Yudan Wang;Peiyao Xiao;Hao Ban;Kaiyi Ji;Shaofeng Zou
{"title":"Theoretical Study of Conflict-Avoidant Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning","authors":"Yudan Wang;Peiyao Xiao;Hao Ban;Kaiyi Ji;Shaofeng Zou","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3581454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3581454","url":null,"abstract":"Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) has shown great promise in many real-world applications. Existing MORL algorithms often aim to learn a policy that optimizes individual objective functions simultaneously with a given prior preference (or weights) on different objectives. However, these methods often suffer from the issue of <italic>gradient conflict</i> such that the objectives with larger gradients dominate the update direction, resulting in a performance degeneration on other objectives. In this paper, we develop a novel dynamic weighting multi-objective actor-critic algorithm (MOAC) under two options of sub-procedures named as conflict-avoidant (CA) and faster convergence (FC) in objective weight updates. MOAC-CA aims to find a CA update direction that maximizes the minimum value improvement among objectives, and MOAC-FC targets at a much faster convergence rate. We provide a comprehensive finite-time convergence analysis for both algorithms. We show that MOAC-CA can find a <inline-formula> <tex-math>$epsilon +epsilon _{text {app}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-accurate Pareto stationary policy using <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathcal {O}({epsilon ^{-5}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> samples, while ensuring a small <inline-formula> <tex-math>$epsilon +sqrt {epsilon _{text {app}}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-level CA distance (defined as the distance to the CA direction), where <inline-formula> <tex-math>$epsilon _{text {app}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the function approximation error. The analysis also shows that MOAC-FC improves the sample complexity to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathcal {O}(epsilon ^{-3})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, but with a constant-level CA distance. Our experiments on MT10 demonstrate the improved performance of our algorithms over existing MORL methods with fixed preference.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 9","pages":"7254-7269"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144891283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Information for Authors","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3575559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3575559","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 7","pages":"C3-C3"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11045267","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144323153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Depending on DEEPAND: Cryptanalysis of NLFSR-Based Lightweight Ciphers TinyJAMBU, KATAN, and KTANTAN","authors":"Amit Jana;Mostafizar Rahman;Dhiman Saha","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3580774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3580774","url":null,"abstract":"Automated cryptanalysis has taken center stage in the arena of cryptanalysis since the pioneering work by Mouha et al. which showcased the power of Mixed Integer Linear Programming (<inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {MILP}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) in solving cryptanalysis problems that otherwise, required significant effort. Since the inception, research in this area has moved in primarily two directions. One is to model more and more classical cryptanalysis tools as optimization problems to leverage the ease provided by state-of-the-art solvers. The other direction is to improve existing models to make them more efficient and/or accurate. The current work is an attempt to contribute to the latter. In this work, a general model referred to as <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {DEEPAND}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> has been devised to capture the correlation between <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {AND}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> gates in <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {NLFSR}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-based lightweight block ciphers. <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {DEEPAND}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> builds upon and generalizes the idea of joint propagation of differences through <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {AND}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> gates captured using refined <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {MILP}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> modeling of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {TinyJAMBU}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> by Saha et al. in FSE 2020. The proposed model has been applied to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {TinyJAMBU}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {KATAN}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {KTANTAN}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and can detect correlations that were missed by earlier models. This leads to more accurate differential bounds for both the ciphers. In particular, a 384-round (<italic>full-round</i> as per earlier specification) <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {Type-IV}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> trail is found for <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {TinyJAMBU}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with 14-active <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {AND}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> gates using the new model, while the refined model reported this figure to be 19. This also reaffirms the decision of the designers to increase the number of rounds from 384 to 640. Moreover, the model succeeds in searching a <italic>full round</i> <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {Type-IV}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> trail of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$textsf {TinyJAMBU}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> keyed permutation <inline-formula> <tex-math>${mathcal {P}}_{1024}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with probability <inline-formula> <tex-math>$2^{-105} (gg 2^{-128})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. This reveals the non-random properties of <inline-formula> <tex-math>${mathcal {P}}_{1024}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> thereby showing i","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 9","pages":"7348-7366"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144891178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bounds on MLDR Codes Over 𝕫pt","authors":"Tim L. Alderson","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3579249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3579249","url":null,"abstract":"Upper bounds on the minimum Lee distance of codes that are linear over <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathbb {Z}_{q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math>$q=p^{t}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <italic>p</i> prime are discussed. The bounds are Singleton like, depending on the length, rank, and alphabet size of the code. Codes meeting such bounds are referred to as Maximum Lee Distance with respect to Rank (MLDR) Codes. We present some new bounds on MLDR codes, using combinatorial arguments. In the context of MLDR codes, our work provides improvements over existing bounds in the literature.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"5912-5919"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A General Coding Framework for Adaptive Private Information Retrieval","authors":"Jinbao Zhu;Xiaohu Tang","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3578871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3578871","url":null,"abstract":"The problem of <italic>T</i>-colluding private information retrieval (PIR) enables the user to retrieve one out of <italic>M</i> files from a distributed storage system with <italic>N</i> servers without revealing anything about the index of the desired file to any group of up to <italic>T</i> colluding servers. In the considered storage system, the <italic>M</i> files are stored across the <italic>N</i> distributed servers in an <italic>X</i>-secure <italic>K</i>-coded manner such that any group of up to <italic>X</i> colluding servers learns nothing about the files; the storage overhead at each server is reduced by a factor of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$frac {1}{K}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> compared to the total size of the files; and the files can be reconstructed from any <inline-formula> <tex-math>$K+X$ </tex-math></inline-formula> servers. However, in practical scenarios, when the user retrieves the desired file from the distributed system, some servers may respond to the user very slowly or not respond at all. These servers are referred to as <italic>stragglers</i>, and particularly their identities and numbers are unknown in advance and may change over time. This paper considers the adaptive PIR problem that can be capable of tolerating the presence of a varying number of stragglers. We propose a general coding method for designing adaptive PIR schemes by introducing the concept of a <italic>feasible PIR coding framework</i>. We demonstrate that any <italic>feasible PIR coding framework</i> over a finite field <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathbb {F}_{q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with size <italic>q</i> can be used to construct an adaptive PIR scheme that achieves a retrieval rate of <inline-formula> <tex-math>$1-frac {K+X+T-1}{N-S}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> simultaneously for all numbers of stragglers <inline-formula> <tex-math>$0leq Sleq N-(K+X+T)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> over the same finite field. Additionally, we provide an implementation of the <italic>feasible PIR coding framework</i>, ensuring that the adaptive PIR scheme operates over any finite field <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathbb {F}_{q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with size <inline-formula> <tex-math>$qgeq N+max {K, N-(K+X+T-1)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 9","pages":"7310-7330"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144891282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is Speckle Noise More Challenging to Mitigate Than Additive Noise?","authors":"Reihaneh Malekian;Hao Xing;Arian Maleki","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3578430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3578430","url":null,"abstract":"We study the problem of estimating a function in the presence of both speckle and additive noises, commonly referred to as the de-speckling problem. Although additive noise has been thoroughly explored in nonparametric estimation, speckle noise, prevalent in applications such as synthetic aperture radar, ultrasound imaging, and digital holography, has not received as much attention. Consequently, there is a lack of theoretical investigations into the fundamental limits of mitigating the speckle noise. This paper is the first step in filling this gap. Our focus is on investigating the minimax estimation error for estimating a <inline-formula> <tex-math>$beta $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-Hölder continuous function and determining the rate of the minimax risk. Specifically, if <italic>n</i> represents the number of data points, <italic>f</i> denotes the underlying function to be estimated, <inline-formula> <tex-math>$hat {nu }_{n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is an estimate of <italic>f</i>, and <inline-formula> <tex-math>$sigma _{n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the standard deviation of the additive Gaussian noise, then <inline-formula> <tex-math>$inf _{hat {nu }_{n}} sup _{f} mathbb {E}_{f}| hat {nu }_{n} {-} f |^{2}_{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> decays at the rate <inline-formula> <tex-math>$left ({{max (1,sigma _{n}^{4})/n}}right)^{frac {2beta }{2beta +1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Comparing this rate with the rate achieved under purely additive noise, namely <inline-formula> <tex-math>$left ({{sigma _{n}^{2}/n}}right)^{frac {2beta }{2beta +1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, leads to the following insights: 1) When <inline-formula> <tex-math>$ sigma _{n} = omega (1) $ </tex-math></inline-formula>, the additive noise appears to be the dominant component in the de-speckling problem. However, the presence of speckle noise significantly complicates the task of mitigating its effects. As a result, the risk increases from the rate <inline-formula> <tex-math>$ left ({{ sigma _{n}^{2} / n }}right)^{frac {2beta }{2beta +1}} $ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which characterizes the problem with only additive noise, to <inline-formula> <tex-math>$ left ({{ sigma _{n}^{4} / n }}right)^{frac {2beta }{2beta +1}} $ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the presence of both speckle and additive noise. 2) When <inline-formula> <tex-math>$ sigma _{n} = o(1) $ </tex-math></inline-formula>, the variance of the additive noise does not contribute to the risk in the de-speckling problem. This suggests that, in this regime, speckle noise is the primary bottleneck. Interestingly, the resulting risk rate matches the rate for mitigating purely additive noise with <inline-formula> <tex-math>$ sigma _{n} = Theta (1) $ </tex-math></inline-formula>. 3) When <inline-formula> <tex-math>$sigma _{n} = Theta (1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, the two rates coincide, suggesting that both the speckle noise and additive noise are contributing to the overall error.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"6353-6372"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capacity of Frequency-Based Channels: Encoding Information in Molecular Concentrations","authors":"Yuval Gerzon;Ilan Shomorony;Nir Weinberger","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3578504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3578504","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a molecular channel, in which messages are encoded into the frequency of molecules in a pool, and whose output during reading time is a noisy version of the input frequencies, obtained by sampling with replacement from the pool. We tightly characterize the capacity of this channel using upper and lower bounds, when the number of molecules in the pool is constrained. We apply this result to the DNA storage channel in a accurately defined short-molecule regime, and show that even though the capacity of this channel is technically zero, it can still achieve very large information density.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"5788-5808"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Golden Ratio-Based Sufficient Dimension Reduction","authors":"Wenjing Yang;Yuhong Yang","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3578516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3578516","url":null,"abstract":"Many machine learning applications deal with high-dimensional data. To make computations feasible and learning more efficient, it is often desirable to reduce the dimensionality of the input variables by finding linear combinations of the predictors that can retain as much original information as possible in the relationship between the response and the original predictors. We propose a neural network-based sufficient dimension reduction method that not only identifies the structural dimension effectively, but also improves the estimation accuracy on the central space. It takes advantage of approximation capabilities of neural networks for functions in some Barron classes and leads to reduced computation cost compared to other dimension reduction methods in the literature. Additionally, the framework can be extended to fit practical dimension reduction, making the methodology more applicable in practical settings.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"6297-6310"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rényi Resolvability, Noise Stability, and Anti-Contractivity","authors":"Lei Yu","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3578324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3578324","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates three closely related topics—Rényi resolvability, noise stability, and anti-contractivity. The Rényi resolvability problem refers to approximating a target output distribution of a given channel in the Rényi divergence when the input is set to a function of a given uniform random variable. This problem for the Rényi parameter in (<inline-formula> <tex-math>$0,2]cup {infty }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was first studied by the present author and Tan in 2019. In the present paper, we provide a complete solution to this problem for the Rényi parameter in the entire range <inline-formula> <tex-math>$mathbb {R}cup {pm infty }$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. We then connect the Rényi resolvability problem to the noise stability problem, by observing that maximizing or minimizing the <italic>q</i>-stability of a set is equivalent to a variant of the Rényi resolvability problem. By such a connection, we provide sharp dimension-free bounds on the <italic>q</i>-stability. We lastly relate the noise stability problem to the anti-contractivity of a Markov operator (i.e., conditional expectation operator), where the terminology “anti-contractivity” introduced by us refers to as the opposite property of the well-known contractivity/hyercontractivity. We derive sharp dimension-free anti-contractivity inequalities. All of the results in this paper are evaluated for binary distributions. Our proofs in this paper are mainly based on the method of types, especially strengthened versions of packing-covering lemmas.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"5836-5867"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explicit Subcodes of Reed-Solomon Codes That Efficiently Achieve List Decoding Capacity","authors":"Amit Berman;Yaron Shany;Itzhak Tamo","doi":"10.1109/TIT.2025.3575899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.2025.3575899","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we introduce an explicit family of subcodes of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes that efficiently achieve list decoding capacity with a constant output list size. The codes are constructed by initially forming the tensor product of two RS codes with carefully selected evaluation sets, followed by specific cyclic shifts to the codeword rows. This process results in each codeword column being treated as an individual coordinate, reminiscent of prior capacity-achieving codes, such as folded RS codes and univariate multiplicity codes. This construction is easily shown to be a subcode of an interleaved RS code, equivalently, an RS code evaluated on a subfield. Alternatively, the codes can be constructed by the evaluation of bivariate polynomials over orbits generated by <italic>two</i> affine transformations with coprime orders, extending the earlier use of a single affine transformation in folded RS codes and the recent affine folded RS codes introduced by Bhandari et al. (IEEE T-IT, Feb. 2024). While our codes require large, yet constant characteristic, the two affine transformations facilitate achieving code length equal to the field size, without the restriction of the field being prime, contrasting with univariate multiplicity codes.","PeriodicalId":13494,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Transactions on Information Theory","volume":"71 8","pages":"5898-5911"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144695649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}