In this note, we introduce a general version of the well-known elliptical potential lemma that is a widely used technique in the analysis of algorithms in sequential learning and decision-making problems. We consider a stochastic linear bandit setting where a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a set of given actions, observes their noisy rewards, and aims to maximize her cumulative expected reward over a decision-making horizon. The elliptical potential lemma is a key tool for quantifying uncertainty in estimating parameters of the reward function, but it requires the noise and the prior distributions to be Gaussian. Our general elliptical potential lemma relaxes this Gaussian requirement which is a highly non-trivial extension for a number of reasons; unlike the Gaussian case, there is no closed-form solution for the covariance matrix of the posterior distribution, the covariance matrix is not a deterministic function of the actions, and the covariance matrix is not decreasing with respect to the semidefinite inequality. While this result is of broad interest, we showcase an application of it to prove an improved Bayesian regret bound for the well-known Thompson sampling algorithm in stochastic linear bandits with changing action sets where prior and noise distributions are general. This bound is minimax optimal up to constants.
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In this paper we propose and analyze finite element discontinuous Galerkin methods for the one- and two-dimensional stochastic Maxwell equations with multiplicative noise. The discrete energy law of the semi-discrete DG methods were studied. Optimal error estimate of the semi-discrete method is obtained for the one-dimensional case, and the two-dimensional case on both rectangular meshes and triangular meshes under certain mesh assumptions. Strong Taylor 2.0 scheme is used as the temporal discretization. Both one- and two-dimensional numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical analysis results.
We employ kernel-based approaches that use samples from a probability distribution to approximate a Kolmogorov operator on a manifold. The self-tuning variable-bandwidth kernel method [Berry & Harlim, Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal., 40(1):68--96, 2016] computes a large, sparse matrix that approximates the differential operator. Here, we use the eigendecomposition of the discretization to (i) invert the operator, solving a differential equation, and (ii) represent gradient vector fields on the manifold. These methods only require samples from the underlying distribution and, therefore, can be applied in high dimensions or on geometrically complex manifolds when spatial discretizations are not available. We also employ an efficient $k$-$d$ tree algorithm to compute the sparse kernel matrix, which is a computational bottleneck.
We give a fast algorithm for sampling uniform solutions of general constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in a local lemma regime. The expected running time of our algorithm is near-linear in $n$ and a fixed polynomial in $\Delta$, where $n$ is the number of variables and $\Delta$ is the max degree of constraints. Previously, up to similar conditions, sampling algorithms with running time polynomial in both $n$ and $\Delta$, only existed for the almost atomic case, where each constraint is violated by a small number of forbidden local configurations. Our sampling approach departs from all previous fast algorithms for sampling LLL, which were based on Markov chains. A crucial step of our algorithm is a recursive marginal sampler that is of independent interests. Within a local lemma regime, this marginal sampler can draw a random value for a variable according to its marginal distribution, at a local cost independent of the size of the CSP.
This paper focuses on stochastic saddle point problems with decision-dependent distributions. These are problems whose objective is the expected value of a stochastic payoff function, where random variables are drawn from a distribution induced by a distributional map. For general distributional maps, the problem of finding saddle points is in general computationally burdensome, even if the distribution is known. To enable a tractable solution approach, we introduce the notion of equilibrium points -- which are saddle points for the stationary stochastic minimax problem that they induce -- and provide conditions for their existence and uniqueness. We demonstrate that the distance between the two solution types is bounded provided that the objective has a strongly-convex-strongly-concave payoff and a Lipschitz continuous distributional map. We develop deterministic and stochastic primal-dual algorithms and demonstrate their convergence to the equilibrium point. In particular, by modeling errors emerging from a stochastic gradient estimator as sub-Weibull random variables, we provide error bounds in expectation and in high probability that hold for each iteration. Moreover, we show convergence to a neighborhood almost surely. Finally, we investigate a condition on the distributional map -- which we call opposing mixture dominance -- that ensures that the objective is strongly-convex-strongly-concave. We tailor the convergence results for the primal-dual algorithms to this opposing mixture dominance setup.
The naive importance sampling (IS) estimator generally does not work well in examples involving simultaneous inference on several targets, as the importance weights can take arbitrarily large values, making the estimator highly unstable. In such situations, alternative multiple IS estimators involving samples from multiple proposal distributions are preferred. Just like the naive IS, the success of these multiple IS estimators crucially depends on the choice of the proposal distributions. The selection of these proposal distributions is the focus of this article. We propose three methods: (i) a geometric space filling approach, (ii) a minimax variance approach, and (iii) a maximum entropy approach. The first two methods are applicable to any IS estimator, whereas the third approach is described in the context of Doss's (2010) two-stage IS estimator. For the first method, we propose a suitable measure of 'closeness' based on the symmetric Kullback-Leibler divergence, while the second and third approaches use estimates of asymptotic variances of Doss's (2010) IS estimator and Geyer's (1994) reverse logistic regression estimator, respectively. Thus, when samples from the proposal distributions are obtained by running Markov chains, we provide consistent spectral variance estimators for these asymptotic variances. The proposed methods for selecting proposal densities are illustrated using various detailed examples.
The multiplicity Schwartz-Zippel lemma asserts that over a field, a low-degree polynomial cannot vanish with high multiplicity very often on a sufficiently large product set. Since its discovery in a work of Dvir, Kopparty, Saraf and Sudan [SIAM J. Comput., 2013], the lemma has found numerous applications in both math and computer science; in particular, in the definition and properties of multiplicity codes by Kopparty, Saraf and Yekhanin [J. ACM, 2014]. In this work, we show how to algorithmize the multiplicity Schwartz-Zippel lemma for arbitrary product sets over any field. In other words, we give an efficient algorithm for unique decoding of multivariate multiplicity codes from half their minimum distance on arbitrary product sets over all fields. Previously, such an algorithm was known either when the underlying product set had a nice algebraic structure: for instance, was a subfield (by Kopparty [ToC, 2015]) or when the underlying field had large (or zero) characteristic, the multiplicity parameter was sufficiently large and the multiplicity code had distance bounded away from $1$ (Bhandari, Harsha, Kumar and Sudan [STOC 2021]). In particular, even unique decoding of bivariate multiplicity codes with multiplicity two from half their minimum distance was not known over arbitrary product sets over any field. Our algorithm builds upon a result of Kim and Kopparty [ToC, 2017] who gave an algorithmic version of the Schwartz-Zippel lemma (without multiplicities) or equivalently, an efficient algorithm for unique decoding of Reed-Muller codes over arbitrary product sets. We introduce a refined notion of distance based on the multiplicity Schwartz-Zippel lemma and design a unique decoding algorithm for this distance measure. On the way, we give an alternate analysis of Forney's classical generalized minimum distance decoder that might be of independent interest.
Implementation of many statistical methods for large, multivariate data sets requires one to solve a linear system that, depending on the method, is of the dimension of the number of observations or each individual data vector. This is often the limiting factor in scaling the method with data size and complexity. In this paper we illustrate the use of Krylov subspace methods to address this issue in a statistical solution to a source separation problem in cosmology where the data size is prohibitively large for direct solution of the required system. Two distinct approaches are described: one that uses the method of conjugate gradients directly to the Kronecker-structured problem and another that reformulates the system as a Sylvester matrix equation. We show that both approaches produce an accurate solution within an acceptable computation time and with practical memory requirements for the data size that is currently available.
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have nowadays gained particular attention. In this paper, we study two variants of this kind, namely, the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics. We prove their convergence to the objective distribution in terms of KL-divergence under the sole assumptions of smoothness and Log-Sobolev inequality which are weaker conditions than those used in prior works for these algorithms. With the batch size and the inner loop length set to $\sqrt{n}$, the gradient complexity to achieve an $\epsilon$-precision is $\tilde{O}((n+dn^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})\gamma^2 L^2\alpha^{-2})$, which is an improvement from any previous analyses. We also show some essential applications of our result to non-convex optimization.
While the theoretical analysis of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has made significant progress for pseudo-Boolean optimization problems in the last 25 years, only sporadic theoretical results exist on how EAs solve permutation-based problems. To overcome the lack of permutation-based benchmark problems, we propose a general way to transfer the classic pseudo-Boolean benchmarks into benchmarks defined on sets of permutations. We then conduct a rigorous runtime analysis of the permutation-based $(1+1)$ EA proposed by Scharnow, Tinnefeld, and Wegener (2004) on the analogues of the \textsc{LeadingOnes} and \textsc{Jump} benchmarks. The latter shows that, different from bit-strings, it is not only the Hamming distance that determines how difficult it is to mutate a permutation $\sigma$ into another one $\tau$, but also the precise cycle structure of $\sigma \tau^{-1}$. For this reason, we also regard the more symmetric scramble mutation operator. We observe that it not only leads to simpler proofs, but also reduces the runtime on jump functions with odd jump size by a factor of $\Theta(n)$. Finally, we show that a heavy-tailed version of the scramble operator, as in the bit-string case, leads to a speed-up of order $m^{\Theta(m)}$ on jump functions with jump size~$m$.%
Statistical-Computational Trade-offs in Tensor PCA and Related Problems via Communication Complexity
Tensor PCA is a stylized statistical inference problem introduced by Montanari and Richard to study the computational difficulty of estimating an unknown parameter from higher-order moment tensors. Unlike its matrix counterpart, Tensor PCA exhibits a statistical-computational gap, i.e., a sample size regime where the problem is information-theoretically solvable but conjectured to be computationally hard. This paper derives computational lower bounds on the run-time of memory bounded algorithms for Tensor PCA using communication complexity. These lower bounds specify a trade-off among the number of passes through the data sample, the sample size, and the memory required by any algorithm that successfully solves Tensor PCA. While the lower bounds do not rule out polynomial-time algorithms, they do imply that many commonly-used algorithms, such as gradient descent and power method, must have a higher iteration count when the sample size is not large enough. Similar lower bounds are obtained for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis, a family of statistical estimation problems in which low-order moment tensors carry no information about the unknown parameter. Finally, stronger lower bounds are obtained for an asymmetric variant of Tensor PCA and related statistical estimation problems. These results explain why many estimators for these problems use a memory state that is significantly larger than the effective dimensionality of the parameter of interest.
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