OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Laplace Functional Ordering of Point Processes in Large-scale Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Stochastic orders on point processes are partial orders which capture notions like being larger or more variable. Laplace functional ordering of point processes is a useful stochastic order for comparing spatial deployments of wireless networks. It is shown that the ordering of point processes is preserved under independent operations such as marking, thinning, clustering, superposition, and random translation. Laplace functional ordering can be used to establish comparisons of several performance metrics such as coverage probability, achievable rate, and resource allocation even when closed form expressions of such metrics are unavailable. Applications in several network scenarios are also provided where tradeoffs between coverage and interference as well as fairness and peakyness are studied. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to supplement our analytical results.
An Algebra of Reversible Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

Process algebra ACP based on the interleaving semantics can not be reversed. We design a reversible version of APTC called RAPTC. It has algebraic laws of reversible choice, sequence, parallelism, communication, silent step and abstraction, and also the soundness and completeness modulo strongly forward-reverse truly concurrent bisimulations and weakly forward-reverse truly concurrent bisimulations.
Coalition Structure Generation on Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2018
Year: 2018

Two fundamental algorithm-design paradigms are Tree Search and Dynamic Programming. The techniques used therein have been shown to complement one another when solving the complete set partitioning problem, also known as the coalition structure generation problem [5]. Inspired by this observation, we develop in this paper an algorithm to solve the coalition structure generation problem on graphs, where the goal is to identifying an optimal partition of a graph into connected subgraphs. More specifically, we develop a new depth-first search algorithm, and combine it with an existing dynamic programming algorithm due to Vinyals et al. [9]. The resulting hybrid algorithm is empirically shown to significantly outperform both its constituent parts when the subset-evaluation function happens to have certain intuitive properties.
Playing the Wrong Game: Bounding Externalities in Diverse Populations of Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

The robustness of multiagent systems can be affected by mistakes or behavioral biases (e.g., risk-aversion, altruism, toll-sensitivity), with some agents playing the "wrong game." This can change the set of equilibria, and may in turn harm or improve the social welfare of agents in the system. We are interested in bounding what we call the biased price of anarchy (BPoA) in populations with diverse agent behaviors, which is the ratio between welfare in the "wrong" equilibrium and optimal welfare. We study nonatomic routing games, and derive an externality bound that depends on a key topological parameter of the underlying network. We then prove two general BPoA bounds for games with diverse populations: one that relies on the network structure and the average bias of all agents in the population, and one that is independent of the structure but depends on the maximal bias. Both types of bounds can be combined with known results to derive concrete BPoA bounds for a variety of specific behaviors (e.g., varied levels of risk-aversion).
A Chasm Between Identity and Equivalence Testing with Conditional Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

A recent model for property testing of probability distributions (Chakraborty et al., ITCS 2013, Canonne et al., SICOMP 2015) enables tremendous savings in the sample complexity of testing algorithms, by allowing them to condition the sampling on subsets of the domain. In particular, Canonne, Ron, and Servedio (SICOMP 2015) showed that, in this setting, testing identity of an unknown distribution $D$ (whether $D=D^\ast$ for an explicitly known $D^\ast$) can be done with a constant number of queries, independent of the support size $n$ -- in contrast to the required $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ in the standard sampling model. It was unclear whether the same stark contrast exists for the case of testing equivalence, where both distributions are unknown. While Canonne et al. established a $\mathrm{poly}(\log n)$-query upper bound for equivalence testing, very recently brought down to $\tilde O(\log\log n)$ by Falahatgar et al. (COLT 2015), whether a dependence on the domain size $n$ is necessary was still open, and explicitly posed by Fischer at the Bertinoro Workshop on Sublinear Algorithms (2014). We show that any testing algorithm for equivalence must make $Ω(\sqrt{\log\log n})$ queries in the conditional sampling model. This demonstrates a gap between identity and equivalence testing, absent in the standard sampling model (where both problems have sampling complexity $n^{Θ(1)}$). We also obtain results on the query complexity of uniformity testing and support-size estimation with conditional samples. We answer a question of Chakraborty et al. (ITCS 2013) showing that non-adaptive uniformity testing indeed requires $Ω(\log n)$ queries in the conditional model. For the related problem of support-size estimation, we provide both adaptive and non-adaptive algorithms, with query complexities $\mathrm{poly}(\log\log n)$ and $\mathrm{poly}(\log n)$, respectively.
Generalized Singular Value Thresholding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This work studies the Generalized Singular Value Thresholding (GSVT) operator ${\text{Prox}}_{g}^{σ}(\cdot)$, \begin{equation*} {\text{Prox}}_{g}^{σ}(B)=\arg\min\limits_{X}\sum_{i=1}^{m}g(σ_{i}(X)) + \frac{1}{2}||X-B||_{F}^{2}, \end{equation*} associated with a nonconvex function $g$ defined on the singular values of $X$. We prove that GSVT can be obtained by performing the proximal operator of $g$ (denoted as $\text{Prox}_g(\cdot)$) on the singular values since $\text{Prox}_g(\cdot)$ is monotone when $g$ is lower bounded. If the nonconvex $g$ satisfies some conditions (many popular nonconvex surrogate functions, e.g., $\ell_p$-norm, $0<p<1$, of $\ell_0$-norm are special cases), a general solver to find $\text{Prox}_g(b)$ is proposed for any $b\geq0$. GSVT greatly generalizes the known Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) which is a basic subroutine in many convex low rank minimization methods. We are able to solve the nonconvex low rank minimization problem by using GSVT in place of SVT.
Revisiting Non-Progressive Influence Models: Scalable Influence Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

While influence maximization in social networks has been studied extensively in computer science community for the last decade the focus has been on the progressive influence models, such as independent cascade (IC) and Linear threshold (LT) models, which cannot capture the reversibility of choices. In this paper, we present the Heat Conduction (HC) model which is a non-progressive influence model with real-world interpretations. We show that HC unifies, generalizes, and extends the existing nonprogressive models, such as the Voter model [1] and non-progressive LT [2]. We then prove that selecting the optimal seed set of influential nodes is NP-hard for HC but by establishing the submodularity of influence spread, we can tackle the influence maximization problem with a scalable and provably near-optimal greedy algorithm. We are the first to present a scalable solution for influence maximization under nonprogressive LT model, as a special case of the HC model. In sharp contrast to the other greedy influence maximization methods, our fast and efficient C2GREEDY algorithm benefits from two analytically computable steps: closed-form computation for finding the influence spread as well as the greedy seed selection. Through extensive experiments on several large real and synthetic networks, we show that C2GREEDY outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both influence spread and scalability.
The Dead Cryptographers Society Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2018
Year: 2018

This paper defines The Dead Cryptographers Society Problem - DCS (where several great cryptographers created many polynomial-time Deterministic Turing Machines (DTMs) of a specific type, ran them on their proper descriptions concatenated with some arbitrary strings, deleted them and left only the results from those running, after they died: if those DTMs only permute and sometimes invert the bits on input, is it possible to decide the language formed by such resulting strings within polynomial time?), proves some facts about its computational complexity, and discusses some possible uses on Cryptography, such as into distance keys distribution, online reverse auction and secure communication.
CARP: Context-Aware Reliability Prediction of Black-Box Web Services
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Reliability prediction is an important task in software reliability engineering, which has been widely studied in the last decades. However, modelling and predicting user-perceived reliability of black-box services remain an open research problem. Software services, such as Web services and Web APIs, generally provide black-box functionalities to users through the Internet, thus leading to a lack of their internal information for reliability analysis. Furthermore, the user-perceived service reliability depends not only on the service itself, but also heavily on the invocation context (e.g., service workloads, network conditions), whereby traditional reliability models become ineffective and inappropriate. To address these new challenges posed by blackbox services, in this paper, we propose CARP, a new contextaware reliability prediction approach, which leverages historical usage data from users to construct context-aware reliability models and further provides online reliability prediction results to users. Through context-aware reliability modelling, CARP is able to alleviate the data sparsity problem that heavily limits the prediction accuracy of other existing approaches. The preliminary evaluation results show that CARP can make a significant improvement in reliability prediction accuracy, e.g., about 41% in MAE and 38% in RMSE when only 5% of the data are available.
Joint Active Learning with Feature Selection via CUR Matrix Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents an unsupervised learning approach for simultaneous sample and feature selection, which is in contrast to existing works which mainly tackle these two problems separately. In fact the two tasks are often interleaved with each other: noisy and high-dimensional features will bring adverse effect on sample selection, while informative or representative samples will be beneficial to feature selection. Specifically, we propose a framework to jointly conduct active learning and feature selection based on the CUR matrix decomposition. From the data reconstruction perspective, both the selected samples and features can best approximate the original dataset respectively, such that the selected samples characterized by the features are highly representative. In particular, our method runs in one-shot without the procedure of iterative sample selection for progressive labeling. Thus, our model is especially suitable when there are few labeled samples or even in the absence of supervision, which is a particular challenge for existing methods. As the joint learning problem is NP-hard, the proposed formulation involves a convex but non-smooth optimization problem. We solve it efficiently by an iterative algorithm, and prove its global convergence. Experimental results on publicly available datasets corroborate the efficacy of our method compared with the state-of-the-art.
Global Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the reward distributions of each arm are independent. But in a wide variety of decision problems -- from drug dosage to dynamic pricing -- the expected rewards of different arms are correlated, so that selecting one arm provides information about the expected rewards of other arms as well. We propose and analyze a class of models of such decision problems, which we call {\em global bandits}. In the case in which rewards of all arms are deterministic functions of a single unknown parameter, we construct a greedy policy that achieves {\em bounded regret}, with a bound that depends on the single true parameter of the problem. Hence, this policy selects suboptimal arms only finitely many times with probability one. For this case we also obtain a bound on regret that is {\em independent of the true parameter}; this bound is sub-linear, with an exponent that depends on the informativeness of the arms. We also propose a variant of the greedy policy that achieves $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ worst-case and $\mathcal{O}(1)$ parameter dependent regret. Finally, we perform experiments on dynamic pricing and show that the proposed algorithms achieve significant gains with respect to the well-known benchmarks.
Approximate Fitting of a Circular Arc When Two Points Are Known
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

The task of approximating points with circular arcs is performed in many applications, such as polyline compression, noise filtering, and feature recognition. However, the development of algorithms that perform a significant amount of circular arcs fitting requires an efficient way of fitting circular arcs with complexity O(1). The elegant solution to this task based on an eigenvector problem for a square nonsymmetrical matrix is described in [1]. For the compression algorithm described in [2], it is necessary to solve this task when two points on the arc are known. This paper describes a different approach to efficiently fitting the arcs and solves the task when one or two points are known.
Theory of Optimizing Pseudolinear Performance Measures: Application to F-measure
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Non-linear performance measures are widely used for the evaluation of learning algorithms. For example, $F$-measure is a commonly used performance measure for classification problems in machine learning and information retrieval community. We study the theoretical properties of a subset of non-linear performance measures called pseudo-linear performance measures which includes $F$-measure, \emph{Jaccard Index}, among many others. We establish that many notions of $F$-measures and \emph{Jaccard Index} are pseudo-linear functions of the per-class false negatives and false positives for binary, multiclass and multilabel classification. Based on this observation, we present a general reduction of such performance measure optimization problem to cost-sensitive classification problem with unknown costs. We then propose an algorithm with provable guarantees to obtain an approximately optimal classifier for the $F$-measure by solving a series of cost-sensitive classification problems. The strength of our analysis is to be valid on any dataset and any class of classifiers, extending the existing theoretical results on pseudo-linear measures, which are asymptotic in nature. We also establish the multi-objective nature of the $F$-score maximization problem by linking the algorithm with the weighted-sum approach used in multi-objective optimization. We present numerical experiments to illustrate the relative importance of cost asymmetry and thresholding when learning linear classifiers on various $F$-measure optimization tasks.
The Topology of Biological Networks from a Complexity Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

A complexity-theoretic approach to studying biological networks is proposed. A simple graph representation is used where molecules (DNA, RNA, proteins and chemicals) are vertices and relations between them are directed and signed (promotional (+) or inhibitory (-)) edges. Based on this model, the problem of network evolution (NE) is defined formally as an optimization problem and subsequently proven to be fundamentally hard (NP-hard) by means of reduction from the Knapsack problem (KP). Second, for empirical validation, various biological networks of experimentally-validated interactions are compared against randomly generated networks with varying degree distributions. An NE instance is created using a given real or synthetic (random) network. After being reverse-reduced to a KP instance, each NE instance is fed to a KP solver and the average achieved knapsack value-to-weight ratio is recorded from multiple rounds of simulated evolutionary pressure. The results show that biological networks (and synthetic networks of similar degree distribution) achieve the highest ratios at maximal evolutionary pressure and minimal error tolerance conditions. The more distant (in degree distribution) a synthetic network is from biological networks the lower its achieved ratio. The results shed light on how computational intractability has shaped the evolution of biological networks into their current topology.
Sparsification of Matrices and Compressed Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Compressed sensing is a signal processing technique whereby the limits imposed by the Shannon--Nyquist theorem can be exceeded provided certain conditions are imposed on the signal. Such conditions occur in many real-world scenarios, and compressed sensing has emerging applications in medical imaging, big data, and statistics. Finding practical matrix constructions and computationally efficient recovery algorithms for compressed sensing is an area of intense research interest. Many probabilistic matrix constructions have been proposed, and it is now well known that matrices with entries drawn from a suitable probability distribution are essentially optimal for compressed sensing. Potential applications have motivated the search for constructions of sparse compressed sensing matrices (i.e., matrices containing few non-zero entries). Various constructions have been proposed, and simulations suggest that their performance is comparable to that of dense matrices. In this paper, extensive simulations are presented which suggest that sparsification leads to a marked improvement in compressed sensing performance for a large class of matrix constructions and for many different recovery algorithms.
Skopus: Mining top-k sequential patterns under leverage
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a framework for exact discovery of the top-k sequential patterns under Leverage. It combines (1) a novel definition of the expected support for a sequential pattern - a concept on which most interestingness measures directly rely - with (2) SkOPUS: a new branch-and-bound algorithm for the exact discovery of top-k sequential patterns under a given measure of interest. Our interestingness measure employs the partition approach. A pattern is interesting to the extent that it is more frequent than can be explained by assuming independence between any of the pairs of patterns from which it can be composed. The larger the support compared to the expectation under independence, the more interesting is the pattern. We build on these two elements to exactly extract the k sequential patterns with highest leverage, consistent with our definition of expected support. We conduct experiments on both synthetic data with known patterns and real-world datasets; both experiments confirm the consistency and relevance of our approach with regard to the state of the art. This article was published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and is accessible at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10618-016-0467-9.
Deciding Univariate Polynomial Problems Using Untrusted Certificates in Isabelle/HOL
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We present a proof procedure for univariate real polynomial problems in Isabelle/HOL. The core mathematics of our procedure is based on univariate cylindrical algebraic decomposition. We follow the approach of untrusted certificates, separating solving from verifying: efficient external tools perform expensive real algebraic computations, producing evidence that is formally checked within Isabelle's logic. This allows us to exploit highly-tuned computer algebra systems like Mathematica to guide our procedure without impacting the correctness of its results. We present experiments demonstrating the efficacy of this approach, in many cases yielding orders of magnitude improvements over previous methods.
Commutativity in the Algorithmic Lovasz Local Lemma
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the recent formulation of the Algorithmic Lovász Local Lemma [10,2,3] for finding objects that avoid `bad features', or `flaws'. It extends the Moser-Tardos resampling algorithm [17] to more general discrete spaces. At each step the method picks a flaw present in the current state and goes to a new state according to some prespecified probability distribution (which depends on the current state and the selected flaw). However, it is less flexible than the Moser-Tardos method since [10,2,3] require a specific flaw selection rule, whereas [17] allows an arbitrary rule (and thus can potentially be implemented more efficiently). We formulate a new "commutativity" condition, and prove that it is sufficient for an arbitrary rule to work. It also enables an efficient parallelization under an additional assumption. We then show that existing resampling oracles for perfect matchings and permutations do satisfy this condition.
Experiments on Parallel Training of Deep Neural Network using Model Averaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this work we apply model averaging to parallel training of deep neural network (DNN). Parallelization is done in a model averaging manner. Data is partitioned and distributed to different nodes for local model updates, and model averaging across nodes is done every few minibatches. We use multiple GPUs for data parallelization, and Message Passing Interface (MPI) for communication between nodes, which allows us to perform model averaging frequently without losing much time on communication. We investigate the effectiveness of Natural Gradient Stochastic Gradient Descent (NG-SGD) and Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) pretraining for parallel training in model-averaging framework, and explore the best setups in term of different learning rate schedules, averaging frequencies and minibatch sizes. It is shown that NG-SGD and RBM pretraining benefits parameter-averaging based model training. On the 300h Switchboard dataset, a 9.3 times speedup is achieved using 16 GPUs and 17 times speedup using 32 GPUs with limited decoding accuracy loss.
Scan $B$-Statistic for Kernel Change-Point Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Detecting the emergence of an abrupt change-point is a classic problem in statistics and machine learning. Kernel-based nonparametric statistics have been used for this task which enjoy fewer assumptions on the distributions than the parametric approach and can handle high-dimensional data. In this paper we focus on the scenario when the amount of background data is large, and propose two related computationally efficient kernel-based statistics for change-point detection, which are inspired by the recently developed $B$-statistics. A novel theoretical result of the paper is the characterization of the tail probability of these statistics using the change-of-measure technique, which focuses on characterizing the tail of the detection statistics rather than obtaining its asymptotic distribution under the null distribution. Such approximations are crucial to control the false alarm rate, which corresponds to the significance level in offline change-point detection and the average-run-length in online change-point detection. Our approximations are shown to be highly accurate. Thus, they provide a convenient way to find detection thresholds for both offline and online cases without the need to resort to the more expensive simulations or bootstrapping. We show that our methods perform well on both synthetic data and real data.