentage of coverage and improves the qualitative features of the generated paths. Extensive simulated evaluation in comparison with a state-of-the-art alternative methodology, for coverage path planning (CPP) operations, establishes the performance gains in terms of achieved coverage and overall duration of the generated missions. On top of that, DARP algorithm is employed to allocate sub-tasks to each member of the swarm, taking into account each UAV's sensing and operational capabilities, their initial positions and any no-fly-zones possibly defined inside the operational area. This feature is of paramount importance in real-life applications, as it has the potential to achieve tremendous performance improvements in terms of time demanded to complete a mission, while at the same time it unlocks a wide new range of applications, that was previously not feasible due to the limited battery life of UAVs. In order to investigate the actual efficiency gains that are introduced by the multi-UAV utilization, a simulated study is performed as well. All of these capabilities are packed inside an end-to-end platform that eases the utilization of UAVs' swarms in remote sensing applications. Its versatility is demonstrated via two different real-life applications: (i) a photogrametry for precision agriculture and (ii) an indicative search and rescue for first responders missions, that were performed utilizing a swarm of commercial UAVs. The source code can be found at: //github.com/savvas-ap/mCPP-optimized-DARP
We propose a new unfitted finite element method for simulation of two-phase flows in presence of insoluble surfactant. The key features of the method are 1) discrete conservation of surfactant mass; 2) the possibility of having meshes that do not conform to the evolving interface separating the immiscible fluids; 3) accurate approximation of quantities with weak or strong discontinuities across evolving geometries such as the velocity field and the pressure. The new discretization of the incompressible Navier--Stokes equations coupled to the convection-diffusion equation modeling the surfactant transport on evolving surfaces is based on a space-time cut finite element formulation with quadrature in time and a stabilization term in the weak formulation that provides function extension. The proposed strategy utilize the same computational mesh for the discretization of the surface Partial Differential Equation (PDE) and the bulk PDEs and can be combined with different techniques for representing and evolving the interface, here the level set method is used. Numerical simulations in both two and three space dimensions are presented including simulations showing the role of surfactant in the interaction between two drops.
In this paper, we develop a local limit theorem for the Student distribution. We use it to improve the normal approximation of the Student survival function given in Shafiei & Saberali (2015) and to derive asymptotic bounds for the corresponding maximal errors at four levels of approximation. As a corollary, approximations for the percentage points (or quantiles) of the Student distribution are obtained in terms of the percentage points of the standard normal distribution.
Iterative random sketching (IRS) offers a computationally expedient approach to solving linear systems. However, IRS' benefits can only be realized if the procedure can be appropriately tracked and stopped -- otherwise, the algorithm may stop before the desired accuracy is achieved, or it may run longer than necessary. Unfortunately, IRS solvers cannot access the residual norm without undermining their computational efficiency. While iterative random sketching solvers have access to noisy estimates of the residual, such estimates turn out to be insufficient to generate accurate estimates and confidence bounds for the true residual. Thus, in this work, we propose a moving average estimator for the system's residual, and rigorously develop practical uncertainty sets for our estimator. We then demonstrate the accuracy of our methods on a number of linear systems problems.
We construct a space-time parallel method for solving parabolic partial differential equations by coupling the Parareal algorithm in time with overlapping domain decomposition in space. The goal is to obtain a discretization consisting of "local" problems that can be solved on parallel computers efficiently. However, this introduces significant sources of error that must be evaluated. Reformulating the original Parareal algorithm as a variational method and implementing a finite element discretization in space enables an adjoint-based a posteriori error analysis to be performed. Through an appropriate choice of adjoint problems and residuals the error analysis distinguishes between errors arising due to the temporal and spatial discretizations, as well as between the errors arising due to incomplete Parareal iterations and incomplete iterations of the domain decomposition solver. We first develop an error analysis for the Parareal method applied to parabolic partial differential equations, and then refine this analysis to the case where the associated spatial problems are solved using overlapping domain decomposition. These constitute our Time Parallel Algorithm (TPA) and Space-Time Parallel Algorithm (STPA) respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the estimator for both algorithms and the iterations between distinct components of the error.
Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has attracted substantial attraction in recent years for spectral efficiency improvement, enabling hardware and spectrum sharing for simultaneous sensing and signaling operations. In-band Full Duplex (FD) is being considered as a key enabling technology for ISAC applications due to its simultaneous transmission and reception capability. In this paper, we present an FD-based ISAC system operating at millimeter Wave (mmWave) frequencies, where a massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Base Station (BS) node employing hybrid Analog and Digital (A/D) beamforming is communicating with a DownLink (DL) multi-antenna user and the same waveform is utilized at the BS receiver for sensing the radar targets in its coverage environment. We develop a sensing algorithm that is capable of estimating Direction of Arrival (DoA), range, and relative velocity of the radar targets. A joint optimization framework for designing the A/D transmit and receive beamformers as well as the Self-Interference (SI) cancellation is presented with the objective to maximize the achievable DL rate and the accuracy of the radar target sensing performance. Our simulation results, considering fifth Generation (5G) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms, verify our approach's high precision in estimating DoA, range, and velocity of multiple radar targets, while maximizing the DL communication rate.
In this work, we propose a special cascade network for image segmentation, which is based on the U-Net networks as building blocks and the idea of the iterative refinement. The model was mainly applied to achieve higher recognition quality for the task of finding borders of the optic disc and cup, which are relevant to the presence of glaucoma. Compared to a single U-Net and the state-of-the-art methods for the investigated tasks, very high segmentation quality has been achieved without a need for increasing the volume of datasets. Our experiments include comparison with the best-known methods on publicly available databases DRIONS-DB, RIM-ONE v.3, DRISHTI-GS, and evaluation on a private data set collected in collaboration with University of California San Francisco Medical School. The analysis of the architecture details is presented, and it is argued that the model can be employed for a broad scope of image segmentation problems of similar nature.
The Normalized Cut (NCut) objective function, widely used in data clustering and image segmentation, quantifies the cost of graph partitioning in a way that biases clusters or segments that are balanced towards having lower values than unbalanced partitionings. However, this bias is so strong that it avoids any singleton partitions, even when vertices are very weakly connected to the rest of the graph. Motivated by the B\"uhler-Hein family of balanced cut costs, we propose the family of Compassionately Conservative Balanced (CCB) Cut costs, which are indexed by a parameter that can be used to strike a compromise between the desire to avoid too many singleton partitions and the notion that all partitions should be balanced. We show that CCB-Cut minimization can be relaxed into an orthogonally constrained $\ell_{\tau}$-minimization problem that coincides with the problem of computing Piecewise Flat Embeddings (PFE) for one particular index value, and we present an algorithm for solving the relaxed problem by iteratively minimizing a sequence of reweighted Rayleigh quotients (IRRQ). Using images from the BSDS500 database, we show that image segmentation based on CCB-Cut minimization provides better accuracy with respect to ground truth and greater variability in region size than NCut-based image segmentation.
We propose a conditional non-autoregressive neural sequence model based on iterative refinement. The proposed model is designed based on the principles of latent variable models and denoising autoencoders, and is generally applicable to any sequence generation task. We extensively evaluate the proposed model on machine translation (En-De and En-Ro) and image caption generation, and observe that it significantly speeds up decoding while maintaining the generation quality comparable to the autoregressive counterpart.