This paper studies the statistical and computational limits of high-order clustering with planted structures. We focus on two clustering models, constant high-order clustering (CHC) and rank-one higher-order clustering (ROHC), and study the methods and theory for testing whether a cluster exists (detection) and identifying the support of cluster (recovery). Specifically, we identify the sharp boundaries of signal-to-noise ratio for which CHC and ROHC detection/recovery are statistically possible. We also develop the tight computational thresholds: when the signal-to-noise ratio is below these thresholds, we prove that polynomial-time algorithms cannot solve these problems under the computational hardness conjectures of hypergraphic planted clique (HPC) detection and hypergraphic planted dense subgraph (HPDS) recovery. We also propose polynomial-time tensor algorithms that achieve reliable detection and recovery when the signal-to-noise ratio is above these thresholds. Both sparsity and tensor structures yield the computational barriers in high-order tensor clustering. The interplay between them results in significant differences between high-order tensor clustering and matrix clustering in literature in aspects of statistical and computational phase transition diagrams, algorithmic approaches, hardness conjecture, and proof techniques. To our best knowledge, we are the first to give a thorough characterization of the statistical and computational trade-off for such a double computational-barrier problem. Finally, we provide evidence for the computational hardness conjectures of HPC detection (via low-degree polynomial and Metropolis methods) and HPDS recovery (via low-degree polynomial method).
We give simply exponential lower bounds on the probabilities of a given strongly Rayleigh distribution, depending only on its expectation. This resolves a weak version of a problem left open by Karlin-Klein-Oveis Gharan in their recent breakthrough work on metric TSP, and this resolution leads to a minor improvement of their approximation factor for metric TSP. Our results also allow for a more streamlined analysis of the algorithm. To achieve these new bounds, we build upon the work of Gurvits-Leake on the use of the productization technique for bounding the capacity of a real stable polynomial. This technique allows one to reduce certain inequalities for real stable polynomials to products of affine linear forms, which have an underlying matrix structure. In this paper, we push this technique further by characterizing the worst-case polynomials via bipartitioned forests. This rigid combinatorial structure yields a clean induction argument, which implies our stronger bounds. In general, we believe the results of this paper will lead to further improvement and simplification of the analysis of various combinatorial and probabilistic bounds and algorithms.
As the third-generation neural network, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has the advantages of low power consumption and high energy efficiency, making it suitable for implementation on edge devices. More recently, the most advanced SNN, Spikformer, combines the self-attention module from Transformer with SNN to achieve remarkable performance. However, it adopts larger channel dimensions in MLP layers, leading to an increased number of redundant model parameters. To effectively decrease the computational complexity and weight parameters of the model, we explore the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and discover a very sparse ($\ge$90%) subnetwork that achieves comparable performance to the original network. Furthermore, we also design a lightweight token selector module, which can remove unimportant background information from images based on the average spike firing rate of neurons, selecting only essential foreground image tokens to participate in attention calculation. Based on that, we present SparseSpikformer, a co-design framework aimed at achieving sparsity in Spikformer through token and weight pruning techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework can significantly reduce 90% model parameters and cut down Giga Floating-Point Operations (GFLOPs) by 20% while maintaining the accuracy of the original model.
The advent of Web3 has ushered in a new era of decentralized digital economy, promising a shift from centralized authority to distributed, peer-to-peer interactions. However, the underlying infrastructure of this decentralized ecosystem often relies on centralized cloud providers, creating a paradoxical concentration of value and power. This paper investigates the mechanics of value accrual and extraction within the Web3 ecosystem, focusing on the roles and revenues of centralized clouds. Through an analysis of publicly available material, we elucidate the financial implications of cloud services in purportedly decentralized contexts. We further explore the individual's perspective of value creation and accumulation, examining the interplay between user participation and centralized monetization strategies. Key findings indicate that while blockchain technology has the potential to significantly reduce infrastructure costs for financial services, the current Web3 landscape is marked by a substantial reliance on cloud providers for hosting, scalability, and performance.
Measures of data depth have been studied extensively for point data. Motivated by recent work on analysis, clustering, and identifying representative elements in sets of trajectories, we introduce {\em curve stabbing depth} to quantify how deeply a given curve $Q$ is located relative to a given set $\cal C$ of curves in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Curve stabbing depth evaluates the average number of elements of $\cal C$ stabbed by rays rooted along the length of $Q$. We describe an $O(n^3 + n^2 m\log^2m+nm^2\log^2 m)$-time algorithm for computing curve stabbing depth when $Q$ is an $m$-vertex polyline and $\cal C$ is a set of $n$ polylines, each with $O(m)$ vertices.
Separation logic's compositionality and local reasoning properties have led to significant advances in scalable static analysis. But program analysis has new challenges -- many programs display computational effects and, orthogonally, static analyzers must handle incorrectness too. We present Outcome Separation Logic (OSL), a program logic that is sound for both correctness and incorrectness reasoning in programs with varying effects. OSL has a frame rule -- just like separation logic -- but uses different underlying assumptions that open up local reasoning to a larger class of properties than can be handled by any single existing logic. Building on this foundational theory, we also define symbolic execution algorithms that use bi-abduction to derive specifications for programs with effects. This involves a new tri-abduction procedure to analyze programs whose execution branches due to effects such as nondeterministic or probabilistic choice. This work furthers the compositionality promised by separation logic by opening up the possibility for greater reuse of analysis tools across two dimensions: bug-finding vs verification in programs with varying effects.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
Neural architecture-based recommender systems have achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, when dealing with highly sparse data, they still fall short of expectation. Self-supervised learning (SSL), as an emerging technique to learn with unlabeled data, recently has drawn considerable attention in many fields. There is also a growing body of research proceeding towards applying SSL to recommendation for mitigating the data sparsity issue. In this survey, a timely and systematical review of the research efforts on self-supervised recommendation (SSR) is presented. Specifically, we propose an exclusive definition of SSR, on top of which we build a comprehensive taxonomy to divide existing SSR methods into four categories: contrastive, generative, predictive, and hybrid. For each category, the narrative unfolds along its concept and formulation, the involved methods, and its pros and cons. Meanwhile, to facilitate the development and evaluation of SSR models, we release an open-source library SELFRec, which incorporates multiple benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, and has implemented a number of state-of-the-art SSR models for empirical comparison. Finally, we shed light on the limitations in the current research and outline the future research directions.
Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel timeaware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.
This paper focuses on two fundamental tasks of graph analysis: community detection and node representation learning, which capture the global and local structures of graphs, respectively. In the current literature, these two tasks are usually independently studied while they are actually highly correlated. We propose a probabilistic generative model called vGraph to learn community membership and node representation collaboratively. Specifically, we assume that each node can be represented as a mixture of communities, and each community is defined as a multinomial distribution over nodes. Both the mixing coefficients and the community distribution are parameterized by the low-dimensional representations of the nodes and communities. We designed an effective variational inference algorithm which regularizes the community membership of neighboring nodes to be similar in the latent space. Experimental results on multiple real-world graphs show that vGraph is very effective in both community detection and node representation learning, outperforming many competitive baselines in both tasks. We show that the framework of vGraph is quite flexible and can be easily extended to detect hierarchical communities.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.