In this paper, we construct and compare algorithmic approaches to solve the Preference Consistency Problem for preference statements based on hierarchical models. Instances of this problem contain a set of preference statements that are direct comparisons (strict and non-strict) between some alternatives, and a set of evaluation functions by which all alternatives can be rated. An instance is consistent based on hierarchical preference models, if there exists an hierarchical model on the evaluation functions that induces an order relation on the alternatives by which all relations given by the preference statements are satisfied. Deciding if an instance is consistent is known to be NP-complete for hierarchical models. We develop three approaches to solve this decision problem. The first involves a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation, the other two are recursive algorithms that are based on properties of the problem by which the search space can be pruned. Our experiments on synthetic data show that the recursive algorithms are faster than solving the MILP formulation and that the ratio between the running times increases extremely quickly.
In this paper, we investigate the \textsc{Grundy Coloring} problem for graphs with a cluster modulator, a structure commonly found in dense graphs. The Grundy chromatic number, representing the maximum number of colors needed for the first-fit coloring of a graph in the worst-case vertex ordering, is known to be $W[1]$-hard when parameterized by the number of colors required by the most adversarial ordering. We focus on fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms for solving this problem on graph classes characterized by dense substructures, specifically those with a cluster modulator. A cluster modulator is a vertex subset whose removal results in a cluster graph (a disjoint union of cliques). We present FPT algorithms for graphs where the cluster graph consists of one, two, or $k$ cliques, leveraging the cluster modulator's properties to achieve the best-known FPT runtimes, parameterized by both the modulator's size and the number of cliques.
We study a fundamental problem in the evaluation of large language models that we call training on the test task. Unlike wrongful practices like training on the test data, leakage, or data contamination, training on the test task is not a malpractice. Rather, the term describes a growing set of practices that utilize knowledge about evaluation tasks at training time. We demonstrate that training on the test task confounds both relative model evaluations and claims about emergent capabilities. We argue that the seeming superiority of one model family over another may be explained by a different degree of training on the test task. To this end, we propose an effective method to adjust for the effect of training on the test task on benchmark evaluations. Put simply, to fine-tune each model under comparison on the same task-relevant data before evaluation. We then show that instances of emergent behavior disappear gradually as models train on the test task. Our work promotes a new perspective on the evaluation of large language models with broad implications for benchmarking and the study of emergent capabilities
In this paper, we study the behavior of the Upper Confidence Bound-Variance (UCB-V) algorithm for Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problems, a variant of the canonical Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm that incorporates variance estimates into its decision-making process. More precisely, we provide an asymptotic characterization of the arm-pulling rates of UCB-V, extending recent results for the canonical UCB in Kalvit and Zeevi (2021) and Khamaru and Zhang (2024). In an interesting contrast to the canonical UCB, we show that the behavior of UCB-V can exhibit instability, meaning that the arm-pulling rates may not always be asymptotically deterministic. Besides the asymptotic characterization, we also provide non-asymptotic bounds for arm-pulling rates in the high probability regime, offering insights into regret analysis. As an application of this high probability result, we show that UCB-V can achieve a refined regret bound, previously unknown even for more complicate and advanced variance-aware online decision-making algorithms.
This paper studies the estimation of large precision matrices and Cholesky factors obtained by observing a Gaussian process at many locations. Under general assumptions on the precision and the observations, we show that the sample complexity scales poly-logarithmically with the size of the precision matrix and its Cholesky factor. The key challenge in these estimation tasks is the polynomial growth of the condition number of the target matrices with their size. For precision estimation, our theory hinges on an intuitive local regression technique on the lattice graph which exploits the approximate sparsity implied by the screening effect. For Cholesky factor estimation, we leverage a block-Cholesky decomposition recently used to establish complexity bounds for sparse Cholesky factorization.
We introduce a new erasure decoder that applies to arbitrary quantum LDPC codes. Dubbed the cluster decoder, it generalizes the decomposition idea of Vertical-Horizontal (VH) decoding introduced by Connelly et al. in 2022. Like the VH decoder, the idea is to first run the peeling decoder and then post-process the resulting stopping set. The cluster decoder breaks the stopping set into a tree of clusters which can be solved sequentially via Gaussian Elimination (GE). By allowing clusters of unconstrained size, this decoder achieves maximum-likelihood (ML) performance with reduced complexity compared with full GE. When GE is applied only to clusters whose sizes are less than a constant, the performance is degraded but the complexity becomes linear in the block length. Our simulation results show that, for hypergraph product codes, the cluster decoder with constant cluster size achieves near-ML performance similar to VH decoding in the low-erasure-rate regime. For the general quantum LDPC codes we studied, the cluster decoder can be used to estimate the ML performance curve with reduced complexity over a wide range of erasure rates.
A directive known as NIS2 was enacted in the European Union (EU) in late 2022. It deals particularly with European critical infrastructures, enlarging their scope substantially from an older directive that only considered the energy and transport sectors as critical. The directive's focus is on cyber security of critical infrastructures, although together with other new EU laws it expands to other security domains as well. Given the importance of the directive and most of all the importance of critical infrastructures, the paper presents a systematic literature review on academic research addressing the NIS2 directive either explicitly or implicitly. According to the review, existing research has often framed and discussed the directive with the EU's other cyber security laws. In addition, existing research has often operated in numerous contextual areas, including industrial control systems, telecommunications, the energy and water sectors, and infrastructures for information sharing and situational awareness. Despite the large scope of existing research, the review reveals noteworthy research gaps and worthwhile topics to examine in further research.
We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with adversarial constraints, where an online algorithm must make repeated decisions to minimize both convex loss functions and cumulative constraint violations. We focus on a setting where the algorithm has access to predictions of the loss and constraint functions. Our results show that we can improve the current best bounds of $ O(\sqrt{T}) $ regret and $ \tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}) $ cumulative constraint violations to $ O(\sqrt{E_T(f)}) $ and $ \tilde{O}(\sqrt{E_T(g)}) $, respectively, where $ E_T(f) $ and $ E_T(g) $ represent the cumulative prediction errors of the loss and constraint functions. In the worst case, where $ E_T(f) = O(T) $ and $ E_T(g) = O(T) $ (assuming bounded loss and constraint functions), our rates match the prior $ O(\sqrt{T}) $ results. However, when the loss and constraint predictions are accurate, our approach yields significantly smaller regret and cumulative constraint violations. Notably, if the constraint function remains constant over time, we achieve $ \tilde{O}(1) $ cumulative constraint violation, aligning with prior results.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.