No Arabic abstract
Distributed source coding is the task of encoding an input in the absence of correlated side information that is only available to the decoder. Remarkably, Slepian and Wolf showed in 1973 that an encoder that has no access to the correlated side information can asymptotically achieve the same compression rate as when the side information is available at both the encoder and the decoder. While there is significant prior work on this topic in information theory, practical distributed source coding has been limited to synthetic datasets and specific correlation structures. Here we present a general framework for lossy distributed source coding that is agnostic to the correlation structure and can scale to high dimensions. Rather than relying on hand-crafted source-modeling, our method utilizes a powerful conditional deep generative model to learn the distributed encoder and decoder. We evaluate our method on realistic high-dimensional datasets and show substantial improvements in distributed compression performance.
While Shannons mutual information has widespread applications in many disciplines, for practical applications it is often difficult to calculate its value accurately for high-dimensional variables because of the curse of dimensionality. This paper is focused on effective approximation methods for evaluating mutual information in the context of neural population coding. For large but finite neural populations, we derive several information-theoretic asymptotic bounds and approximation formulas that remain valid in high-dimensional spaces. We prove that optimizing the population density distribution based on these approximation formulas is a convex optimization problem which allows efficient numerical solutions. Numerical simulation results confirmed that our asymptotic formulas were highly accurate for approximating mutual information for large neural populations. In special cases, the approximation formulas are exactly equal to the true mutual information. We also discuss techniques of variable transformation and dimensionality reduction to facilitate computation of the approximations.
For reliable transmission across a noisy communication channel, classical results from information theory show that it is asymptotically optimal to separate out the source and channel coding processes. However, this decomposition can fall short in the finite bit-length regime, as it requires non-trivial tuning of hand-crafted codes and assumes infinite computational power for decoding. In this work, we propose to jointly learn the encoding and decoding processes using a new discrete variational autoencoder model. By adding noise into the latent codes to simulate the channel during training, we learn to both compress and error-correct given a fixed bit-length and computational budget. We obtain codes that are not only competitive against several separation schemes, but also learn useful robust representations of the data for downstream tasks such as classification. Finally, inference amortization yields an extremely fast neural decoder, almost an order of magnitude faster compared to standard decoding methods based on iterative belief propagation.
The distributed source coding problem is considered when the sensors, or encoders, are under Byzantine attack; that is, an unknown group of sensors have been reprogrammed by a malicious intruder to undermine the reconstruction at the fusion center. Three different forms of the problem are considered. The first is a variable-rate setup, in which the decoder adaptively chooses the rates at which the sensors transmit. An explicit characterization of the variable-rate achievable sum rates is given for any number of sensors and any groups of traitors. The converse is proved constructively by letting the traitors simulate a fake distribution and report the generated values as the true ones. This fake distribution is chosen so that the decoder cannot determine which sensors are traitors while maximizing the required rate to decode every value. Achievability is proved using a scheme in which the decoder receives small packets of information from a sensor until its message can be decoded, before moving on to the next sensor. The sensors use randomization to choose from a set of coding functions, which makes it probabilistically impossible for the traitors to cause the decoder to make an error. Two forms of the fixed-rate problem are considered, one with deterministic coding and one with randomized coding. The achievable rate regions are given for both these problems, and it is shown that lower rates can be achieved with randomized coding.
The distributed source coding problem is considered when the sensors, or encoders, are under Byzantine attack; that is, an unknown number of sensors have been reprogrammed by a malicious intruder to undermine the reconstruction at the fusion center. Three different forms of the problem are considered. The first is a variable-rate setup, in which the decoder adaptively chooses the rates at which the sensors transmit. An explicit characterization of the variable-rate minimum achievable sum rate is stated, given by the maximum entropy over the set of distributions indistinguishable from the true source distribution by the decoder. In addition, two forms of the fixed-rate problem are considered, one with deterministic coding and one with randomized coding. The achievable rate regions are given for both these problems, with a larger region achievable using randomized coding, though both are suboptimal compared to variable-rate coding.
A central issue of distributed computing systems is how to optimally allocate computing and storage resources and design data shuffling strategies such that the total execution time for computing and data shuffling is minimized. This is extremely critical when the computation, storage and communication resources are limited. In this paper, we study the resource allocation and coding scheme for the MapReduce-type framework with limited resources. In particular, we focus on the coded distributed computing (CDC) approach proposed by Li et al.. We first extend the asymmetric CDC (ACDC) scheme proposed by Yu et al. to the cascade case where each output function is computed by multiple servers. Then we demonstrate that whether CDC or ACDC is better depends on system parameters (e.g., number of computing servers) and task parameters (e.g., number of input files), implying that neither CDC nor ACDC is optimal. By merging the ideas of CDC and ACDC, we propose a hybrid scheme and show that it can strictly outperform CDC and ACDC. Furthermore, we derive an information-theoretic converse showing that for the MapReduce task using a type of weakly symmetric Reduce assignment, which includes the Reduce assignments of CDC and ACDC as special cases, the hybrid scheme with a corresponding resource allocation strategy is optimal, i.e., achieves the minimum execution time, for an arbitrary amount of computing servers and storage memories.