We explore the features of two methods of stabilization, aggregation and supremizer methods, for reduced-order modeling of parametrized optimal control problems. In both methods, the reduced basis spaces are augmented to guarantee stability. For the aggregation method, the reduced basis approximation spaces for the state and adjoint variables are augmented in such a way that the spaces are identical. For the supremizer method, the reduced basis approximation space for the state-control product space is augmented with the solutions of a supremizer equation. We implement both of these methods for solving several parametrized control problems and assess their performance. Results indicate that the number of reduced basis vectors needed to approximate the solution space to some tolerance with the supremizer method is much larger, possibly double, that for aggregation. There are also some cases where the supremizer method fails to produce a converged solution. We present results to compare the accuracy, efficiency, and computational costs associated with both methods of stabilization which suggest that stabilization by aggregation is a superior stabilization method for control problems.
Optimal model reduction for large-scale linear dynamical systems is studied. In contrast to most existing works, the systems under consideration are not required to be stable, neither in discrete nor in continuous time. As a consequence, the underlying rational transfer functions are allowed to have poles in general domains in the complex plane. In particular, this covers the case of specific conservative partial differential equations such as the linear Schr\"odinger and the undamped linear wave equation with spectra on the imaginary axis. By an appropriate modification of the classical continuous time Hardy space $\mathcal{H}_2$, a new $\mathcal{H}_2$ like optimal model reduction problem is introduced and first order optimality conditions are derived. As in the classical $\mathcal{H}_2$ case, these conditions exhibit a rational Hermite interpolation structure for which an iterative model reduction algorithm is proposed. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method.
We study the problem of choosing algorithm hyper-parameters in unsupervised domain adaptation, i.e., with labeled data in a source domain and unlabeled data in a target domain, drawn from a different input distribution. We follow the strategy to compute several models using different hyper-parameters, and, to subsequently compute a linear aggregation of the models. While several heuristics exist that follow this strategy, methods are still missing that rely on thorough theories for bounding the target error. In this turn, we propose a method that extends weighted least squares to vector-valued functions, e.g., deep neural networks. We show that the target error of the proposed algorithm is asymptotically not worse than twice the error of the unknown optimal aggregation. We also perform a large scale empirical comparative study on several datasets, including text, images, electroencephalogram, body sensor signals and signals from mobile phones. Our method outperforms deep embedded validation (DEV) and importance weighted validation (IWV) on all datasets, setting a new state-of-the-art performance for solving parameter choice issues in unsupervised domain adaptation with theoretical error guarantees. We further study several competitive heuristics, all outperforming IWV and DEV on at least five datasets. However, our method outperforms each heuristic on at least five of seven datasets.
Motivated by a recent literature on the double-descent phenomenon in machine learning, we consider highly over-parametrized models in causal inference, including synthetic control with many control units. In such models, there may be so many free parameters that the model fits the training data perfectly. As a motivating example, we first investigate high-dimensional linear regression for imputing wage data, where we find that models with many more covariates than sample size can outperform simple ones. As our main contribution, we document the performance of high-dimensional synthetic control estimators with many control units. We find that adding control units can help improve imputation performance even beyond the point where the pre-treatment fit is perfect. We then provide a unified theoretical perspective on the performance of these high-dimensional models. Specifically, we show that more complex models can be interpreted as model-averaging estimators over simpler ones, which we link to an improvement in average performance. This perspective yields concrete insights into the use of synthetic control when control units are many relative to the number of pre-treatment periods.
We consider a class of high-dimensional spatial filtering problems, where the spatial locations of the observations are unknown and driven by the unobserved signal. This problem is exceptionally challenging as not only is the problem of high-dimensions in the signal, but the model for the signal yields longer-range time dependencies on this object. Motivated by this model we revisit a lesser-known and $\textit{exact}$ computational methodology from Centanni $\&$ Minozzo (2006a) (see also Martin et al. (2013)) designed for filtering of point-processes. We adapt the methodology for this new class of problem. The algorithm is implemented on high-dimensional (of the order of $10^4$) rotating shallow water model with real and synthetic observational data from ocean drifters. In comparison to existing methodology, we demonstrate a significant improvement in speed and accuracy.
We develop two unfitted finite element methods for the Stokes equations based on $\mathbf{H}^{\text{div}}$-conforming finite elements. The first method is a cut finite element discretization of the Stokes equations based on the Brezzi-Douglas-Marini elements and involves interior penalty terms to enforce tangential continuity of the velocity at interior edges in the mesh. The second method is a cut finite element discretization of a three-field formulation of the Stokes problem involving the vorticity, velocity, and pressure and uses the Raviart-Thomas space for the velocity. We present mixed ghost penalty stabilization terms for both methods so that the resulting discrete problems are stable and the divergence-free property of the $\mathbf{H}^{\text{div}}$-conforming elements is preserved also for unfitted meshes. We compare the two methods numerically. Both methods exhibit robust discrete problems, optimal convergence order for the velocity, and pointwise divergence-free velocity fields, independently of the position of the boundary relative to the computational mesh.
Theoretical studies on transfer learning or domain adaptation have so far focused on situations with a known hypothesis class or model; however in practice, some amount of model selection is usually involved, often appearing under the umbrella term of hyperparameter-tuning: for example, one may think of the problem of tuning for the right neural network architecture towards a target task, while leveraging data from a related source task. Now, in addition to the usual tradeoffs on approximation vs estimation errors involved in model selection, this problem brings in a new complexity term, namely, the transfer distance between source and target distributions, which is known to vary with the choice of hypothesis class. We present a first study of this problem, focusing on classification; in particular, the analysis reveals some remarkable phenomena: adaptive rates, i.e., those achievable with no distributional information, can be arbitrarily slower than oracle rates, i.e., when given knowledge on distances.
In this paper we obtain complexity bounds for computational problems on algebraic power series over several commuting variables. The power series are specified by systems of polynomial equations: a formalism closely related to weighted context-free grammars. We focus on three problems -- decide whether a given algebraic series is identically zero, determine whether all but finitely many coefficients are zero, and compute the coefficient of a specific monomial. We relate these questions to well-known computational problems on arithmetic circuits and thereby show that all three problems lie in the counting hierarchy. Our main result improves the best known complexity bound on deciding zeroness of an algebraic series. This problem is known to lie in PSPACE by reduction to the decision problem for the existential fragment of the theory of real closed fields. Here we show that the problem lies in the counting hierarchy by reduction to the problem of computing the degree of a polynomial given by an arithmetic circuit. As a corollary we obtain new complexity bounds on multiplicity equivalence of context-free grammars restricted to a bounded language, language inclusion of a nondeterministic finite automaton in an unambiguous context-free grammar, and language inclusion of a non-deterministic context-free grammar in an unambiguous finite automaton.
Discrete Differential Equations (DDEs) are functional equations that relate polynomially a power series $F(t,u)$ in $t$ with polynomial coefficients in a "catalytic" variable $u$ and the specializations, say at $u=1$, of $F(t,u)$ and of some of its partial derivatives in $u$. DDEs occur frequently in combinatorics, especially in map enumeration. If a DDE is of fixed-point type then its solution $F(t,u)$ is unique, and a general result by Popescu (1986) implies that $F(t,u)$ is an algebraic power series. Constructive proofs of algebraicity for solutions of fixed-point type DDEs were proposed by Bousquet-M\'elou and Jehanne (2006). Bostan et. al (2022) initiated a systematic algorithmic study of such DDEs of order 1. We generalize this study to DDEs of arbitrary order. First, we propose nontrivial extensions of algorithms based on polynomial elimination and on the guess-and-prove paradigm. Second, we design two brand-new algorithms that exploit the special structure of the underlying polynomial systems. Last, but not least, we report on implementations that are able to solve highly challenging DDEs with a combinatorial origin.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks have reported outstanding performance in tasks like community detection, molecule classification and link prediction. However, the black-box nature of these models prevents their application in domains like health and finance, where understanding the models' decisions is essential. Counterfactual Explanations (CE) provide these understandings through examples. Moreover, the literature on CE is flourishing with novel explanation methods which are tailored to graph learning. In this survey, we analyse the existing Graph Counterfactual Explanation methods, by providing the reader with an organisation of the literature according to a uniform formal notation for definitions, datasets, and metrics, thus, simplifying potential comparisons w.r.t to the method advantages and disadvantages. We discussed seven methods and sixteen synthetic and real datasets providing details on the possible generation strategies. We highlight the most common evaluation strategies and formalise nine of the metrics used in the literature. We first introduce the evaluation framework GRETEL and how it is possible to extend and use it while providing a further dimension of comparison encompassing reproducibility aspects. Finally, we provide a discussion on how counterfactual explanation interplays with privacy and fairness, before delving into open challenges and future works.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.