A silting theorem was established by Buan and Zhou as a generalisation of the classical tilting theorem of Brenner and Butler. In this paper, we give an alternative proof of the theorem by using differential graded algebras.
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic coordinates algorit
hm equipped with powerball method to accelerate. We prove that the proposed algorithm has a convergence rate of $mathcal{O}(sqrt{p}/sqrt{nT})$ for general nonconvex cost functions. We consider solving the generation of adversarial examples from black-box DNNs problem to compare with the existing state-of-the-art centralized and distributed ZO algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate the faster convergence rate of the proposed algorithm and match the theoretical analysis.
Mitotic count is the most important morphological feature of breast cancer grading. Many deep learning-based methods have been proposed but suffer from domain shift. In this work, we construct a Fourier-based segmentation model for mitosis detection
to address the problem. Swapping the low-frequency spectrum of source and target images is shown effective to alleviate the discrepancy between different scanners. Our Fourier-based segmentation method can achieve F1 with 0.7456 on the preliminary test set.
This paper investigates task-oriented communication for multi-device cooperative edge inference, where a group of distributed low-end edge devices transmit the extracted features of local samples to a powerful edge server for inference. While coopera
tive edge inference can overcome the limited sensing capability of a single device, it substantially increases the communication overhead and may incur excessive latency. To enable low-latency cooperative inference, we propose a learning-based communication scheme that optimizes local feature extraction and distributed feature encoding in a task-oriented manner, i.e., to remove data redundancy and transmit information that is essential for the downstream inference task rather than reconstructing the data samples at the edge server. Specifically, we leverage an information bottleneck (IB) principle to extract the task-relevant feature at each edge device and adopt a distributed information bottleneck (DIB) framework to formalize a single-letter characterization of the optimal rate-relevance tradeoff for distributed feature encoding. To admit flexible control of the communication overhead, we extend the DIB framework to a distributed deterministic information bottleneck (DDIB) objective that explicitly incorporates the representational costs of the encoded features. As the IB-based objectives are computationally prohibitive for high-dimensional data, we adopt variational approximations to make the optimization problems tractable. To compensate the potential performance loss due to the variational approximations, we also develop a selective retransmission (SR) mechanism to identify the redundancy in the encoded features of multiple edge devices to attain additional communication overhead reduction. Extensive experiments evidence that the proposed task-oriented communication scheme achieves a better rate-relevance tradeoff than baseline methods.
We report here a general theory describing photoelectron transportation dynamics in GaAs semiconductor photocathodes. Gradient doping is incorporated in the model through the inclusion of directional carrier drift. The time-evolution of electron conc
entration in the active layer upon the injection of an excitation pulse is solved both numerically and analytically. The predictions of the model are compared with experiments via carrier-induced transient reflectivity change, which is measured for gradient-doped and uniform-doped photocathodes using femtosecond pump-probe reflectometry. Excellent agreement is found between the experiments and the theory, leading to the characterization of key device parameters such as diffusion constant and electron decay rates. Comparisons are also made between uniform doping and gradient doping for their characteristics in photoelectron transportation. Doping gradient is found to be able to accelerate electron accumulation on the device surface. These results offer new insights into the dynamics of III-V photocathodes and potentially open a new avenue toward experimental characterization of device parameters.
The existing segmentation techniques require high-fidelity images as input to perform semantic segmentation. Since the segmentation results contain most of edge information that is much less than the acquired images, the throughput gap leads to both
hardware and software waste. In this letter, we report an image-free single-pixel segmentation technique. The technique combines structured illumination and single-pixel detection together, to efficiently samples and multiplexes scenes segmentation information into compressed one-dimensional measurements. The illumination patterns are optimized together with the subsequent reconstruction neural network, which directly infers segmentation maps from the single-pixel measurements. The end-to-end encoding-and-decoding learning framework enables optimized illumination with corresponding network, which provides both high acquisition and segmentation efficiency. Both simulation and experimental results validate that accurate segmentation can be achieved using two-order-of-magnitude less input data. When the sampling ratio is 1%, the Dice coefficient reaches above 80% and the pixel accuracy reaches above 96%. We envision that this image-free segmentation technique can be widely applied in various resource-limited platforms such as UAV and unmanned vehicle that require real-time sensing.
This paper develops a novel self-training U-net (STU-net) based method for the automated WPC model generation without requiring data pre-processing. The self-training (ST) process of STU-net has two steps. First, different from traditional studies re
garding the WPC modeling as a curve fitting problem, in this paper, we renovate the WPC modeling formulation from a machine vision aspect. To develop sufficiently diversified training samples, we synthesize supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data based on a set of S-shape functions depicting WPCs. These synthesized SCADA data and WPC functions are visualized as images and paired as training samples(I_x, I_wpc). A U-net is then developed to approximate the model recovering I_wpc from I_x. The developed U-net is applied into observed SCADA data and can successfully generate the I_wpc. Moreover, we develop a pixel mapping and correction process to derive a mathematical form f_wpc representing I_wpcgenerated previously. The proposed STU-net only needs to train once and does not require any data preprocessing in applications. Numerical experiments based on 76 WTs are conducted to validate the superiority of the proposed method by benchmarking against classical WPC modeling methods. To demonstrate the repeatability of the presented research, we release our code at https://github.com/IkeYang/STU-net.
Lane detection plays a key role in autonomous driving. While car cameras always take streaming videos on the way, current lane detection works mainly focus on individual images (frames) by ignoring dynamics along the video. In this work, we collect a
new video instance lane detection (VIL-100) dataset, which contains 100 videos with in total 10,000 frames, acquired from different real traffic scenarios. All the frames in each video are manually annotated to a high-quality instance-level lane annotation, and a set of frame-level and video-level metrics are included for quantitative performance evaluation. Moreover, we propose a new baseline model, named multi-level memory aggregation network (MMA-Net), for video instance lane detection. In our approach, the representation of current frame is enhanced by attentively aggregating both local and global memory features from other frames. Experiments on the new collected dataset show that the proposed MMA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art lane detection methods and video object segmentation methods. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/yujun0-0/MMA-Net.
End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving commonly rely on expert demonstrations. Although humans are good drivers, they are not good coaches for end-to-end algorithms that demand dense on-policy supervision. On the contrary, automated experts that
leverage privileged information can efficiently generate large scale on-policy and off-policy demonstrations. However, existing automated experts for urban driving make heavy use of hand-crafted rules and perform suboptimally even on driving simulators, where ground-truth information is available. To address these issues, we train a reinforcement learning expert that maps birds-eye view images to continuous low-level actions. While setting a new performance upper-bound on CARLA, our expert is also a better coach that provides informative supervision signals for imitation learning agents to learn from. Supervised by our reinforcement learning coach, a baseline end-to-end agent with monocular camera-input achieves expert-level performance. Our end-to-end agent achieves a 78% success rate while generalizing to a new town and new weather on the NoCrash-dense benchmark and state-of-the-art performance on the more challenging CARLA LeaderBoard.
This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with powerball method to accelerate. We show that the
proposed algorithm achieves the linear speedup convergence rate $mathcal{O}(1/sqrt{nT})$ for general smooth (possibly non-convex) cost functions. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm through numerical experiments by training two-layer fully connected neural networks and convolutional neural networks on the MNIST dataset to compare with state-of-the-art distributed SGD algorithms and centralized SGD algorithms.
