Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Rahul Jain

Publications and source records attributed to Rahul Jain.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Vision-based Obstacle Removal System for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Using a Robotic Arm

Over the past few years, the use of camera-equipped robotic platforms for data collection and visually monitoring applications has exponentially grown. Cluttered construction sites with many objects (e.g., bricks, pipes, etc.) on the ground are challenging environments for a mobile unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to navigate. To address this issue, this study presents a mobile UGV equipped with a stereo camera and a robotic arm that can remove obstacles along the UGV's path. To achieve this objective, the surrounding environment is captured by the stereo camera and obstacles are detected. The obstacle's relative location to the UGV is sent to the robotic arm module through Robot Operating System (ROS). Then, the robotic arm picks up and removes the obstacle. The proposed method will greatly enhance the degree of automation and the frequency of data collection for construction monitoring. The proposed system is validated through two case studies. The results successfully demonstrate the detection and removal of obstacles, serving as one of the enabling factors for developing an autonomous UGV with various construction operating applications.

cs.RO↗

A Two Stage Mechanism For Selling Random Power

We present a two stage auction mechanism that renewable generators (or aggregators) could use to allocate renewable energy among LSEs. The auction is conducted day- ahead. LSEs submit bids specifying their valuation per unit, as well as their real-time fulfillment costs in case of shortfall in generation. We present an allocation rule and a de-allocation rule that maximizes expected social welfare. Since the LSEs are strategic and may not report their private valuations and costs truthfully, we design a two-part payment, one made in Stage 1, before renewable energy generation level W is realized, and another determined later to be paid as compensation to those LSEs that have to be de-allocated in case of a shortfall. We proposes a two-stage Stochastic VCG mechanism which we prove is incentive compatible in expectation (expected payoff maximizing bidders will bid truthfully), individually rational in expectation (expected payoff of all participants is non-negative) and is also efficient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such two-stage mechanism for selling random goods.

cs.GT↗

Convex-split and hypothesis testing approach to one-shot quantum measurement compression and randomness extraction

We consider the problem of quantum measurement compression with side information in the one-shot setting with shared randomness. In this problem, Alice shares a pure state with Reference and Bob and she performs a measurement on her registers. She wishes to communicate the outcome of this measurement to Bob using shared randomness and classical communication, in such a way that the outcome that Bob receives is correctly correlated with Reference and Bob's own registers. Our goal is to simultaneously minimize the classical communication and randomness cost. We provide a protocol based on convex-split and position based decoding with its communication upper bounded in terms of smooth max and hypothesis testing relative entropies. We also study the randomness cost of our protocol in both one-shot and asymptotic and i.i.d. setting. By generalizing the convex-split technique to incorporate pair-wise independent random variables, we show that our one shot protocol requires small number of bits of shared randomness. This allows us to construct a new protocol in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting, which is optimal in both the number of bits of communication and the number of bits of shared randomness required. We construct a new protocol for the task of strong randomness extraction in the presence of quantum side information. Our protocol achieves error guarantee in terms of relative entropy (as opposed to trace distance) and extracts close to optimal number of uniform bits. As an application, we provide new achievability result for the task of quantum measurement compression without feedback, in which Alice does not need to know the outcome of the measurement. This leads to the optimal number of bits communicated and number of bits of shared randomness required, for this task in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting.

quant-ph↗

Parallel Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution

A prominent application of quantum cryptography is the distribution of cryptographic keys that are provably secure. Recently, such security proofs were extended by Vazirani and Vidick (Physical Review Letters, 113, 140501, 2014) to the device-independent (DI) scenario, where the users do not need to trust the integrity of the underlying quantum devices. The protocols analyzed by them and by subsequent authors all require a sequential execution of N multiplayer games, where N is the security parameter. In this work, we prove unconditional security of a protocol where all games are executed in parallel. Besides decreasing the number of time-steps necessary for key generation, this result reduces the security requirements for DI-QKD by allowing arbitrary information leakage of each user's inputs within his or her lab. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel security proof for a fully device-independent QKD protocol. Our protocol tolerates a constant level of device imprecision and achieves a linear key rate.

quant-ph↗

On the near-optimality of one-shot classical communication over quantum channels

We study the problem of transmission of classical messages through a quantum channel in several network scenarios in the one-shot setting. We consider both the entanglement assisted and unassisted cases for the point to point quantum channel, quantum multiple-access channel, quantum channel with state and the quantum broadcast channel. We show that it is possible to near-optimally characterize the amount of communication that can be transmitted in these scenarios, using the position-based decoding strategy introduced in a prior work [Anshu, Jain and Warsi, 2017]. In the process, we provide a short and elementary proof of the converse for entanglement-assisted quantum channel coding in terms of the quantum hypothesis testing divergence (obtained earlier in [Matthews and Wehner, 2014]). Our proof has the additional utility that it naturally extends to various network scenarios mentioned above. Furthermore, none of our achievability results require a simultaneous decoding strategy, existence of which is an important open question in quantum Shannon theory.

quant-ph↗

Quantum state redistribution with local coherence

Quantum entanglement and coherence are two fundamental resources for quantum information processing. Recent results clearly demonstrate their relevance in quantum technological tasks, including quantum communication and quantum algorithms. In this Letter we study the role of quantum coherence for quantum state redistribution, a fundamental task where two parties aim to relocate a quantum particle by using a limited amount of quantum communication and shared entanglement. We provide general bounds for the resource rates required for this process, and show that these bounds are tight under additional reasonable constraints, including the situation where the receiving party cannot use local coherence. While entanglement cannot be directly converted into local coherence in our setting, we show that entanglement is still useful for local coherence creation if an additional quantum channel is provided, and the optimal protocol for local coherence creation for any given amount of quantum communication and shared entanglement is presented. We also discuss possible extensions of our methods to other scenarios where the receiving party is limited by local constraints, including theories of thermodynamics and asymmetry.

quant-ph↗

A hypothesis testing approach for communication over entanglement assisted compound quantum channel

We study the problem of communication over a compound quantum channel in the presence of entanglement. Classically such channels are modeled as a collection of conditional probability distributions wherein neither the sender nor the receiver is aware of the channel being used for transmission, except for the fact that it belongs to this collection. We provide near optimal achievability and converse bounds for this problem in the one-shot quantum setting in terms of quantum hypothesis testing divergence. We also consider the case of informed sender, showing a one-shot achievability result that converges appropriately in the asymptotic and i.i.d. setting. Our achievability proof is similar in spirit to its classical counterpart. To arrive at our result, we use the technique of position-based decoding along with a new approach for constructing a union of two projectors, which can be of independent interest. We give another application of the union of projectors to the problem of testing composite quantum hypotheses.

quant-ph↗

A one-shot achievability result for quantum state redistribution

We study the problem of entanglement-assisted quantum state redistribution in the one-shot setting and provide a new achievability result on the quantum communication required. Our bounds are in terms of the max-relative entropy and the hypothesis testing relative entropy. We use the techniques of convex split and position-based decoding to arrive at our result. We show that our result is upper bounded by the result obtained in Berta, Christandl, Touchette (2016).

cs.IT↗

A generalized quantum Slepian-Wolf

In this work we consider a quantum generalization of the task considered by Slepian and Wolf [1973] regarding distributed source compression. In our task Alice, Bob, Charlie and Reference share a joint pure state. Alice and Bob wish to send a part of their respective systems to Charlie without collaborating with each other. We give achievability bounds for this task in the one-shot setting and provide the asymptotic and i.i.d. analysis in the case when there is no side information with Charlie. Our result implies the result of Abeyesinghe, Devetak, Hayden and Winter [2009] who studied a special case of this problem. As another special case wherein Bob holds trivial registers, we recover the result of Devetak and Yard [2008] regarding quantum state redistribution.

quant-ph↗

Lifting randomized query complexity to randomized communication complexity

We show that for a relation $f\subseteq \{0,1\}^n\times \mathcal{O}$ and a function $g:\{0,1\}^{m}\times \{0,1\}^{m} \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ (with $m= O(\log n)$), $$\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f\circ g^n) = Ω\left(\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f) \cdot \left(\log\frac{1}{\mathrm{disc}(M_g)} - O(\log n)\right)\right),$$ where $f\circ g^n$ represents the composition of $f$ and $g^n$, $M_g$ is the sign matrix for $g$, $\mathrm{disc}(M_g)$ is the discrepancy of $M_g$ under the uniform distribution and $\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f)$ ($\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f\circ g^n)$) denotes the randomized query complexity of $f$ (randomized communication complexity of $f\circ g^n$) with worst case error $\frac{1}{3}$. In particular, this implies that for a relation $f\subseteq \{0,1\}^n\times \mathcal{O}$, $$\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f\circ \mathrm{IP}_m^n) = Ω\left(\mathrm{R}_{1/3}(f) \cdot m\right),$$ where $\mathrm{IP}_m:\{0,1\}^m\times \{0,1\}^m\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is the Inner Product (modulo $2$) function and $m= O(\log(n))$.

cs.CC↗

One shot entanglement assisted classical and quantum communication over noisy quantum channels: A hypothesis testing and convex split approach

Capacity of a quantum channel characterizes the limits of reliable communication through a noisy quantum channel. This fundamental information theoretic question is very well studied specially in the setting of many independent uses of the channel. An important scenario, both from practical and conceptual point of view, is when the channel can be used only once. This is known as the one-shot channel coding problem. We provide a tight characterization of the one-shot entanglement assisted classical capacity of a quantum channel. We arrive at our result by introducing a simple decoding technique which we refer to as position-based decoding. We also consider two other important quantum network scenarios: quantum channel with a jammer and quantum broadcast channel. For these problems, we use the recently introduced convex split technique [Anshu, Devabathini and Jain 2014] in addition to position based decoding. Our approach exhibits that the simultaneous use of these two techniques provides a uniform and conceptually simple framework for designing communication protocols for quantum networks.

quant-ph↗

Conditioned Functional Limits and Applications to Queues

We consider a renewal process that is conditioned on the number of events in a fixed time horizon. We prove that a centered and scaled version of this process converges to a Brownian bridge, as the number of events grows large, which relies on first establishing a functional strong law of large numbers result to determine the centering. These results are consistent with the asymptotic behavior of a conditioned Poisson process. We prove the limit theorems over triangular arrays of exchangeable random variables, obtained by conditionning a sequence of independent and identically distributed renewal processes. We construct martingale difference sequences with respect to these triangular arrays, and use martingale convergence results in our proofs. To illustrate how these results apply to performance analysis in queueing, we prove that the workload process of a single server queue with conditioned renewal arrival process can be approximated by a reflected diffusion having the sum of a Brownian Bridge and Brownian motion as input to its regulator mapping.

math.PR↗

Learning Unknown Markov Decision Processes: A Thompson Sampling Approach

We consider the problem of learning an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP) that is weakly communicating in the infinite horizon setting. We propose a Thompson Sampling-based reinforcement learning algorithm with dynamic episodes (TSDE). At the beginning of each episode, the algorithm generates a sample from the posterior distribution over the unknown model parameters. It then follows the optimal stationary policy for the sampled model for the rest of the episode. The duration of each episode is dynamically determined by two stopping criteria. The first stopping criterion controls the growth rate of episode length. The second stopping criterion happens when the number of visits to any state-action pair is doubled. We establish $\tilde O(HS\sqrt{AT})$ bounds on expected regret under a Bayesian setting, where $S$ and $A$ are the sizes of the state and action spaces, $T$ is time, and $H$ is the bound of the span. This regret bound matches the best available bound for weakly communicating MDPs. Numerical results show it to perform better than existing algorithms for infinite horizon MDPs.

cs.LG↗

Learning-based Control of Unknown Linear Systems with Thompson Sampling

We propose a Thompson sampling-based learning algorithm for the Linear Quadratic (LQ) control problem with unknown system parameters. The algorithm is called Thompson sampling with dynamic episodes (TSDE) where two stopping criteria determine the lengths of the dynamic episodes in Thompson sampling. The first stopping criterion controls the growth rate of episode length. The second stopping criterion is triggered when the determinant of the sample covariance matrix is less than half of the previous value. We show under some conditions on the prior distribution that the expected (Bayesian) regret of TSDE accumulated up to time T is bounded by O(\sqrt{T}). Here O(.) hides constants and logarithmic factors. This is the first O(\sqrt{T} ) bound on expected regret of learning in LQ control. By introducing a reinitialization schedule, we also show that the algorithm is robust to time-varying drift in model parameters. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the performance of TSDE.

eess.SY↗

Transitory Queueing Networks

Queueing networks are notoriously difficult to analyze sans both Markovian and stationarity assumptions. Much of the theoretical contribution towards performance analysis of time-inhomogeneous single class queueing networks has focused on Markovian networks, with the recent exception of work in Liu and Whitt (2011) and Mandelbaum and Ramanan (2010). In this paper, we introduce transitory queueing networks as a model of inhomogeneous queueing networks, where a large, but finite, number of jobs arrive at queues in the network over a fixed time horizon. The queues offer FIFO service, and we assume that the service rate can be time-varying. The non-Markovian dynamics of this model complicate the analysis of network performance metrics, necessitating approximations. In this paper we develop fluid and diffusion approximations to the number-in-system performance metric by scaling up the number of external arrivals to each queue, following Honnappa et al. (2014). We also discuss the implications for bottleneck detection in tandem queueing networks.

math.PR↗

Quantifying resource in catalytic resource theory

We consider a general resource theory that allows the use of free resource as a catalyst. We show that the amount of `resource' contained in a given state, in the asymptotic scenario, is equal to the regularized relative entropy of resource of that state, which then yields a straightforward operational meaning to this quantity. Such an answer has been long sought for in any resource theory since the usefulness of a state in information-processing tasks is directly related to the amount of resource the state possesses in the beginning. While we need to place a few assumptions in our resource theoretical framework, it is still general enough and includes quantum resource theory of entanglement, coherence, asymmetry, non-uniformity, purity, contextuality, stabilizer computation and the classical resource theory of randomness extraction as special cases. Since our resource theoretic framework includes entanglement theory, our result also implies that the amount of noise one has to inject locally in order to erase all entanglement contained in an entangled state is equal to the regularized relative entropy of entanglement, resolving an open question posted in [Groisman et al., Phys. Rev. A. 72: 032317, 2005]. On the way to prove the main result, we also quantify the amount of resource contained in a state in the one-shot setting (where one only has a single copy of the state), in terms of the smooth max-relative entropy. Our one-shot result employs a recently developed technique of convex-split lemma.

quant-ph↗

Quadratically Tight Relations for Randomized Query Complexity

Let $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ be a Boolean function. The certificate complexity $C(f)$ is a complexity measure that is quadratically tight for the zero-error randomized query complexity $R_0(f)$: $C(f) \leq R_0(f) \leq C(f)^2$. In this paper we study a new complexity measure that we call expectational certificate complexity $EC(f)$, which is also a quadratically tight bound on $R_0(f)$: $EC(f) \leq R_0(f) = O(EC(f)^2)$. We prove that $EC(f) \leq C(f) \leq EC(f)^2$ and show that there is a quadratic separation between the two, thus $EC(f)$ gives a tighter upper bound for $R_0(f)$. The measure is also related to the fractional certificate complexity $FC(f)$ as follows: $FC(f) \leq EC(f) = O(FC(f)^{3/2})$. This also connects to an open question by Aaronson whether $FC(f)$ is a quadratically tight bound for $R_0(f)$, as $EC(f)$ is in fact a relaxation of $FC(f)$. In the second part of the work, we upper bound the distributed query complexity $D^μ_ε(f)$ for product distributions $μ$ by the square of the query corruption bound ($\mathrm{corr}_ε(f)$) which improves upon a result of Harsha, Jain and Radhakrishnan [2015]. A similar statement for communication complexity is open.

cs.CC↗

A Composition Theorem for Randomized Query Complexity

Let the randomized query complexity of a relation for error probability $ε$ be denoted by $R_ε(\cdot)$. We prove that for any relation $f \subseteq \{0,1\}^n \times \mathcal{R}$ and Boolean function $g:\{0,1\}^m \rightarrow \{0,1\}$, $R_{1/3}(f\circ g^n) = Ω(R_{4/9}(f)\cdot R_{1/2-1/n^4}(g))$, where $f \circ g^n$ is the relation obtained by composing $f$ and $g$. We also show that $R_{1/3}\left(f \circ \left(g^\oplus_{O(\log n)}\right)^n\right)=Ω(\log n \cdot R_{4/9}(f) \cdot R_{1/3}(g))$, where $g^\oplus_{O(\log n)}$ is the function obtained by composing the xor function on $O(\log n)$ bits and $g^t$.

cs.CC↗