This paper deals with Niho functions which are one of the most important classes of functions thanks to their close connections with a wide variety of objects from mathematics, such as spreads and oval polynomials or from applied areas, such as symmetric cryptography, coding theory and sequences. In this paper, we investigate specifically the $c$-differential uniformity of the power function $F(x)=x^{s(2^m-1)+1}$ over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$, where $n=2m$, $m$ is odd and $s=(2^k+1)^{-1}$ is the multiplicative inverse of $2^k+1$ modulo $2^m+1$, and show that the $c$-differential uniformity of $F(x)$ is $2^{\gcd(k,m)}+1$ by carrying out some subtle manipulation of certain equations over $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$. Notably, $F(x)$ has a very low $c$-differential uniformity equals $3$ when $k$ and $m$ are coprime.
In this paper, we study the following problem. Consider a setting where a proposal is offered to the vertices of a given network $G$, and the vertices must conduct a vote and decide whether to accept the proposal or reject it. Each vertex $v$ has its own valuation of the proposal; we say that $v$ is ``happy'' if its valuation is positive (i.e., it expects to gain from adopting the proposal) and ``sad'' if its valuation is negative. However, vertices do not base their vote merely on their own valuation. Rather, a vertex $v$ is a \emph{proponent} of the proposal if a majority of its neighbors are happy with it and an \emph{opponent} in the opposite case. At the end of the vote, the network collectively accepts the proposal whenever a majority of its vertices are proponents. We study this problem on regular graphs with loops. Specifically, we consider the class ${\mathcal G}_{n|d|h}$ of $d$-regular graphs of odd order $n$ with all $n$ loops and $h$ happy vertices. We are interested in establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for the class ${\mathcal G}_{n|d|h}$ to contain a labeled graph accepting the proposal, as well as conditions to contain a graph rejecting the proposal. We also discuss connections to the existing literature, including that on majority domination, and investigate the properties of the obtained conditions.
The aim of this article is to analyze numerical schemes using two-layer neural networks with infinite width for the resolution of the high-dimensional Poisson-Neumann partial differential equations (PDEs) with Neumann boundary conditions. Using Barron's representation of the solution with a measure of probability, the energy is minimized thanks to a gradient curve dynamic on the $2$ Wasserstein space of parameters defining the neural network. Inspired by the work from Bach and Chizat, we prove that if the gradient curve converges, then the represented function is the solution of the elliptic equation considered. Numerical experiments are given to show the potential of the method.
This study investigates a class of initial-boundary value problems pertaining to the time-fractional mixed sub-diffusion and diffusion-wave equation (SDDWE). To facilitate the development of a numerical method and analysis, the original problem is transformed into a new integro-differential model which includes the Caputo derivatives and the Riemann-Liouville fractional integrals with orders belonging to (0,1). By providing an a priori estimate of the solution, we have established the existence and uniqueness of a numerical solution for the problem. We propose a second-order method to approximate the fractional Riemann-Liouville integral and employ an L2 type formula to approximate the Caputo derivative. This results in a method with a temporal accuracy of second-order for approximating the considered model. The proof of the unconditional stability of the proposed difference scheme is established. Moreover, we demonstrate the proposed method's potential to construct and analyze a second-order L2-type numerical scheme for a broader class of the time-fractional mixed SDDWEs with multi-term time-fractional derivatives. Numerical results are presented to assess the accuracy of the method and validate the theoretical findings.
This work deals with the numerical solution of systems of oscillatory second-order differential equations which often arise from the semi-discretization in space of partial differential equations. Since these differential equations exhibit (pronounced or highly) oscillatory behavior, standard numerical methods are known to perform poorly. Our approach consists in directly discretizing the problem by means of Gautschi-type integrators based on $\operatorname{sinc}$ matrix functions. The novelty contained here is that of using a suitable rational approximation formula for the $\operatorname{sinc}$ matrix function to apply a rational Krylov-like approximation method with suitable choices of poles. In particular, we discuss the application of the whole strategy to a finite element discretization of the wave equation.
The two-trials rule for drug approval requires "at least two adequate and well-controlled studies, each convincing on its own, to establish effectiveness". This is usually employed by requiring two significant pivotal trials and is the standard regulatory requirement to provide evidence for a new drug's efficacy. However, there is need to develop suitable alternatives to this rule for a number of reasons, including the possible availability of data from more than two trials. I consider the case of up to 3 studies and stress the importance to control the partial Type-I error rate, where only some studies have a true null effect, while maintaining the overall Type-I error rate of the two-trials rule, where all studies have a null effect. Some less-known $p$-value combination methods are useful to achieve this: Pearson's method, Edgington's method and the recently proposed harmonic mean $\chi^2$-test. I study their properties and discuss how they can be extended to a sequential assessment of success while still ensuring overall Type-I error control. I compare the different methods in terms of partial Type-I error rate, project power and the expected number of studies required. Edgington's method is eventually recommended as it is easy to implement and communicate, has only moderate partial Type-I error rate inflation but substantially increased project power.
It is well known that the Euler method for approximating the solutions of a random ordinary differential equation $\mathrm{d}X_t/\mathrm{d}t = f(t, X_t, Y_t)$ driven by a stochastic process $\{Y_t\}_t$ with $\theta$-H\"older sample paths is estimated to be of strong order $\theta$ with respect to the time step, provided $f=f(t, x, y)$ is sufficiently regular and with suitable bounds. Here, it is proved that, in many typical cases, further conditions on the noise can be exploited so that the strong convergence is actually of order 1, regardless of the H\"older regularity of the sample paths. This applies for instance to additive or multiplicative It\^o process noises (such as Wiener, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, and geometric Brownian motion processes); to point-process noises (such as Poisson point processes and Hawkes self-exciting processes, which even have jump-type discontinuities); and to transport-type processes with sample paths of bounded variation. The result is based on a novel approach, estimating the global error as an iterated integral over both large and small mesh scales, and switching the order of integration to move the critical regularity to the large scale. The work is complemented with numerical simulations illustrating the strong order 1 convergence in those cases, and with an example with fractional Brownian motion noise with Hurst parameter $0 < H < 1/2$ for which the order of convergence is $H + 1/2$, hence lower than the attained order 1 in the examples above, but still higher than the order $H$ of convergence expected from previous works.
Given a graph $G=(V,E)$, for a vertex set $S\subseteq V$, let $N(S)$ denote the set of vertices in $V$ that have a neighbor in $S$. Extending the concept of binding number of graphs by Woodall~(1973), for a vertex set $X \subseteq V$, we define the binding number of $X$, denoted by $\bind(X)$, as the maximum number $b$ such that for every $S \subseteq X$ where $N(S)\neq V(G)$ it holds that $|N(S)|\ge b {|S|}$. Given this definition, we prove that if a graph $V(G)$ contains a subset $X$ with $\bind(X)= 1/k$ where $k$ is an integer, then $G$ possesses a matching of size at least $|X|/(k+1)$. Using this statement, we derive tight bounds for the estimators of the matching size in planar graphs. These estimators are previously used in designing sublinear space algorithms for approximating the maching size in the data stream model of computation. In particular, we show that the number of locally superior vertices is a $3$ factor approximation of the matching size in planar graphs. The previous analysis by Jowhari (2023) proved a $3.5$ approximation factor. As another application, we show a simple variant of an estimator by Esfandiari \etal (2015) achieves $3$ factor approximation of the matching size in planar graphs. Namely, let $s$ be the number of edges with both endpoints having degree at most $2$ and let $h$ be the number of vertices with degree at least $3$. We prove that when the graph is planar, the size of matching is at least $(s+h)/3$. This result generalizes a known fact that every planar graph on $n$ vertices with minimum degree $3$ has a matching of size at least $n/3$.
Information decompositions quantify how the Shannon information about a given random variable is distributed among several other random variables. Various requirements have been proposed that such a decomposition should satisfy, leading to different candidate solutions. Curiously, however, only two of the original requirements that determined the Shannon information have been considered, namely monotonicity and normalization. Two other important properties, continuity and additivity, have not been considered. In this contribution, we focus on the mutual information of two finite variables $Y,Z$ about a third finite variable $S$ and check which of the decompositions satisfy these two properties. While most of them satisfy continuity, only one of them is both continuous and additive.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.