Browsing by Author "Hicks, Illya"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    A Branch-and-Cut Method for Solving the Bilevel Clique Interdiction Problem
    (2015-04-20) Becker, Timothy J; Hicks, Illya; Zhang, Yin; McLurkin, James
    I introduce an algorithm to solve the current formulation of the bilevel clique interdiction problem. Interdiction, a military term, describes the removal of enemy resources. The single level clique interdiction problem describes the attempt of an attacker to interdict a maximum number of cliques. The bilevel form of the problem introduces a defender who attempts to minimize the number of cliques interdicted by the attacker. Previous authors have developed algorithms for the single level clique interdiction problem, as well as for bilevel formulations of other problems. However, an algorithm for the bilevel clique interdiction problem has not previously been creatd. The algorithm presented in this thesis uses a branch and cut approach to solve the proposed problem. This algorithm is expected to be usable on any social network, thereby improving the study of many network problems including terrorist cells or marketing strategies.
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    Blind Demodulation via Convex and Non-Convex Programming
    (2019-04-18) Joshi, Babhru; Hand, Paul; Hicks, Illya
    We consider the bilinear inverse problem of recovering two vectors, $x$ and $w$, in $\R^L$ from their entrywise product. In this dissertation, we consider three different prior on these unknown signals, a subspace prior, a sparsity prior and a generative prior. For both subspace prior and sparsity prior case, we assume the signs of $x$ and $w$ are known which admits intuitive convex programs. For the generative prior case, we study a non-convex program, the empirical risk minimization program. For the case where the vectors have known signs and belong to known subspaces, we introduce the convex program BranchHull, which is posed in the natural parameter space that does not require an approximate solution or initialization in order to be stated or solved. Under the structural assumptions that $x$ and $w$ are members of known $K$ and $N$ dimensional random subspaces, we present a recovery guarantee for the noiseless case and a noisy case. In the noiseless case, we prove that the BranchHull recovers $x$ and $w$ up to the inherent scaling ambiguity with high probability when $L >> 2(K+N)$. The analysis provides a precise upper bound on the coefficient for the sample complexity. In a noisy case, we show that with high probability the BranchHull is robust to small dense noise when $L = \Omega(K+N)$. We reformulate the BranchHull program and introduce the $l_1$-BranchHull program for the case where $w$ and $x$ are sparse with respect to known dictionaries of size $K$ and $N$, respectively. Here, $K$ and $N$ may be larger than, smaller than, or equal to $L$. The $l_1$-BranchHull program is also a convex program that is posed in the natural parameter space. { We study the case where $x$ and $w$ are $S_1$- and $S_2$-sparse with respect to a random dictionary, with the sparse vectors satisfying an effective sparsity condition, and present a recovery guarantee that depends on the number of measurements as $L > \Omega(S_1+S_2)\log^{2}(K+N)$. We also introduce a variants of $l_1$-BranchHull for the purposes of tolerating noise and outliers, and for the purpose of recovering piecewise constant signals. We provide an ADMM implementation of these variants and show they can extract piecewise constant behavior from real images. We also examine the theoretical properties of enforcing priors provided by generative deep neural networks on the unknown signals via empirical risk minimization. We establish that for networks of suitable dimensions with a randomness assumption on the network weights, the non-convex objective function given by empirical risk minimization has a favorable landscape. That is, we show that at any point away from small neighborhoods around four hyperbolic curves, the objective function has a descent direction. We also characterize the local maximizers of the empirical risk objective and, hence, show that there does not exist any other stationary point outside of the four hyperbolic neighborhoods and the set of local maximizers.
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    Distributed Space Coverage for Exploration, Localization, and Navigation in Unknown Environments
    (2015-04-22) Lee, Seoung Kyou; McLurkin, James D.; Kavraki, Lydia; Hicks, Illya; Fekete, Sándor
    Many tasks, such as search and rescue, exploration and mapping, security and surveil- lance are suited for mobile robots. These tasks require the population to spread out over a large environment, where the sensing and communicating capacity of an individual robot might be too small to cover the entire environment. This thesis presents approaches for cooperative coverage tasks by large populations of robots to overcome the limitation of a single robot. Not only can a multi-robot system accomplish the coverage task far more efficiently than an individual robot, but also it is more reliable against individual hardware failure. This thesis investigates two different scenarios with respect to distributed multi-robot space coverage in an unknown environment: First, I consider the space coverage in un- bounded environments. This scenario takes care of robots searching or monitoring in an unlimited region, such as a forest or submarine sea floor. For efficient scanning, robots need to spread out sufficiently to cover a large area. At the same time, they have to be close to their neighbors to prevent network disconnection. In order to fulfill both requirements simultaneously, I present a cohesive configuration controller by combining existing flock- ing strategies with a boundary force algorithm and network sensing and mode switching method. By doing so, robots form a convex and cohesive configuration without any dis- connection. Moreover, they maintain this final configuration even while moving. Secondly, I study space coverage problem in bounded environments that pursues to build a robotic sensor network. In this scenario, I present an algorithm to construct a triangulation using multiple low-cost robots. The resulting triangulation approximately maps the geometric characteristics of its surrounding environment and produces a physical data structure that stores triangle information distributively. This physical data structure provides auxiliary data to robots and lets them accomplish the application’s goal using only local communications. In this thesis, I address one simple application for patrolling and one complex application for topological Voronoi tessellation and center computation. This work provides theoretical guarantees about the algorithm performance. I also provide numerous simulation and hardware experiment results using the model of low- cost platforms to validate the feasibility of presented methods. In both scenarios, robots successfully form desired configurations without the aid of centralized infrastructures. In addition, the group of robots maintains the connectivity while running the algorithms.
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    Learned Generative Priors for Imaging Inverse Problems
    (2021-04-30) Leong, Oscar; Hicks, Illya; Hand, Paul
    A ubiquitous and fundamental task across the natural sciences is an imaging inverse problem, where the goal is to reconstruct a desired image from a small number of noisy measurements. Due to the ill-posed nature of such problems, it is desirable to enforce that the reconstructed image obeys particular structural properties believed to be obeyed by the image of interest. To minimize the amount of measurements required, the desired properties often have a low-dimensional structure. Such properties are known as priors and the dominant paradigm over the last two decades or so has been to exploit the sparsity of natural images in a hand-crafted basis. In recent years, however, the field of machine learning, and deep learning in particular, has demonstrated the effectiveness of data-driven priors in the form of generative models. These models represent signals as lying on an explicitly parameterized low-dimensional manifold, and have shown to generate highly realistic, yet synthetic images from a number of complex image classes, ranging from human faces to proteins. This dissertation proposes a novel framework for image recovery by exploiting these data-driven priors, and offers three main contributions. First, we rigorously prove that these learned models can help recover images from fewer nonlinear measurements than traditional hand-crafted techniques in the challenging inverse problem, phase retrieval. We additionally discuss how our developed theory has a broader applicability to more general settings without structural information on the image. Finally, we present a method using invertible generative models to overcome dataset biases and representational issues in previous generative prior-based approaches, and theoretically analyze the method’s recovery performance in compressive sensing. This thesis, more broadly, offers a new paradigm for image recovery under deep generative priors and gives concrete empirical and theoretical evidence towards the benefits of utilizing such learned priors in a variety of inverse problems.
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    Phase Retrieval Under a Generative Prior
    (2019-04-11) Leong, Oscar; Hicks, Illya; Hand, Paul
    The phase retrieval problem, arising from X-ray crystallography and medical imaging, asks to recover a signal given intensity-only measurements. When the number of measurements is less than the dimensionality of the signal, solving the problem requires additional assumptions, or priors, on its structure in order to guarantee recovery. Many techniques enforce a sparsity prior, meaning that the signal has very few non-zero entries. However, these methods have seen various computational bottlenecks. We sidestep this issue by enforcing a generative prior: the assumption that the signal is in the range of a generative neural network. By formulating an empirical risk minimization problem and directly optimizing over the domain of the generator, we show that the objective’s energy landscape exhibits favorable global geometry for gradient descent with information theoretically optimal sample complexity. Based on this geometric result, we introduce a gradient descent algorithm to converge to the true solution. We corroborate these results with experiments showing that exploiting generative models in phase retrieval tasks outperforms sparse phase retrieval methods.