This paper concerns the paraconsistent logic LPQ$^{\supset,\mathsf{F}}$ and an application of it in the area of relational database theory. The notions of a relational database, a query applicable to a relational database, and a consistent answer to a query with respect to a possibly inconsistent relational database are considered from the perspective of this logic. This perspective enables among other things the definition of a consistent answer to a query with respect to a possibly inconsistent database without resort to database repairs. In a previous paper, LPQ$^{\supset,\mathsf{F}}$ is presented with a sequent-style natural deduction proof system. In this paper, a sequent calculus proof system is presented because it is common to use a sequent calculus proof system as the basis of proof search procedures and such procedures may form the core of algorithms for computing consistent answers to queries.
We study the problem of detecting the correlation between two Gaussian databases $\mathsf{X}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$ and $\mathsf{Y}^{n\times d}$, each composed of $n$ users with $d$ features. This problem is relevant in the analysis of social media, computational biology, etc. We formulate this as a hypothesis testing problem: under the null hypothesis, these two databases are statistically independent. Under the alternative, however, there exists an unknown permutation $\sigma$ over the set of $n$ users (or, row permutation), such that $\mathsf{X}$ is $\rho$-correlated with $\mathsf{Y}^\sigma$, a permuted version of $\mathsf{Y}$. We determine sharp thresholds at which optimal testing exhibits a phase transition, depending on the asymptotic regime of $n$ and $d$. Specifically, we prove that if $\rho^2d\to0$, as $d\to\infty$, then weak detection (performing slightly better than random guessing) is statistically impossible, irrespectively of the value of $n$. This compliments the performance of a simple test that thresholds the sum all entries of $\mathsf{X}^T\mathsf{Y}$. Furthermore, when $d$ is fixed, we prove that strong detection (vanishing error probability) is impossible for any $\rho<\rho^\star$, where $\rho^\star$ is an explicit function of $d$, while weak detection is again impossible as long as $\rho^2d\to0$. These results close significant gaps in current recent related studies.
For solving combinatorial optimisation problems with metaheuristics, different search operators are applied for sampling new solutions in the neighbourhood of a given solution. It is important to understand the relationship between operators for various purposes, e.g., adaptively deciding when to use which operator to find optimal solutions efficiently. However, it is difficult to theoretically analyse this relationship, especially in the complex solution space of combinatorial optimisation problems. In this paper, we propose to empirically analyse the relationship between operators in terms of the correlation between their local optima and develop a measure for quantifying their relationship. The comprehensive analyses on a wide range of capacitated vehicle routing problem benchmark instances show that there is a consistent pattern in the correlation between commonly used operators. Based on this newly proposed local optima correlation metric, we propose a novel approach for adaptively selecting among the operators during the search process. The core intention is to improve search efficiency by preventing wasting computational resources on exploring neighbourhoods where the local optima have already been reached. Experiments on randomly generated instances and commonly used benchmark datasets are conducted. Results show that the proposed approach outperforms commonly used adaptive operator selection methods.
Courcelle's theorem and its adaptations to cliquewidth have shaped the field of exact parameterized algorithms and are widely considered the archetype of algorithmic meta-theorems. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in developing parameterized approximation algorithms for problems which are not captured by Courcelle's theorem and, in particular, are considered not fixed-parameter tractable under the associated widths. We develop a generalization of Courcelle's theorem that yields efficient approximation schemes for any problem that can be captured by an expanded logic we call Blocked CMSO, capable of making logical statements about the sizes of set variables via so-called weight comparisons. The logic controls weight comparisons via the quantifier-alternation depth of the involved variables, allowing full comparisons for zero-alternation variables and limited comparisons for one-alternation variables. We show that the developed framework threads the very needle of tractability: on one hand it can describe a broad range of approximable problems, while on the other hand we show that the restrictions of our logic cannot be relaxed under well-established complexity assumptions. The running time of our approximation scheme is polynomial in $1/\varepsilon$, allowing us to fully interpolate between faster approximate algorithms and slower exact algorithms. This provides a unified framework to explain the tractability landscape of graph problems parameterized by treewidth and cliquewidth, as well as classical non-graph problems such as Subset Sum and Knapsack.
The flexibility and effectiveness of message passing based graph neural networks (GNNs) induced considerable advances in deep learning on graph-structured data. In such approaches, GNNs recursively update node representations based on their neighbors and they gain expressivity through the use of node and edge attribute vectors. E.g., in computational tasks such as physics and chemistry usage of edge attributes such as relative position or distance proved to be essential. In this work, we address not what kind of attributes to use, but how to condition on this information to improve model performance. We consider three types of conditioning; weak, strong, and pure, which respectively relate to concatenation-based conditioning, gating, and transformations that are causally dependent on the attributes. This categorization provides a unifying viewpoint on different classes of GNNs, from separable convolutions to various forms of message passing networks. We provide an empirical study on the effect of conditioning methods in several tasks in computational chemistry.
Question answering over knowledge bases is considered a difficult problem due to the challenge of generalizing to a wide variety of possible natural language questions. Additionally, the heterogeneity of knowledge base schema items between different knowledge bases often necessitates specialized training for different knowledge base question-answering (KBQA) datasets. To handle questions over diverse KBQA datasets with a unified training-free framework, we propose KB-BINDER, which for the first time enables few-shot in-context learning over KBQA tasks. Firstly, KB-BINDER leverages large language models like Codex to generate logical forms as the draft for a specific question by imitating a few demonstrations. Secondly, KB-BINDER grounds on the knowledge base to bind the generated draft to an executable one with BM25 score matching. The experimental results on four public heterogeneous KBQA datasets show that KB-BINDER can achieve a strong performance with only a few in-context demonstrations. Especially on GraphQA and 3-hop MetaQA, KB-BINDER can even outperform the state-of-the-art trained models. On GrailQA and WebQSP, our model is also on par with other fully-trained models. We believe KB-BINDER can serve as an important baseline for future research. We plan to release all the code and data.
We present a study using new computational methods, based on a novel combination of machine learning for inferring admixture hidden Markov models and probabilistic model checking, to uncover interaction styles in a mobile app. These styles are then used to inform a redesign, which is implemented, deployed, and then analysed using the same methods. The data sets are logged user traces, collected over two six-month deployments of each version, involving thousands of users and segmented into different time intervals. The methods do not assume tasks or absolute metrics such as measures of engagement, but uncover the styles through unsupervised inference of clusters and analysis with probabilistic temporal logic. For both versions there was a clear distinction between the styles adopted by users during the first day/week/month of usage, and during the second and third months, a result we had not anticipated.
We consider the problem of discovering $K$ related Gaussian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the involved graph structures share a consistent causal order and sparse unions of supports. Under the multi-task learning setting, we propose a $l_1/l_2$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for learning $K$ linear structural equation models. We theoretically show that the joint estimator, by leveraging data across related tasks, can achieve a better sample complexity for recovering the causal order (or topological order) than separate estimations. Moreover, the joint estimator is able to recover non-identifiable DAGs, by estimating them together with some identifiable DAGs. Lastly, our analysis also shows the consistency of union support recovery of the structures. To allow practical implementation, we design a continuous optimization problem whose optimizer is the same as the joint estimator and can be approximated efficiently by an iterative algorithm. We validate the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the joint estimator in experiments.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.