The break minimization problem is a fundamental problem in sports scheduling. Recently, its quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulation has been proposed, which has gained much interest with the rapidly growing field of quantum computing. In this paper, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art QUBO solver outperforms the general mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) solver on break minimization problems in a mirrored double round-robin tournament. Moreover, we demonstrate that it still outperforms or is competitive even if we add practical constraints, such as consecutive constraints, to the break minimization problem.
The emergence of vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, has spurred a significant research effort towards their application for downstream supervised learning tasks. Although some previous studies have explored the unsupervised fine-tuning of CLIP, they often rely on prior knowledge in the form of class names associated with ground truth labels. In this paper, we delve into a realistic unsupervised fine-tuning scenario by assuming that the unlabeled data might contain out-of-distribution samples from unknown classes. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of simultaneously enhancing out-of-distribution detection capabilities alongside the recognition of instances associated with predefined class labels. To tackle this problem, we present a simple, efficient, and effective fine-tuning approach called Universal Entropy Optimization (UEO). UEO leverages sample-level confidence to approximately minimize the conditional entropy of confident instances and maximize the marginal entropy of less confident instances. Apart from optimizing the textual prompts, UEO also incorporates optimization of channel-wise affine transformations within the visual branch of CLIP. Through extensive experiments conducted across 15 domains and 4 different types of prior knowledge, we demonstrate that UEO surpasses baseline methods in terms of both generalization and out-of-distribution detection.
For the convolutional neural network (CNN) used for pattern classification, the training loss function is usually applied to the final output of the network, except for some regularization constraints on the network parameters. However, with the increasing of the number of network layers, the influence of the loss function on the network front layers gradually decreases, and the network parameters tend to fall into local optimization. At the same time, it is found that the trained network has significant information redundancy at all stages of features, which reduces the effectiveness of feature mapping at all stages and is not conducive to the change of the subsequent parameters of the network in the direction of optimality. Therefore, it is possible to obtain a more optimized solution of the network and further improve the classification accuracy of the network by designing a loss function for restraining the front stage features and eliminating the information redundancy of the front stage features .For CNN, this article proposes a multi-stage feature decorrelation loss (MFD Loss), which refines effective features and eliminates information redundancy by constraining the correlation of features at all stages. Considering that there are many layers in CNN, through experimental comparison and analysis, MFD Loss acts on multiple front layers of CNN, constrains the output features of each layer and each channel, and performs supervision training jointly with classification loss function during network training. Compared with the single Softmax Loss supervised learning, the experiments on several commonly used datasets on several typical CNNs prove that the classification performance of Softmax Loss+MFD Loss is significantly better. Meanwhile, the comparison experiments before and after the combination of MFD Loss and some other typical loss functions verify its good universality.
We present a method for finding envy-free prices in a combinatorial auction where the consumers' number $n$ coincides with that of distinct items for sale, each consumer can buy one single item and each item has only one unit available. This is a particular case of the {\it unit-demand envy-free pricing problem}, and was recently revisited by Arbib et al. (2019). These authors proved that using a Fibonacci heap for solving the maximum weight perfect matching and the Bellman-Ford algorithm for getting the envy-free prices, the overall time complexity for solving the problem is $O(n^3)$. We propose a method based on dynamic programming design strategy that seeks the optimal envy-free prices by increasing the consumers' utilities, which has the same cubic complexity time as the aforementioned approach, but whose theoretical and empirical results indicate that our method performs faster than the shortest paths strategy, obtaining an average time reduction in determining optimal envy-free prices of approximately 48\%.
Multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the appealing feature of being amenable to parallel computing. At each iteration, it samples several candidates for the next state of the Markov chain and randomly selects one of them based on a weight function. The canonical weight function is proportional to the target density. We show both theoretically and empirically that this weight function induces pathological behaviours in high dimensions, especially during the convergence phase. We propose to instead use weight functions akin to the locally-balanced proposal distributions of Zanella (2020), thus yielding MTM algorithms that do not exhibit those pathological behaviours. To theoretically analyse these algorithms, we study the high-dimensional performance of ideal schemes that can be thought of as MTM algorithms which sample an infinite number of candidates at each iteration, as well as the discrepancy between such schemes and the MTM algorithms which sample a finite number of candidates. Our analysis unveils a strong distinction between the convergence and stationary phases: in the former, local balancing is crucial and effective to achieve fast convergence, while in the latter, the canonical and novel weight functions yield similar performance. Numerical experiments include an application in precision medicine involving a computationally-expensive forward model, which makes the use of parallel computing within MTM iterations beneficial.
Numerous theories of learning suggest to prevent the gradient variance from exponential growth with depth or time, to stabilize and improve training. Typically, these analyses are conducted on feed-forward fully-connected neural networks or single-layer recurrent neural networks, given their mathematical tractability. In contrast, this study demonstrates that pre-training the network to local stability can be effective whenever the architectures are too complex for an analytical initialization. Furthermore, we extend known stability theories to encompass a broader family of deep recurrent networks, requiring minimal assumptions on data and parameter distribution, a theory that we refer to as the Local Stability Condition (LSC). Our investigation reveals that the classical Glorot, He, and Orthogonal initialization schemes satisfy the LSC when applied to feed-forward fully-connected neural networks. However, analysing deep recurrent networks, we identify a new additive source of exponential explosion that emerges from counting gradient paths in a rectangular grid in depth and time. We propose a new approach to mitigate this issue, that consists on giving a weight of a half to the time and depth contributions to the gradient, instead of the classical weight of one. Our empirical results confirm that pre-training both feed-forward and recurrent networks to fulfill the LSC often results in improved final performance across models. This study contributes to the field by providing a means to stabilize networks of any complexity. Our approach can be implemented as an additional step before pre-training on large augmented datasets, and as an alternative to finding stable initializations analytically.
With the increasing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all the parameters in the model is not efficient, especially when there are a large number of downstream tasks, which incur significant training and storage costs. Many parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches have been proposed, among which, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a representative approach that injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into every target module. Yet LoRA ignores the importance of parameters in different modules. To address this problem, many works have been proposed to prune the parameters of LoRA. However, under limited training conditions, the upper bound of the rank of the pruned parameter matrix is still affected by the preset values. We, therefore, propose IncreLoRA, an incremental parameter allocation method that adaptively adds trainable parameters during training based on the importance scores of each module. This approach is different from the pruning method as it is not limited by the initial number of training parameters, and each parameter matrix has a higher rank upper bound for the same training overhead. We conduct extensive experiments on GLUE to demonstrate the effectiveness of IncreLoRA. The results show that our method owns higher parameter efficiency, especially when under the low-resource settings where our method significantly outperforms the baselines. Our code is publicly available.
It is known that different categorial grammars have surface representation in a fragment of first order multiplicative linear logic (MLL1). We show that the fragment of interest is equivalent to the recently introduced extended tensor type calculus (ETTC). ETTC is a calculus of specific typed terms, which represent tuples of strings, more precisely bipartite graphs decorated with strings. Types are derived from linear logic formulas, and rules correspond to concrete operations on these string-labeled graphs, so that they can be conveniently visualized. This provides the above mentioned fragment of MLL1 that is relevant for language modeling not only with some alternative syntax and intuitive geometric representation, but also with an intrinsic deductive system, which has been absent. In this work we consider a non-trivial notationally enriched variation of the previously introduced {\bf ETTC}, which allows more concise and transparent computations. We present both a cut-free sequent calculus and a natural deduction formalism.
Individual brains vary in both anatomy and functional organization, even within a given species. Inter-individual variability is a major impediment when trying to draw generalizable conclusions from neuroimaging data collected on groups of subjects. Current co-registration procedures rely on limited data, and thus lead to very coarse inter-subject alignments. In this work, we present a novel method for inter-subject alignment based on Optimal Transport, denoted as Fused Unbalanced Gromov Wasserstein (FUGW). The method aligns cortical surfaces based on the similarity of their functional signatures in response to a variety of stimulation settings, while penalizing large deformations of individual topographic organization. We demonstrate that FUGW is well-suited for whole-brain landmark-free alignment. The unbalanced feature allows to deal with the fact that functional areas vary in size across subjects. Our results show that FUGW alignment significantly increases between-subject correlation of activity for independent functional data, and leads to more precise mapping at the group level.
In the past few years, the emergence of pre-training models has brought uni-modal fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. Substantial works have shown they are beneficial for downstream uni-modal tasks and avoid training a new model from scratch. So can such pre-trained models be applied to multi-modal tasks? Researchers have explored this problem and made significant progress. This paper surveys recent advances and new frontiers in vision-language pre-training (VLP), including image-text and video-text pre-training. To give readers a better overall grasp of VLP, we first review its recent advances from five aspects: feature extraction, model architecture, pre-training objectives, pre-training datasets, and downstream tasks. Then, we summarize the specific VLP models in detail. Finally, we discuss the new frontiers in VLP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey on VLP. We hope that this survey can shed light on future research in the VLP field.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.