arXiv subjects

Thinh Nguyen

Publications and source records attributed to Thinh Nguyen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Sequence Transferability and Task Order Selection in Continual Learning

In continual learning, understanding the properties of task sequences and their relationships to model performance is important for developing advanced algorithms with better accuracy. However, efforts in this direction remain underdeveloped despite encouraging progress in methodology development. In this work, we investigate the impacts of sequence transferability on continual learning and propose two novel measures that capture the total transferability of a task sequence, either in the forward or backward direction. Based on the empirical properties of these measures, we then develop a new method for the task order selection problem in continual learning. Our method can be shown to offer a better performance than the conventional strategy of random task selection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

A District-level Ensemble Model to Enhance Dengue Prediction and Control for the Mekong Delta Region of Vietnam

The Mekong Delta Region of Vietnam faces increasing dengue risks driven by urbanization, globalization, and climate change. This study introduces a probabilistic forecasting model for predicting dengue incidence and outbreaks with one to three month lead times, integrating meteorological, sociodemographic, preventive, and epidemiological data. Seventy-two models were evaluated, and an ensemble combining top-performing spatiotemporal, supervised PCA, and semi-mechanistic hhh4 frameworks was developed. Using data from 2004-2022 for training, validation, and evaluation, the ensemble model demonstrated 69% accuracy at a 3-month horizon, outperforming a baseline model. While effective, its performance declined in years with atypical seasonality, such as 2019 and 2022. The model provides critical lead time for targeted dengue prevention and control measures, addressing a growing public health need in the region.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Perception-based multiplicative noise removal using SDEs

Multiplicative noise, also known as speckle or pepper noise, commonly affects images produced by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), lasers, or optical lenses. Unlike additive noise, which typically arises from thermal processes or external factors, multiplicative noise is inherent to the system, originating from the fluctuation in diffuse reflections. These fluctuations result in multiple copies of the same signal with varying magnitudes being combined. Consequently, despeckling, or removing multiplicative noise, necessitates different techniques compared to those used for additive noise removal. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using Stochastic Differential Equations based diffusion models to address multiplicative noise. We demonstrate that multiplicative noise can be effectively modeled as a Geometric Brownian Motion process in the logarithmic domain. Utilizing the Fokker-Planck equation, we derive the corresponding reverse process for image denoising. To validate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on two different datasets, comparing our approach to both classical signal processing techniques and contemporary CNN-based noise removal models. Our results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on perception-based metrics such as FID and LPIPS, while maintaining competitive performance on traditional metrics like PSNR and SSIM.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

An approach to hummed-tune and song sequences matching

Melody stuck in your head, also known as "earworm", is tough to get rid of, unless you listen to it again or sing it out loud. But what if you can not find the name of that song? It must be an intolerable feeling. Recognizing a song name base on humming sound is not an easy task for a human being and should be done by machines. However, there is no research paper published about hum tune recognition. Adapting from Hum2Song Zalo AI Challenge 2021 - a competition about querying the name of a song by user's giving humming tune, which is similar to Google's Hum to Search. This paper covers details about the pre-processed data from the original type (mp3) to usable form for training and inference. In training an embedding model for the feature extraction phase, we ran experiments with some states of the art, such as ResNet, VGG, AlexNet, MobileNetV2. And for the inference phase, we use the Faiss module to effectively search for a song that matched the sequence of humming sound. The result comes at nearly 94\% in MRR@10 metric on the public test set, along with the top 1 result on the public leaderboard.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Class-Incremental Learning via Federated Global Twin Generator

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) increasingly becomes important in the decentralized setting, where it enables multiple participants to collaboratively train a global model to perform well on a sequence of tasks without sharing their private data. In FCIL, conventional Federated Learning algorithms such as FedAVG often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, resulting in significant performance declines on earlier tasks. Recent works, based on generative models, produce synthetic images to help mitigate this issue across all classes, but these approaches' testing accuracy on previous classes is still much lower than recent classes, i.e., having better plasticity than stability. To overcome these issues, this paper presents Federated Global Twin Generator (FedGTG), an FCIL framework that exploits privacy-preserving generative-model training on the global side without accessing client data. Specifically, the server trains a data generator and a feature generator to create two types of information from all seen classes, and then it sends the synthetic data to the client side. The clients then use feature-direction-controlling losses to make the local models retain knowledge and learn new tasks well. We extensively analyze the robustness of FedGTG on natural images, as well as its ability to converge to flat local minima and achieve better-predicting confidence (calibration). Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and tiny-ImageNet demonstrate the improvements in accuracy and forgetting measures of FedGTG compared to previous frameworks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Venomancer: Towards Imperceptible and Target-on-Demand Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that maintains data privacy by training on decentralized data sources. Similar to centralized machine learning, FL is also susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an attacker can compromise some clients by injecting a backdoor trigger into local models of those clients, leading to the global model's behavior being manipulated as desired by the attacker. Most backdoor attacks in FL assume a predefined target class and require control over a large number of clients or knowledge of benign clients' information. Furthermore, they are not imperceptible and are easily detected by human inspection due to clear artifacts left on the poison data. To overcome these challenges, we propose Venomancer, an effective backdoor attack that is imperceptible and allows target-on-demand. Specifically, imperceptibility is achieved by using a visual loss function to make the poison data visually indistinguishable from the original data. Target-on-demand property allows the attacker to choose arbitrary target classes via conditional adversarial training. Additionally, experiments showed that the method is robust against state-of-the-art defenses such as Norm Clipping, Weak DP, Krum, Multi-Krum, RLR, FedRAD, Deepsight, and RFLBAT. The source code is available at https://github.com/nguyenhongson1902/Venomancer.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

From two simple problems to the connection of special points

Both the USA TST 2008 and the ELMO Shortlist 2013 suggested two issues that are connected to fixed points. These problems provide a strong linkage between the various attributes of specific points in a triangle. In this article, we will first investigate various theorems concerning the fixed points that have been presented, and then we will demonstrate how those points are connected to a few triangle centers.

math.GM↗

arXiv2024

ALOHA 2: An Enhanced Low-Cost Hardware for Bimanual Teleoperation

Diverse demonstration datasets have powered significant advances in robot learning, but the dexterity and scale of such data can be limited by the hardware cost, the hardware robustness, and the ease of teleoperation. We introduce ALOHA 2, an enhanced version of ALOHA that has greater performance, ergonomics, and robustness compared to the original design. To accelerate research in large-scale bimanual manipulation, we open source all hardware designs of ALOHA 2 with a detailed tutorial, together with a MuJoCo model of ALOHA 2 with system identification. See the project website at aloha-2.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Electronic properties of kagome metal ScV6Sn6 using high field torque magnetometry

This work presents electronic properties of the kagome metal ScV6Sn6 using de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) oscillations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The torque signal with the applied fields up to 43 T shows clear dHvA oscillations with six major frequencies, five of them are below 400 T (low frequencies) and one is nearly 2800 T (high frequency). The Berry phase calculated using the Landau level fan diagram near the quantum limit is approximately π, which suggests the non-trivial band topology in ScV6Sn6. To explain the experimental data, we computed the electronic band structure and Fermi surface using DFT in both the pristine and charge density wave (CDW) phases. Our results confirm that the CDW phase is energetically favorable, and the Fermi surface undergoes a severe reconstruction in the CDW state. Furthermore, the angular dependence of the dHvA frequencies are consistent with the DFT calculations. The detailed electronic properties presented here are invaluable for understanding the electronic structure and CDWorder in ScV6Sn6, as well as in other vanadium-based kagome systems.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Bounded Guaranteed Algorithms for Concave Impurity Minimization Via Maximum Likelihood

Partitioning algorithms play a key role in many scientific and engineering disciplines. A partitioning algorithm divides a set into a number of disjoint subsets or partitions. Often, the quality of the resulted partitions is measured by the amount of impurity in each partition, the smaller impurity the higher quality of the partitions. In general, for a given impurity measure specified by a function of the partitions, finding the minimum impurity partitions is an NP-hard problem. Let $M$ be the number of $N$-dimensional elements in a set and $K$ be the number of desired partitions, then an exhaustive search over all the possible partitions to find a minimum partition has the complexity of $O(K^M)$ which quickly becomes impractical for many applications with modest values of $K$ and $M$. Thus, many approximate algorithms with polynomial time complexity have been proposed, but few provide bounded guarantee. In this paper, an upper bound and a lower bound for a class of impurity functions are constructed. Based on these bounds, we propose a low-complexity partitioning algorithm with bounded guarantee based on the maximum likelihood principle. The theoretical analyses on the bounded guarantee of the algorithms are given for two well-known impurity functions Gini index and entropy. When $K \geq N$, the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of lowest approximations and polynomial time complexity $O(NM)$. In addition, a heuristic greedy-merge algorithm having the time complexity of $O((N-K)N^2+NM)$ is proposed for $K<N$. Although the greedy-merge algorithm does not provide a bounded guarantee, its performance is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art methods. Our results also generalize some well-known information-theoretic bounds such as Fano's inequality and Boyd-Chiang's bound.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Optimal quantizer structure for binary discrete input continuous output channels under an arbitrary quantized-output constraint

Given a channel having binary input X = (x_1, x_2) having the probability distribution p_X = (p_{x_1}, p_{x_2}) that is corrupted by a continuous noise to produce a continuous output y \in Y = R. For a given conditional distribution p(y|x_1) = ϕ_1(y) and p(y|x_2) = ϕ_2(y), one wants to quantize the continuous output y back to the final discrete output Z = (z_1, z_2, ..., z_N) with N \leq 2 such that the mutual information between input and quantized-output I(X; Z) is maximized while the probability of the quantized-output p_Z = (p_{z_1}, p_{z_2}, ..., p_{z_N}) has to satisfy a certain constraint. Consider a new variable r_y=p_{x_1}ϕ_1(y)/ (p_{x_1}ϕ_1(y)+p_{x_2}ϕ_2(y)), we show that the optimal quantizer has a structure of convex cells in the new variable r_y. Based on the convex cells property of the optimal quantizers, a fast algorithm is proposed to find the global optimal quantizer in a polynomial time complexity.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Entropy-Constrained Maximizing Mutual Information Quantization

In this paper, we investigate the quantization of the output of a binary input discrete memoryless channel that maximizing the mutual information between the input and the quantized output under an entropy-constrained of the quantized output. A polynomial time algorithm is introduced that can find the truly global optimal quantizer. These results hold for binary input channels with an arbitrary number of quantized output. Finally, we extend these results to binary input continuous output channels and show a sufficient condition such that a single threshold quantizer is an optimal quantizer. Both theoretical results and numerical results are provided to justify our techniques.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

On the Uniqueness of Binary Quantizers for Maximizing Mutual Information

We consider a channel with a binary input X being corrupted by a continuous-valued noise that results in a continuous-valued output Y. An optimal binary quantizer is used to quantize the continuous-valued output Y to the final binary output Z to maximize the mutual information I(X; Z). We show that when the ratio of the channel conditional density r(y) = P(Y=y|X=0)/ P(Y =y|X=1) is a strictly increasing/decreasing function of y, then a quantizer having a single threshold can maximize mutual information. Furthermore, we show that an optimal quantizer (possibly with multiple thresholds) is the one with the thresholding vector whose elements are all the solutions of r(y) = r* for some constant r* > 0. Interestingly, the optimal constant r* is unique. This uniqueness property allows for fast algorithmic implementation such as a bisection algorithm to find the optimal quantizer. Our results also confirm some previous results using alternative elementary proofs. We show some numerical examples of applying our results to channels with additive Gaussian noises.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Single-bit Quantization Capacity of Binary-input Continuous-output Channels

We consider a channel with discrete binary input X that is corrupted by a given continuous noise to produce a continuous-valued output Y. A quantizer is then used to quantize the continuous-valued output Y to the final binary output Z. The goal is to design an optimal quantizer Q* and also find the optimal input distribution p*(X) that maximizes the mutual information I(X; Z) between the binary input and the binary quantized output. A linear time complexity searching procedure is proposed. Based on the properties of the optimal quantizer and the optimal input distribution, we reduced the searching range that results in a faster implementation algorithm. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to illustrate our method.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

On Bounds and Closed Form Expressions for Capacities of Discrete Memoryless Channels with Invertible Positive Matrices

While capacities of discrete memoryless channels are well studied, it is still not possible to obtain a closed-form expression for the capacity of an arbitrary discrete memoryless channel. This paper describes an elementary technique based on Karush Kuhn Tucker (KKT) conditions to obtain (1) a good upper bound of a discrete memoryless channel having an invertible positive channel matrix and (2) a closed-form expression for the capacity if the channel matrix satisfies certain conditions related to its singular value and its Gershgorin disk.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Communication-Channel Optimized Partition

Given an original discrete source X with the distribution p_X that is corrupted by noise to produce the noisy data Y with the given joint distribution p(X, Y). A quantizer/classifier Q : Y -> Z is then used to classify/quantize the data Y to the discrete partitioned output Z with probability distribution p_Z. Next, Z is transmitted over a deterministic channel with a given channel matrix A that produces the final discrete output T. One wants to design the optimal quantizer/classifier Q^* such that the cost function F(X; T) between the input X and the final output T is minimized while the probability of the partitioned output Z satisfies a concave constraint G(p_Z) < C. Our results generalized some famous previous results. First, an iteration linear time complexity algorithm is proposed to find the local optimal quantizer. Second, we show that the optimal partition should produce a hard partition that is equivalent to the cuts by hyper-planes in the probability space of the posterior probability p(X|Y). This result finally provides a polynomial-time algorithm to find the globally optimal quantizer.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Minimizing Impurity Partition Under Constraints

Set partitioning is a key component of many algorithms in machine learning, signal processing, and communications. In general, the problem of finding a partition that minimizes a given impurity (loss function) is NP-hard. As such, there exists a wealth of literature on approximate algorithms and theoretical analyses of the partitioning problem under different settings. In this paper, we formulate and solve a variant of the partition problem called the minimum impurity partition under constraint (MIPUC). MIPUC finds an optimal partition that minimizes a given loss function under a given concave constraint. MIPUC generalizes the recently proposed deterministic information bottleneck problem which finds an optimal partition that maximizes the mutual information between the input and partition output while minimizing the partition output entropy. Our proposed algorithm is developed based on a novel optimality condition, which allows us to find a locally optimal solution efficiently. Moreover, we show that the optimal partition produces a hard partition that is equivalent to the cuts by hyperplanes in the probability space of the posterior probability that finally yields a polynomial time complexity algorithm to find the globally optimal partition. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to validate the proposed algorithm.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Achievable Rate Regions Using Novel Location Assisted Coding (LAC)

The recent increase in number of wireless devices has been driven by the growing markets of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, expanding and/or efficient utilization of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum is critical to accommodate such an increase in wireless bandwidth. Alternatively, recent free-space optical (FSO) communication technologies have demonstrated the feasibility of building WiFO, a high capacity indoor wireless network using the femtocell architecture. Since FSO transmission does not interfere with the RF signals, such a system can be integrated with the current WiFi systems to provide orders of magnitude improvement in bandwidth. A novel component of WiFO is its ability to jointly encode bits from different flows for optimal transmissions. In this paper, we introduce the WiFO architecture and a novel cooperative transmission framework using location assisted coding (LAC) technique to increase the overall wireless capacity. Specifically, achievable rate regions for WiFO using LAC will be characterized. Both numerical and theoretical analyses are given to validate the proposed coding schemes.

cs.IT↗