Advantages of the Discrete Stochastic Arithmetic to Validate the Results of the Taylor Expansion Method to Solve the Generalized Abel’s Integral Equation

The aim of this paper is to apply the Taylor expansion method to solve the first and second kinds Volterra integral equations with Abel kernel. This study focuses on two main arithmetics: the FPA and the DSA. In order to apply the DSA, we use the CESTAC method and the CADNA library. Using this method, we can find the optimal step of the method, the optimal approximation, the optimal error, and some of numerical instabilities. They are the main novelties of the DSA in comparison with the FPA. The error analysis of the method is proved. Furthermore, the main theorem of the CESTAC method is presented. Using this theorem we can apply a new termination criterion instead of the traditional absolute error. Several examples are approximated based on the FPA and the DSA. The numerical results show the applications and advantages of the DSA than the FPA.

Guided Visibility Sampling++

Visibility computation is a common problem in the field of computer graphics. Examples include occlusion culling, where parts of the scene are culled away, or global illumination simulations, which are based on the mutual visibility of pairs of points to calculate lighting. In this paper, an aggressive from-region visibility technique called Guided Visibility Sampling++ (GVS++) is presented. The proposed technique improves the Guided Visibility Sampling algorithm through improved sampling strategies, thus achieving low error rates on various scenes, and being over four orders of magnitude faster than the original CPU-based Guided Visibility Sampling implementation. We present sampling strategies that adaptively compute sample locations and use ray casting to determine a set of triangles visible from a flat or volumetric rectangular region in space. This set is called a potentially visible set (PVS). Based on initial random sampling, subsequent exploration phases progressively grow an intermediate solution. A termination criterion is used to terminate the PVS search. A modern implementation using the Vulkan graphics API and RTX ray tracing is discussed. Furthermore, we show optimizations that allow for an implementation that is over 20 times faster than a naive implementation.

Convergence behavior of single-step GBLUP and SNPBLUP for different termination criteria

Background The preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method is the current method of choice for iterative solving of genetic evaluations. The relative difference between two successive iterates and the relative residual of the system of equations are usually chosen as a termination criterion for the PCG method in animal breeding. However, our initial analyses showed that these two commonly used termination criteria may report that a PCG method applied to a single-step single nucleotide polymorphism best linear unbiased prediction (ssSNPBLUP) is not converged yet, whereas the solutions are accurate enough for practical use. Therefore, the aim of this study was to propose two termination criteria that have been (partly) developed in other fields, but are new in animal breeding, and to compare their behavior to that of the two termination criteria widely used in animal breeding for the PCG method applied to ssSNPBLUP. The convergence patterns of ssSNPBLUP were also compared to the convergence patterns of single-step genomic BLUP (ssGBLUP). Results Building upon previous work, we propose two termination criteria that take the properties of the system of equations into account. These two termination criteria are directly related to the relative error of the iterates with respect to the true solutions. Based on pig and dairy cattle datasets, we show that the preconditioned coefficient matrices of ssSNPBLUP and ssGBLUP have similar properties when using a second-level preconditioner for ssSNPBLUP. Therefore, the PCG method applied to ssSNPBLUP and ssGBLUP converged similarly based on the relative error of the iterates with respect to the true solutions. This similar convergence behavior between ssSNPBLUP and ssGBLUP was observed for both proposed termination criteria. This was, however, not the case for the termination criterion defined as the relative residual when applied to the dairy cattle evaluations. Conclusion Our results showed that the PCG method can converge similarly when applied to ssSNPBLUP and to ssGBLUP. The two proposed termination criteria always depicted these similar convergence behaviors, and we recommend them for comparing convergence properties of different models and for routine evaluations.

A Termination Criterion for Probabilistic Point Clouds Registration

Probabilistic Point Clouds Registration (PPCR) is an algorithm that, in its multi-iteration version, outperformed state-of-the-art algorithms for local point clouds registration. However, its performances have been tested using a fixed high number of iterations. To be of practical usefulness, we think that the algorithm should decide by itself when to stop, on one hand to avoid an excessive number of iterations and waste computational time, on the other to avoid getting a sub-optimal registration. With this work, we compare different termination criteria on several datasets, and prove that the chosen one produces very good results that are comparable to those obtained using a very large number of iterations, while saving computational time.

Area-Efficient Early-Termination Technique for Belief-Propagation Polar Decoders

Early-termination techniques for a belief-propagation (BP) decoder of polar codes can improve the decoding throughput by finishing a decoding iteration when an early-termination condition is satisfied. In the BP decoders, the early-termination condition plays an important role, as it affects decoding iteration savings. In this letter, an area-efficient early-termination criterion is proposed, which simplifies the previous threshold-based termination condition by completely eliminating redundant computations. According to the experimental results, the proposed structure for (1024, 512) polar codes can reduce 72.7%, 66.5%, and 59.7% of hardware resources without any degradation in the error-correction performance and decoding throughput compared to the previous threshold-based, information-BER (bit error rate)-based, and frozen-BER-based early-termination techniques, respectively.