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Day-ahead unit commitment (UC) is a fundamental task for power system operators, where generator statuses and power dispatch are determined based on the forecasted nodal net demands. The uncertainty inherent in renewables and load forecasting requires the use of techniques in optimization under uncertainty to find more resilient and reliable UC solutions. However, the solution procedure of such specialized optimization may differ from the deterministic UC. The original constraint screening approach can be unreliable and inefficient for them. Thus, in this work we design a novel screening approach under the forecasting uncertainty. Our approach accommodates such uncertainties in both chance-constrained and robust forms, and can greatly reduce the UC instance size by screening out non-binding constraints. To further improve the screening efficiency, we utilize the multi-parametric programming theory to convert the underlying optimization problem of the screening model to a piecewise affine function. A multi-area screening approach is further developed to handle the computational intractability issues for large-scale problems. We verify the proposed method's performance on a variety of UC setups and uncertainty situations. Experimental results show that our robust screening procedure can guarantee better feasibility, while the CC screening can produce more efficient reduced models. The average screening time for a single line flow constraint can be accelerated by 71.2X to 131.3X using our proposed method., Comment: In submission, 11 pages, 10 figures

In this paper, we delve into the computations performed at a node within a message-passing algorithm. We investigate low complexity/latency multi-input structures that can be adopted by the node for computing outgoing messages y = (y1, y2, . . . , yn) from incoming messages x = (x1, x2, . . . , xn), where each yj , j = 1, 2, . . . , n is computed via a multi-way tree with leaves x excluding xj . Specifically, we propose two classes of structures for different scenarios. For the scenario where complexity has a higher priority than latency, the star-tree-based structures are proposed. The complexity-optimal ones (as well as their lowest latency) of such structures are obtained, which have the near-lowest (and sometimes the lowest) complexity among all structures. For the scenario where latency has a higher priority than complexity, the isomorphic-directed-rooted-tree-based structures are proposed. The latency-optimal ones (as well as their lowest complexity) of such structures are obtained, which are proved to have the lowest latency among all structures.

The recent years have witnessed great advances in video generation. However, the development of automatic video metrics is lagging significantly behind. None of the existing metric is able to provide reliable scores over generated videos. The main barrier is the lack of large-scale human-annotated dataset. In this paper, we release VideoFeedback, the first large-scale dataset containing human-provided multi-aspect score over 37.6K synthesized videos from 11 existing video generative models. We train VideoScore (initialized from Mantis) based on VideoFeedback to enable automatic video quality assessment. Experiments show that the Spearman correlation between VideoScore and humans can reach 77.1 on VideoFeedback-test, beating the prior best metrics by about 50 points. Further result on other held-out EvalCrafter, GenAI-Bench, and VBench show that VideoScore has consistently much higher correlation with human judges than other metrics. Due to these results, we believe VideoScore can serve as a great proxy for human raters to (1) rate different video models to track progress (2) simulate fine-grained human feedback in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to improve current video generation models.

In the age of large-scale language models, benchmarks like the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have been pivotal in pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve in language comprehension and reasoning across diverse domains. However, as models continue to improve, their performance on these benchmarks has begun to plateau, making it increasingly difficult to discern differences in model capabilities. This paper introduces MMLU-Pro, an enhanced dataset designed to extend the mostly knowledge-driven MMLU benchmark by integrating more challenging, reasoning-focused questions and expanding the choice set from four to ten options. Additionally, MMLU-Pro eliminates the trivial and noisy questions in MMLU. Our experimental results show that MMLU-Pro not only raises the challenge, causing a significant drop in accuracy by 16% to 33% compared to MMLU but also demonstrates greater stability under varying prompts. With 24 different prompt styles tested, the sensitivity of model scores to prompt variations decreased from 4-5% in MMLU to just 2% in MMLU-Pro. Additionally, we found that models utilizing Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning achieved better performance on MMLU-Pro compared to direct answering, which is in stark contrast to the findings on the original MMLU, indicating that MMLU-Pro includes more complex reasoning questions. Our assessments confirm that MMLU-Pro is a more discriminative benchmark to better track progress in the field.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a paradigm-shifting approach for large language models (LLMs), offering unprecedented computational efficiency. However, these architectures grapple with challenges of token distribution imbalance and expert homogenization, impeding optimal semantic generalization. We introduce a novel framework that redefines MoE routing through affinity-driven active selection. The innovations for the framework encompass: (1) A rigorous formulation of expert-token affinity metrics. (2) An adaptive bidirectional selection mechanism leveraging resonance between experts and tokens. (3) Theoretical derivation and experimental evidence of reduced expert capacity bounds under dynamic token distribution evolution. It is also integrated with orthogonal feature extraction module and an optimized loss function for expert localization. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach mitigates expert homogenization while enabling substantial capacity boundary reduction. Experimental validation corroborates these findings: it achieves a 40% reduction in token processed by each expert without compromising model convergence or efficacy. When coupled with communication optimizations, the training efficiency improvements of 5.4% to 46.6% can be observed. After supervised fine-tuning, it exhibits performance gains of 9.7% to 14.1% across GDAD, C-Eval, and TeleQnA benchmarks.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown great results in single-image vision language tasks. However, their abilities to solve multi-image visual language tasks is yet to be improved. The existing LMMs like OpenFlamingo, Emu2, Idefics gain their multi-image ability through pre-training on hundreds of millions of noisy interleaved image-text data from the web, which is neither efficient nor effective. In this paper, we aim to build strong multi-image LMMs via instruction tuning with academic-level resources. Therefore, we meticulously construct Mantis-Instruct containing 721K multi-image instruction data to train a family of models Mantis. The instruction tuning empowers Mantis with different multi-image skills like co-reference, comparison, reasoning, and temporal understanding. We evaluate Mantis on five multi-image benchmarks and seven single-image benchmarks. Mantis-SigLIP can achieve SoTA results on all the multi-image benchmarks and beat the strongest multi-image baseline, Idefics2-8B by an average of 11 absolute points. Notably, Idefics2-8B was pre-trained on 140M interleaved multi-image data, which is 200x larger than Mantis-Instruct. We observe that Mantis performs equivalently well on the held-in and held-out benchmarks, which shows its generalization ability. Notably, we found that Mantis can even match the performance of GPT-4V on multi-image benchmarks. We further evaluate Mantis on single-image benchmarks and demonstrate that Mantis also maintains a strong single-image performance on par with CogVLM and Emu2. Our results show that multi-image abilities are not necessarily gained through massive pre-training, instead, it can be gained by the low-cost instruction tuning. Our work provides new perspectives on how to improve LMMs' multi-image abilities., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 8 tables

End-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have shown exceptional performance in both closed-set and open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) tasks through the integration of language modalities. However, their demanding computational requirements have hindered their practical application in real-time object detection (OD) scenarios. In this paper, we scrutinize the limitations of two leading models in the OVDEval benchmark, OmDet and Grounding-DINO, and introduce OmDet-Turbo. This novel transformer-based real-time OVD model features an innovative Efficient Fusion Head (EFH) module designed to alleviate the bottlenecks observed in OmDet and Grounding-DINO. Notably, OmDet-Turbo-Base achieves a 100.2 frames per second (FPS) with TensorRT and language cache techniques applied. Notably, in zero-shot scenarios on COCO and LVIS datasets, OmDet-Turbo achieves performance levels nearly on par with current state-of-the-art supervised models. Furthermore, it establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on ODinW and OVDEval, boasting an AP of 30.1 and an NMS-AP of 26.86, respectively. The practicality of OmDet-Turbo in industrial applications is underscored by its exceptional performance on benchmark datasets and superior inference speed, positioning it as a compelling choice for real-time object detection tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet}, Comment: Preprint

This paper introduces the task of Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking (AR-MOT), which dynamically tracks specific objects in a video sequence based on audio expressions and appears as a challenging problem in autonomous driving. Due to the lack of semantic modeling capacity in audio and video, existing works have mainly focused on text-based multi-object tracking, which often comes at the cost of tracking quality, interaction efficiency, and even the safety of assistance systems, limiting the application of such methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we delve into the problem of AR-MOT from the perspective of audio-video fusion and audio-video tracking. We put forward EchoTrack, an end-to-end AR-MOT framework with dual-stream vision transformers. The dual streams are intertwined with our Bidirectional Frequency-domain Cross-attention Fusion Module (Bi-FCFM), which bidirectionally fuses audio and video features from both frequency- and spatiotemporal domains. Moreover, we propose the Audio-visual Contrastive Tracking Learning (ACTL) regime to extract homogeneous semantic features between expressions and visual objects by learning homogeneous features between different audio and video objects effectively. Aside from the architectural design, we establish the first set of large-scale AR-MOT benchmarks, including Echo-KITTI, Echo-KITTI+, and Echo-BDD. Extensive experiments on the established benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EchoTrack and its components. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lab206/EchoTrack., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS). The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lab206/EchoTrack

An insdel refers to a deletion or an insertion, and an edit refers to an insdel or a substitution. In this paper, we consider the segmented single-insdel (resp. single-edit) channel, where the channel's input bit stream is partitioned into segments of length $n$ and each segment can suffer from at most a single insdel (resp. edit) error. The value of $n$ is known to the receiver but the boundaries of segments are not. We propose to encode each segment following a marker+codeword+marker structure, where the two markers are carefully selected and the codewords are chosen from Varshamov-Tenegolts (VT) codes. In this way, we are able to construct a new class of binary codes that can correct segmented single-insdel errors. Our codes have the lowest redundancy of $\log_2(n-6)+7$ bits and are the first one that has linear-time encoder/decoder in the literature. Moreover, by enhancing the VT codes and one of the markers, we are able to construct the first class of binary codes that can correct segmented single-edit errors. This class of codes has redundancy $\log_2(n-9)+10$ bits and has linear-time encoder/decoder., Comment: 20 pages

The Mixtures-of-Experts (MoE) model is a widespread distributed and integrated learning method for large language models (LLM), which is favored due to its ability to sparsify and expand models efficiently. However, the performance of MoE is limited by load imbalance and high latency of All-to-All communication, along with relatively redundant computation owing to large expert capacity. Load imbalance may result from existing routing policies that consistently tend to select certain experts. The frequent inter-node communication in the All-to-All procedure also significantly prolongs the training time. To alleviate the above performance problems, we propose a novel routing strategy that combines load balance and locality by converting partial inter-node communication to that of intra-node. Notably, we elucidate that there is a minimum threshold for expert capacity, calculated through the maximal angular deviation between the gating weights of the experts and the assigned tokens. We port these modifications on the PanGu-Sigma model based on the MindSpore framework with multi-level routing and conduct experiments on Ascend clusters. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed LocMoE reduces training time per epoch by 12.68% to 22.24% compared to classical routers, such as hash router and switch router, without impacting the model accuracy., Comment: 1. Update the font size of all figures. 2. Update the name of the proposed layer Grouped Average Pooling (GrAP). 3. Change the order of the Section Contribution Statement

In this paper, we consider the outer channel for DNA-based data storage, where each DNA string is either correctly transmitted, or being erased, or being corrupted by uniformly distributed random substitution errors, and all strings are randomly shuffled with each other. We first derive the capacity of the outer channel, which surprisingly implies that the uniformly distributed random substitution errors are only as harmful as the erasure errors. Next, we propose efficient coding schemes which encode the bits at the same position of different strings into a codeword. We compute the soft/hard information of each bit, which allows us to independently decode the bits within a codeword, leading to an independent decoding scheme. To improve the decoding performance, we measure the reliability of each string based on the independent decoding result, and perform a further step of decoding over the most reliable strings, leading to a joint decoding scheme. Simulations with low-density parity-check codes confirm that the joint decoding scheme can reduce the frame error rate by more than 3 orders of magnitude compared to the independent decoding scheme, and it can outperform the state-of-the-art decoding scheme in the literature in a wide parameter regions., Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory

Global climate challenge is demanding urgent actions for decarbonization, while electric power systems take the major roles in clean energy transition. Due to the existence of spatially and temporally dispersed renewable energy resources and the uneven distribution of carbon emission intensity throughout the grid, it is worth investigating future load planning and demand management to offset those generations with higher carbon emission rates. Such techniques include inter-region utilization of geographically shiftable resources and stochastic renewable energy. For instance, data center is considered to be a major carbon emission producer in the future due to increasing information load, while it holds the capability of geographical load balancing. In this paper, we propose a novel planning and operation model minimizing the system-level carbon emissions via sitting and operating geographically shiftable resources. This model decides the optimal locations for shiftable resources expansion along with power dispatch schedule. To accommodate future system operation patterns and a wide range of operating conditions, we incorporate 20-year fine-grained load and renewables scenarios for grid simulations of realistic sizes (e.g., up to 1888 buses). To tackle the computational challenges coming from the combinatorial nature of such large-scale planning problem, we develop a customized Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method, which can find reasonable solutions satisfying solution time limits. Besides, MCTS enables flexible time window settings and offline solution adjustments. Extensive simulations validate that our planning model can reduce more than 10\% carbon emission across all setups. Compared to off-the-shelf optimization solvers such as Gurobi, our method achieves up to 8.1X acceleration while the solution gaps are less than 1.5\% in large-scale cases., Comment: Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Power Systems

This paper investigates the uplink channel estimation of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) extremely large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communication system in the beam-delay domain, taking into account the near-field and beam-squint effects due to the transmission bandwidth and array aperture growth. Specifically, we model the sparsity in the delay domain to explore inter-subcarrier correlations and propose the beam-delay domain sparse representation of spatial-frequency domain channels. The independent and non-identically distributed Bernoulli-Gaussian models with unknown prior hyperparameters are employed to capture the sparsity in the beam-delay domain, posing a challenge for channel estimation. Under the constrained Bethe free energy minimization framework, we design different structures on the beliefs to develop hybrid message passing (HMP) algorithms, thus achieving efficient joint estimation of beam-delay domain channel and prior hyperparameters. To further improve the model accuracy, the multidimensional grid point perturbation (MDGPP)-based representation is presented, which assigns individual perturbation parameters to each multidimensional discrete grid. By treating the MDGPP parameters as unknown hyperparameters, we propose the two-stage HMP algorithm for MDGPP-based channel estimation, where the output of the initial estimation stage is pruned for the refinement stage for the computational complexity reduction. Numerical simulations demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed algorithms over benchmarks with both near-field and beam-squint effects., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible

Power systems Unit Commitment (UC) problem determines the generator commitment schedule and dispatch decisions for power networks based on forecasted electricity demand. However, with the increasing penetration of renewables and stochastic demand behaviors, it becomes challenging to solve the large-scale, multi-interval UC problem in an efficient manner. The main objective of this paper is to propose a fast and reliable scheme to eliminate a set of redundant or inactive physical constraints in the high-dimensional, multi-interval, mixed-integer UC problem, while the reduced problem is equivalent to the original full problem in terms of commitment decisions. Our key insights lie on pre-screening the constraints based on the load distribution and considering the physical feasibility regions of multi-interval UC problem. For the multistep UC formulation, we overcome screening conservativeness by utilizing the multi-step ramping relationships, and can reliably screen out more constraints compared to current practice. Extensive simulations on both specific load samples and load regions validate the proposed technique can screen out more than 80% constraints while preserving the feasibility of multi-interval UC problem., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2023

Recently, transformer-based methods have shown exceptional performance in monocular 3D object detection, which can predict 3D attributes from a single 2D image. These methods typically use visual and depth representations to generate query points on objects, whose quality plays a decisive role in the detection accuracy. However, current unsupervised attention mechanisms without any geometry appearance awareness in transformers are susceptible to producing noisy features for query points, which severely limits the network performance and also makes the model have a poor ability to detect multi-category objects in a single training process. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel ``Supervised Shape&Scale-perceptive Deformable Attention'' (S$^3$-DA) module for monocular 3D object detection. Concretely, S$^3$-DA utilizes visual and depth features to generate diverse local features with various shapes and scales and predict the corresponding matching distribution simultaneously to impose valuable shape&scale perception for each query. Benefiting from this, S$^3$-DA effectively estimates receptive fields for query points belonging to any category, enabling them to generate robust query features. Besides, we propose a Multi-classification-based Shape&Scale Matching (MSM) loss to supervise the above process. Extensive experiments on KITTI and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate that S$^3$-DA significantly improves the detection accuracy, yielding state-of-the-art performance of single-category and multi-category 3D object detection in a single training process compared to the existing approaches. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/S3-MonoDETR., Comment: The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/S3-MonoDETR

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated superior performance for monocular 3D object detection recently, which aims at predicting 3D attributes from a single 2D image. Most existing transformer-based methods leverage both visual and depth representations to explore valuable query points on objects, and the quality of the learned query points has a great impact on detection accuracy. Unfortunately, existing unsupervised attention mechanisms in transformers are prone to generate low-quality query features due to inaccurate receptive fields, especially on hard objects. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel "Supervised Scale-aware Deformable Attention" (SSDA) for monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, SSDA presets several masks with different scales and utilizes depth and visual features to adaptively learn a scale-aware filter for object query augmentation. Imposing the scale awareness, SSDA could well predict the accurate receptive field of an object query to support robust query feature generation. Aside from this, SSDA is assigned with a Weighted Scale Matching (WSM) loss to supervise scale prediction, which presents more confident results as compared to the unsupervised attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo Open datasets demonstrate that SSDA significantly improves the detection accuracy, especially on moderate and hard objects, yielding state-of-the-art performance as compared to the existing approaches. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/SSD-MonoDETR., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (T-IV). Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/mikasa3lili/SSD-MonoDETR

Unit commitment (UC) are essential tools to transmission system operators for finding the most economical and feasible generation schedules and dispatch signals. Constraint screening has been receiving attention as it holds the promise for reducing a number of inactive or redundant constraints in the UC problem, so that the solution process of large scale UC problem can be accelerated by considering the reduced optimization problem. Standard constraint screening approach relies on optimizing over load and generations to find binding line flow constraints, yet the screening is conservative with a large percentage of constraints still reserved for the UC problem. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning (ML) model to predict the most economical costs given load inputs. Such ML model bridges the cost perspectives of UC decisions to the optimization-based constraint screening model, and can screen out higher proportion of operational constraints. We verify the proposed method's performance on both sample-aware and sample-agnostic setting, and illustrate the proposed scheme can further reduce the computation time on a variety of setup for UC problems.

In this paper, we consider how to partition the parity-check matrices (PCMs) to reduce the hardware complexity and computation delay for the row layered decoding of quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. First, we formulate the PCM partitioning as an optimization problem, which targets to minimize the maximum column weight of each layer while maintaining a block cyclic shift property among different layers. As a result, we derive all the feasible solutions for the problem and propose a tight lower bound $\omega_{LB}$ on the minimum possible maximum column weight to evaluate a solution. Second, we define a metric called layer distance to measure the data dependency between consecutive layers and further illustrate how to identify the solutions with desired layer distance from those achieving the minimum value of $\omega_{LB}=1$, which is preferred to reduce computation delay. Next, we demonstrate that up-to-now, finding an optimal solution for the optimization problem with polynomial time complexity is unachievable. Therefore, both enumerative and greedy partition algorithms are proposed instead. After that, we modify the quasi-cyclic progressive edge-growth (QC-PEG) algorithm to directly construct PCMs that have a straightforward partition scheme to achieve $\omega_{LB} $ or the desired layer distance. Simulation results showed that the constructed codes have better error correction performance and smaller average number of iterations than the underlying 5G LDPC code.

In this letter, we propose a two-stage design method to construct memory efficient mutual information-maximizing quantized min-sum (MIM-QMS) decoder for rate-compatible low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We first develop a modified density evolution to design a unique set of lookup tables (LUTs) that can be used for rate-compatible LDPC codes. The constructed LUTs are optimized based on their discrepancy values and a merge function to reduce the memory requirement. Numerical results show that the proposed rate-compatible MIM-QMS decoder can reduce the memory requirement for decoding by up to 94.92% compared to the benchmark rate-compatible LUT-based decoder with generally faster convergence speed. In addition, the proposed decoder can approach the performance of the floating-pointing belief propagation decoder within 0.15 dB., Comment: This paper is an extended version of the manuscript submitted to IEEE Communications Letters

In this paper, we propose a framework of the mutual information-maximizing (MIM) quantized decoding for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes by using simple mappings and fixed-point additions. Our decoding method is generic in the sense that it can be applied to LDPC codes with arbitrary degree distributions, and can be implemented based on either the belief propagation (BP) algorithm or the min-sum (MS) algorithm. In particular, we propose the MIM density evolution (MIM-DE) to construct the lookup tables (LUTs) for the node updates. The computational complexity and memory requirements are discussed and compared to the LUT decoder variants. For applications with low-latency requirement, we consider the layered schedule to accelerate the convergence speed of decoding quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. In particular, we develop the layered MIM-DE to design the LUTs based on the MS algorithm, leading to the MIM layered quantized MS (MIM-LQMS) decoder. An optimization method is further introduced to reduce the memory requirement for storing the LUTs. Simulation results show that the MIM quantized decoders outperform the state-of-the-art LUT decoders in the waterfall region with both 3-bit and 4-bit precision over the additive white Gaussian noise channels. For small decoding iterations, the MIM quantized decoders also achieve a faster convergence speed compared to the benchmarks. Moreover, the 4-bit MIM-LQMS decoder can approach the error performance of the floating-point layered BP decoder within 0.3 dB in the moderate-to-high SNR regions, over both the AWGN channels and the fast fading channels., Comment: This paper is an extended version of the manuscript submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

Consider the computations at a node in a message passing algorithm. Assume that the node has incoming and outgoing messages $\mathbf{x} = (x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n)$ and $\mathbf{y} = (y_1, y_2, \ldots, y_n)$, respectively. In this paper, we investigate a class of structures that can be adopted by the node for computing $\mathbf{y}$ from $\mathbf{x}$, where each $y_j, j = 1, 2, \ldots, n$ is computed via a binary tree with leaves $\mathbf{x}$ excluding $x_j$. We make three main contributions regarding this class of structures. First, we prove that the minimum complexity of such a structure is $3n - 6$, and if a structure has such complexity, its minimum latency is $\delta + \lceil \log(n-2^{\delta}) \rceil$ with $\delta = \lfloor \log(n/2) \rfloor$, where the logarithm always takes base two. Second, we prove that the minimum latency of such a structure is $\lceil \log(n-1) \rceil$, and if a structure has such latency, its minimum complexity is $n \log(n-1)$ when $n-1$ is a power of two. Third, given $(n, \tau)$ with $\tau \geq \lceil \log(n-1) \rceil$, we propose a construction for a structure which we conjecture to have the minimum complexity among structures with latencies at most $\tau$. Our construction method runs in $O(n^3 \log^2(n))$ time, and the obtained structure has complexity at most (generally much smaller than) $n \lceil \log(n) \rceil - 2$., Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Recent work by Smagloy et al. (ISIT 2020) shows that the redundancy of a single-deletion $s$-substitution correcting code is asymptotically at least $(s+1)\log n+o(\log n)$, where $n$ is the length of the codes. They also provide a construction of single-deletion and single-substitution codes with redundancy $6\log n+8$. In this paper, we propose a family of systematic single-deletion $s$-substitution correcting codes of length $n$ with asymptotical redundancy at most $(3s+4)\log n+o(\log n)$ and polynomial encoding/decoding complexity, where $s\geq 2$ is a constant. Specifically, the encoding and decoding complexity of the proposed codes are $O(n^{s+3})$ and $O(n^{s+2})$, respectively.

In this paper, we consider the decoding of fountain codes where the received symbols may have errors. It is motivated by the application of fountain codes in DNA-based data storage systems where the inner code decoding, which generally has undetectable errors, is performed before the outer fountain code decoding. We propose a novel and efficient decoding algorithm, namely basis-finding algorithm (BFA), followed by three implementations. The key idea of the BFA is to find a basis of the received symbols, and then use the most reliable basis elements to recover the source symbols with the inactivation decoding. Gaussian elimination is used to find the basis and to identify the most reliable basis elements. As a result, the BFA has polynomial time complexity. For random fountain codes, we are able to derive some theoretical bounds for the frame error rate (FER) of the BFA. Extensive simulations with Luby transform (LT) codes show that, the BFA has significantly lower FER than the belief propagation (BP) algorithm except for an extremely large amount of received symbols, and the FER of the BFA generally decreases as the average weight of basis elements increases., Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory

The practical NAND flash memory suffers from various non-stationary noises that are difficult to be predicted. Furthermore, the data retention noise induced channel offset is unknown during the readback process. This severely affects the data recovery from the memory cell. In this paper, we first propose a novel recurrent neural network (RNN)-based detector to effectively detect the data symbols stored in the multi-level-cell (MLC) flash memory without any prior knowledge of the channel. However, compared with the conventional threshold detector, the proposed RNN detector introduces much longer read latency and more power consumption. To tackle this problem, we further propose an RNN-aided (RNNA) dynamic threshold detector, whose detection thresholds can be derived based on the outputs of the RNN detector. We thus only need to activate the RNN detector periodically when the system is idle. Moreover, to enable soft-decision decoding of error-correction codes, we first show how to obtain more read thresholds based on the hard-decision read thresholds derived from the RNN detector. We then propose integer-based reliability mappings based on the designed read thresholds, which can generate the soft information of the channel. Finally, we propose to apply density evolution (DE) combined with differential evolution algorithm to optimize the read thresholds for LDPC coded flash memory channels. Computer simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our RNNA dynamic read thresholds design, for both the uncoded and LDPC-coded flash memory channels, without any prior knowledge of the channel.

In this paper, we consider safety message transmission in a dense vehicular network. With increasing vehicular network density, the collision rate increases when multiple vehicles transmit safety messages simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose a request-transmission split time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, referred to as RTS-TDMA. In our scheme, we divide a frame into three phases, i.e., a contention access phase, a broadcast feedback phase, and a contention-free transmission phase. Each vehicle selects a repetition rate according to a given probability distribution and repeats the transmission of its request packet to improve the reliability of the request. In addition, a roadside unit acts as the coordinator and uses a successive interference cancellation technique to resolve request collisions. RTS-TDMA also reduces the request time percentage by containing only the vehicle identity in each request packet. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results verify that the RTS-TDMA scheme can provide higher throughput than the coded slotted ALOHA scheme., Comment: 2019 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)

In this paper, we propose a class of finite alphabet iterative decoder (FAID), called mutual information-maximizing quantized belief propagation (MIM-QBP) decoder, for decoding regular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Our decoder follows the reconstruction-calculation-quantization (RCQ) decoding architecture that is widely used in FAIDs. We present the first complete and systematic design framework for the RCQ parameters, and prove that our design with sufficient precision at node update is able to maximize the mutual information between coded bits and exchanged messages. Simulation results show that the MIM-QBP decoder can always considerably outperform the state-of-the-art mutual information-maximizing FAIDs that adopt two-input single-output lookup tables for decoding. Furthermore, with only 3 bits being used for each exchanged message, the MIM-QBP decoder can outperform the floating-point belief propagation decoder at the high signal-to-noise ratio regions when testing on high-rate LDPC codes with a maximum of 10 and 30 iterations.

A novel two-mode non-degenerate squeezed light is generated based on a four-wave mixing (4WM) process driven by two pump fields crossing at a small angle. By exchanging the roles of the pump beams and the probe and conjugate beams, we have demonstrated the frequency-degenerate two-mode squeezed light with separated spatial patterns. Different from a 4WM process driven by one pump field, the refractive index of the corresponding probe field $n_{p}$ can be converted to a value that is greater than $1$ or less than $1$ by an angle adjustment. In the new region with $n_{p}<1$, the bandwidth of the gain is relatively large due to the slow change in the refractive index with the two-photon detuning. As the bandwidth is important for the practical application of a quantum memory, the wide-bandwidth intensity-squeezed light fields provide new prospects for quantum memories.

In this paper, under a general cost function $C$, we present a dynamic programming (DP) method to obtain an optimal sequential deterministic quantizer (SDQ) for $q$-ary input discrete memoryless channel (DMC). The DP method has complexity $O(q (N-M)^2 M)$, where $N$ and $M$ are the alphabet sizes of the DMC output and quantizer output, respectively. Then, starting from the quadrangle inequality, two techniques are applied to reduce the DP method's complexity. One technique makes use of the Shor-Moran-Aggarwal-Wilber-Klawe (SMAWK) algorithm and achieves complexity $O(q (N-M) M)$. The other technique is much easier to be implemented and achieves complexity $O(q (N^2 - M^2))$. We further derive a sufficient condition under which the optimal SDQ is optimal among all quantizers and the two techniques are applicable. This generalizes the results in the literature for binary-input DMC. Next, we show that the cost function of $\alpha$-mutual information ($\alpha$-MI)-maximizing quantizer belongs to the category of $C$. We further prove that under a weaker condition than the sufficient condition we derived, the aforementioned two techniques are applicable to the design of $\alpha$-MI-maximizing quantizer. Finally, we illustrate the particular application of our design method to practical pulse-amplitude modulation systems., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted by TCOM

Monitoring the interaction behaviors of network traffic flows and detecting unwanted Internet applications and anomalous flows have become a challenging problem, since many applications obfuscate their network traffic flow using unregistered port numbers or payload encryption. In this paper, the temporal locality complex network model--TLCN is proposed as a way to monitor, analyze and visualize network traffic flows. TLCNs model the interaction behaviors of large-scale network traffic flows, where the nodes and the edges can be defined to represent different flow levels and flow interactions separately. Then, the statistical characteristics and dynamic behaviors of the TLCNs are studied to represent TLCN's structure representing ability to the flow interactions. According to the analysis of TLCN statistical characteristics with different Internet applications, we found that the weak interaction flows prefer to form the small-world TLCN and the strong interaction flows prefer to the scale-free TLCN. In the studies of anomaly behaviors of TLCNs, the network structure of attacked TLCNs can have a remarkable feature for three attack patterns, and the evolution of TLCNs exhibits a good consistency between TLCN structure and attack process. With the introduction of TLCNs, we are able to harness a wealth of tools and graph modeling techniques from a diverse set of disciplines.

To obtain a better cycle-structure is still a challenge for the low-density parity-check (LDPC) code design. This paper formulates two metrics firstly so that the progressive edge-growth (PEG) algorithm and the approximate cycle extrinsic message degree (ACE) constrained PEG algorithm are unified into one integrated algorithm, called the metric-constrained PEG algorithm (M-PEGA). Then, as an improvement for the M-PEGA, the multi-edge metric-constrained PEG algorithm (MM-PEGA) is proposed based on two new concepts, the multi-edge local girth and the edge-trials. The MM-PEGA with the edge-trials, say a positive integer $r$, is called the $r$-edge M-PEGA, which constructs each edge of the non-quasi-cyclic (non-QC) LDPC code graph through selecting a check node whose $r$-edge local girth is optimal. In addition, to design the QC-LDPC codes with any predefined valid design parameters, as well as to detect and even to avoid generating the undetectable cycles in the QC-LDPC codes designed by the QC-PEG algorithm, the multi-edge metric constrained QC-PEG algorithm (MM-QC-PEGA) is proposed lastly. It is verified by the simulation results that increasing the edge-trials of the MM-PEGA/MM-QC-PEGA is expected to have a positive effect on the cycle-structures and the error performances of the LDPC codes designed by the MM-PEGA/MM-QC-PEGA., Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures