We consider the problem of inferring the topology of a network with M sources and N receivers (an M-by- N network), by sending probes between the sources and receivers. Prior work has shown that this problem can be decomposed into two parts: first, infer smaller subnetwork components (1-by- N's or 2-by-2's) and then merge them to identify the M-by- N topology. We focus on the second part, which had previously received less attention in the literature. We assume that a 1-by- N topology is given and that all 2-by-2 components can be queried and learned using end-to-end probes. The problem is which 2-by-2's to query and how to merge them with the given 1-by- N, so as to exactly identify the 2-by- N topology, and optimize a number of performance metrics, including the number of queries (which directly translates into measurement bandwidth), time complexity, and memory usage. We provide a lower bound, [N 2], on the number of 2-by-2's required by any active learning algorithm and propose two greedy algorithms. The first algorithm follows the framework of multiple hypothesis testing, in particular Generalized Binary Search (GBS). The second algorithm is called the Receiver Elimination Algorithm (REA) and follows a bottom-up approach. It requires exactly N-1 steps, which is much less than all (2N) possible 2-by-2's. Simulation results demonstrate that both algorithms correctly identify the 2-by- N topology and are near-optimal, but REA is more efficient in practice.
Relation to the conference version. This journal paper builds on our conference paper in @cite_39 . In addition to revisions and elaborating on parts of the writing, new materials contributions in this paper include the following: the formulation of the problem in the GBS framework as well as the performance evaluation of the GBS algorithm via simulation, and its comparison against REA.
@cite_39
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We present a recommender systems approach to conference paper assignment, i.e., the task of assigning paper submissions to reviewers. We address both the modeling of reviewer-paper preferences (which can be cast as a learning problem) and the optimization of reviewing assignments to satisfy global conference criteria (which can be viewed as constraint satisfaction). Due to the paucity of preference data per reviewer or per paper (relative to other recommender systems applications) we show how we can integrate multiple sources of information to learn reviewer-paper preference models. Our models are evaluated not just in terms of prediction accuracy but in terms of end-assignment quality. Using a linear programming-based assignment optimization, we show how our approach better explores the space of unsupplied assignments to maximize the overall affinities of papers assigned to reviewers. We demonstrate our results on real reviewer bidding data from the IEEE ICDM 2007 conference. At the heart of many scientific conferences is the problem of matching submitted papers to suitable reviewers. Arriving at a good assignment is a major and important challenge for any conference organizer. In this paper we propose a framework to optimize paper-to-reviewer assignments. Our framework uses suitability scores to measure pairwise affinity between papers and reviewers. We show how learning can be used to infer suitability scores from a small set of provided scores, thereby reducing the burden on reviewers and organizers. We frame the assignment problem as an integer program and propose several variations for the paper-to-reviewer matching domain. We also explore how learning and matching interact. Experiments on two conference data sets examine the performance of several learning methods as well as the effectiveness of the matching formulations. Automatic review assignment can significantly improve the productivity of many people such as conference organizers, journal editors and grant administrators. Most previous works have set the problem up as using a paper as a query to independently "retrieve" a set of reviewers that should review the paper. A more appropriate formulation of the problem would be to simultaneously optimize the assignments of all the papers to an entire committee of reviewers under constraints such as the review quota. In this paper, we solve the problem of committee review assignment with multi-aspect expertise matching by casting it as an integer linear programming problem. The proposed algorithm can naturally accommodate any probabilistic or deterministic method for modeling multiple aspects to automate committee review assignments. Evaluation using an existing data set shows that the proposed algorithm is effective for committee review assignments based on multi-aspect expertise matching. This paper addresses the problem of noisy Generalized Binary Search (GBS). GBS is a well-known greedy algorithm for determining a binary-valued hypothesis through a sequence of strategically selected queries. At each step, a query is selected that most evenly splits the hypotheses under consideration into two disjoint subsets, a natural generalization of the idea underlying classic binary search. GBS is used in many applications, including fault testing, machine diagnostics, disease diagnosis, job scheduling, image processing, computer vision, and active learning. In most of these cases, the responses to queries can be noisy. Past work has provided a partial characterization of GBS, but existing noise-tolerant versions of GBS are suboptimal in terms of query complexity. This paper presents an optimal algorithm for noisy GBS and demonstrates its application to learning multidimensional threshold functions. This paper investigates the problem of determining a binary-valued function through a sequence of strategically selected queries. The focus is an algorithm called Generalized Binary Search (GBS). GBS is a well-known greedy algorithm for determining a binary-valued function through a sequence of strategically selected queries. At each step, a query is selected that most evenly splits the hypotheses under consideration into two disjoint subsets, a natural generalization of the idea underlying classic binary search. This paper develops novel incoherence and geometric conditions under which GBS achieves the information-theoretically optimal query complexity; i.e., given a collection of N hypotheses, GBS terminates with the correct function after no more than a constant times logN queries. Furthermore, a noise-tolerant version of GBS is developed that also achieves the optimal query complexity. These results are applied to learning halfspaces, a problem arising routinely in image processing and machine learning. Abstract In this paper we report on our early experience on porting, optimizing and benchmarking a Lattice Boltzmann (LB) code on the Xeon-Phi co-processor, the first generally available version of the new Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, developed by Intel. We consider as a test-bed a state-of-the-art LB model, that accurately reproduces the thermo-hydrodynamics of a 2D- fluid obeying the equations of state of a perfect gas. The regular structure of LB algorithms makes it relatively easy to identify a large degree of available parallelism. However, mapping a large fraction of this parallelism onto this new class of processors is not straightforward. The D2Q37 LB algorithm considered in this paper is an appropriate test-bed for this architecture since the critical computing kernels require high performances both in terms of memory bandwidth for sparse memory access patterns and number crunching capability. We describe our implementation of the code, that builds on previous experience made on other (simpler) many-core processors and GPUs, present benchmark results and measure performances, and finally compare with the results obtained by previous implementations developed on state-of-the-art classic multi-core CPUs and GP-GPUs. A model is presented of the manifestation of the birth and development of a scientific specialty in a collection of journal papers. The proposed model, Cumulative Advantage by Paper with Exemplars (CAPE) is an adaptation of Price's cumulative advantage model (D. Price, [1976]. Two modifications are made: (a) references are cited in groups by paper, and (b) the model accounts for the generation of highly cited exemplar references immediately after the birth of the specialty. This simple growth process mimics many characteristic features of real collections of papers, including the structure of the paper-to-reference matrix, the reference-per-paper distribution, the paper-per-reference distribution, the bibliographic coupling distribution, the cocitation distribution, the bibliographic coupling clustering coefficient distribution, and the temporal distribution of exemplar references. The model yields a great deal of insight into the process that produces the connectedness and clustering of a collection of articles and references. Two examples are presented and successfully modeled: a collection of 131 articles on MEMS RF (microelectromechnical systems radio frequency) switches, and a collection of 901 articles on the subject of complex networks. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Abstract Avoiding the use of complicated pre-processing steps such as accurate face and body part segmentation or image normalization, this paper proposes a novel face person image representation which can properly handle background and illumination variations. Denoted as gBiCov, this representation relies on the combination of Biologically Inspired Features (BIF) and Covariance descriptors [1]. More precisely, gBiCov is obtained by computing and encoding the difference between BIF features at different scales. The distance between two persons can then be efficiently measured by computing the Euclidean distance of their signatures, avoiding some time consuming operations in Riemannian manifold required by the use of Covariance descriptors. In addition, the recently proposed KISSME framework [2] is adopted to learn a metric adapted to the representation. To show the effectiveness of gBiCov, experiments are conducted on three person re-identification tasks (VIPeR, i-LIDS and ETHZ) and one face verification task (LFW), on which competitive results are obtained. As an example, the matching rate at rank 1 on the VIPeR dataset is of 31.11 , improving the best previously published result by more than 10. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to jointly optimize user association and resource allocation in the uplink cognitive femtocell network (CFN). In the considered CFN, femtocell base stations (FBSs) are deployed to serve a set of femtocell user equipments (FUEs) by reusing subchannels used in a macrocell base station (MBS). The problem of joint user association, subchannel assignment, and power allocation is formulated as an optimization problem, in which the goal is to maximize the overall uplink throughput while guaranteeing FBSs overloading avoidance, data rate requirements of the served FUEs, and MBS protection. To solve this problem, a distributed framework based on the matching game is proposed to model and analyze the interactions between the FUEs and FBSs. Using this framework, distributed algorithms are developed to enable the CFN to make decisions about user association, subchannel allocation, and transmit power. The algorithms are then shown to converge to a stable matching and exhibit a low computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed approach yields a performance improvement in terms of the overall network throughput and outage probability, with a small number of iterations to converge. We tackle the fundamental problem of Bayesian active learning with noise, where we need to adaptively select from a number of expensive tests in order to identify an unknown hypothesis sampled from a known prior distribution. In the case of noise-free observations, a greedy algorithm called generalized binary search (GBS) is known to perform near-optimally. We show that if the observations are noisy, perhaps surprisingly, GBS can perform very poorly. We develop EC2, a novel, greedy active learning algorithm and prove that it is competitive with the optimal policy, thus obtaining the first competitiveness guarantees for Bayesian active learning with noisy observations. Our bounds rely on a recently discovered diminishing returns property called adaptive submodularity, generalizing the classical notion of submodular set functions to adaptive policies. Our results hold even if the tests have non-uniform cost and their noise is correlated. We also propose EffECXtive, a particularly fast approximation of EC2, and evaluate it on a Bayesian experimental design problem involving human subjects, intended to tease apart competing economic theories of how people make decisions under uncertainty. We tackle the fundamental problem of Bayesian active learning with noise, where we need to adaptively select from a number of expensive tests in order to identify an unknown hypothesis sampled from a known prior distribution. In the case of noise-free observations, a greedy algorithm called generalized binary search (GBS) is known to perform near-optimally. We show that if the observations are noisy, perhaps surprisingly, GBS can perform very poorly. We develop EC2, a novel, greedy active learning algorithm and prove that it is competitive with the optimal policy, thus obtaining the first competitiveness guarantees for Bayesian active learning with noisy observations. Our bounds rely on a recently discovered diminishing returns property called adaptive submodularity, generalizing the classical notion of submodular set functions to adaptive policies. Our results hold even if the tests have non-uniform cost and their noise is correlated. We also propose EFFECX-TIVE, a particularly fast approximation of EC2, and evaluate it on a Bayesian experimental design problem involving human subjects, intended to tease apart competing economic theories of how people make decisions under uncertainty. We present insights from a bibliometric analysis and scientific paper publication mining of 551 papers in Requirements Engineering (RE) series of conference (11 years from 2005 to 2015). We study cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of RE re- search by analyzing the cited disciplines in the reference section of each paper. We apply topic modeling on a corpus consisting of 551 abstracts and extract topics as frequently co-occurring and connected terms. We use topic modeling to study the structure and composition of RE research and analyze popular topics in industry as well as research track. Co-authorship in papers is an indicator of collaboration and interaction between scientists as well as institutions and we analyze co-authorship data to in- vestigate university-industry collaboration, internal and external collaborations. We present results on the distribution of the num- ber of co-authors in each paper as well as distribution of authors across world regions. We present our analysis on the public or proprietary dataset as well as the domain of the dataset used in studies published in Requirements Engineering (RE) series of conferences. This article considers approaches which rerank the output of an existing probabilistic parser. The base parser produces a set of candidate parses for each input sentence, with associated probabilities that define an initial ranking of these parses. A second model then attempts to improve upon this initial ranking, using additional features of the tree as evidence. The strength of our approach is that it allows a tree to be represented as an arbitrary set of features, without concerns about how these features interact or overlap and without the need to define a derivation or a generative model which takes these features into account. We introduce a new method for the reranking task, based on the boosting approach to ranking problems described in (1998). We apply the boosting method to parsing the Wall Street Journal treebank. The method combined the log-likelihood under a baseline model (that of Collins [1999]) with evidence from an additional 500,000 features over parse trees that were not included in the original model. The new model achieved 89.75 F-measure, a 13 relative decrease in F measure error over the baseline model's score of 88.2 . The article also introduces a new algorithm for the boosting approach which takes advantage of the sparsity of the feature space in the parsing data. Experiments show significant efficiency gains for the new algorithm over the obvious implementation of the boosting approach. We argue that the method is an appealing alternative—in terms of both simplicity and efficiency—to work on feature selection methods within log-linear (maximum-entropy) models. Although the experiments in this article are on natural language parsing (NLP), the approach should be applicable to many other NLP problems which are naturally framed as ranking tasks, for example, speech recognition, machine translation, or natural language generation. In the context of reverse-engineering project we designed a use-case specification recovery technique for legacy information systems. With our technique, we can recover the alternative flows of each use-case of the system. It is based on a dynamic (i.e. runtime) analysis of the working of the system using execution traces. But "traditional" execution trace format do not contain enough information for this approach to work. Then we designed a new execution trace format together with the associated tool to get the program's dynamic decision tree corresponding to each of the use-case scenario. These trees are then processed to find the possible variants from the main scenario of each use-case. In this paper we first present our approach to the use-case specification recovery technique and the new trace format we designed. Then the decision tree compression technique is showed with a feasibility study. The contribution of the paper is our approach to the recovery of legacy systems' use-case, the new trace format and the decision tree processing technique. In this paper, we study the gradient boosted decision trees (GBDT) when the output space is high dimensional and sparse. For example, in multilabel classification, the output space is a L-dimensional 0 1 vector, where L is number of labels that can grow to millions and beyond in many modern applications. We show that vanilla GBDT can easily run out of memory or encounter near-forever running time in this regime, and propose a new GBDT variant, GBDT-SPARSE, to resolve this problem by employing L0 regularization. We then discuss in detail how to utilize this sparsity to conduct GBDT training, including splitting the nodes, computing the sparse residual, and predicting in sub-linear time. Finally, we apply our algorithm to extreme multilabel classification problems, and show that the proposed GBDT-SPARSE achieves an order of magnitude improvements in model size and prediction time over existing methods, while yielding similar performance. This paper presents a new method based on the cost-benefit analysis for optimal sizing of an energy storage system in a microgrid (MG). The unit commitment problem with spinning reserve for MG is considered in this method. Time series and feed-forward neural network techniques are used for forecasting the wind speed and solar radiations respectively and the forecasting errors are also considered in this paper. Two mathematical models have been built for both the islanded and grid-connected modes of MGs. The main problem is formulated as a mixed linear integer problem (MLIP), which is solved in AMPL (A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming). The effectiveness of the approach is validated by case studies where the optimal system energy storage ratings for the islanded and grid-connected MGs are determined. Quantitative results show that the optimal size of BESS exists and differs for both the grid-connected and islanded MGs in this paper. Important inference problems in statistical physics, computer vision, error-correcting coding theory, and artificial intelligence can all be reformulated as the computation of marginal probabilities on factor graphs. The belief propagation (BP) algorithm is an efficient way to solve these problems that is exact when the factor graph is a tree, but only approximate when the factor graph has cycles. We show that BP fixed points correspond to the stationary points of the Bethe approximation of the free energy for a factor graph. We explain how to obtain region-based free energy approximations that improve the Bethe approximation, and corresponding generalized belief propagation (GBP) algorithms. We emphasize the conditions a free energy approximation must satisfy in order to be a "valid" or "maxent-normal" approximation. We describe the relationship between four different methods that can be used to generate valid approximations: the "Bethe method", the "junction graph method", the "cluster variation method", and the "region graph method". Finally, we explain how to tell whether a region-based approximation, and its corresponding GBP algorithm, is likely to be accurate, and describe empirical results showing that GBP can significantly outperform BP. This paper deals with content-based large-scale image retrieval using the state-of-the-art framework of VLAD and Product Quantization proposed by Jegou as a starting point. Demonstrating an excellent accuracy-efficiency trade-off, this framework has attracted increased attention from the community and numerous extensions have been proposed. In this work, we make an in-depth analysis of the framework that aims at increasing our understanding of its different processing steps and boosting its overall performance. Our analysis involves the evaluation of numerous extensions (both existing and novel) as well as the study of the effects of several unexplored parameters. We specifically focus on: a) employing more efficient and discriminative local features; b) improving the quality of the aggregated representation; and c) optimizing the indexing scheme. Our thorough experimental evaluation provides new insights into extensions that consistently contribute, and others that do not, to performance improvement, and sheds light onto the effects of previously unexplored parameters of the framework. As a result, we develop an enhanced framework that significantly outperforms the previous best reported accuracy results on standard benchmarks and is more efficient. This paper presents a new approach for automatically deriving worst-case resource bounds for C programs. The described technique combines ideas from amortized analysis and abstract interpretation in a unified framework to address four challenges for state-of-the-art techniques: compositionality, user interaction, generation of proof certificates, and scalability. Compositionality is achieved by incorporating the potential method of amortized analysis. It enables the derivation of global whole-program bounds with local derivation rules by naturally tracking size changes of variables in sequenced loops and function calls. The resource consumption of functions is described abstractly and a function call can be analyzed without access to the function body. User interaction is supported with a new mechanism that clearly separates qualitative and quantitative verification. A user can guide the analysis to derive complex non-linear bounds by using auxiliary variables and assertions. The assertions are separately proved using established qualitative techniques such as abstract interpretation or Hoare logic. Proof certificates are automatically generated from the local derivation rules. A soundness proof of the derivation system with respect to a formal cost semantics guarantees the validity of the certificates. Scalability is attained by an efficient reduction of bound inference to a linear optimization problem that can be solved by off-the-shelf LP solvers. The analysis framework is implemented in the publicly-available tool C4B. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of the new technique with a comparison of C4B with existing tools on challenging micro benchmarks and the analysis of more than 2900 lines of C code from the cBench benchmark suite. A traditional counterexample to a linear-time safety property shows the values of all signals at all times prior to the error. However, some signals may not be critical to causing the failure. A succinct explanation may help human understanding as well as speed up algorithms that have to analyze many such traces. In Bounded Model Checking (BMC), a counterexample is constructed from a satisfying assignment to a Boolean formula, typically in CNF. Modern SAT solvers usually assign values to all variables when the input formula is satisfiable. Deriving minimal satisfying assignments from such complete assignments does not lead to concise explanations of counterexamples because of how CNF formulae are derived from the models. Hence, we formulate the extraction of a succinct counterexample as the problem of finding a minimal assignment that, together with the Boolean formula describing the model, implies an objective. We present a two-stage algorithm for this problem, such that the result of each stage contributes to identify the “interesting” events that cause the failure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with an example and with experimental results.