General Rotating Black Holes in String Theory: Greybody Factors and Event Horizons

We derive the wave equation for a minimally coupled scalar field in the background of a general rotating five-dimensional black hole. It is written in a form that involves two types of thermodynamic variables, defined at the inner and outer event horizon, respectively. We model the microscopic structure as an effective string theory, with the thermodynamic properties of the left and right moving excitations related to those of the horizons. Previously known solutions to the wave equation are generalized to the rotating case, and their regime of validity is sharpened. We calculate the greybody factors and interpret the resulting Hawking emission spectrum microscopically in several limits. We find a U-duality invariant expression for the effective string length that does not assume a hierarchy between the charges. It accounts for the universal low-energy absorption cross-section in the general non-extremal case.Comment: 33 pages, latex; minor typos corrected; version to appear in PR

Efficient Nearest Neighbor Classification Using a Cascade of Approximate Similarity Measures

Nearest neighbor classification using shape context can yield highly accurate results in a number of recognition problems. Unfortunately, the approach can be too slow for practical applications, and thus approximation strategies are needed to make shape context practical. This paper proposes a method for efficient and accurate nearest neighbor classification in non-Euclidean spaces, such as the space induced by the shape context measure. First, a method is introduced for constructing a Euclidean embedding that is optimized for nearest neighbor classification accuracy. Using that embedding, multiple approximations of the underlying non-Euclidean similarity measure are obtained, at different levels of accuracy and efficiency. The approximations are automatically combined to form a cascade classifier, which applies the slower approximations only to the hardest cases. Unlike typical cascade-of-classifiers approaches, that are applied to binary classification problems, our method constructs a cascade for a multiclass problem. Experiments with a standard shape data set indicate that a two-to-three order of magnitude speed up is gained over the standard shape context classifier, with minimal losses in classification accuracy.National Science Foundation (IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067); Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108

Parsimonious Labeling

We propose a new family of discrete energy minimization problems, which we call parsimonious labeling. Specifically, our energy functional consists of unary potentials and high-order clique potentials. While the unary potentials are arbitrary, the clique potentials are proportional to the {\em diversity} of set of the unique labels assigned to the clique. Intuitively, our energy functional encourages the labeling to be parsimonious, that is, use as few labels as possible. This in turn allows us to capture useful cues for important computer vision applications such as stereo correspondence and image denoising. Furthermore, we propose an efficient graph-cuts based algorithm for the parsimonious labeling problem that provides strong theoretical guarantees on the quality of the solution. Our algorithm consists of three steps. First, we approximate a given diversity using a mixture of a novel hierarchical $P^n$ Potts model. Second, we use a divide-and-conquer approach for each mixture component, where each subproblem is solved using an effficient $\alpha$-expansion algorithm. This provides us with a small number of putative labelings, one for each mixture component. Third, we choose the best putative labeling in terms of the energy value. Using both sythetic and standard real datasets, we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other graph-cuts based approaches

Approximate reasoning for real-time probabilistic processes

We develop a pseudo-metric analogue of bisimulation for generalized semi-Markov processes. The kernel of this pseudo-metric corresponds to bisimulation; thus we have extended bisimulation for continuous-time probabilistic processes to a much broader class of distributions than exponential distributions. This pseudo-metric gives a useful handle on approximate reasoning in the presence of numerical information -- such as probabilities and time -- in the model. We give a fixed point characterization of the pseudo-metric. This makes available coinductive reasoning principles for reasoning about distances. We demonstrate that our approach is insensitive to potentially ad hoc articulations of distance by showing that it is intrinsic to an underlying uniformity. We provide a logical characterization of this uniformity using a real-valued modal logic. We show that several quantitative properties of interest are continuous with respect to the pseudo-metric. Thus, if two processes are metrically close, then observable quantitative properties of interest are indeed close.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in QEST 0

Continuum limit of total variation on point clouds

We consider point clouds obtained as random samples of a measure on a Euclidean domain. A graph representing the point cloud is obtained by assigning weights to edges based on the distance between the points they connect. Our goal is to develop mathematical tools needed to study the consistency, as the number of available data points increases, of graph-based machine learning algorithms for tasks such as clustering. In particular, we study when is the cut capacity, and more generally total variation, on these graphs a good approximation of the perimeter (total variation) in the continuum setting. We address this question in the setting of $\Gamma$-convergence. We obtain almost optimal conditions on the scaling, as number of points increases, of the size of the neighborhood over which the points are connected by an edge for the $\Gamma$-convergence to hold. Taking the limit is enabled by a transportation based metric which allows to suitably compare functionals defined on different point clouds

Piecewise rigid curve deformation via a Finsler steepest descent

This paper introduces a novel steepest descent flow in Banach spaces. This extends previous works on generalized gradient descent, notably the work of Charpiat et al., to the setting of Finsler metrics. Such a generalized gradient allows one to take into account a prior on deformations (e.g., piecewise rigid) in order to favor some specific evolutions. We define a Finsler gradient descent method to minimize a functional defined on a Banach space and we prove a convergence theorem for such a method. In particular, we show that the use of non-Hilbertian norms on Banach spaces is useful to study non-convex optimization problems where the geometry of the space might play a crucial role to avoid poor local minima. We show some applications to the curve matching problem. In particular, we characterize piecewise rigid deformations on the space of curves and we study several models to perform piecewise rigid evolution of curves