Sparse Recovery with Very Sparse Compressed Counting

Compressed sensing (sparse signal recovery) often encounters nonnegative data (e.g., images). Recently we developed the methodology of using (dense) Compressed Counting for recovering nonnegative K-sparse signals. In this paper, we adopt very sparse Compressed Counting for nonnegative signal recovery. Our design matrix is sampled from a maximally-skewed p-stable distribution (0<p<1), and we sparsify the design matrix so that on average (1-g)-fraction of the entries become zero. The idea is related to very sparse stable random projections (Li et al 2006 and Li 2007), the prior work for estimating summary statistics of the data. In our theoretical analysis, we show that, when p->0, it suffices to use M= K/(1-exp(-gK) log N measurements, so that all coordinates can be recovered in one scan of the coordinates. If g = 1 (i.e., dense design), then M = K log N. If g= 1/K or 2/K (i.e., very sparse design), then M = 1.58K log N or M = 1.16K log N. This means the design matrix can be indeed very sparse at only a minor inflation of the sample complexity. Interestingly, as p->1, the required number of measurements is essentially M = 2.7K log N, provided g= 1/K. It turns out that this result is a general worst-case bound

Ricci Curvature on Alexandrov spaces and Rigidity Theorems

In this paper, we introduce a new notion for lower bounds of Ricci curvature on Alexandrov spaces, and extend Cheeger-Gromoll splitting theorem and Cheng's maximal diameter theorem to Alexandrov spaces under this Ricci curvature condition.Comment: final versio

Lipschitz continuity of harmonic maps between Alexandrov spaces

In 1997, J. Jost [27] and F. H. Lin [39], independently proved that every energy minimizing harmonic map from an Alexandrov space with curvature bounded from below to an Alexandrov space with non-positive curvature is locally H\"older continuous. In [39], F. H. Lin proposed a challenge problem: Can the H\"older continuity be improved to Lipschitz continuity? J. Jost also asked a similar problem about Lipschitz regularity of harmonic maps between singular spaces (see Page 38 in [28]). The main theorem of this paper gives a complete resolution to it.Comment: We remove the assumption in the previous version that the domain space has nonnegative generalized Ricci curvature. This solves Lin's conjecture completely. To appear in Invent. Mat