To solve inverse problems, plug-and-play (PnP) methods have been developed that replace the proximal step in a convex optimization algorithm with a call to an application-specific denoiser, often implemented using a deep neural network (DNN). Although such methods have been successful, they can be improved. For example, denoisers are usually designed/trained to remove white Gaussian noise, but the denoiser input error in PnP algorithms is usually far from white or Gaussian. Approximate message passing (AMP) methods provide white and Gaussian denoiser input error, but only when the forward operator is a large random matrix. In this work, for Fourier-based forward operators, we propose a PnP algorithm based on generalized expectation-consistent (GEC) approximation -- a close cousin of AMP -- that offers predictable error statistics at each iteration, as well as a new DNN denoiser that leverages those statistics. We apply our approach to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image recovery and demonstrate its advantages over existing PnP and AMP methods.
Regression modeling is the workhorse of statistics and there is a vast literature on estimation of the regression function. It is realized in recent years that in regression analysis the ultimate aim may be the estimation of a level set of the regression function, instead of the estimation of the regression function itself. The published work on estimation of the level set has thus far focused mainly on nonparametric regression, especially on point estimation. In this paper, the construction of confidence sets for the level set of linear regression is considered. In particular, $1-\alpha$ level upper, lower and two-sided confidence sets are constructed for the normal-error linear regression. It is shown that these confidence sets can be easily constructed from the corresponding $1-\alpha$ level simultaneous confidence bands. It is also pointed out that the construction method is readily applicable to other parametric regression models where the mean response depends on a linear predictor through a monotonic link function, which include generalized linear models, linear mixed models and generalized linear mixed models. Therefore the method proposed in this paper is widely applicable. Examples are given to illustrate the method.
We study the problems of testing isomorphism of polynomials, algebras, and multilinear forms. Our first main results are average-case algorithms for these problems. For example, we develop an algorithm that takes two cubic forms $f, g\in \mathbb{F}_q[x_1,\dots, x_n]$, and decides whether $f$ and $g$ are isomorphic in time $q^{O(n)}$ for most $f$. This average-case setting has direct practical implications, having been studied in multivariate cryptography since the 1990s. Our second result concerns the complexity of testing equivalence of alternating trilinear forms. This problem is of interest in both mathematics and cryptography. We show that this problem is polynomial-time equivalent to testing equivalence of symmetric trilinear forms, by showing that they are both Tensor Isomorphism-complete (Grochow-Qiao, ITCS, 2021), therefore is equivalent to testing isomorphism of cubic forms over most fields.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technique to enhance the performance of physical-layer key generation (PKG) due to its ability to smartly customize the radio environments. Existing RIS-assisted PKG methods are mainly based on the idealistic assumption of an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channel model at both the transmitter and the RIS. However, the i.i.d. model is inaccurate for a typical RIS in an isotropic scattering environment. Also, neglecting the existence of channel spatial correlation would degrade the PKG performance. In this paper, we establish a general spatially correlated channel model in multi-antenna systems and propose a new PKG framework based on the transmit and the reflective beamforming at the base station (BS) and the RIS. Specifically, we derive a closed-form expression for characterizing the key generation rate (KGR) and obtain a globally optimal solution of the beamformers to maximize the KGR. Furthermore, we analyze the KGR performance difference between the one adopting the assumption of the i.i.d. model and that of the spatially correlated model. It is found that the beamforming designed for the correlated model outperforms that for the i.i.d. model while the KGR gain increases with the channel correlation. Simulation results show that compared to existing methods based on the i.i.d. fading model, our proposed method achieves about $5$ dB performance gain when the BS antenna correlation $\rho$ is $0.3$ and the RIS element spacing is half of the wavelength.
We study streaming algorithms in the white-box adversarial model, where the stream is chosen adaptively by an adversary who observes the entire internal state of the algorithm at each time step. We show that nontrivial algorithms are still possible. We first give a randomized algorithm for the $L_1$-heavy hitters problem that outperforms the optimal deterministic Misra-Gries algorithm on long streams. If the white-box adversary is computationally bounded, we use cryptographic techniques to reduce the memory of our $L_1$-heavy hitters algorithm even further and to design a number of additional algorithms for graph, string, and linear algebra problems. The existence of such algorithms is surprising, as the streaming algorithm does not even have a secret key in this model, i.e., its state is entirely known to the adversary. One algorithm we design is for estimating the number of distinct elements in a stream with insertions and deletions achieving a multiplicative approximation and sublinear space; such an algorithm is impossible for deterministic algorithms. We also give a general technique that translates any two-player deterministic communication lower bound to a lower bound for {\it randomized} algorithms robust to a white-box adversary. In particular, our results show that for all $p\ge 0$, there exists a constant $C_p>1$ such that any $C_p$-approximation algorithm for $F_p$ moment estimation in insertion-only streams with a white-box adversary requires $\Omega(n)$ space for a universe of size $n$. Similarly, there is a constant $C>1$ such that any $C$-approximation algorithm in an insertion-only stream for matrix rank requires $\Omega(n)$ space with a white-box adversary. Our algorithmic results based on cryptography thus show a separation between computationally bounded and unbounded adversaries. (Abstract shortened to meet arXiv limits.)
The {\em insertion-deletion channel} takes as input a binary string $x \in\{0, 1\}^n$, and outputs a string $\widetilde{x}$ where some of the bits have been deleted and others inserted independently at random. In the {\em trace reconstruction problem}, one is given many outputs (called {\em traces}) of the insertion-deletion channel on the same input message $x$, and asked to recover the input message. Nazarov and Peres (STOC 2017), and De, Odonnell and Servido (STOC 2017) showed that any string $x$ can be reconstructed from $\exp(O(n^{1/3}))$ traces. Holden, Pemantle, Peres and Zhai (COLT 2018) adapt the techniques used to prove this upper bound, to an algorithm for the average-case trace reconstruction with a sample complexity of $\exp(O(\log^{1/3} n))$. However, it is not clear how to apply their techniques more generally and in particular for the recent worst-case upper bound of $\exp(\widetilde{O}(n^{1/5}))$ shown by Chase (STOC 2021) for the deletion-channel. We prove a general reduction from the average-case to smaller instances of a problem similar to worst-case. Using this reduction and a generalization of Chase's bound, we construct an improved average-case algorithm with a sample complexity of $\exp(\widetilde{O}(\log^{1/5} n))$. Additionally, we show that Chase's upper-bound holds for the insertion-deletion channel as well.
Recent work has shown that finite mixture models with $m$ components are identifiable, while making no assumptions on the mixture components, so long as one has access to groups of samples of size $2m-1$ which are known to come from the same mixture component. In this work we generalize that result and show that, if every subset of $k$ mixture components of a mixture model are linearly independent, then that mixture model is identifiable with only $(2m-1)/(k-1)$ samples per group. We further show that this value cannot be improved. We prove an analogous result for a stronger form of identifiability known as "determinedness" along with a corresponding lower bound. This independence assumption almost surely holds if mixture components are chosen randomly from a $k$-dimensional space. We describe some implications of our results for multinomial mixture models and topic modeling.
Neural networks have been proposed for medical image registration by learning, with a substantial amount of training data, the optimal transformations between image pairs. These trained networks can further be optimized on a single pair of test images - known as test-time optimization. This work formulates image registration as a meta-learning algorithm. Such networks can be trained by aligning the training image pairs while simultaneously improving test-time optimization efficacy; tasks which were previously considered two independent training and optimization processes. The proposed meta-registration is hypothesized to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the test-time optimization in the "outer" meta-optimization of the networks. For image guidance applications that often are time-critical yet limited in training data, the potentially gained speed and accuracy are compared with classical registration algorithms, registration networks without meta-learning, and single-pair optimization without test-time optimization data. Experiments are presented in this paper using clinical transrectal ultrasound image data from 108 prostate cancer patients. These experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of a meta-registration protocol, which yields significantly improved performance relative to existing learning-based methods. Furthermore, the meta-registration achieves comparable results to classical iterative methods in a fraction of the time, owing to its rapid test-time optimization process.
Registration of multivariate functional data involves handling of both cross-component and cross-observation phase variations. Allowing for the two phase variations to be modelled as general diffeomorphic time warpings, in this work we focus on the hitherto unconsidered setting where phase variation of the component functions are spatially correlated. We propose an algorithm to optimize a metric-based objective function for registration with a novel penalty term that incorporates the spatial correlation between the component phase variations through a kriging estimate of an appropriate phase random field. The penalty term encourages the overall phase at a particular location to be similar to the spatially weighted average phase in its neighbourhood, and thus engenders a regularization that prevents over-alignment. Utility of the registration method, and its superior performance compared to methods that fail to account for the spatial correlation, is demonstrated through performance on simulated examples and two multivariate functional datasets pertaining to EEG signals and ozone concentrations. The generality of the framework opens up the possibility for extension to settings involving different forms of correlation between the component functions and their phases.
High levels of noise usually exist in today's captured images due to the relatively small sensors equipped in the smartphone cameras, where the noise brings extra challenges to lossy image compression algorithms. Without the capacity to tell the difference between image details and noise, general image compression methods allocate additional bits to explicitly store the undesired image noise during compression and restore the unpleasant noisy image during decompression. Based on the observations, we optimize the image compression algorithm to be noise-aware as joint denoising and compression to resolve the bits misallocation problem. The key is to transform the original noisy images to noise-free bits by eliminating the undesired noise during compression, where the bits are later decompressed as clean images. Specifically, we propose a novel two-branch, weight-sharing architecture with plug-in feature denoisers to allow a simple and effective realization of the goal with little computational cost. Experimental results show that our method gains a significant improvement over the existing baseline methods on both the synthetic and real-world datasets. Our source code is available at //github.com/felixcheng97/DenoiseCompression.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.