BPGrad: Towards Global Optimality in Deep Learning via Branch and Pruning

Understanding the global optimality in deep learning (DL) has been attracting more and more attention recently. Conventional DL solvers, however, have not been developed intentionally to seek for such global optimality. In this paper we propose a novel approximation algorithm, BPGrad, towards optimizing deep models globally via branch and pruning. Our BPGrad algorithm is based on the assumption of Lipschitz continuity in DL, and as a result it can adaptively determine the step size for current gradient given the history of previous updates, wherein theoretically no smaller steps can achieve the global optimality. We prove that, by repeating such branch-and-pruning procedure, we can locate the global optimality within finite iterations. Empirically an efficient solver based on BPGrad for DL is proposed as well, and it outperforms conventional DL solvers such as Adagrad, Adadelta, RMSProp, and Adam in the tasks of object recognition, detection, and segmentation

Self-dual cyclic codes over finite chain rings

Let $R$ be a finite commutative chain ring with unique maximal ideal $\langle \gamma\rangle$, and let $n$ be a positive integer coprime with the characteristic of $R/\langle \gamma\rangle$. In this paper, the algebraic structure of cyclic codes of length $n$ over $R$ is investigated. Some new necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of nontrivial self-dual cyclic codes are provided. An enumeration formula for the self-dual cyclic codes is also studied.Comment: 15 page

Application of Constacyclic codes to Quantum MDS Codes

Quantum maximal-distance-separable (MDS) codes form an important class of quantum codes. To get $q$-ary quantum MDS codes, it suffices to find linear MDS codes $C$ over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ satisfying $C^{\perp_H}\subseteq C$ by the Hermitian construction and the quantum Singleton bound. If $C^{\perp_{H}}\subseteq C$, we say that $C$ is a dual-containing code. Many new quantum MDS codes with relatively large minimum distance have been produced by constructing dual-containing constacyclic MDS codes (see \cite{Guardia11}, \cite{Kai13}, \cite{Kai14}). These works motivate us to make a careful study on the existence condition for nontrivial dual-containing constacyclic codes. This would help us to avoid unnecessary attempts and provide effective ideas in order to construct dual-containing codes. Several classes of dual-containing MDS constacyclic codes are constructed and their parameters are computed. Consequently, new quantum MDS codes are derived from these parameters. The quantum MDS codes exhibited here have parameters better than the ones available in the literature.Comment: 16 page