This paper studies the problem of entropy identity testing: given sample access to a distribution p and a fully described distribution q (both discrete distributions over a domain of size k), and the promise that either p = q or |H (p) H (q)| ε, where H () denotes the Shannon entropy, a tester needs to distinguish between the two cases with high probability.

Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

In this work, we study the fully observable discrete case where the structure of the network is given.

This paper studies the problem of entropy identity testing: given sample access to a distribution p and a fully described distribution q (both discrete distributions over a domain of size k), and the promise that either p = q or |H (p) H (q)| ε, where H () denotes the Shannon entropy, a tester needs to distinguish between the two cases with high probability.

Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason.

We thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments. An expander graph code allows simple, neurally plausible decoding to perform at par with BP . These expander codes can also be decoded by belief propagation (BP), but it's harder the other way around. We plan to follow this paper with another paper describing neuroscience applications. For space and coherence, this paper focuses on the conceptual theory without elaborating on applications.

It is often convenient to model high-dimensional datasets as probability distributions.

An increasing number of applications are exploiting sampling-based algorithms for planning, optimization, and inference. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms form the computational backbone of this emerging branch of machine learning. Unfortunately, the high computational cost limits their feasibility for large-scale problems and real-world applications, and the existing MCMC acceleration solutions are either limited in hardware flexibility or fail to maintain efficiency at the system level across a variety of end-to-end applications. This paper introduces \textbf{MC$^2$A}, an algorithm-hardware co-design framework, enabling efficient and flexible optimization for MCMC acceleration. Firstly, \textbf{MC$^2$A} analyzes the MCMC workload diversity through an extension of the processor performance roofline model with a 3rd dimension to derive the optimal balance between the compute, sampling and memory parameters. Secondly, \textbf{MC$^2$A} proposes a parametrized hardware accelerator architecture with flexible and efficient support of MCMC kernels with a pipeline of ISA-programmable tree-structured processing units, reconfigurable samplers and a crossbar interconnect to support irregular access. Thirdly, the core of \textbf{MC$^2$A} is powered by a novel Gumbel sampler that eliminates exponential and normalization operations. In the end-to-end case study, \textbf{MC$^2$A} achieves an overall {$307.6\times$, $1.4\times$, $2.0\times$, $84.2\times$} speedup compared to the CPU, GPU, TPU and state-of-the-art MCMC accelerator. Evaluated on various representative MCMC workloads, this work demonstrates and exploits the feasibility of general hardware acceleration to popularize MCMC-based solutions in diverse application domains.