In this paper, we leverage polar codes and the well-established channel polarization to design capacity-achieving codes with a certain constraint on the weights of all the columns in the generator matrix (GM) while having a low-complexity decoding algorithm. We first show that given a binary-input memoryless symmetric (BMS) channel $W$ and a constant $s \in (0, 1]$, there exists a polarization kernel such that the corresponding polar code is capacity-achieving with the \textit{rate of polarization} $s/2$, and the GM column weights being bounded from above by $N^s$. To improve the sparsity versus error rate trade-off, we devise a column-splitting algorithm and two coding schemes for BEC and then for general BMS channels. The \textit{polar-based} codes generated by the two schemes inherit several fundamental properties of polar codes with the original $2 \times 2$ kernel including the decay in error probability, decoding complexity, and the capacity-achieving property. Furthermore, they demonstrate the additional property that their GM column weights are bounded from above sublinearly in $N$, while the original polar codes have some column weights that are linear in $N$. In particular, for any BEC and $\beta <0.5$, the existence of a sequence of capacity-achieving polar-based codes where all the GM column weights are bounded from above by $N^\lambda$ with $\lambda \approx 0.585$, and with the error probability bounded by $O(2^{-N^{\beta}} )$ under a decoder with complexity $O(N\log N)$, is shown. The existence of similar capacity-achieving polar-based codes with the same decoding complexity is shown for any BMS channel and $\beta <0.5$ with $\lambda \approx 0.631$.
Maximum-distance separable (MDS) convolutional codes are characterized by the property that their free distance reaches the generalized Singleton bound. In this paper, new criteria to construct MDS convolutional codes are presented. Additionally, the obtained convolutional codes have optimal first (reverse) column distances and the criteria allow to relate the construction of MDS convolutional codes to the construction of reverse superregular Toeplitz matrices. Moreover, we present some construction examples for small code parameters over small finite fields.
We consider a queue-channel model that captures the waiting time-dependent degradation of information bits as they wait to be transmitted. Such a scenario arises naturally in quantum communications, where quantum bits tend to decohere rapidly. Trailing the capacity results obtained recently for certain queue-channels, this paper aims to construct practical channel codes for the erasure queue-channel (EQC) -- a channel characterized by highly correlated erasures, governed by the underlying queuing dynamics. Our main contributions in this paper are twofold: (i) We propose a generic `wrapper' based on interleaving across renewal blocks of the queue to convert any capacity-achieving block code for a memoryless erasure channel to a capacity-achieving code for the EQC. Next, due to the complexity involved in implementing interleaved systems, (ii) we study the performance of LDPC and Polar codes without any interleaving. We show that standard Ar{\i}kan's Polar transform polarizes the EQC for certain restricted class of erasure probability functions. We also highlight some possible approaches and the corresponding challenges involved in proving polarization of a general EQC.
Many real-world systems modeled using differential equations involve unknown or uncertain parameters. Standard approaches to address parameter estimation inverse problems in this setting typically focus on estimating constants; yet some unobservable system parameters may vary with time without known evolution models. In this work, we propose a novel approximation method inspired by the Fourier series to estimate time-varying parameters in deterministic dynamical systems modeled with ordinary differential equations. Using ensemble Kalman filtering in conjunction with Fourier series-based approximation models, we detail two possible implementation schemes for sequentially updating the time-varying parameter estimates given noisy observations of the system states. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach in estimating periodic parameters, both when the period is known and unknown, as well as non-periodic time-varying parameters of different forms with several computed examples using a forced harmonic oscillator. Results emphasize the importance of the frequencies and number of approximation model terms on the time-varying parameter estimates and corresponding dynamical system predictions.
Factor analysis provides a canonical framework for imposing lower-dimensional structure such as sparse covariance in high-dimensional data. High-dimensional data on the same set of variables are often collected under different conditions, for instance in reproducing studies across research groups. In such cases, it is natural to seek to learn the shared versus condition-specific structure. Existing hierarchical extensions of factor analysis have been proposed, but face practical issues including identifiability problems. To address these shortcomings, we propose a class of SUbspace Factor Analysis (SUFA) models, which characterize variation across groups at the level of a lower-dimensional subspace. We prove that the proposed class of SUFA models lead to identifiability of the shared versus group-specific components of the covariance, and study their posterior contraction properties. Taking a Bayesian approach, these contributions are developed alongside efficient posterior computation algorithms. Our sampler fully integrates out latent variables, is easily parallelizable and has complexity that does not depend on sample size. We illustrate the methods through application to integration of multiple gene expression datasets relevant to immunology.
The time continuous Volterra equations valued in $\mathbb{R}$ with completely positive kernels have two basic monotonicity properties. The first is that any two solution curves do not intersect with suitable given signals. The second is that the solutions to the autonomous equations are monotone. Due to the fading memory principle, we also desire the kernels to be nonincreasing. In this work, through an generalization of the convolution to nonuniform meshes, we introduce the concept of ``right complementary monotone'' (R-CMM) kernels in the discrete level for nonuniform meshes, which inherits both the nonincreasing property and complete positivity in the continuous level. We prove that the discrete solutions preserve these two monotonicity properties if the discretized kernel satisfies R-CMM property. Technically, we highly rely on the resolvent kernels to achieve this.
Most inverse problems from physical sciences are formulated as PDE-constrained optimization problems. This involves identifying unknown parameters in equations by optimizing the model to generate PDE solutions that closely match measured data. The formulation is powerful and widely used in many sciences and engineering fields. However, one crucial assumption is that the unknown parameter must be deterministic. In reality, however, many problems are stochastic in nature, and the unknown parameter is random. The challenge then becomes recovering the full distribution of this unknown random parameter. It is a much more complex task. In this paper, we examine this problem in a general setting. In particular, we conceptualize the PDE solver as a push-forward map that pushes the parameter distribution to the generated data distribution. This way, the SDE-constrained optimization translates to minimizing the distance between the generated distribution and the measurement distribution. We then formulate a gradient-flow equation to seek the ground-truth parameter probability distribution. This opens up a new paradigm for extending many techniques in PDE-constrained optimization to that for systems with stochasticity.
Using a hierarchical construction, we develop methods for a wide and flexible class of models by taking a fully parametric approach to generalized linear mixed models with complex covariance dependence. The Laplace approximation is used to marginally estimate covariance parameters while integrating out all fixed and latent random effects. The Laplace approximation relies on Newton-Raphson updates, which also leads to predictions for the latent random effects. We develop methodology for complete marginal inference, from estimating covariance parameters and fixed effects to making predictions for unobserved data, for any patterned covariance matrix in the hierarchical generalized linear mixed models framework. The marginal likelihood is developed for six distributions that are often used for binary, count, and positive continuous data, and our framework is easily extended to other distributions. The methods are illustrated with simulations from stochastic processes with known parameters, and their efficacy in terms of bias and interval coverage is shown through simulation experiments. Examples with binary and proportional data on election results, count data for marine mammals, and positive-continuous data on heavy metal concentration in the environment are used to illustrate all six distributions with a variety of patterned covariance structures that include spatial models (e.g., geostatistical and areal models), time series models (e.g., first-order autoregressive models), and mixtures with typical random intercepts based on grouping.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission gathers 1.4 terabytes of data each day from its geosynchronous orbit in space. SDO data includes images of the Sun captured at different wavelengths, with the primary scientific goal of understanding the dynamic processes governing the Sun. Recently, end-to-end optimized artificial neural networks (ANN) have shown great potential in performing image compression. ANN-based compression schemes have outperformed conventional hand-engineered algorithms for lossy and lossless image compression. We have designed an ad-hoc ANN-based image compression scheme to reduce the amount of data needed to be stored and retrieved on space missions studying solar dynamics. In this work, we propose an attention module to make use of both local and non-local attention mechanisms in an adversarially trained neural image compression network. We have also demonstrated the superior perceptual quality of this neural image compressor. Our proposed algorithm for compressing images downloaded from the SDO spacecraft performs better in rate-distortion trade-off than the popular currently-in-use image compression codecs such as JPEG and JPEG2000. In addition we have shown that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the art lossy transform coding compression codec, i.e., BPG.
Approximate computing (AC) has become a prominent solution to improve the performance, area, and power/energy efficiency of a digital design at the cost of output accuracy. We propose a novel scalable approximate multiplier that utilizes a lookup table-based compensation unit. To improve energy-efficiency, input operands are truncated to a reduced bitwidth representation (e.g., h bits) based on their leading one positions. Then, a curve-fitting method is employed to map the product term to a linear function, and a piecewise constant error-correction term is used to reduce the approximation error. For computing the piecewise constant error-compensation term, we partition the function space into M segments and compute the compensation factor for each segment by averaging the errors in the segment. The multiplier supports various degrees of truncation and error-compensation to exploit accuracy-efficiency trade-off. The proposed approximate multiplier offers better error metrics such as mean and standard deviation of absolute relative error (MARED and StdARED) compare to a state-of-the-art integer approximate multiplier. The proposed approximate multiplier improves the MARED and StdARED by about 38% and 32% when its energy consumption is about equal to the state-of-the-art approximate multiplier. Moreover, the performance of the proposed approximate multiplier is evaluated in image classification applications using a Deep Neural Network (DNN). The results indicate that the degradation of DNN accuracy is negligible especially due to the compensation properties of our approximate multiplier.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.