Within the ViSE (Voting in Stochastic Environment) model, we study the effectiveness of majority voting in various environments. By the pit of losses paradox, majority decisions in apparently hostile environments systematically reduce the capital of society. In such cases, the basic action of ``rejecting all proposals without voting'' outperforms simple majority. We reveal another pit of losses appearing in favorable environments. Here, the simple action of ``accepting all proposals without voting'' is superior to simple majority, which thus causes a loss compared to total acceptance. We show that the second pit of losses is a mirror image of the pit of losses in hostile environments and explain this phenomenon. Technically, we consider a voting society consisting of individual agents whose strategy is supporting all proposals that increase their capital and a group whose members vote for the increase of the total group capital. According to the main result, the expected capital gain of each agent in the environment whose proposal generator $\xi$ has mean $\mu>0$ exceeds by $\mu$ their expected capital gain with generator $-\xi$. This result extends to the shift-based families of generators with symmetric distributions. The difference by $\mu$ causes symmetry relative to the basic action that rejects/accepts all proposals in unfavorable/favorable environments.
Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on contexts from the universal domain without relying on any form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted and used to produce related questions, then we leverage both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples. Experiments on multiple MCQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning to losing. In this note, we prove a new impossibility theorem concerning this axiom: there is no ordinal voting method satisfying positive involvement that also satisfies the Condorcet winner and loser criteria, resolvability, and a common invariance property for Condorcet methods, namely that the choice of winners depends only on the ordering of majority margins by size.
Testing for independence between two random vectors is a fundamental problem in statistics. It is observed from empirical studies that many existing omnibus consistent tests may not work well for some strongly nonmonotonic and nonlinear relationships. To explore the reasons behind this issue, we novelly transform the multivariate independence testing problem equivalently into checking the equality of two bivariate means. An important observation we made is that the power loss is mainly due to cancellation of positive and negative terms in dependence metrics, making them very close to zero. Motivated by this observation, we propose a class of consistent metrics with a positive integer $\gamma$ that exactly characterize independence. Theoretically, we show that the metrics with even and infinity $\gamma$ can effectively avoid the cancellation, and have high powers under the alternatives that two mean differences offset each other. Since we target at a wide range of dependence scenarios in practice, we further suggest to combine the p-values of test statistics with different $\gamma$'s through the Fisher's method. We illustrate the advantages of our proposed tests through extensive numerical studies.
Motivated by optimization with differential equations, we consider optimization problems with Hilbert spaces as decision spaces. As a consequence of their infinite dimensionality, the numerical solution necessitates finite dimensional approximations and discretizations. We develop an approximation framework and demonstrate criticality measure-based error estimates. We consider criticality measures inspired by those used within optimization methods, such as semismooth Newton and (conditional) gradient methods. Furthermore, we show that our error estimates are order-optimal. Our findings augment existing distance-based error estimates, but do not rely on strong convexity or second-order sufficient optimality conditions. Moreover, our error estimates can be used for code verification and validation. We illustrate our theoretical convergence rates on linear, semilinear, and bilinear PDE-constrained optimization.
Interpolation of data on non-Euclidean spaces is an active research area fostered by its numerous applications. This work considers the Hermite interpolation problem: finding a sufficiently smooth manifold curve that interpolates a collection of data points on a Riemannian manifold while matching a prescribed derivative at each point. We propose a novel procedure relying on the general concept of retractions to solve this problem on a large class of manifolds, including those for which computing the Riemannian exponential or logarithmic maps is not straightforward, such as the manifold of fixed-rank matrices. We analyze the well-posedness of the method by introducing and showing the existence of retraction-convex sets, a generalization of geodesically convex sets. We extend to the manifold setting a classical result on the asymptotic interpolation error of Hermite interpolation. We finally illustrate these results and the effectiveness of the method with numerical experiments on the manifold of fixed-rank matrices and the Stiefel manifold of matrices with orthonormal columns.
In this work, the high order accuracy and the well-balanced (WB) properties of some novel continuous interior penalty (CIP) stabilizations for the Shallow Water (SW) equations are investigated. The underlying arbitrary high order numerical framework is given by a Residual Distribution (RD)/continuous Galerkin (CG) finite element method (FEM) setting for the space discretization coupled with a Deferred Correction (DeC) time integration, to have a fully-explicit scheme. If, on the one hand, the introduced CIP stabilizations are all specifically designed to guarantee the exact preservation of the lake at rest steady state, on the other hand, some of them make use of general structures to tackle the preservation of general steady states, whose explicit analytical expression is not known. Several basis functions have been considered in the numerical experiments and, in all cases, the numerical results confirm the high order accuracy and the ability of the novel stabilizations to exactly preserve the lake at rest steady state and to capture small perturbations of such equilibrium. Moreover, some of them, based on the notions of space residual and global flux, have shown very good performances and superconvergences in the context of general steady solutions not known in closed-form. Many elements introduced here can be extended to other hyperbolic systems, e.g., to the Euler equations with gravity.
Modern Out-of-Order (OoO) CPUs are complex systems with many components interleaved in non-trivial ways. Pinpointing performance bottlenecks and understanding the underlying causes of program performance issues are critical tasks to make the most of hardware resources. We provide an in-depth overview of performance bottlenecks in recent OoO microarchitectures and describe the difficulties of detecting them. Techniques that measure resources utilization can offer a good understanding of a program's execution, but, due to the constraints inherent to Performance Monitoring Units (PMU) of CPUs, do not provide the relevant metrics for each use case. Another approach is to rely on a performance model to simulate the CPU behavior. Such a model makes it possible to implement any new microarchitecture-related metric. Within this framework, we advocate for implementing modeled resources as parameters that can be varied at will to reveal performance bottlenecks. This allows a generalization of bottleneck analysis that we call sensitivity analysis. We present Gus, a novel performance analysis tool that combines the advantages of sensitivity analysis and dynamic binary instrumentation within a resource-centric CPU model. We evaluate the impact of sensitivity on bottleneck analysis over a set of high-performance computing kernels.
In a regression model with multiple response variables and multiple explanatory variables, if the difference of the mean vectors of the response variables for different values of explanatory variables is always in the direction of the first principal eigenvector of the covariance matrix of the response variables, then it is called a multivariate allometric regression model. This paper studies the estimation of the first principal eigenvector in the multivariate allometric regression model. A class of estimators that includes conventional estimators is proposed based on weighted sum-of-squares matrices of regression sum-of-squares matrix and residual sum-of-squares matrix. We establish an upper bound of the mean squared error of the estimators contained in this class, and the weight value minimizing the upper bound is derived. Sufficient conditions for the consistency of the estimators are discussed in weak identifiability regimes under which the difference of the largest and second largest eigenvalues of the covariance matrix decays asymptotically and in ``large $p$, large $n$" regimes, where $p$ is the number of response variables and $n$ is the sample size. Several numerical results are also presented.
This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of the optimization and performance evaluation of various routing algorithms within the context of computer networks. Routing algorithms are critical for determining the most efficient path for data transmission between nodes in a network. The efficiency, reliability, and scalability of a network heavily rely on the choice and optimization of its routing algorithm. This paper begins with an overview of fundamental routing strategies, including shortest path, flooding, distance vector, and link state algorithms, and extends to more sophisticated techniques.
To achieve high-accuracy manipulation in the presence of unknown disturbances, we propose two novel efficient and robust motion control schemes for high-dimensional robot manipulators. Both controllers incorporate an unknown system dynamics estimator (USDE) to estimate disturbances without requiring acceleration signals and the inverse of inertia matrix. Then, based on the USDE framework, an adaptive-gain controller and a super-twisting sliding mode controller are designed to speed up the convergence of tracking errors and strengthen anti-perturbation ability. The former aims to enhance feedback portions through error-driven control gains, while the latter exploits finite-time convergence of discontinuous switching terms. We analyze the boundedness of control signals and the stability of the closed-loop system in theory, and conduct real hardware experiments on a robot manipulator with seven degrees of freedom (DoF). Experimental results verify the effectiveness and improved performance of the proposed controllers, and also show the feasibility of implementation on high-dimensional robots.