When two players are engaged in a repeated game with unknown payoff matrices, they may be completely unaware of the existence of each other and use multi-armed bandit algorithms to choose the actions, which is referred to as the ``blindfolded game'' in this paper. We show that when the players use Thompson sampling, the game dynamics converges to the Nash equilibrium under a mild assumption on the payoff matrices. Therefore, algorithmic collusion doesn't arise in this case despite the fact that the players do not intentionally deploy competitive strategies. To prove the convergence result, we find that the framework developed in stochastic approximation doesn't apply, because of the sporadic and infrequent updates of the inferior actions and the lack of Lipschitz continuity. We develop a novel sample-path-wise approach to show the convergence.
We consider the class of two-person ordinal potential games where each player has the same number of actions $K$. Each game in this class admits at least one pure Nash equilibrium and the best-response dynamics converges to one of these pure Nash equilibria; which one depends on the starting point. So, each pure Nash equilibrium has a basin of attraction. We pick uniformly at random one game from this class and we study the joint distribution of the sizes of the basins of attraction. We provide an asymptotic exact value for the expected basin of attraction of each pure Nash equilibrium, when the number of actions $K$ goes to infinity.
Vision-based occupancy prediction, also known as 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC), presents a significant challenge in computer vision. Previous methods, confined to onboard processing, struggle with simultaneous geometric and semantic estimation, continuity across varying viewpoints, and single-view occlusion. Our paper introduces OccFiner, a novel offboard framework designed to enhance the accuracy of vision-based occupancy predictions. OccFiner operates in two hybrid phases: 1) a multi-to-multi local propagation network that implicitly aligns and processes multiple local frames for correcting onboard model errors and consistently enhancing occupancy accuracy across all distances. 2) the region-centric global propagation, focuses on refining labels using explicit multi-view geometry and integrating sensor bias, especially to increase the accuracy of distant occupied voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccFiner improves both geometric and semantic accuracy across various types of coarse occupancy, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset. Notably, OccFiner elevates vision-based SSC models to a level even surpassing that of LiDAR-based onboard SSC models. Furthermore, OccFiner is the first to achieve automatic annotation of SSC in a purely vision-based approach. Quantitative experiments prove that OccFiner successfully facilitates occupancy data loop-closure in autonomous driving. Additionally, we quantitatively and qualitatively validate the superiority of the offboard approach on city-level SSC static maps. The source code will be made publicly available at //github.com/MasterHow/OccFiner.
Multimodal emotion recognition has recently gained much attention since it can leverage diverse and complementary relationships over multiple modalities (e.g., audio, visual, biosignals, etc.), and can provide some robustness to noisy modalities. Most state-of-the-art methods for audio-visual (A-V) fusion rely on recurrent networks or conventional attention mechanisms that do not effectively leverage the complementary nature of A-V modalities. In this paper, we focus on dimensional emotion recognition based on the fusion of facial and vocal modalities extracted from videos. Specifically, we propose a joint cross-attention model that relies on the complementary relationships to extract the salient features across A-V modalities, allowing for accurate prediction of continuous values of valence and arousal. The proposed fusion model efficiently leverages the inter-modal relationships, while reducing the heterogeneity between the features. In particular, it computes the cross-attention weights based on correlation between the combined feature representation and individual modalities. By deploying the combined A-V feature representation into the cross-attention module, the performance of our fusion module improves significantly over the vanilla cross-attention module. Experimental results on validation-set videos from the AffWild2 dataset indicate that our proposed A-V fusion model provides a cost-effective solution that can outperform state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available on GitHub: //github.com/praveena2j/JointCrossAttentional-AV-Fusion.
This paper focuses on the online saddle point problem, which involves a sequence of two-player time-varying convex-concave games. Considering the nonstationarity of the environment, we adopt the duality gap and the dynamic Nash equilibrium regret as performance metrics for algorithm design. We present three variants of the proximal point method: the Online Proximal Point Method~(OPPM), the Optimistic OPPM~(OptOPPM), and the OptOPPM with multiple predictors. Each algorithm guarantees upper bounds for both the duality gap and dynamic Nash equilibrium regret, achieving near-optimality when measured against the duality gap. Specifically, in certain benign environments, such as sequences of stationary payoff functions, these algorithms maintain a nearly constant metric bound. Experimental results further validate the effectiveness of these algorithms. Lastly, this paper discusses potential reliability concerns associated with using dynamic Nash equilibrium regret as a performance metric.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success, ranging from complex computer games to real-world applications, showing the potential for intelligent agents capable of learning in dynamic environments. However, its application in real-world scenarios presents challenges, including the jerky problem, in which jerky trajectories not only compromise system safety but also increase power consumption and shorten the service life of robotic and autonomous systems. To address jerky actions, a method called conditioning for action policy smoothness (CAPS) was proposed by adding regularization terms to reduce the action changes. This paper further proposes a novel method, named Gradient-based CAPS (Grad-CAPS), that modifies CAPS by reducing the difference in the gradient of action and then uses displacement normalization to enable the agent to adapt to invariant action scales. Consequently, our method effectively reduces zigzagging action sequences while enhancing policy expressiveness and the adaptability of our method across diverse scenarios and environments. In the experiments, we integrated Grad-CAPS with different reinforcement learning algorithms and evaluated its performance on various robotic-related tasks in DeepMind Control Suite and OpenAI Gym environments. The results demonstrate that Grad-CAPS effectively improves performance while maintaining a comparable level of smoothness compared to CAPS and Vanilla agents.
Total Lagrangian Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (TLSPH) is one variant of SPH where the variables are described using the fixed reference configuration and a Lagrangian smoothing kernel. TLSPH elevates the computational efficiency of the standard SPH when no topological change is involved, and it alleviates the stability of SPH scheme with respect to tensile loading. However, instabilities associated with spurious mode, or hourglass/zero-energy mode, persists and often affects the simulation of solids undergoing extremely large strain. This work proposes an alternative formulation to compute deformation gradient with improved accuracy and therefore minimising the possibility of encountering the zero-energy mode. Specifically, we leverage the local discrete computation of bond-based (or pairwise) deformation gradient smoothed by the kernel. Additionally, the bond of a particle with itself is considered to preserve the polynomial reproducibility imposed by the kernel correction scheme. We showcase the convergence of the approach using a two-dimensional benchmark example. Furthermore, the accuracy, robustness, and stability of the proposed approach are assessed in various two- and three-dimensional examples, highlighting on the stability improvement that allows for solid dynamic simulations with more extreme elongation.
The mempool plays a crucial role in blockchain systems as a buffer zone for pending transactions before they are executed and included in a block. However, existing works primarily focus on mitigating defenses against already identified real-world attacks. This paper introduces secure blockchain-mempool designs capable of defending against any form of asymmetric eviction DoS attacks. We establish formal security definitions for mempools under the eviction-based attack vector. Our proposed secure transaction admission algorithm, named \textsc{saferAd-PR}, ensures eviction-security by providing a provable lower bound on the cost of executing eviction DoS attacks. Through evaluation with real transaction trace replays, \textsc{saferAd-PR} demonstrates negligible latency and significantly high lower bounds against any eviction attack, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in securing blockchain mempools.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Promoting behavioural diversity is critical for solving games with non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). Yet, there is a lack of rigorous treatment for defining diversity and constructing diversity-aware learning dynamics. In this work, we offer a geometric interpretation of behavioural diversity in games and introduce a novel diversity metric based on \emph{determinantal point processes} (DPP). By incorporating the diversity metric into best-response dynamics, we develop \emph{diverse fictitious play} and \emph{diverse policy-space response oracle} for solving normal-form games and open-ended games. We prove the uniqueness of the diverse best response and the convergence of our algorithms on two-player games. Importantly, we show that maximising the DPP-based diversity metric guarantees to enlarge the \emph{gamescape} -- convex polytopes spanned by agents' mixtures of strategies. To validate our diversity-aware solvers, we test on tens of games that show strong non-transitivity. Results suggest that our methods achieve much lower exploitability than state-of-the-art solvers by finding effective and diverse strategies.
We consider the task of weakly supervised one-shot detection. In this task, we attempt to perform a detection task over a set of unseen classes, when training only using weak binary labels that indicate the existence of a class instance in a given example. The model is conditioned on a single exemplar of an unseen class and a target example that may or may not contain an instance of the same class as the exemplar. A similarity map is computed by using a Siamese neural network to map the exemplar and regions of the target example to a latent representation space and then computing cosine similarity scores between representations. An attention mechanism weights different regions in the target example, and enables learning of the one-shot detection task using the weaker labels alone. The model can be applied to detection tasks from different domains, including computer vision object detection. We evaluate our attention Siamese networks on a one-shot detection task from the audio domain, where it detects audio keywords in spoken utterances. Our model considerably outperforms a baseline approach and yields a 42.6% average precision for detection across 10 unseen classes. Moreover, architectural developments from computer vision object detection models such as a region proposal network can be incorporated into the model architecture, and results show that performance is expected to improve by doing so.