10,347 research outputs found
Learning Compositional Visual Concepts with Mutual Consistency
Compositionality of semantic concepts in image synthesis and analysis is
appealing as it can help in decomposing known and generatively recomposing
unknown data. For instance, we may learn concepts of changing illumination,
geometry or albedo of a scene, and try to recombine them to generate physically
meaningful, but unseen data for training and testing. In practice however we
often do not have samples from the joint concept space available: We may have
data on illumination change in one data set and on geometric change in another
one without complete overlap. We pose the following question: How can we learn
two or more concepts jointly from different data sets with mutual consistency
where we do not have samples from the full joint space? We present a novel
answer in this paper based on cyclic consistency over multiple concepts,
represented individually by generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our method,
ConceptGAN, can be understood as a drop in for data augmentation to improve
resilience for real world applications. Qualitative and quantitative
evaluations demonstrate its efficacy in generating semantically meaningful
images, as well as one shot face verification as an example application.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, CVPR 201
Winners and Losers of Tax Competition in the European Union
This paper quantifies the macroeconomic effects of capital income tax competition in the European Union using a two-country neoclassical dynamic general equilibrium model. This model incorporates three key externalities of tax competition: the relative price externality, the wealth distribution externality and the fiscal solvency externality. We consider tax strategies limited to the class of time-invariant taxes and allow governments to issue debt to smooth the tax burden. The analysis starts from a pre-tax-competition equilibrium calibrated to represent the United Kingdom and Continental Europe (France, Germany and Italy) using data from the early 1980s, just before the European integration of financial markets. When labor taxes adjust to maintain fiscal solvency, competition does not trigger a race to the bottom' in capital taxes. The UK makes a large welfare gain and cuts its capital tax. Continental Europe increases both labor and capital taxes and suffers a large welfare loss. These results are consistent with evidence showing that over the last two decades the UK lowered its capital tax, while Continental Europe increased both capital and labor taxes. When consumption taxes adjust to maintain fiscal solvency, there is a race to the bottom' in capital taxes but both the UK and Continental Europe are better off than in the pre-tax-competition equilibrium. The gains from coordination in all of these experiments are trivial.
Distributed Approximation of Maximum Independent Set and Maximum Matching
We present a simple distributed -approximation algorithm for maximum
weight independent set (MaxIS) in the model which completes
in rounds, where is the maximum
degree, is the number of rounds needed to compute a maximal
independent set (MIS) on , and is the maximum weight of a node. %Whether
our algorithm is randomized or deterministic depends on the \texttt{MIS}
algorithm used as a black-box.
Plugging in the best known algorithm for MIS gives a randomized solution in
rounds, where is the number of nodes.
We also present a deterministic -round algorithm based
on coloring.
We then show how to use our MaxIS approximation algorithms to compute a
-approximation for maximum weight matching without incurring any additional
round penalty in the model. We use a known reduction for
simulating algorithms on the line graph while incurring congestion, but we show
our algorithm is part of a broad family of \emph{local aggregation algorithms}
for which we describe a mechanism that allows the simulation to run in the
model without an additional overhead.
Next, we show that for maximum weight matching, relaxing the approximation
factor to () allows us to devise a distributed algorithm
requiring rounds for any constant
. For the unweighted case, we can even obtain a
-approximation in this number of rounds. These algorithms are
the first to achieve the provably optimal round complexity with respect to
dependency on
Winners and Losers of Tax Competition in the European Union
This paper quantifies the macroeconomic effects of capital income tax competition in the European Union using a two-country neoclassical dynamic general equilibrium model. This model incorporates three key externalities of tax competition: the relative price externality, the wealth distribution externality and the fiscal solvency externality. We consider tax strategies limited to the class of time-invariant taxes and allow governments to issue debt to smooth the tax burden. The analysis starts from a pre-tax-competition equilibrium calibrated to represent the United Kingdom and Continental Europe (France, Germany and Italy) using data from the early 1980s, just before the European integration of financial markets. When labor taxes adjust to maintain fiscal solvency, competition does not trigger a “race to the bottom” in capital taxes. The UK makes a large welfare gain and cuts its capital tax. Continental Europe increases both labor and capital taxes and suffers a large welfare loss. These results are consistent with evidence showing that over the last two decades the UK lowered its capital tax, while Continental Europe increased both capital and labor taxes. When consumption taxes adjust to maintain fiscal solvency, there is a “race to the bottom” in capital taxes but both the UK and Continental Europe are better off than in the pre-tax-competition equilibrium. The gains from coordination in all of these experiments are trivial.
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