OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Interim Envy-Free Allocation Lotteries
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

With very few exceptions, recent research in fair division has mostly focused on deterministic allocations. Deviating from this trend, we study the fairness notion of interim envy-freeness (iEF) for lotteries over allocations, which serves as a sweet spot between the too stringent notion of ex-post envy-freeness and the very weak notion of ex-ante envy-freeness. Our analysis relates iEF to other fairness notions as well, and reveals tradeoffs between iEF and efficiency. Even though several of our results apply to general fair division problems, we are particularly interested in instances with equal numbers of agents and items where allocations are perfect matchings of the items to the agents. We show how to compute iEF allocations in matching allocation instances in polynomial time, while also maximizing several efficiency objectives, even though this proves to be considerably more challenging than computing envy-free allocations. Our algorithms use efficient solutions to a novel variant of the bipartite matching problem. We also study the extension of iEF when payments to or from the agents are allowed. We present a series of results on two optimization problems, including a generalization of the classical rent division problem to random allocations.
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Differentially Private Online Learning in a Stochastic Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we study differentially private online learning problems in a stochastic environment under both bandit and full information feedback. For differentially private stochastic bandits, we propose both UCB and Thompson Sampling-based algorithms that are anytime and achieve the optimal $O \left(\sum_{j: Δ_j>0} \frac{\ln(T)}{\min \left\{Δ_j, ε\right\}} \right)$ instance-dependent regret bound, where $T$ is the finite learning horizon, $Δ_j$ denotes the suboptimality gap between the optimal arm and a suboptimal arm $j$, and $ε$ is the required privacy parameter. For the differentially private full information setting with stochastic rewards, we show an $Ω\left(\frac{\ln(K)}{\min \left\{Δ_{\min}, ε\right\}} \right)$ instance-dependent regret lower bound and an $Ω\left(\sqrt{T\ln(K)} + \frac{\ln(K)}ε\right)$ minimax lower bound, where $K$ is the total number of actions and $Δ_{\min}$ denotes the minimum suboptimality gap among all the suboptimal actions. For the same differentially private full information setting, we also present an $ε$-differentially private algorithm whose instance-dependent regret and worst-case regret match our respective lower bounds up to an extra $\log(T)$ factor.
Learning to Persuade on the Fly: Robustness Against Ignorance
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Motivated by information sharing in online platforms, we study repeated persuasion between a sender and a stream of receivers where at each time, the sender observes a payoff-relevant state drawn independently and identically from an unknown distribution, and shares state information with the receivers who each choose an action. The sender seeks to persuade the receivers into taking actions aligned with the sender's preference by selectively sharing state information. However, in contrast to the standard models, neither the sender nor the receivers know the distribution, and the sender has to persuade while learning the distribution on the fly. We study the sender's learning problem of making persuasive action recommendations to achieve low regret against the optimal persuasion mechanism with the knowledge of the distribution. To do this, we first propose and motivate a persuasiveness criterion for the unknown distribution setting that centers robustness as a requirement in the face of uncertainty. Our main result is an algorithm that, with high probability, is robustly-persuasive and achieves $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$ regret, where $T$ is the horizon length. Intuitively, at each time our algorithm maintains a set of candidate distributions, and chooses a signaling mechanism that is simultaneously persuasive for all of them. Core to our proof is a tight analysis about the cost of robust persuasion, which may be of independent interest. We further prove that this regret order is optimal (up to logarithmic terms) by showing that no algorithm can achieve regret better than $Ω(\sqrt{T})$.
MAPFAST: A Deep Algorithm Selector for Multi Agent Path Finding using Shortest Path Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Solving the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem optimally is known to be NP-Hard for both make-span and total arrival time minimization. While many algorithms have been developed to solve MAPF problems, there is no dominating optimal MAPF algorithm that works well in all types of problems and no standard guidelines for when to use which algorithm. In this work, we develop the deep convolutional network MAPFAST (Multi-Agent Path Finding Algorithm SelecTor), which takes a MAPF problem instance and attempts to select the fastest algorithm to use from a portfolio of algorithms. We improve the performance of our model by including single-agent shortest paths in the instance embedding given to our model and by utilizing supplemental loss functions in addition to a classification loss. We evaluate our model on a large and diverse dataset of MAPF instances, showing that it outperforms all individual algorithms in its portfolio as well as the state-of-the-art optimal MAPF algorithm selector. We also provide an analysis of algorithm behavior in our dataset to gain a deeper understanding of optimal MAPF algorithms' strengths and weaknesses to help other researchers leverage different heuristics in algorithm designs.
CoDeGAN: Contrastive Disentanglement for Generative Adversarial Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Disentanglement, a critical concern in interpretable machine learning, has also garnered significant attention from the computer vision community. Many existing GAN-based class disentanglement (unsupervised) approaches, such as InfoGAN and its variants, primarily aim to maximize the mutual information (MI) between the generated image and its latent codes. However, this focus may lead to a tendency for the network to generate highly similar images when presented with the same latent class factor, potentially resulting in mode collapse or mode dropping. To alleviate this problem, we propose \texttt{CoDeGAN} (Contrastive Disentanglement for Generative Adversarial Networks), where we relax similarity constraints for disentanglement from the image domain to the feature domain. This modification not only enhances the stability of GAN training but also improves their disentangling capabilities. Moreover, we integrate self-supervised pre-training into CoDeGAN to learn semantic representations, significantly facilitating unsupervised disentanglement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches across multiple benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/learninginvision/CoDeGAN.
Neural Networks with Complex-Valued Weights Have No Spurious Local Minima
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We study the benefits of complex-valued weights for neural networks. We prove that shallow complex neural networks with quadratic activations have no spurious local minima. In contrast, shallow real neural networks with quadratic activations have infinitely many spurious local minima under the same conditions. In addition, we provide specific examples to demonstrate that complex-valued weights turn poor local minima into saddle points.
AAformer: Auto-Aligned Transformer for Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In person re-identification (re-ID), extracting part-level features from person images has been verified to be crucial to offer fine-grained information. Most of the existing CNN-based methods only locate the human parts coarsely, or rely on pretrained human parsing models and fail in locating the identifiable nonhuman parts (e.g., knapsack). In this article, we introduce an alignment scheme in transformer architecture for the first time and propose the auto-aligned transformer (AAformer) to automatically locate both the human parts and nonhuman ones at patch level. We introduce the "Part tokens ([PART]s)", which are learnable vectors, to extract part features in the transformer. A [PART] only interacts with a local subset of patches in self-attention and learns to be the part representation. To adaptively group the image patches into different subsets, we design the auto-alignment. Auto-alignment employs a fast variant of optimal transport (OT) algorithm to online cluster the patch embeddings into several groups with the [PART]s as their prototypes. AAformer integrates the part alignment into the self-attention and the output [PART]s can be directly used as part features for retrieval. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of [PART]s and the superiority of AAformer over various state-of-the-art methods.
Finite Automata Encoding Piecewise Polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

Finite automata are used to encode geometric figures, functions and can be used for image compression and processing. The original approach is to represent each point of a figure in $\mathbb{R}^n$ as a convolution of its $n$ coordinates written in some base. Then a figure is said to be encoded as a finite automaton if the set of convolutions corresponding to the points in this figure is accepted by a finite automaton. The only differentiable functions which can be encoded as a finite automaton in this way are linear. In this paper we propose a representation which enables to encode piecewise polynomial functions with arbitrary degrees of smoothness that substantially extends a family of functions which can be encoded as finite automata. Such representation naturally comes from the framework of hierarchical tensor product B-splines, which are piecewise polynomials widely utilized in numerical computational geometry. We show that finite automata provide a suitable tool for solving computational problems arising in this framework when the support of a function is unbounded.
Generating Physically-Consistent Satellite Imagery for Climate Visualizations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep generative vision models are now able to synthesize realistic-looking satellite imagery. But, the possibility of hallucinations prevents their adoption for risk-sensitive applications, such as generating materials for communicating climate change. To demonstrate this issue, we train a generative adversarial network (pix2pixHD) to create synthetic satellite imagery of future flooding and reforestation events. We find that a pure deep learning-based model can generate photorealistic flood visualizations but hallucinates floods at locations that were not susceptible to flooding. To address this issue, we propose to condition and evaluate generative vision models on segmentation maps of physics-based flood models. We show that our physics-conditioned model outperforms the pure deep learning-based model and a handcrafted baseline. We evaluate the generalization capability of our method to different remote sensing data and different climate-related events (reforestation). We publish our code and dataset which includes the data for a third case study of melting Arctic sea ice and $>$30,000 labeled HD image triplets -- or the equivalent of 5.5 million images at 128x128 pixels -- for segmentation guided image-to-image translation in Earth observation. Code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/blutjens/eie-earth-public}.
Vibration Analysis of Timoshenko Beams using Isogeometric Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, the finite free-form beam element is formulated by the isogeometric approach based on the Timoshenko beam theory to investigate the free vibration behavior of the beams. The non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) functions which define the geometry of the beam are used as the basis functions for the finite element analysis. In order to enrich the basis functions and to increase the accuracy of the solution fields, the h-, p-, and k-refinement techniques are implemented. The geometry and curvature of the beams are modelled in a unique way based on NURBS. All the effects of the the shear deformation, and the rotary inertia are taken into consideration by the present isogeometric model. Results of the beams for non-dimensional frequencies are compared with other available results in order to show the accuracy and efficiency of the present isogeometric approach. From numerical results, the present element can produce very accurate values of natural frequencies and the mode shapes due to exact definition of the geometry. With higher order basis functions, there is no shear locking phenomenon in very thin beam situations. Finally, the benchmark tests described in this study are provided as future reference solutions for Timoshenko beam vibration problem.
A Knowledge Enhanced Learning and Semantic Composition Model for Multi-Claim Fact Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

To inhibit the spread of rumorous information and its severe consequences, traditional fact checking aims at retrieving relevant evidence to verify the veracity of a given claim. Fact checking methods typically use knowledge graphs (KGs) as external repositories and develop reasoning mechanism to retrieve evidence for verifying the triple claim. However, existing methods only focus on verifying a single claim. As real-world rumorous information is more complex and a textual statement is often composed of multiple clauses (i.e. represented as multiple claims instead of a single one), multiclaim fact checking is not only necessary but more important for practical applications. Although previous methods for verifying a single triple can be applied repeatedly to verify multiple triples one by one, they ignore the contextual information implied in a multi-claim statement and could not learn the rich semantic information in the statement as a whole. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end knowledge enhanced learning and verification method for multi-claim fact checking. Our method consists of two modules, KG-based learning enhancement and multi-claim semantic composition. To fully utilize the contextual information, the KG-based learning enhancement module learns the dynamic context-specific representations via selectively aggregating relevant attributes of entities. To capture the compositional semantics of multiple triples, the multi-claim semantic composition module constructs the graph structure to model claim-level interactions, and integrates global and salient local semantics with multi-head attention. Experimental results on a real-world dataset and two benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method for multi-claim fact checking over KG.
The Doge of Wall Street: Analysis and Detection of Pump and Dump Cryptocurrency Manipulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these assets, and nowadays, cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month. Despite this, many cryptocurrencies have low liquidity and are highly prone to market manipulation. This paper performs an in-depth analysis of two market manipulations organized by communities over the Internet: The pump and dump and the crowd pump. The pump and dump scheme is a fraud as old as the stock market. Now, it got new vitality in the loosely regulated market of cryptocurrencies. Groups of highly coordinated people systematically arrange this scam, usually on Telegram and Discord. We monitored these groups for more than 3 years detecting around 900 individual events. We report on three case studies related to pump and dump groups. We leverage our unique dataset of the verified pump and dumps to build a machine learning model able to detect a pump and dump in 25 seconds from the moment it starts, achieving the results of 94.5% of F1-score. Then, we move on to the crowd pump, a new phenomenon that hit the news in the first months of 2021, when a Reddit community inflates the price of the GameStop stocks (GME) by over 1,900% on Wall Street, the world's largest stock exchange. Later, other Reddit communities replicate the operation on the cryptocurrency markets. The targets were DogeCoin (DOGE) and Ripple (XRP). We reconstruct how these operations developed and discuss differences and analogies with the standard pump and dump. We believe this study helps understand a widespread phenomenon affecting cryptocurrency markets. The detection algorithms we develop effectively detect these events in real-time and help investors stay out of the market when these frauds are in action.
Two-Stage Facility Location Games with Strategic Clients and Facilities
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider non-cooperative facility location games where both facilities and clients act strategically and heavily influence each other. This contrasts established game-theoretic facility location models with non-strategic clients that simply select the closest opened facility. In our model, every facility location has a set of attracted clients and each client has a set of shopping locations and a weight that corresponds to her spending capacity. Facility agents selfishly select a location for opening their facility to maximize the attracted total spending capacity, whereas clients strategically decide how to distribute their spending capacity among the opened facilities in their shopping range. We focus on a natural client behavior similar to classical load balancing: our selfish clients aim for a distribution that minimizes their maximum waiting times for getting serviced, where a facility's waiting time corresponds to its total attracted client weight. We show that subgame perfect equilibria exist and give almost tight constant bounds on the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability, which even hold for a broader class of games with arbitrary client behavior. Since facilities and clients influence each other, it is crucial for the facilities to anticipate the selfish clients' behavior when selecting their location. For this, we provide an efficient algorithm that also implies an efficient check for equilibrium. Finally, we show that computing a socially optimal facility placement is NP-hard and that this result holds for all feasible client weight distributions.
Construction of Sparse Suffix Trees and LCE Indexes in Optimal Time and Space
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The notions of synchronizing and partitioning sets are recently introduced variants of locally consistent parsings with great potential in problem-solving. In this paper we propose a deterministic algorithm that constructs for a given readonly string of length $n$ over the alphabet $\{0,1,\ldots,n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}\}$ a variant of $τ$-partitioning set with size $\mathcal{O}(b)$ and $τ= \frac{n}{b}$ using $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space and $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}εn)$ time provided $b \ge n^ε$, for $ε> 0$. As a corollary, for $b \ge n^ε$ and constant $ε> 0$, we obtain linear construction algorithms with $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space on top of the string for two major small-space indexes: a sparse suffix tree, which is a compacted trie built on $b$ chosen suffixes of the string, and a longest common extension (LCE) index, which occupies $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space and allows us to compute the longest common prefix for any pair of substrings in $\mathcal{O}(n/b)$ time. For both, the $\mathcal{O}(b)$ construction storage is asymptotically optimal since the tree itself takes $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space and any LCE index with $\mathcal{O}(n/b)$ query time must occupy at least $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space by a known trade-off (at least for $b \ge Ω(n / \log n)$). In case of arbitrary $b \ge Ω(\log^2 n)$, we present construction algorithms for the partitioning set, sparse suffix tree, and LCE index with $\mathcal{O}(n\log_b n)$ running time and $\mathcal{O}(b)$ space, thus also improving the state of the art.
Foresight Social-aware Reinforcement Learning for Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

When robots handle navigation tasks while avoiding collisions, they perform in crowded and complex environments not as good as in stable and homogeneous environments. This often results in a low success rate and poor efficiency. Therefore, we propose a novel Foresight Social-aware Reinforcement Learning (FSRL) framework for mobile robots to achieve collision-free navigation. Compared to previous learning-based methods, our approach is foresighted. It not only considers the current human-robot interaction to avoid an immediate collision, but also estimates upcoming social interactions to still keep distance in the future. Furthermore, an efficiency constraint is introduced in our approach that significantly reduces navigation time. Comparative experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method under more realistic and challenging simulated environments.
Learning Approximate and Exact Numeral Systems via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent work (Xu et al., 2020) has suggested that numeral systems in different languages are shaped by a functional need for efficient communication in an information-theoretic sense. Here we take a learning-theoretic approach and show how efficient communication emerges via reinforcement learning. In our framework, two artificial agents play a Lewis signaling game where the goal is to convey a numeral concept. The agents gradually learn to communicate using reinforcement learning and the resulting numeral systems are shown to be efficient in the information-theoretic framework of Regier et al. (2015); Gibson et al. (2017). They are also shown to be similar to human numeral systems of same type. Our results thus provide a mechanistic explanation via reinforcement learning of the recent results in Xu et al. (2020) and can potentially be generalized to other semantic domains.
A Survey of Knowledge Tracing: Models, Variants, and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Modern online education has the capacity to provide intelligent educational services by automatically analyzing substantial amounts of student behavioral data. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is one of the fundamental tasks for student behavioral data analysis, aiming to monitor students' evolving knowledge state during their problem-solving process. In recent years, a substantial number of studies have concentrated on this rapidly growing field, significantly contributing to its advancements. In this survey, we will conduct a thorough investigation of these progressions. Firstly, we present three types of fundamental KT models with distinct technical routes. Subsequently, we review extensive variants of the fundamental KT models that consider more stringent learning assumptions. Moreover, the development of KT cannot be separated from its applications, thereby we present typical KT applications in various scenarios. To facilitate the work of researchers and practitioners in this field, we have developed two open-source algorithm libraries: EduData that enables the download and preprocessing of KT-related datasets, and EduKTM that provides an extensible and unified implementation of existing mainstream KT models. Finally, we discuss potential directions for future research in this rapidly growing field. We hope that the current survey will assist both researchers and practitioners in fostering the development of KT, thereby benefiting a broader range of students.