This paper presents a novel solution concept, called BAR Nash Equilibrium (BARNE) and apply it to analyse the Verifier's dilemma, a fundamental problem in blockchain. Our solution concept adapts the Nash equilibrium (NE) to accommodate interactions among Byzantine, altruistic and rational agents, which became known as the BAR setting in the literature. We prove the existence of BARNE in a large class of games and introduce two natural refinements, global and local stability. Using this equilibrium and its refinement, we analyse the free-rider problem in the context of byzantine consensus. We demonstrate that by incorporating fines and forced errors into a standard quorum-based blockchain protocol, we can effectively reestablish honest behavior as a globally stable BARNE.
Over the last 30 years, the World Wide Web has changed significantly. In this paper, we argue that common practices to prepare web pages for delivery conflict with many efforts to present content with minimal latency, one fundamental goal that pushed changes in the WWW. To bolster our arguments, we revisit reasons that led to changes of HTTP and compare them systematically with techniques to prepare web pages. We found that the structure of many web pages leverages features of HTTP/1.1 but hinders the use of recent HTTP features to present content quickly. To improve the situation in the future, we propose fine-grained content segmentation. This would allow to exploit streaming capabilities of recent HTTP versions and to render content as quickly as possible without changing underlying protocols or web browsers.
In this paper, we tackle the problem of Egocentric Human-Object Interaction (EHOI) detection in an industrial setting. To overcome the lack of public datasets in this context, we propose a pipeline and a tool for generating synthetic images of EHOIs paired with several annotations and data signals (e.g., depth maps or segmentation masks). Using the proposed pipeline, we present EgoISM-HOI a new multimodal dataset composed of synthetic EHOI images in an industrial environment with rich annotations of hands and objects. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of synthetic EHOI data produced by the proposed tool, we designed a new method that predicts and combines different multimodal signals to detect EHOIs in RGB images. Our study shows that exploiting synthetic data to pre-train the proposed method significantly improves performance when tested on real-world data. Moreover, to fully understand the usefulness of our method, we conducted an in-depth analysis in which we compared and highlighted the superiority of the proposed approach over different state-of-the-art class-agnostic methods. To support research in this field, we publicly release the datasets, source code, and pre-trained models at //iplab.dmi.unict.it/egoism-hoi.
This paper introduces a new formulation that finds the optimum for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP), which seeks to find a shortest path for an agent, that starts at a depot, visits a set of moving targets exactly once within their assigned time-windows, and returns to the depot. The formulation relies on the key idea that when the targets move along lines, their trajectories become convex sets within the space-time coordinate system. The problem then reduces to finding the shortest path within a graph of convex sets, subject to some speed constraints. We compare our formulation with the current state-of-the-art Mixed Integer Conic Program (MICP) solver for the MT-TSP. The experimental results show that our formulation outperforms the MICP for instances with up to 20 targets, with up to two orders of magnitude reduction in runtime, and up to a 60\% tighter optimality gap. We also show that the solution cost from the convex relaxation of our formulation provides significantly tighter lower bounds for the MT-TSP than the ones from the MICP.
This paper proposes an improved linear discriminant analysis called spectrally-corrected and regularized LDA (SRLDA). This method integrates the design ideas of the sample spectrally-corrected covariance matrix and the regularized discriminant analysis. With the support of a large-dimensional random matrix analysis framework, it is proved that SRLDA has a linear classification global optimal solution under the spiked model assumption. According to simulation data analysis, the SRLDA classifier performs better than RLDA and ILDA and is closer to the theoretical classifier. Experiments on different data sets show that the SRLDA algorithm performs better in classification and dimensionality reduction than currently used tools.
In the Network Revenue Management (NRM) problem, products composed of up to L resources are sold to stochastically arriving customers. We take a randomized rounding approach to NRM, motivated by developments in Online Contention Resolution Schemes (OCRS). The goal is to take a fractional solution to NRM that satisfies the resource constraints in expectation, and implement it in an online policy that satisfies the resource constraints in any state, while (approximately) preserving all of the sales that were prescribed by the fractional solution. OCRS cannot be naively applied to NRM or revenue management problems in general, because customer substitution induces a negative correlation in products being demanded. We start by deriving an OCRS that achieves a guarantee of 1/(1+L) for NRM with customer substitution, matching a common benchmark in the literature. We then show how to beat this benchmark for all integers L>1 assuming no substitution, i.e., in the standard OCRS setting. By contrast, we show that this benchmark is unbeatable using OCRS or any fractional relaxation if there is customer substitution, for all integers L that are the power of a prime number. Finally, we show how to beat 1/(1+L) even with customer substitution, if the products comprise one item from each of up to L groups. Our results have corresponding implications for Online Combinatorial Auctions, in which buyers bid for bundles of up to L items, and buyers being single-minded is akin to no substitution. Our final result also beats 1/(1+L) for Prophet Inequality on the intersection of L partition matroids. All in all, our paper provides a unifying framework for applying OCRS to these problems, delineating the impact of substitution, and establishing a separation between the guarantees achievable with vs. without substitution under general resource constraints parametrized by L.
This paper proposes a new approach to address the problem of unmeasured confounding in spatial designs. Spatial confounding occurs when some confounding variables are unobserved and not included in the model, leading to distorted inferential results about the effect of an exposure on an outcome. We show the relationship existing between the confounding bias of a non-spatial model and that of a semi-parametric model that includes a basis matrix to represent the unmeasured confounder conditional on the exposure. This relationship holds for any basis expansion, however it is shown that using the semi-parametric approach guarantees a reduction in the confounding bias only under certain circumstances, which are related to the spatial structures of the exposure and the unmeasured confounder, the type of basis expansion utilized, and the regularization mechanism. To adjust for spatial confounding, and therefore try to recover the effect of interest, we propose a Bayesian semi-parametric regression model, where an expansion matrix of principal spline basis functions is used to approximate the unobserved factor, and spike-and-slab priors are imposed on the respective expansion coefficients in order to select the most important bases. From the results of an extensive simulation study, we conclude that our proposal is able to reduce the confounding bias with respect to the non-spatial model, and it also seems more robust to bias amplification than competing approaches.
This paper develops a novel minimal-state operational semantics for higher-order functional languages that uses only the call stack and a source program point or a lexical level as the complete state information: there is no environment, no substitution, no continuation, etc. We prove this form of operational semantics equivalent to standard presentations. We then show how this approach can open the door to potential new applications: we define a program analysis as a direct finitization of this operational semantics. The program analysis that naturally emerges has a number of novel and interesting properties compared to standard program analyses for higher-order programs: for example, it can infer recurrences and does not need value widening. We both give a formal definition of the analysis and describe our current implementation.
This paper updates the survey of AI accelerators and processors from past three years. This paper collects and summarizes the current commercial accelerators that have been publicly announced with peak performance and power consumption numbers. The performance and power values are plotted on a scatter graph, and a number of dimensions and observations from the trends on this plot are again discussed and analyzed. Two new trends plots based on accelerator release dates are included in this year's paper, along with the additional trends of some neuromorphic, photonic, and memristor-based inference accelerators.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
The present paper surveys neural approaches to conversational AI that have been developed in the last few years. We group conversational systems into three categories: (1) question answering agents, (2) task-oriented dialogue agents, and (3) chatbots. For each category, we present a review of state-of-the-art neural approaches, draw the connection between them and traditional approaches, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies.