arXiv subjects

Andrew C. Singer

Publications and source records attributed to Andrew C. Singer.

42 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

A Modulo-Based Architecture for Analog-to-Digital Conversion

Systems that capture and process analog signals must first acquire them through an analog-to-digital converter. While subsequent digital processing can remove statistical correlations present in the acquired data, the dynamic range of the converter is typically scaled to match that of the input analog signal. The present paper develops an approach for analog-to-digital conversion that aims at minimizing the number of bits per sample at the output of the converter. This is attained by reducing the dynamic range of the analog signal by performing a modulo operation on its amplitude, and then quantizing the result. While the converter itself is universal and agnostic of the statistics of the signal, the decoder operation on the output of the quantizer can exploit the statistical structure in order to unwrap the modulo folding. The performance of this method is shown to approach information theoretical limits, as captured by the rate-distortion function, in various settings. An architecture for modulo analog-to-digital conversion via ring oscillators is suggested, and its merits are numerically demonstrated.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Cost-Performance Tradeoffs in Fusing Unreliable Computational Units

We investigate fusing several unreliable computational units that perform the same task. We model an unreliable computational outcome as an additive perturbation to its error-free result in terms of its fidelity and cost. We analyze performance of repetition-based strategies that distribute cost across several unreliable units and fuse their outcomes. When the cost is a convex function of fidelity, the optimal repetition-based strategy in terms of incurred cost while achieving a target mean-square error (MSE) performance may fuse several computational units. For concave and linear costs, a single more reliable unit incurs lower cost compared to fusion of several lower cost and less reliable units while achieving the same MSE performance. We show how our results give insight into problems from theoretical neuroscience, circuits, and crowdsourcing.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2017

EE-Grad: Exploration and Exploitation for Cost-Efficient Mini-Batch SGD

We present a generic framework for trading off fidelity and cost in computing stochastic gradients when the costs of acquiring stochastic gradients of different quality are not known a priori. We consider a mini-batch oracle that distributes a limited query budget over a number of stochastic gradients and aggregates them to estimate the true gradient. Since the optimal mini-batch size depends on the unknown cost-fidelity function, we propose an algorithm, {\it EE-Grad}, that sequentially explores the performance of mini-batch oracles and exploits the accumulated knowledge to estimate the one achieving the best performance in terms of cost-efficiency. We provide performance guarantees for EE-Grad with respect to the optimal mini-batch oracle, and illustrate these results in the case of strongly convex objectives. We also provide a simple numerical example that corroborates our theoretical findings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Timing Channel: Achievable Rate in the Finite Block-Length Regime

The exponential server timing channel is known to be the simplest, and in some sense canonical, queuing timing channel. The capacity of this infinite-memory channel is known. Here, we discuss practical finite-length restrictions on the codewords and attempt to understand the maximal rate that can be achieved for a target error probability. By using Markov chain analysis, we prove a lower bound on the maximal channel coding rate achievable at blocklength $n$ and error probability $ε$. The bound is approximated by $C- n^{-1/2} σQ^{-1}(ε)$ where $Q$ denotes the Q-function and $σ^2$ is the asymptotic variance of the underlying Markov chain. A closed form expression for $σ^2$ is given.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2012

Linear MMSE-Optimal Turbo Equalization Using Context Trees

Formulations of the turbo equalization approach to iterative equalization and decoding vary greatly when channel knowledge is either partially or completely unknown. Maximum aposteriori probability (MAP) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) approaches leverage channel knowledge to make explicit use of soft information (priors over the transmitted data bits) in a manner that is distinctly nonlinear, appearing either in a trellis formulation (MAP) or inside an inverted matrix (MMSE). To date, nearly all adaptive turbo equalization methods either estimate the channel or use a direct adaptation equalizer in which estimates of the transmitted data are formed from an expressly linear function of the received data and soft information, with this latter formulation being most common. We study a class of direct adaptation turbo equalizers that are both adaptive and nonlinear functions of the soft information from the decoder. We introduce piecewise linear models based on context trees that can adaptively approximate the nonlinear dependence of the equalizer on the soft information such that it can choose both the partition regions as well as the locally linear equalizer coefficients in each region independently, with computational complexity that remains of the order of a traditional direct adaptive linear equalizer. This approach is guaranteed to asymptotically achieve the performance of the best piecewise linear equalizer and we quantify the MSE performance of the resulting algorithm and the convergence of its MSE to that of the linear minimum MSE estimator as the depth of the context tree and the data length increase.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2012

Low Complexity Turbo-Equalization: A Clustering Approach

We introduce a low complexity approach to iterative equalization and decoding, or "turbo equalization", that uses clustered models to better match the nonlinear relationship that exists between likelihood information from a channel decoder and the symbol estimates that arise in soft-input channel equalization. The introduced clustered turbo equalizer uses piecewise linear models to capture the nonlinear dependency of the linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) symbol estimate on the symbol likelihoods produced by the channel decoder and maintains a computational complexity that is only linear in the channel memory. By partitioning the space of likelihood information from the decoder, based on either hard or soft clustering, and using locally-linear adaptive equalizers within each clustered region, the performance gap between the linear MMSE equalizer and low-complexity, LMS-based linear turbo equalizers can be dramatically narrowed.

eess.SY↗