Hassan Tavakoli

Hassan Tavakoli, Thinh Nguyen, Bella Bose

We study the problem of estimating a parametric discrete memoryless channel \( p(y \mid x; \boldsymbolθ) \) when the transmitter selects its input distribution \( π\) to maximize mutual information under the true parameter \( \boldsymbolθ^* \). Using only i.i.d.\ observations of the channel output, we aim to jointly estimate the capacity-achieving input distribution \( \boldsymbolπ^* \) and the true channel parameter \( \boldsymbolθ^* \). In general, recovery of \( \boldsymbolπ^* \) and \( \boldsymbolθ^* \) can be challenging. To that end, we propose two efficient algorithms based on the Blahut--Arimoto (BA) optimality conditions: (i) a bilevel fixed-point method and (ii) an augmented Lagrangian method. Empirical results demonstrate that both proposed algorithms successfully recover the true \( \boldsymbolθ^* \) and \( \boldsymbolπ^* \), whereas a naive maximum-likelihood approach that ignores the mutual-information maximization constraint fails to do so.

Hassan Tavakoli, Thinh Nguyen, Bella Bose

We introduce \textbf{RankGuard-Polar}, a framework for safely publishing a subset of polar codeword coordinates over shared public resources. We assume a strong eavesdropper who has access to the channel input, i.e., the transmitted codeword coordinates published on a public resource access model. Working over \(\mathbb F_2\) and focusing on time-shared public/private BEC uses, we show that leakage from a published index set \(\mathbf{P}\) admits an exact algebraic characterization comes from an information-theoretic viewpoint, and we construct an explicit linear extractor ($R$) that identifies the leaked linear combinations. Building on this identity, we (i) give efficient procedures to compute and certify leakage for any \(\mathbf{P}\), (ii) propose a practical fast algorithm with provable efficiency.

Nam Nguyen, Hassan Tavakoli, An Vuong et al.

This paper studies cross-domain lossy compression through the lens of minimum entropy coupling (MEC) with rate and classification constraints. In this setting, an encoder observes samples from a degraded source domain, while the decoder is required to generate outputs following a prescribed target distribution and to preserve information relevant to a downstream classification task. Motivated by logarithmic-loss distortion, we adopt an information-based objective that maximizes the coupling strength between the source and reconstruction, rather than minimizing a sample-wise distortion. Under common randomness, we formulate a rate-constrained MEC problem (MEC-B) and show that the intermediate representation can be removed without loss of optimality, yielding an equivalent deterministic coupling formulation. For Bernoulli sources, closed-form expressions are derived with and without classification constraints. In addition, we implement a neural restoration framework using quantization, entropy modeling, distribution matching, and classification regularization. Experiments on MNIST super-resolution and SVHN denoising show that increasing the available rate improves classification accuracy and yields more informative reconstructions.