Efficient Maximum-Likelihood Decoding of Linear Block Codes on Binary Memoryless Channels

In this work, we consider efficient maximum-likelihood decoding of linear block codes for small-to-moderate block lengths. The presented approach is a branch-and-bound algorithm using the cutting-plane approach of Zhang and Siegel (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 2012) for obtaining lower bounds. We have compared our proposed algorithm to the state-of-the-art commercial integer program solver CPLEX, and for all considered codes our approach is faster for both low and high signal-to-noise ratios. For instance, for the benchmark (155,64) Tanner code our algorithm is more than 11 times as fast as CPLEX for an SNR of 1.0 dB on the additive white Gaussian noise channel. By a small modification, our algorithm can be used to calculate the minimum distance, which we have again verified to be much faster than using the CPLEX solver.Comment: Submitted to 2014 International Symposium on Information Theory. 5 Pages. Accepte

Optimal web-scale tiering as a flow problem

We present a fast online solver for large scale parametric max-flow problems as they occur in portfolio optimization, inventory management, computer vision, and logistics. Our algorithm solves an integer linear program in an online fashion. It exploits total unimodularity of the constraint matrix and a Lagrangian relaxation to solve the problem as a convex online game. The algorithm generates approximate solutions of max-flow problems by performing stochastic gradient descent on a set of flows. We apply the algorithm to optimize tier arrangement of over 84 million web pages on a layered set of caches to serve an incoming query stream optimally

Fast Non-Parametric Learning to Accelerate Mixed-Integer Programming for Online Hybrid Model Predictive Control

Today's fast linear algebra and numerical optimization tools have pushed the frontier of model predictive control (MPC) forward, to the efficient control of highly nonlinear and hybrid systems. The field of hybrid MPC has demonstrated that exact optimal control law can be computed, e.g., by mixed-integer programming (MIP) under piecewise-affine (PWA) system models. Despite the elegant theory, online solving hybrid MPC is still out of reach for many applications. We aim to speed up MIP by combining geometric insights from hybrid MPC, a simple-yet-effective learning algorithm, and MIP warm start techniques. Following a line of work in approximate explicit MPC, the proposed learning-control algorithm, LNMS, gains computational advantage over MIP at little cost and is straightforward for practitioners to implement