In this paper, we are interested in the performance of a variable-length stop-feedback (VLSF) code with $m$ optimal decoding times for the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (BI-AWGN) channel. We first develop tight approximations on the tail probability of length-$n$ cumulative information density. Building on the work of Yavas \emph{et al.}, we formulate the problem of minimizing the upper bound on average blocklength subject to the error probability, minimum gap, and integer constraints. For this integer program, we show that for a given error constraint, a VLSF code that decodes after every symbol attains the maximum achievable rate. We also present a greedy algorithm that yields possibly suboptimal integer decoding times. By allowing a positive real-valued decoding time, we develop the gap-constrained sequential differential optimization (SDO) procedure. Numerical evaluation shows that the gap-constrained SDO can provide a good estimate on achievable rate of VLSF codes with $m$ optimal decoding times and that a finite $m$ suffices to attain Polyanskiy's bound for VLSF codes with $m = \infty$.
The hard thresholding technique plays a vital role in the development of algorithms for sparse signal recovery. By merging this technique and heavy-ball acceleration method which is a multi-step extension of the traditional gradient descent method, we propose the so-called heavy-ball-based hard thresholding (HBHT) and heavy-ball-based hard thresholding pursuit (HBHTP) algorithms for signal recovery. It turns out that the HBHT and HBHTP can successfully recover a $k$-sparse signal if the restricted isometry constant of the measurement matrix satisfies $\delta_{3k}<0.618 $ and $\delta_{3k}<0.577,$ respectively. The guaranteed success of HBHT and HBHTP is also shown under the conditions $\delta_{2k}<0.356$ and $\delta_{2k}<0.377,$ respectively. Moreover, the finite convergence and stability of the two algorithms are also established in this paper. Simulations on random problem instances are performed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms and several existing ones. Empirical results indicate that the HBHTP performs very comparably to a few existing algorithms and it takes less average time to achieve the signal recovery than these existing methods.
Optimal feedback control (OFC) is a theory from the motor control literature that explains how humans move their body to achieve a certain goal, e.g., pointing with the finger. OFC is based on the assumption that humans aim to control their body optimally, within the constraints imposed by body, environment, and task. In this paper, we explain how this theory can be applied to understanding Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the case of pointing. We propose that the human body and computer dynamics can be interpreted as a single dynamical system. The system state is controlled by the user via muscle control signals, and estimated from observations. Between-trial variability arises from signal-dependent control noise and observation noise. We compare four different models from optimal control theory and evaluate to what degree these models can replicate movements in the case of mouse pointing. We introduce a procedure to identify parameters that best explain observed user behavior. To support HCI researchers in simulating, analyzing, and optimizing interaction movements, we provide the Python toolbox OFC4HCI. We conclude that OFC presents a powerful framework for HCI to understand and simulate motion of the human body and of the interface on a moment by moment basis.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
Escaping from saddle points and finding local minimum is a central problem in nonconvex optimization. Perturbed gradient methods are perhaps the simplest approach for this problem. However, to find $(\epsilon, \sqrt{\epsilon})$-approximate local minima, the existing best stochastic gradient complexity for this type of algorithms is $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3.5})$, which is not optimal. In this paper, we propose LENA (Last stEp shriNkAge), a faster perturbed stochastic gradient framework for finding local minima. We show that LENA with stochastic gradient estimators such as SARAH/SPIDER and STORM can find $(\epsilon, \epsilon_{H})$-approximate local minima within $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3} + \epsilon_{H}^{-6})$ stochastic gradient evaluations (or $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3})$ when $\epsilon_H = \sqrt{\epsilon}$). The core idea of our framework is a step-size shrinkage scheme to control the average movement of the iterates, which leads to faster convergence to the local minima.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
In the storied Colonel Blotto game, two colonels allocate $a$ and $b$ troops, respectively, to $k$ distinct battlefields. A colonel wins a battle if they assign more troops to that particular battle, and each colonel seeks to maximize their total number of victories. Despite the problem's formulation in 1921, the first polynomial-time algorithm to compute Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies for this game was discovered only quite recently. In 2016, \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} formulated a breakthrough algorithm to compute NE strategies for the Colonel Blotto game\footnote{To the best of our knowledge, the algorithm from \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} has computational complexity $O(k^{14}\max\{a,b\}^{13})$}, receiving substantial media coverage (e.g. \citep{Insider}, \citep{NSF}, \citep{ScienceDaily}). In this work, we present the first known $\epsilon$-approximation algorithm to compute NE strategies in the two-player Colonel Blotto game in runtime $\widetilde{O}(\epsilon^{-4} k^8 \max\{a,b\}^2)$ for arbitrary settings of these parameters. Moreover, this algorithm computes approximate coarse correlated equilibrium strategies in the multiplayer (continuous and discrete) Colonel Blotto game (when there are $\ell > 2$ colonels) with runtime $\widetilde{O}(\ell \epsilon^{-4} k^8 n^2 + \ell^2 \epsilon^{-2} k^3 n (n+k))$, where $n$ is the maximum troop count. Before this work, no polynomial-time algorithm was known to compute exact or approximate equilibrium (in any sense) strategies for multiplayer Colonel Blotto with arbitrary parameters. Our algorithm computes these approximate equilibria by a novel (to the author's knowledge) sampling technique with which we implicitly perform multiplicative weights update over the exponentially many strategies available to each player.
We introduce a novel methodology for particle filtering in dynamical systems where the evolution of the signal of interest is described by a SDE and observations are collected instantaneously at prescribed time instants. The new approach includes the discretisation of the SDE and the design of efficient particle filters for the resulting discrete-time state-space model. The discretisation scheme converges with weak order 1 and it is devised to create a sequential dependence structure along the coordinates of the discrete-time state vector. We introduce a class of space-sequential particle filters that exploits this structure to improve performance when the system dimension is large. This is numerically illustrated by a set of computer simulations for a stochastic Lorenz 96 system with additive noise. The new space-sequential particle filters attain approximately constant estimation errors as the dimension of the Lorenz 96 system is increased, with a computational cost that increases polynomially, rather than exponentially, with the system dimension. Besides the new numerical scheme and particle filters, we provide in this paper a general framework for discrete-time filtering in continuous-time dynamical systems described by a SDE and instantaneous observations. Provided that the SDE is discretised using a weakly-convergent scheme, we prove that the marginal posterior laws of the resulting discrete-time state-space model converge to the posterior marginal posterior laws of the original continuous-time state-space model under a suitably defined metric. This result is general and not restricted to the numerical scheme or particle filters specifically studied in this manuscript.
In this work, we develop quantization and variable-length source codecs for the feedback links in linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control systems. We prove that for any fixed control performance, the approaches we propose nearly achieve lower bounds on communication cost that have been established in prior work. In particular, we refine the analysis of a classical achievability approach with an eye towards more practical details. Notably, in the prior literature the source codecs used to demonstrate the (near) achievability of these lower bounds are often implicitly assumed to be time-varying. For single-input single-output (SISO) plants, we prove that it suffices to consider time-invariant quantization and source coding. This result follows from analyzing the long-term stochastic behavior of the system's quantized measurements and reconstruction errors. To our knowledge, this time-invariant achievability result is the first in the literature.
Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
Binding operation is fundamental to many cognitive processes, such as cognitive map formation, relational reasoning, and language comprehension. In these processes, two different modalities, such as location and objects, events and their contextual cues, and words and their roles, need to be bound together, but little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. Previous works introduced a binding model based on quadratic functions of bound pairs, followed by vector summation of multiple pairs. Based on this framework, we address following questions: Which classes of quadratic matrices are optimal for decoding relational structures? And what is the resultant accuracy? We introduce a new class of binding matrices based on a matrix representation of octonion algebra, an eight-dimensional extension of complex numbers. We show that these matrices enable a more accurate unbinding than previously known methods when a small number of pairs are present. Moreover, numerical optimization of a binding operator converges to this octonion binding. We also show that when there are a large number of bound pairs, however, a random quadratic binding performs as well as the octonion and previously-proposed binding methods. This study thus provides new insight into potential neural mechanisms of binding operations in the brain.