Relevance Singular Vector Machine for Low-­rank Matrix Sensing
Martin Sundin; Saikat Chatterjee; Magnus Jansson; Cristian Rojas
This talk was on designing Bayesian priors for sparse-PCA problems — the key is to find a prior which induces a low-rank structure on the matrix. The model was something like where is a low-rank matrix and is noise. The previous state of the art is by Babacan et al., a paper which I obviously haven’t read, but the method they propose here (which involved some heavy algebra/matrix factorizations) appears to be competitive in several regimes. Probably more of interest to those working on Bayesian methods…

Non-Convex Sparse Estimation for Signal Processing
David Wipf
More Bayesian methods! Although David (who I met at ICML) was not trying to say that the priors are particularly “correct,” but rather that the penalty functions that they induce on the problems he is studying actually make sense. More of an algorithmist’s approach, you might say. He set up the problem a bit more generally, to minimize problems of the form

where are some operators. He made the case that convex relaxations of many of these problems, while analytically beautiful, have restrictions which are not satisfied in practice, and indeed they often have poor performance. His approach is via Empirical Bayes, but this leads to non-convex problems. What he can show is that the algorithm he proposes is competitive with any method that tries to separate the error from the “low-rank” constraint, and that the new optimization is “smoother.” I’m sure more details are in his various papers, for those who are interested.

PCA-HDR: A Robust PCA Based Solution to HDR Imaging
Adit Bhardwaj; Shanmuganathan Raman
My apologies for taking fewer notes on this one, but I don’t know much about HDR imaging, so this was mostly me learning about HDR image processing. There are several different ways of doing HDR, from multiple exposures to flash/no-flash, and so on. The idea is that artifacts introduced by the camera can be modeled using the robust PCA framework and that denoting in HDR imaging may be better using robust PCA. I think that looking at some of the approaches David mentioned may be good in this domain, since it seems unlikely to me that these images will satisfy the conditions necessary for convex relaxations to work…

On Communication Requirements for Secure Computation
Vinod M Prabhakaran
Vinod showed some information theoretic approaches to understanding how much communication is needed for secure computation protocols like remote oblivious transfer: Xavier has , Yvonne has and Zelda wants , but nobody should be able to infer each other’s values. Feige, Killian, and Naor have a protocol for this, which Vinod and Co. can show is communication-optimal. There were several ingredients here, including cut-set bounds, distribution switching, data processing inequalities, and special bounds for 3-party protocols. More details in his CRYPTO paper (and others).

Artificial Noise Revisited: When Eve Has More Antennas Than Alice
Shuiyin Liu; Yi Hong; Emanuele Viterbo
In a MIMO wiretap setting, if the receiver has more antennas than the transmitter, then the transmitter can send noise in the nullspace of the channel matrix of the direct channel — as long as the eavesdropper has fewer antennas than the transmitter then secure transmission is possible. In this paper they show that positive secrecy capacity is possible even when the eavesdropper has more antennas, but as the number of eavesdropper antennas grows, the achievable rate goes to . Perhaps a little bit of a surprise here!