12352201
Tight Lower Bound for the State Complexity of Shuffle of Regular Languages
The upper bound for the state complexity of the shuffle of two regular languages is 2mn -1. We prove that this bound can be reached for some (not necessarily complete) deterministic finite automata with, respectively, m and n states. Our construction uses an alphabet of size 5.
7865019
Follow automata
We give two new algorithms for constructing small nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) from regular expressions. The first constructs NFAs with e-transitions (eNFA) which are smaller than all the other eNFAs obtained by similar constructions. Their size is at most 3/2 |α| + 5/2, where α is the regular expression. This is very close to optimal since we prove also the lower bound 4/3; |α| + 5/2. The second constructs NFAs. It uses e-elimination in the eNFAs we just introduced and builds a quotient of the well-known position automaton w.r.t. the equivalence given by the follow relation; therefore giving the name of follow automaton. The new automaton uses optimally the information from the positions of a regular expression. We compare the follow automaton with the best constructions to date and show that it has important advantages over those.
546963
Decision Problems for Patterns
We settle an open problem, the inclusion problem for pattern languages. This is the first known case where inclusion is undecidable for generative devices having a trivially decidable equivalence problem. The study of patterns goes back to the seminal work of Thue and is important also, for instance, in recent work concerning inductive inference and learning. Our results concern both erasing and nonerasing patterns.
14075162
Synchronization Expressions: Characterization Results and Implementation
Synchronization expressions are defined as restricted regular expressions that specify synchronization constraints between parallel processes and their semantics is defined using the synchronization languages. In this paper we survey results on synchronization languages, in particular, various approaches to obtain a characterization of this language family using closure under a set of rewriting rules. Also, we discuss the use and implementation of synchronization expressions in a programming language designed for a parallel or distributed computing environment.
27445105
Minimal cover-automata for finite languages
Abstract A cover-automaton A of a finite language L⊆Σ ∗ is a finite deterministic automaton (DFA) that accepts all words in L and possibly other words that are longer than any word in L . A minimal deterministic finite cover automaton (DFCA) of a finite language L usually has a smaller size than a minimal DFA that accept L . Thus, cover automata can be used to reduce the size of the representations of finite languages in practice. In this paper, we describe an efficient algorithm that, for a given DFA accepting a finite language, constructs a minimal deterministic finite cover-automaton of the language. We also give algorithms for the boolean operations on deterministic cover automata, i.e., on the finite languages they represent.
28358466
On Synchronization in P Systems
The P systems were recently introduced as distributed parallel computing models of a biochemical type. Multisets of objects are placed in a hierarchical structure of membranes and they evolve according to given rules, which are applied in a synchronous manner: at each step, all objects which can evolve, from all membranes, must evolve. We consider here the case when this restriction is removed. As expected, unsynchronized systems (even using catalysts) are weaker than the synchronized ones, providing that no priority relation among rules is considered. The power of P systems is not diminished when a priority is used and, moreover, the catalysts can change their states, among two possible states for each catalyst.
9400780
Bayesian image classification using Markov random fields
In this paper, we present three optimisation techniques, Deterministic Pseudo-Annealing (DPA), Game Strategy Approach (GSA), and Modified Metropolis Dynamics (MMD), in order to carry out image classification using a Markov random field model. For the first approach (DPA), the a posteriori probability of a tentative labelling is generalised to a continuous labelling. The merit function thus defined has the same maxima under constraints yielding probability vectors. Changing these constraints convexifies the merit function. The algorithm solves this unambiguous maximisation problem, and then tracks down the solution while the original constraints are restored yielding a good, even if suboptimal, solution to the original labelling assignment problem. In the second method (GSA), the maximisation problem of the a posteriori probability of the labelling is solved by an optimisation algorithm based on game theory. A non-cooperative n-person game with pure strategies is designed such that the set of Nash equilibrium points of the game is identical to the set of local maxima of the a posteriori probability of the labelling. The algorithm converges to a Nash equilibrium. The third method (MMD) is a modified version of the Metropolis algorithm: at each iteration the new state is chosen randomly, but the decision to accept it is purely deterministic. This is also a suboptimal technique but it is much faster than stochastic relaxation. These three methods have been implemented on a Connection Machine CM2. Experimental results are compared to those obtained by the Metropolis algorithm, the Gibbs sampler and ICM (Iterated Conditional Mode).
2196967
Multiclass spectral clustering
We propose a principled account on multiclass spectral clustering. Given a discrete clustering formulation, we first solve a relaxed continuous optimization problem by eigen-decomposition. We clarify the role of eigenvectors as a generator of all optimal solutions through orthonormal transforms. We then solve an optimal discretization problem, which seeks a discrete solution closest to the continuous optima. The discretization is efficiently computed in an iterative fashion using singular value decomposition and nonmaximum suppression. The resulting discrete solutions are nearly global-optimal. Our method is robust to random initialization and converges faster than other clustering methods. Experiments on real image segmentation are reported.
3164237
Multi-output regularized projection
Dimensionality reduction via feature projection has been widely used in pattern recognition and machine learning. It is often beneficial to derive the projections not only based on the inputs but also on the target values in the training data set. This is of particular importance in predicting multivariate or structured outputs which is an area of growing interest. In this paper we introduce a novel projection framework which is sensitive to both input features and outputs. Based on the derived features prediction accuracy can be greatly improved. We validate our approach in two applications. The first is to model users' preferences on a set of paintings. The second application is concerned with image categorization where each image may belong to multiple categories. The proposed algorithm produces very encouraging results in both settings.
38593151
Performance Comparison of a Deterministic and a Stochastic Method for Image Classification
In this paper, we compare the performances of two methods that we proposed for image classification. The first method is a stochastic approach which uses a Markov random field modelization. An optimization technique based on the game theory is used for the maximization of the a posteriori probability of the classes. The second method is a deterministic one which uses a feed-forward neural network. A novel learning method called projection learning is employed to train the neural network. The performances of these two methods are compared through their applications to image classification. The advantages and disadvantages of both methods, as well as possibilities to improve them are discussed.
1394662
Dirichlet Enhanced Latent Semantic Analysis
This paper describes nonparametric Bayesian treatments for analyzing records containing occurrences of items. The introduced model retains the strength of previous approaches that explore the latent factors of each record (e.g. topics of documents), and further uncovers the clustering structure of records, which reflects the statistical dependencies of the latent factors. The nonparametric model induced by a Dirichlet process (DP) flexibly adapts model complexity to reveal the clustering structure of the data. To avoid the problems of dealing with infinite dimensions, we further replace the DP prior by a simpler alternative, namely Dirichlet-multinomial allocation (DMA), which maintains the main modelling properties of the DP. Instead of relying on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for inference, this paper applies efficient variational inference based on DMA. The proposed approach yields encouraging empirical results on both a toy problem and text data. The results show that the proposed algorithm uncovers not only the latent factors, but also the clustering structure.