We consider an information update system consisting of $N$ sources sending status packets at random instances according to a Poisson process to a remote monitor through a single server. We assume a heteregeneous server with exponentially distributed service times which is equipped with a waiting room holding the freshest packet from each source referred to as Single Buffer Per-Source Queueing (SBPSQ). The sources are assumed to be equally important, i.e., non-weighted average AoI is used as the information freshness metric, and subsequently two symmetric scheduling policies are studied in this paper, namely First Source First Serve (FSFS) and the Earliest Served First Serve (ESFS) policies, the latter policy being proposed the first time in the current paper to the best of our knowledge. By employing the theory of Markov Fluid Queues (MFQ), an analytical model is proposed to obtain the exact distribution of the Age of Information (AoI) for each source when the FSFS and ESFS policies are employed at the server. Subsequently, a benchmark scheduling-free scheme named as Single Buffer with Replacement (SBR) that uses a single one-packet buffer shared by all sources is also studied with a similar but less complex analytical model. We comparatively study the performance of the three schemes through numerical examples and show that the proposed ESFS policy outperforms the other two schemes in terms of the average AoI and the age violation probability averaged across all sources, in a scenario of sources possessing different traffic intensities but sharing a common service time.
We explore analytically and numerically agglomeration driven by advection and localized source. The system is inhomogeneous in one dimension, viz. along the direction of advection. We analyze a simplified model with mass-independent advection velocity, diffusion coefficient, and reaction rates. We also examine a model with mass-dependent coefficients describing aggregation with sedimentation. For the simplified model, we obtain an exact solution for the stationary spatially dependent agglomerate densities. In the model describing aggregation with sedimentation, we report a new conservation law and develop a scaling theory for the densities. For numerical efficiency we exploit the low-rank approximation technique; this dramatically increases the computational speed and allows simulations of large systems. The numerical results are in excellent agreement with the predictions of our theory.
Clocked Cubical Type Theory is a new type theory combining the power of guarded recursion with univalence and higher inductive types (HITs). This type theory can be used as a metalanguage for synthetic guarded domain theory in which one can solve guarded recursive type equations, also with negative variable occurrences, and use these to construct models for reasoning about programming languages. Combining this with HITs allows for the use of type constructors familiar from set-theory based approaches to semantics, such as quotients and finite powersets in these models. In this paper we show how to reason about the combination of finite non-determinism and recursion in this type theory. Unlike traditional domain theory which takes an ordering of programs as primitive, synthetic guarded domain theory takes the notion of computation step as primitive in the form of a modal operator. We use this extra intensional information to define two guarded recursive (finite) powerdomain constructions differing in the way non-determinism interacts with the computation steps. As an example application of these we show how to prove applicative similarity a congruence in the cases of may- and must-convergence for the untyped lambda calculus with finite non-determinism. Such results are usually proved using operational reasoning and Howe's method. Here we use an adaptation of a denotational method developed by Pitts in the context of domain theory.
Fine-tuning a deep network trained with the standard cross-entropy loss is a strong baseline for few-shot learning. When fine-tuned transductively, this outperforms the current state-of-the-art on standard datasets such as Mini-ImageNet, Tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC-100 with the same hyper-parameters. The simplicity of this approach enables us to demonstrate the first few-shot learning results on the ImageNet-21k dataset. We find that using a large number of meta-training classes results in high few-shot accuracies even for a large number of few-shot classes. We do not advocate our approach as the solution for few-shot learning, but simply use the results to highlight limitations of current benchmarks and few-shot protocols. We perform extensive studies on benchmark datasets to propose a metric that quantifies the "hardness" of a few-shot episode. This metric can be used to report the performance of few-shot algorithms in a more systematic way.
Item-to-item collaborative filtering (aka. item-based CF) has been long used for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored optimization for the recommendation task. In recent years, several works attempt to learn item similarities from data, by expressing the similarity as an underlying model and estimating model parameters by optimizing a recommendation-aware objective function. While extensive efforts have been made to use shallow linear models for learning item similarities, there has been relatively less work exploring nonlinear neural network models for item-based CF. In this work, we propose a neural network model named Neural Attentive Item Similarity model (NAIS) for item-based CF. The key to our design of NAIS is an attention network, which is capable of distinguishing which historical items in a user profile are more important for a prediction. Compared to the state-of-the-art item-based CF method Factored Item Similarity Model (FISM), our NAIS has stronger representation power with only a few additional parameters brought by the attention network. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of NAIS. This work is the first attempt that designs neural network models for item-based CF, opening up new research possibilities for future developments of neural recommender systems.
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.
Although Recommender Systems have been comprehensively studied in the past decade both in industry and academia, most of current recommender systems suffer from the fol- lowing issues: 1) The data sparsity of the user-item matrix seriously affect the recommender system quality. As a result, most of traditional recommender system approaches are not able to deal with the users who have rated few items, which is known as cold start problem in recommender system. 2) Traditional recommender systems assume that users are in- dependently and identically distributed and ignore the social relation between users. However, in real life scenario, due to the exponential growth of social networking service, such as facebook and Twitter, social connections between different users play an significant role for recommender system task. In this work, aiming at providing a better recommender sys- tems by incorporating user social network information, we propose a matrix factorization framework with user social connection constraints. Experimental results on the real-life dataset shows that the proposed method performs signifi- cantly better than the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of MAE and RMSE, especially for the cold start users.
Many recommendation algorithms rely on user data to generate recommendations. However, these recommendations also affect the data obtained from future users. This work aims to understand the effects of this dynamic interaction. We propose a simple model where users with heterogeneous preferences arrive over time. Based on this model, we prove that naive estimators, i.e. those which ignore this feedback loop, are not consistent. We show that consistent estimators are efficient in the presence of myopic agents. Our results are validated using extensive simulations.
In this paper, we propose to tackle the problem of reducing discrepancies between multiple domains referred to as multi-source domain adaptation and consider it under the target shift assumption: in all domains we aim to solve a classification problem with the same output classes, but with labels' proportions differing across them. We design a method based on optimal transport, a theory that is gaining momentum to tackle adaptation problems in machine learning due to its efficiency in aligning probability distributions. Our method performs multi-source adaptation and target shift correction simultaneously by learning the class probabilities of the unlabeled target sample and the coupling allowing to align two (or more) probability distributions. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data related to satellite image segmentation task show the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art.
Person re-identification plays an important role in realistic video surveillance with increasing demand for public safety. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with rules of updating images for person re-identification in real-world surveillance system. First, Image Pool is generated by using mean-shift tracking method to automatically select video frame fragments of the target person. Second, features extracted from Image Pool by convolutional network work together to re-rank original ranking list of the main image and matching results will be generated. In addition, updating rules are designed for replacing images in Image Pool when a new image satiating with our updating critical formula in video system. These rules fall into two categories: if the new image is from the same camera as the previous updated image, it will replace one of assist images; otherwise, it will replace the main image directly. Experiments are conduced on Market-1501, iLIDS-VID and PRID-2011 and our ITSD datasets to validate that our framework outperforms on rank-1 accuracy and mAP for person re-identification. Furthermore, the update ability of our framework provides consistently remarkable accuracy rate in real-world surveillance system.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.