arXiv subjects

Zitan Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Zitan Chen.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trellis codes with a good distance profile constructed from expander graphs

We derive Singleton-type bounds on the free distance and column distances of trellis codes. Our results show that, at a given time instant, the maximum attainable column distance of trellis codes can exceed that of convolutional codes. Moreover, using expander graphs, we construct trellis codes over constant-size alphabets that achieve a rate-distance trade-off arbitrarily close to that of convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile. By comparison, all known constructions of convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile require working over alphabets whose size grows at least exponentially with the number of output symbols per time instant.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

First-order optimal codes for an adversarial nanopore channel

We study error-correcting codes for an adversarial nanopore channel, where a $q$-ary string is first transformed by an inter-symbol interference channel with window size $\ell$ into a sequence of overlapping $\ell$-mers, and an adversary then corrupts this $\ell$-mer sequence by introducing at most $t$ edits. For the deletion-only nanopore channel, we show that the optimal redundancy of $t$-deletion-correcting codes of length $n$ lies between $t\log_q n+\Omega(1)$ and $2t\log_q n-\log_q\log_2 n+O(1)$. We then give two explicit deletion-correcting constructions in the regime $t\leq \min\{(\ell-1)/2,(\ell+2)/3\}$. The first construction relies on generalized Reed-Solomon codes and has redundancy $2t\log_q n+\Theta(\log\log n)$. The second is based on Sidon sets (or rather $B_t$ sequences) and has redundancy $t\log_q n+\Theta(\log\log n)$, matching the lower bound to first order. We further extend the $B_t$-based approach to the edit channel, allowing insertions, deletions, and substitutions of $\ell$-mers. In the regime $t\leq \min\{(\ell-1)/4,(\ell+2)/6\}$, this gives explicit $t$-edit-correcting codes with redundancy $t\log_q n+\Theta(\log\log n)$, which is first-order optimal.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Coding methods for string reconstruction from erroneous prefix-suffix compositions

The number of zeros and the number of ones in a binary string are referred to as the composition of the string, and the prefix-suffix compositions of a string are a multiset formed by the compositions of the prefixes and suffixes of all possible lengths of the string. In this work, we present binary codes of length n in which every codeword can be efficiently reconstructed from its erroneous prefix-suffix compositions with at most t composition errors. All our constructions have decoding complexity polynomial in n and the best of our constructions has constant rate and can correct $t = \Theta(n)$ errors. As a comparison, no prior constructions can afford to efficiently correct $t = \Theta(n)$ arbitrary composition errors. Additionally, we propose a method of encoding h arbitrary strings of the same length so that they can be reconstructed from the multiset union of their error-free prefix-suffix compositions, at the expense of h-fold coding overhead. In contrast, existing methods can only recover h distinct strings, albeit with code rate asymptotically equal to 1/h. Building on the top of the proposed method, we also present a coding scheme that enables efficient recovery of h strings from their erroneous prefix-suffix compositions with $t = \Theta(n)$ errors.

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arXiv2024

Reconstruction of multiple strings of constant weight from prefix-suffix compositions

Motivated by studies of data retrieval in polymer-based storage systems, we consider the problem of reconstructing a multiset of binary strings that have the same length and the same weight from the compositions of their prefixes and suffixes of every possible length. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for which unique reconstruction up to reversal of the strings is possible. Additionally, we present two algorithms for reconstructing strings from the compositions of prefixes and suffixes of constant-length constant-weight strings.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2024

Towards Better Text-to-Image Generation Alignment via Attention Modulation

In text-to-image generation tasks, the advancements of diffusion models have facilitated the fidelity of generated results. However, these models encounter challenges when processing text prompts containing multiple entities and attributes. The uneven distribution of attention results in the issues of entity leakage and attribute misalignment. Training from scratch to address this issue requires numerous labeled data and is resource-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose an attribution-focusing mechanism, a training-free phase-wise mechanism by modulation of attention for diffusion model. One of our core ideas is to guide the model to concentrate on the corresponding syntactic components of the prompt at distinct timesteps. To achieve this, we incorporate a temperature control mechanism within the early phases of the self-attention modules to mitigate entity leakage issues. An object-focused masking scheme and a phase-wise dynamic weight control mechanism are integrated into the cross-attention modules, enabling the model to discern the affiliation of semantic information between entities more effectively. The experimental results in various alignment scenarios demonstrate that our model attain better image-text alignment with minimal additional computational cost.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Class-level Structural Relation Modelling and Smoothing for Visual Representation Learning

Representation learning for images has been advanced by recent progress in more complex neural models such as the Vision Transformers and new learning theories such as the structural causal models. However, these models mainly rely on the classification loss to implicitly regularize the class-level data distributions, and they may face difficulties when handling classes with diverse visual patterns. We argue that the incorporation of the structural information between data samples may improve this situation. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a framework termed \textbf{C}lass-level Structural Relation Modeling and Smoothing for Visual Representation Learning (CSRMS), which includes the Class-level Relation Modelling, Class-aware Graph Sampling, and Relational Graph-Guided Representation Learning modules to model a relational graph of the entire dataset and perform class-aware smoothing and regularization operations to alleviate the issue of intra-class visual diversity and inter-class similarity. Specifically, the Class-level Relation Modelling module uses a clustering algorithm to learn the data distributions in the feature space and identify three types of class-level sample relations for the training set; Class-aware Graph Sampling module extends typical training batch construction process with three strategies to sample dataset-level sub-graphs; and Relational Graph-Guided Representation Learning module employs a graph convolution network with knowledge-guided smoothing operations to ease the projection from different visual patterns to the same class. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of structured knowledge modelling for enhanced representation learning and show that CSRMS can be incorporated with any state-of-the-art visual representation learning models for performance gains. The source codes and demos have been released at https://github.com/czt117/CSRMS.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Cross-Silo Prototypical Calibration for Federated Learning with Non-IID Data

Federated Learning aims to learn a global model on the server side that generalizes to all clients in a privacy-preserving manner, by leveraging the local models from different clients. Existing solutions focus on either regularizing the objective functions among clients or improving the aggregation mechanism for the improved model generalization capability. However, their performance is typically limited by the dataset biases, such as the heterogeneous data distributions and the missing classes. To address this issue, this paper presents a cross-silo prototypical calibration method (FedCSPC), which takes additional prototype information from the clients to learn a unified feature space on the server side. Specifically, FedCSPC first employs the Data Prototypical Modeling (DPM) module to learn data patterns via clustering to aid calibration. Subsequently, the cross-silo prototypical calibration (CSPC) module develops an augmented contrastive learning method to improve the robustness of the calibration, which can effectively project cross-source features into a consistent space while maintaining clear decision boundaries. Moreover, the CSPC module's ease of implementation and plug-and-play characteristics make it even more remarkable. Experiments were conducted on four datasets in terms of performance comparison, ablation study, in-depth analysis and case study, and the results verified that FedCSPC is capable of learning the consistent features across different data sources of the same class under the guidance of calibrated model, which leads to better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. The source codes have been released at https://github.com/qizhuang-qz/FedCSPC.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

A lower bound on the field size of convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile and an improved construction

Convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile attain the largest possible column distances for the maximum number of time instants and thus have outstanding error-correcting capability especially for streaming applications. Explicit constructions of such codes are scarce in the literature. In particular, known constructions of convolutional codes with rate k/n and a maximum distance profile require a field of size at least exponential in n for general code parameters. At the same time, the only known lower bound on the field size is the trivial bound that is linear in n. In this paper, we show that a finite field of size $\Omega_L(n^{L-1})$ is necessary for constructing convolutional codes with rate k/n and a maximum distance profile of length L. As a direct consequence, this rules out the possibility of constructing convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile of length L >= 3 over a finite field of size $O(n)$. Additionally, we also present an explicit construction of convolutional code with rate k/n and a maximum profile of length L = 1 over a finite field of size $O(n^{\min\{k,n-k\}})$, achieving a smaller field size than known constructions with the same profile length.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Rack-aware minimum-storage regenerating codes with optimal access

We derive a lower bound on the amount of information accessed to repair failed nodes within a single rack from any number of helper racks in the rack-aware storage model that allows collective information processing in the nodes that share the same rack. Furthermore, we construct a family of rack-aware minimum-storage regenerating (MSR) codes with the property that the number of symbols accessed for repairing a single failed node attains the bound with equality for all admissible parameters. Constructions of rack-aware optimal-access MSR codes were only known for limited parameters. We also present a family of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes that only require accessing a relatively small number of symbols to repair multiple failed nodes in a single rack. In particular, for certain code parameters, the RS construction attains the bound on the access complexity with equality and thus has optimal access.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Multi-modal Video Chapter Generation

Chapter generation becomes practical technique for online videos nowadays. The chapter breakpoints enable users to quickly find the parts they want and get the summative annotations. However, there is no public method and dataset for this task. To facilitate the research along this direction, we introduce a new dataset called Chapter-Gen, which consists of approximately 10k user-generated videos with annotated chapter information. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. On top of this dataset, we design an effective baseline specificlly for video chapters generation task. which captures two aspects of a video,including visual dynamics and narration text. It disentangles local and global video features for localization and title generation respectively. To parse the long video efficiently, a skip sliding window mechanism is designed to localize potential chapters. And a cross attention multi-modal fusion module is developed to aggregate local features for title generation. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior results over existing methods which illustrate that the method design for similar task cannot be transfered directly even after fine-tuning. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/czt117/MVCG.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile based on skew polynomials

We construct a family of (n,k) convolutional codes with degree \delta in {k,n-k} that have a maximum distance profile. The field size required for our construction is of the order n^{2\delta}, which improves upon the known constructions of convolutional codes with a maximum distance profile. Our construction is based on the theory of skew polynomials.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

A construction of maximally recoverable codes

We construct a family of linear maximally recoverable codes with locality $r$ and dimension $r+1.$ For codes of length $n$ with $r\approx n^\alpha, 0\le\alpha\le 1$ the code alphabet is of the order $n^{1+3\alpha},$ which improves upon the previously known constructions of maximally recoverable codes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Cyclic and convolutional codes with locality

Locally recoverable (LRC) codes and their variants have been extensively studied in recent years. In this paper we focus on cyclic constructions of LRC codes and derive conditions on the zeros of the code that support the property of hierarchical locality. As a result, we obtain a general family of hierarchical LRC codes for a new range of code parameters. We also observe that our approach enables one to represent an LRC code in quasicyclic form, and use this representation to construct tail-biting convolutional LRC codes with locality. Among other results, we extend the general approach to cyclic codes with locality to multidimensional cyclic codes, yielding new families of LRC codes with availability, and construct a family of q-ary cyclic hierarchical LRC codes of unbounded length.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Enabling optimal access and error correction for the repair of Reed-Solomon codes

Recently Reed-Solomon (RS) codes were shown to possess a repair scheme that supports repair of failed nodes with optimal repair bandwidth. In this paper, we extend this result in two directions. First, we propose a new repair scheme for the RS codes constructed in [Tamo-Ye-Barg, {\em IEEE Transactions on Information Theory}, vol. 65, May 2019] and show that our new scheme is robust to erroneous information provided by the helper nodes while maintaining the optimal repair bandwidth. Second, we construct a new family of RS codes with optimal access for the repair of any single failed node. We also show that the constructed codes can accommodate both features, supporting optimal-access repair with optimal error-correction capability. Going beyond RS codes, we also prove that any scalar MDS code with optimal repair bandwidth allows for a repair scheme with optimal access property.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Explicit constructions of MSR codes for clustered distributed storage: The rack-aware storage model

The paper is devoted to the problem of erasure coding in distributed storage. We consider a model of storage that assumes that nodes are organized into equally sized groups, called racks, that within each group the nodes can communicate freely without taxing the system bandwidth, and that the only information transmission that counts is the one between the racks. This assumption implies that the nodes within each of the racks can collaborate before providing information to the failed node. The main emphasis of the paper is on code construction for this storage model. We present an explicit family of MDS array codes that support recovery of a single failed node from any number of helper racks using the minimum possible amount of inter-rack communication (such codes are said to provide optimal repair). The codes are constructed over finite fields of size comparable to the code length. We also derive a bound on the number of symbols accessed at helper nodes for the purposes of repair, and construct a code family that approaches this bound, while still maintaining the optimal repair property. Finally, we present a construction of scalar Reed-Solomon codes that support optimal repair for the rack-oriented storage model.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

The Capacity of Online (Causal) $q$-ary Error-Erasure Channels

In the $q$-ary online (or "causal") channel coding model, a sender wishes to communicate a message to a receiver by transmitting a codeword $\mathbf{x} =(x_1,\ldots,x_n) \in \{0,1,\ldots,q-1\}^n$ symbol by symbol via a channel limited to at most $pn$ errors and/or $p^{*} n$ erasures. The channel is "online" in the sense that at the $i$th step of communication the channel decides whether to corrupt the $i$th symbol or not based on its view so far, i.e., its decision depends only on the transmitted symbols $(x_1,\ldots,x_i)$. This is in contrast to the classical adversarial channel in which the corruption is chosen by a channel that has a full knowledge on the sent codeword $\mathbf{x}$. In this work we study the capacity of $q$-ary online channels for a combined corruption model, in which the channel may impose at most $pn$ {\em errors} and at most $p^{*} n$ {\em erasures} on the transmitted codeword. The online channel (in both the error and erasure case) has seen a number of recent studies which present both upper and lower bounds on its capacity. In this work, we give a full characterization of the capacity as a function of $q,p$, and $p^{*}$.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

A characterization of the capacity of online (causal) binary channels

In the binary online (or "causal") channel coding model, a sender wishes to communicate a message to a receiver by transmitting a codeword $\mathbf{x} =(x_1,\ldots,x_n) \in \{0,1\}^n$ bit by bit via a channel limited to at most $pn$ corruptions. The channel is "online" in the sense that at the $i$th step of communication the channel decides whether to corrupt the $i$th bit or not based on its view so far, i.e., its decision depends only on the transmitted bits $(x_1,\ldots,x_i)$. This is in contrast to the classical adversarial channel in which the error is chosen by a channel that has a full knowledge on the sent codeword $\mathbf{x}$. In this work we study the capacity of binary online channels for two corruption models: the {\em bit-flip} model in which the channel may flip at most $pn$ of the bits of the transmitted codeword, and the {\em erasure} model in which the channel may erase at most $pn$ bits of the transmitted codeword. Specifically, for both error models we give a full characterization of the capacity as a function of $p$. The online channel (in both the bit-flip and erasure case) has seen a number of recent studies which present both upper and lower bounds on its capacity. In this work, we present and analyze a coding scheme that improves on the previously suggested lower bounds and matches the previously suggested upper bounds thus implying a tight characterization.

cs.IT↗