We formulate a framework for describing behaviour of effectful higher-order recursive programs. Examples of effects are implemented using effect operations, and include: execution cost, nondeterminism, global store and interaction with a user. The denotational semantics of a program is given by a coinductive tree in a monad, which combines potential return values of the program in terms of effect operations. Using a simple test logic, we construct two sorts of predicate liftings, which lift predicates on a result type to predicates on computations that produce results of that type, each capturing a facet of program behaviour. Firstly, we study inductive predicate liftings which can be used to describe effectful notions of total correctness. Secondly, we study coinductive predicate liftings, which describe effectful notions of partial correctness. The two constructions are dual in the sense that one can be used to disprove the other. The predicate liftings are used as a basis for an endogenous logic of behavioural properties for higher-order programs. The program logic has a derivable notion of negation, arising from the duality of the two sorts of predicate liftings, and it generates a program equivalence which subsumes a notion of bisimilarity. Appropriate definitions of inductive and coinductive predicate liftings are given for a multitude of effect examples. The whole development has been fully formalized in the Agda proof assistant.
Current challenges of the manufacturing industry require modular and changeable manufacturing systems that can be adapted to variable conditions with little effort. At the same time, production recipes typically represent important company know-how that should not be directly tied to changing plant configurations. Thus, there is a need to model general production recipes independent of specific plant layouts. For execution of such a recipe however, a binding to then available production resources needs to be made. In this contribution, select a suitable modeling language to model and execute such recipes. Furthermore, we present an approach to solve the issue of recipe modeling and execution in modular plants using semantically modeled capabilities and skills as well as BPMN. We make use of BPMN to model \emph{capability processes}, i.e. production processes referencing abstract descriptions of resource functions. These capability processes are not bound to a certain plant layout, as there can be multiple resources fulfilling the same capability. For execution, every capability in a capability process is replaced by a skill realizing it, effectively creating a \emph{skill process} consisting of various skill invocations. The presented solution is capable of orchestrating and executing complex processes that integrate production steps with typical IT functionalities such as error handling, user interactions and notifications. Benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a flexible manufacturing system.
In a sports competition, a team might lose a powerful incentive to exert full effort if its final rank does not depend on the outcome of the matches still to be played. Therefore, the organiser should reduce the probability of such a situation to the extent possible. Our paper provides a classification scheme to identify these weakly (where one team is indifferent) or strongly (where both teams are indifferent) stakeless games. A statistical model is estimated to simulate the UEFA Champions League groups and compare the candidate schedules used in the 2021/22 season according to the competitiveness of the matches played in the last round(s). The option followed in four of the eight groups is found to be optimal under a wide set of parameters. Minimising the number of strongly stakeless matches is verified to be a likely goal in the computer draw of the fixture that remains hidden from the public.
Conditional behavior prediction (CBP) builds up the foundation for a coherent interactive prediction and planning framework that can enable more efficient and less conservative maneuvers in interactive scenarios. In CBP task, we train a prediction model approximating the posterior distribution of target agents' future trajectories conditioned on the future trajectory of an assigned ego agent. However, we argue that CBP may provide overly confident anticipation on how the autonomous agent may influence the target agents' behavior. Consequently, it is risky for the planner to query a CBP model. Instead, we should treat the planned trajectory as an intervention and let the model learn the trajectory distribution under intervention. We refer to it as the interventional behavior prediction (IBP) task. Moreover, to properly evaluate an IBP model with offline datasets, we propose a Shapley-value-based metric to testify if the prediction model satisfies the inherent temporal independence of an interventional distribution. We show that the proposed metric can effectively identify a CBP model violating the temporal independence, which plays an important role when establishing IBP benchmarks.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
We consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of the drift and diffusion coefficients of a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE), based on $n$ independent replicates $\left\{X_i(t)\::\: t\in [0,1]\right\}_{1 \leq i \leq n}$, observed sparsely and irregularly on the unit interval, and subject to additive noise corruption. By \textit{sparse} we intend to mean that the number of measurements per path can be arbitrary (as small as two), and remain constant with respect to $n$. We focus on time-inhomogeneous SDE of the form $dX_t = \mu(t)X_t^{\alpha}dt + \sigma(t)X_t^{\beta}dW_t$, where $\alpha \in \{0,1\}$ and $\beta \in \{0,1/2,1\}$, which includes prominent examples such as Brownian motion, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, geometric Brownian motion, and Brownian bridge. Our estimators are constructed by relating the local (drift/diffusion) parameters of the diffusion to their global parameters (mean/covariance, and their derivatives) by means of an apparently novel PDE. This allows us to use methods inspired by functional data analysis, and pool information across the sparsely measured paths. The methodology we develop is fully non-parametric and avoids any functional form specification on the time-dependency of either the drift function or the diffusion function. We establish almost sure uniform asymptotic convergence rates of the proposed estimators as the number of observed curves $n$ grows to infinity. Our rates are non-asymptotic in the number of measurements per path, explicitly reflecting how different sampling frequency might affect the speed of convergence. Our framework suggests possible further fruitful interactions between FDA and SDE methods in problems with replication.
Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.
Relation prediction for knowledge graphs aims at predicting missing relationships between entities. Despite the importance of inductive relation prediction, most previous works are limited to a transductive setting and cannot process previously unseen entities. The recent proposed subgraph-based relation reasoning models provided alternatives to predict links from the subgraph structure surrounding a candidate triplet inductively. However, we observe that these methods often neglect the directed nature of the extracted subgraph and weaken the role of relation information in the subgraph modeling. As a result, they fail to effectively handle the asymmetric/anti-symmetric triplets and produce insufficient embeddings for the target triplets. To this end, we introduce a \textbf{C}\textbf{o}mmunicative \textbf{M}essage \textbf{P}assing neural network for \textbf{I}nductive re\textbf{L}ation r\textbf{E}asoning, \textbf{CoMPILE}, that reasons over local directed subgraph structures and has a vigorous inductive bias to process entity-independent semantic relations. In contrast to existing models, CoMPILE strengthens the message interactions between edges and entitles through a communicative kernel and enables a sufficient flow of relation information. Moreover, we demonstrate that CoMPILE can naturally handle asymmetric/anti-symmetric relations without the need for explosively increasing the number of model parameters by extracting the directed enclosing subgraphs. Extensive experiments show substantial performance gains in comparison to state-of-the-art methods on commonly used benchmark datasets with variant inductive settings.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.