Second-order polynomials generalize classical first-order ones in allowing for additional variables that range over functions rather than values. We are motivated by their applications in higher-order computational complexity theory, extending for example classical classes like P or PSPACE to operators in Analysis [doi:10.1137/S0097539794263452, doi:10.1145/2189778.2189780]. The degree subclassifies ordinary polynomial growth into linear, quadratic, cubic etc. In order to similarly classify second-order polynomials, define their degree to be an 'arctic' first-order polynomial (namely a term/expression over variable $D$ and operations $+$ and $\cdot$ and $\max$). Our normal form and semantic uniqueness results for second-order polynomials assert said second-order degree to be well-defined; and it turns out to transform well under (now two kinds of) polynomial composition. More generally we define the degree of a third-order polynomial to be an arctic second-order polynomial, and establish its transformation under three kinds of composition.
The algebraic degree is an important parameter of Boolean functions used in cryptography. When a function in a large number of variables is not given explicitly in algebraic normal form, it might not be feasible to compute its degree. Instead, one can try to estimate the degree using probabilistic tests. We propose a probabilistic test for deciding whether the algebraic degree of a Boolean function $f$ is below a certain value $k$. The test involves picking an affine space of dimension $k$ and testing whether the values on $f$ on that space sum up to zero. If $deg(f)<k$, then $f$ will always pass the test, otherwise it will sometimes pass and sometimes fail the test, depending on which affine space was chosen. The probability of failing the proposed test is closely related to the number of monomials of degree $k$ in a polynomial $g$, averaged over all the polynomials $g$ which are affine equivalent to $f$. We initiate the study of the probability of failing the proposed ``$deg(f)<k$'' test. We show that in the particular case when the degree of $f$ is actually equal to $k$, the probability will be in the interval $(0.288788, 0.5]$, and therefore a small number of runs of the test is sufficient to give, with very high probability, the correct answer. Exact values of this probability for all the polynomials in 8 variables were computed using the representatives listed by Hou and by Langevin and Leander.
We consider leader election in clique networks, where $n$ nodes are connected by point-to-point communication links. For the synchronous clique under simultaneous wake-up, i.e., where all nodes start executing the algorithm in round $1$, we show a tradeoff between the number of messages and the amount of time. More specifically, we show that any deterministic algorithm with a message complexity of $n f(n)$ requires $\Omega\left(\frac{\log n}{\log f(n)+1}\right)$ rounds, for $f(n) = \Omega(\log n)$. Our result holds even if the node IDs are chosen from a relatively small set of size $\Theta(n\log n)$, as we are able to avoid using Ramsey's theorem. We also give an upper bound that improves over the previously-best tradeoff. Our second contribution for the synchronous clique under simultaneous wake-up is to show that $\Omega(n\log n)$ is in fact a lower bound on the message complexity that holds for any deterministic algorithm with a termination time $T(n)$. We complement this result by giving a simple deterministic algorithm that achieves leader election in sublinear time while sending only $o(n\log n)$ messages, if the ID space is of at most linear size. We also show that Las Vegas algorithms (that never fail) require $\Theta(n)$ messages. For the synchronous clique under adversarial wake-up, we show that $\Omega(n^{3/2})$ is a tight lower bound for randomized $2$-round algorithms. Finally, we turn our attention to the asynchronous clique: Assuming adversarial wake-up, we give a randomized algorithm that achieves a message complexity of $O(n^{1 + 1/k})$ and an asynchronous time complexity of $k+8$. For simultaneous wake-up, we translate the deterministic tradeoff algorithm of Afek and Gafni to the asynchronous model, thus partially answering an open problem they pose.
The Plackett--Luce model is a popular approach for ranking data analysis, where a utility vector is employed to determine the probability of each outcome based on Luce's choice axiom. In this paper, we investigate the asymptotic theory of utility vector estimation by maximizing different types of likelihood, such as the full-, marginal-, and quasi-likelihood. We provide a rank-matching interpretation for the estimating equations of these estimators and analyze their asymptotic behavior as the number of items being compared tends to infinity. In particular, we establish the uniform consistency of these estimators under conditions characterized by the topology of the underlying comparison graph sequence and demonstrate that the proposed conditions are sharp for common sampling scenarios such as the nonuniform random hypergraph model and the hypergraph stochastic block model; we also obtain the asymptotic normality of these estimators and discuss the trade-off between statistical efficiency and computational complexity for practical uncertainty quantification. Both results allow for nonuniform and inhomogeneous comparison graphs with varying edge sizes and different asymptotic orders of edge probabilities. We verify our theoretical findings by conducting detailed numerical experiments.
We present an implicit-explicit finite volume scheme for two-fluid single-temperature flow in all Mach number regimes which is based on a symmetric hyperbolic thermodynamically compatible description of the fluid flow. The scheme is stable for large time steps controlled by the interface transport and is computational efficient due to a linear implicit character. The latter is achieved by linearizing along constant reference states given by the asymptotic analysis of the single-temperature model. Thus, the use of a stiffly accurate IMEX Runge Kutta time integration and the centered treatment of pressure based quantities provably guarantee the asymptotic preserving property of the scheme for weakly compressible Euler equations with variable volume fraction. The properties of the first and second order scheme are validated by several numerical test cases.
Attack trees (ATs) are an important tool in security analysis, and an important part of AT analysis is computing metrics. However, metric computation is NP-complete in general. In this paper, we showcase the use of mixed integer linear programming (MILP) as a tool for quantitative analysis. Specifically, we use MILP to solve the open problem of calculating the min time metric of dynamic ATs, i.e., the minimal time to attack a system. We also present two other tools to further improve our MILP method: First, we show how the computation can be sped up by identifying the modules of an AT, i.e. subtrees connected to the rest of the AT via only one node. Second, we define a general semantics for dynamic ATs that significantly relaxes the restrictions on attack trees compared to earlier work, allowing us to apply our methods to a wide variety of ATs. Experiments on a synthetic testing set of large ATs verify that both the integer linear programming approach and modular analysis considerably decrease the computation time of attack time analysis.
An intensive line of research on fixed parameter tractability of integer programming is focused on exploiting the relation between the sparsity of a constraint matrix $A$ and the norm of the elements of its Graver basis. In particular, integer programming is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the primal tree-depth and the entry complexity of $A$, and when parameterized by the dual tree-depth and the entry complexity of $A$; both these parameterization imply that $A$ is sparse, in particular, the number of its non-zero entries is linear in the number of columns or rows, respectively. We study preconditioners transforming a given matrix to a row-equivalent sparse matrix if it exists and provide structural results characterizing the existence of a sparse row-equivalent matrix in terms of the structural properties of the associated column matroid. In particular, our results imply that the $\ell_1$-norm of the Graver basis is bounded by a function of the maximum $\ell_1$-norm of a circuit of $A$. We use our results to design a parameterized algorithm that constructs a matrix row-equivalent to an input matrix $A$ that has small primal/dual tree-depth and entry complexity if such a row-equivalent matrix exists. Our results yield parameterized algorithms for integer programming when parameterized by the $\ell_1$-norm of the Graver basis of the constraint matrix, when parameterized by the $\ell_1$-norm of the circuits of the constraint matrix, when parameterized by the smallest primal tree-depth and entry complexity of a matrix row-equivalent to the constraint matrix, and when parameterized by the smallest dual tree-depth and entry complexity of a matrix row-equivalent to the constraint matrix.
A numerical approach for the Serre-Green-Naghdi (SGN) equations in 2D based on a Fourier spectral method with a Krylov subspace technique is presented. The code is used to study the transverse stability of line solitary waves, 1D solitary waves being exact solutions of the 2D waves independent of the second variable. The study of localised initial data as well as crossing 1D solitary waves does not give an indication of stable structures in SGN solutions localised in two spatial dimensions.
Multivariate sequential data collected in practice often exhibit temporal irregularities, including nonuniform time intervals and component misalignment. However, if uneven spacing and asynchrony are endogenous characteristics of the data rather than a result of insufficient observation, the information content of these irregularities plays a defining role in characterizing the multivariate dependence structure. Existing approaches for probabilistic forecasting either overlook the resulting statistical heterogeneities, are susceptible to imputation biases, or impose parametric assumptions on the data distribution. This paper proposes an end-to-end solution that overcomes these limitations by allowing the observation arrival times to play the central role of model construction, which is at the core of temporal irregularities. To acknowledge temporal irregularities, we first enable unique hidden states for components so that the arrival times can dictate when, how, and which hidden states to update. We then develop a conditional flow representation to non-parametrically represent the data distribution, which is typically non-Gaussian, and supervise this representation by carefully factorizing the log-likelihood objective to select conditional information that facilitates capturing time variation and path dependency. The broad applicability and superiority of the proposed solution are confirmed by comparing it with existing approaches through ablation studies and testing on real-world datasets.
Despite the growing interest in parallel-in-time methods as an approach to accelerate numerical simulations in atmospheric modelling, improving their stability and convergence remains a substantial challenge for their application to operational models. In this work, we study the temporal parallelization of the shallow water equations on the rotating sphere combined with time-stepping schemes commonly used in atmospheric modelling due to their stability properties, namely an Eulerian implicit-explicit (IMEX) method and a semi-Lagrangian semi-implicit method (SL-SI-SETTLS). The main goal is to investigate the performance of parallel-in-time methods, namely Parareal and Multigrid Reduction in Time (MGRIT), when these well-established schemes are used on the coarse discretization levels and provide insights on how they can be improved for better performance. We begin by performing an analytical stability study of Parareal and MGRIT applied to a linearized ordinary differential equation depending on the choice of coarse scheme. Next, we perform numerical simulations of two standard tests to evaluate the stability, convergence and speedup provided by the parallel-in-time methods compared to a fine reference solution computed serially. We also conduct a detailed investigation on the influence of artificial viscosity and hyperviscosity approaches, applied on the coarse discretization levels, on the performance of the temporal parallelization. Both the analytical stability study and the numerical simulations indicate a poorer stability behaviour when SL-SI-SETTLS is used on the coarse levels, compared to the IMEX scheme. With the IMEX scheme, a better trade-off between convergence, stability and speedup compared to serial simulations can be obtained under proper parameters and artificial viscosity choices, opening the perspective of the potential competitiveness for realistic models.
Reliable probabilistic primality tests are fundamental in public-key cryptography. In adversarial scenarios, a composite with a high probability of passing a specific primality test could be chosen. In such cases, we need worst-case error estimates for the test. However, in many scenarios the numbers are randomly chosen and thus have significantly smaller error probability. Therefore, we are interested in average case error estimates. In this paper, we establish such bounds for the strong Lucas primality test, as only worst-case, but no average case error bounds, are currently available. This allows us to use this test with more confidence. We examine an algorithm that draws odd $k$-bit integers uniformly and independently, runs $t$ independent iterations of the strong Lucas test with randomly chosen parameters, and outputs the first number that passes all $t$ consecutive rounds. We attain numerical upper bounds on the probability on returing a composite. Furthermore, we consider a modified version of this algorithm that excludes integers divisible by small primes, resulting in improved bounds. Additionally, we classify the numbers that contribute most to our estimate.