We propose a novel constrained Bayesian Optimization (BO) algorithm optimizing the design process of Laterally-Diffused Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (LDMOS) transistors while realizing a target Breakdown Voltage (BV). We convert the constrained BO problem into a conventional BO problem using a Lagrange multiplier. Instead of directly optimizing the traditional Figure-of-Merit (FOM), we set the Lagrangian as the objective function of BO. This adaptive objective function with a changeable Lagrange multiplier can address constrained BO problems which have constraints that require costly evaluations, without the need for additional surrogate models to approximate constraints. Our algorithm enables a device designer to set the target BV in the design space, and obtain a device that satisfies the optimized FOM and the target BV constraint automatically. Utilizing this algorithm, we have also explored the physical limits of the FOM for our devices in 30 - 50 V range within the defined design space.
Computer power is a constantly increasing demand in scientific data analyses, in particular when Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are involved, for example for estimating integral functions or Bayesian posterior probabilities. In this paper, we describe the benefits of a parallel computation of MCMC using a cloud-based, serverless architecture: first, the computation time can be spread over thousands of processes, hence greatly reducing the time the user should wait to have its computation completed. Second, the overhead time required for running in parallel several processes is minor and grows logarithmically with respect to the number of processes. Third, the serverless approach does not require time-consuming efforts for maintaining and updating the computing infrastructure when/if the number of walkers increases or for adapting the code to optimally use the infrastructure. The benefits are illustrated with the computation of the posterior probability distribution of a real astronomical analysis.
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) aims to learn node representations by aligning positive pairs and separating negative ones. However, limited research has been conducted on the inner law behind specific augmentations used in graph-based learning. What kind of augmentation will help downstream performance, how does contrastive learning actually influence downstream tasks, and why the magnitude of augmentation matters? This paper seeks to address these questions by establishing a connection between augmentation and downstream performance, as well as by investigating the generalization of contrastive learning. Our findings reveal that GCL contributes to downstream tasks mainly by separating different classes rather than gathering nodes of the same class. So perfect alignment and augmentation overlap which draw all intra-class samples the same can not explain the success of contrastive learning. Then in order to comprehend how augmentation aids the contrastive learning process, we conduct further investigations into its generalization, finding that perfect alignment that draw positive pair the same could help contrastive loss but is poisonous to generalization, on the contrary, imperfect alignment enhances the model's generalization ability. We analyse the result by information theory and graph spectrum theory respectively, and propose two simple but effective methods to verify the theories. The two methods could be easily applied to various GCL algorithms and extensive experiments are conducted to prove its effectiveness.
We propose a federated averaging Langevin algorithm (FA-LD) for uncertainty quantification and mean predictions with distributed clients. In particular, we generalize beyond normal posterior distributions and consider a general class of models. We develop theoretical guarantees for FA-LD for strongly log-concave distributions with non-i.i.d data and study how the injected noise and the stochastic-gradient noise, the heterogeneity of data, and the varying learning rates affect the convergence. Such an analysis sheds light on the optimal choice of local updates to minimize communication costs. Important to our approach is that the communication efficiency does not deteriorate with the injected noise in the Langevin algorithms. In addition, we examine in our FA-LD algorithm both independent and correlated noise used over different clients. We observe there is a trade-off between the pairs among communication, accuracy, and data privacy. As local devices may become inactive in federated networks, we also show convergence results based on different averaging schemes where only partial device updates are available. In such a case, we discover an additional bias that does not decay to zero.
In this article we consider Bayesian parameter inference for a type of partially observed stochastic Volterra equation (SVE). SVEs are found in many areas such as physics and mathematical finance. In the latter field they can be used to represent long memory in unobserved volatility processes. In many cases of practical interest, SVEs must be time-discretized and then parameter inference is based upon the posterior associated to this time-discretized process. Based upon recent studies on time-discretization of SVEs (e.g. Richard et al. 2021), we use Euler-Maruyama methods for the afore-mentioned discretization. We then show how multilevel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods (Jasra et al. 2018) can be applied in this context. In the examples we study, we give a proof that shows that the cost to achieve a mean square error (MSE) of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^2)$, $\epsilon>0$, is $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-20/9})$. If one uses a single level MCMC method then the cost is $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-38/9})$ to achieve the same MSE. We illustrate these results in the context of state-space and stochastic volatility models, with the latter applied to real data.
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t), such extrapolation ability is impressive. However, most existing KGE works focus on the design of delicate triple modeling function, which mainly tells us how to measure the plausibility of observed triples, but offers limited explanation of why the methods can extrapolate to unseen data, and what are the important factors to help KGE extrapolate. Therefore in this work, we attempt to study the KGE extrapolation of two problems: 1. How does KGE extrapolate to unseen data? 2. How to design the KGE model with better extrapolation ability? For the problem 1, we first discuss the impact factors for extrapolation and from relation, entity and triple level respectively, propose three Semantic Evidences (SEs), which can be observed from train set and provide important semantic information for extrapolation. Then we verify the effectiveness of SEs through extensive experiments on several typical KGE methods. For the problem 2, to make better use of the three levels of SE, we propose a novel GNN-based KGE model, called Semantic Evidence aware Graph Neural Network (SE-GNN). In SE-GNN, each level of SE is modeled explicitly by the corresponding neighbor pattern, and merged sufficiently by the multi-layer aggregation, which contributes to obtaining more extrapolative knowledge representation. Finally, through extensive experiments on FB15k-237 and WN18RR datasets, we show that SE-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on Knowledge Graph Completion task and performs a better extrapolation ability.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
This work investigates the use of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to perform an estimation of the Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) maximum launch range. The WEZ allows the pilot to identify an airspace in which the available missile has a more significant probability of successfully engaging a particular target, i.e., a hypothetical area surrounding an aircraft in which an adversary is vulnerable to a shot. We propose an approach to determine the WEZ of a given missile using 50,000 simulated launches in variate conditions. These simulations are used to train a DNN that can predict the WEZ when the aircraft finds itself on different firing conditions, with a coefficient of determination of 0.99. It provides another procedure concerning preceding research since it employs a non-discretized model, i.e., it considers all directions of the WEZ at once, which has not been done previously. Additionally, the proposed method uses an experimental design that allows for fewer simulation runs, providing faster model training.
This work aims to provide an engagement decision support tool for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat in the context of Defensive Counter Air (DCA) missions. In BVR air combat, engagement decision refers to the choice of the moment the pilot engages a target by assuming an offensive stance and executing corresponding maneuvers. To model this decision, we use the Brazilian Air Force's Aerospace Simulation Environment (\textit{Ambiente de Simula\c{c}\~ao Aeroespacial - ASA} in Portuguese), which generated 3,729 constructive simulations lasting 12 minutes each and a total of 10,316 engagements. We analyzed all samples by an operational metric called the DCA index, which represents, based on the experience of subject matter experts, the degree of success in this type of mission. This metric considers the distances of the aircraft of the same team and the opposite team, the point of Combat Air Patrol, and the number of missiles used. By defining the engagement status right before it starts and the average of the DCA index throughout the engagement, we create a supervised learning model to determine the quality of a new engagement. An algorithm based on decision trees, working with the XGBoost library, provides a regression model to predict the DCA index with a coefficient of determination close to 0.8 and a Root Mean Square Error of 0.05 that can furnish parameters to the BVR pilot to decide whether or not to engage. Thus, using data obtained through simulations, this work contributes by building a decision support system based on machine learning for BVR air combat.
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.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.