Creativity, or the ability to produce new useful ideas, is commonly associated to the human being; but there are many other examples in nature where this phenomenon can be observed. Inspired by this fact, in engineering and particularly in computational sciences, many different models have been developed to tackle a number of problems. Composing music, a form of art broadly present along the human history, is the main topic addressed in this thesis. Taking advantage of the kind of ideas that bring diversity and creativity to nature and computation, we present Melomics: an algorithmic composition method based on evolutionary search. The solutions have a genetic encoding based on formal grammars and these are interpreted in a complex developmental process followed by a fitness assessment, to produce valid music compositions in standard formats. The system has exhibited a high creative power and versatility to produce music of different types and it has been tested, proving on many occasions the outcome to be indistinguishable from the music made by human composers. The system has also enabled the emergence of a set of completely novel applications: from effective tools to help anyone to easily obtain the precise music that they need, to radically new uses, such as adaptive music for therapy, exercise, amusement and many others. It seems clear that automated composition is an active research area and that countless new uses will be discovered.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
In this perspective paper we study the effect of non independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data on federated online learning to rank (FOLTR) and chart directions for future work in this new and largely unexplored research area of Information Retrieval. In the FOLTR process, clients join a federation to jointly create an effective ranker from the implicit click signal originating in each client, without the need to share data (documents, queries, clicks). A well-known factor that affects the performance of federated learning systems, and that poses serious challenges to these approaches, is the fact that there may be some type of bias in the way the data is distributed across clients. While FOLTR systems are on their own rights a type of federated learning system, the presence and effect of non-IID data in FOLTR has not been studied. To this aim, we first enumerate possible data distribution settings that may showcase data bias across clients and thus give rise to the non-IID problem. Then, we study the impact of each of these settings on the performance of the current state-of-the-art FOLTR approach, the Federated Pairwise Differentiable Gradient Descent (FPDGD), and we highlight which data distributions may pose a problem for FOLTR methods. We also explore how common approaches proposed in the federated learning literature address non-IID issues in FOLTR. This allows us to unveil new research gaps that, we argue, future research in FOLTR should consider. This is an important contribution to the current state of the field of FOLTR because, for FOLTR systems to be deployed, the factors affecting their performance, including the impact of non-IID data, need to thoroughly be understood.
Recruitment in large organisations often involves interviewing a large number of candidates. The process is resource intensive and complex. Therefore, it is important to carry it out efficiently and effectively. Planning the selection process consists of several problems, each of which maps to one or the other well-known computing problem. Research that looks at each of these problems in isolation is rich and mature. However, research that takes an integrated view of the problem is not common. In this paper, we take two of the most important aspects of the application processing problem, namely review/interview panel creation and interview scheduling. We have implemented our approach as a prototype system and have used it to automatically plan the interview process of a real-life data set. Our system provides a distinctly better plan than the existing practice, which is predominantly manual. We have explored various algorithmic options and have customised them to solve these panel creation and interview scheduling problems. We have evaluated these design options experimentally on a real data set and have presented our observations. Our prototype and experimental process and results may be a very good starting point for a full-fledged development project for automating application processing process.
Music Structure Analysis (MSA) consists in segmenting a music piece in several distinct sections. We approach MSA within a compression framework, under the hypothesis that the structure is more easily revealed by a simplified representation of the original content of the song. More specifically, under the hypothesis that MSA is correlated with similarities occurring at the bar scale, this article introduces the use of linear and non-linear compression schemes on barwise audio signals. Compressed representations capture the most salient components of the different bars in the song and are then used to infer the song structure using a dynamic programming algorithm. This work explores both low-rank approximation models such as Principal Component Analysis or Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and "piece-specific" Auto-Encoding Neural Networks, with the objective to learn latent representations specific to a given song. Such approaches do not rely on supervision nor annotations, which are well-known to be tedious to collect and possibly ambiguous in MSA description. In our experiments, several unsupervised compression schemes achieve a level of performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art supervised methods (for 3s tolerance) on the RWC-Pop dataset, showcasing the importance of the barwise compression processing for MSA.
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal likelihood (model evidence), which is computationally challenging, prohibiting its use in many high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems. With Bayesian imaging applications in mind, in this work we present the proximal nested sampling methodology to objectively compare alternative Bayesian imaging models for applications that use images to inform decisions under uncertainty. The methodology is based on nested sampling, a Monte Carlo approach specialised for model comparison, and exploits proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to scale efficiently to large problems and to tackle models that are log-concave and not necessarily smooth (e.g., involving l_1 or total-variation priors). The proposed approach can be applied computationally to problems of dimension O(10^6) and beyond, making it suitable for high-dimensional inverse imaging problems. It is validated on large Gaussian models, for which the likelihood is available analytically, and subsequently illustrated on a range of imaging problems where it is used to analyse different choices of dictionary and measurement model.
There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.
We present a novel static analysis technique to derive higher moments for program variables for a large class of probabilistic loops with potentially uncountable state spaces. Our approach is fully automatic, meaning it does not rely on externally provided invariants or templates. We employ algebraic techniques based on linear recurrences and introduce program transformations to simplify probabilistic programs while preserving their statistical properties. We develop power reduction techniques to further simplify the polynomial arithmetic of probabilistic programs and define the theory of moment-computable probabilistic loops for which higher moments can precisely be computed. Our work has applications towards recovering probability distributions of random variables and computing tail probabilities. The empirical evaluation of our results demonstrates the applicability of our work on many challenging examples.
Upcoming HEP experiments, e.g. at the HL-LHC, are expected to increase the volume of generated data by at least one order of magnitude. In order to retain the ability to analyze the influx of data, full exploitation of modern storage hardware and systems, such as low-latency high-bandwidth NVMe devices and distributed object stores, becomes critical. To this end, the ROOT RNTuple I/O subsystem has been designed to address performance bottlenecks and shortcomings of ROOT's current state of the art TTree I/O subsystem. RNTuple provides a backwards-incompatible redesign of the TTree binary format and access API that evolves the ROOT event data I/O for the challenges of the upcoming decades. It focuses on a compact data format, on performance engineering for modern storage hardware, for instance through making parallel and asynchronous I/O calls by default, and on robust interfaces that are easy to use correctly. In this contribution, we evaluate the RNTuple performance for typical HEP analysis tasks. We compare the throughput delivered by RNTuple to popular I/O libraries outside HEP, such as HDF5 and Apache Parquet. We demonstrate the advantages of RNTuple for HEP analysis workflows and provide an outlook on the road to its use in production.
In 1954, Alston S. Householder published Principles of Numerical Analysis, one of the first modern treatments on matrix decomposition that favored a (block) LU decomposition-the factorization of a matrix into the product of lower and upper triangular matrices. And now, matrix decomposition has become a core technology in machine learning, largely due to the development of the back propagation algorithm in fitting a neural network. The sole aim of this survey is to give a self-contained introduction to concepts and mathematical tools in numerical linear algebra and matrix analysis in order to seamlessly introduce matrix decomposition techniques and their applications in subsequent sections. However, we clearly realize our inability to cover all the useful and interesting results concerning matrix decomposition and given the paucity of scope to present this discussion, e.g., the separated analysis of the Euclidean space, Hermitian space, Hilbert space, and things in the complex domain. We refer the reader to literature in the field of linear algebra for a more detailed introduction to the related fields.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.