We investigate several online packing problems in which convex polygons arrive one by one and have to be placed irrevocably into a container, while the aim is to minimize the used space. Among other variants, we consider strip packing and bin packing, where the container is the infinite horizontal strip $[0,\infty)\times [0,1]$ or a collection of $1 \times 1$ bins, respectively. We draw interesting connections to the following online sorting problem OnlineSorting$[\gamma,n]$: We receive a stream of real numbers $s_1,\ldots,s_n$, $s_i\in[0,1]$, one by one. Each real must be placed in an array $A$ with $\gamma n$ initially empty cells without knowing the subsequent reals. The goal is to minimize the sum of differences of consecutive reals in $A$. The offline optimum is to place the reals in sorted order so the cost is at most $1$. We show that for any $\Delta$-competitive online algorithm of OnlineSorting$[\gamma,n]$, it holds that $\gamma \Delta \in\Omega(\log n/\log \log n)$. We use this lower bound to prove the non-existence of competitive algorithms for various online translational packing problems of convex polygons, among them strip packing, bin packing and perimeter packing. This also implies that there exists no online algorithm that can pack all streams of pieces of diameter and total area at most $\delta$ into the unit square. These results are in contrast to the case when the pieces are restricted to rectangles, for which competitive algorithms are known. Likewise, the offline versions of packing convex polygons have constant factor approximation algorithms. As a complement, we also include algorithms for both online sorting and translation-only online strip packing with non-trivial competitive ratios. Our algorithm for strip packing relies on a new technique for recursively subdividing the strip into parallelograms of varying height, thickness and slope.
We consider outlier-robust and sparse estimation of linear regression coefficients, when the covariates and the noises are contaminated by adversarial outliers and noises are sampled from a heavy-tailed distribution. Our results present sharper error bounds under weaker assumptions than prior studies that share similar interests with this study. Our analysis relies on some sharp concentration inequalities resulting from generic chaining.
Fairness is a critical objective in policy design and algorithmic decision-making. Identifying the causal pathways of unfairness requires knowledge of the underlying structural causal model, which may be incomplete or unavailable. This limits the practicality of causal fairness analysis in complex or low-knowledge domains. To mitigate this practicality gap, we advocate for developing efficient causal discovery methods for fairness applications. To this end, we introduce local discovery for direct discrimination (LD3): a polynomial-time algorithm that recovers structural evidence of direct discrimination. LD3 performs a linear number of conditional independence tests with respect to variable set size. Moreover, we propose a graphical criterion for identifying the weighted controlled direct effect (CDE), a qualitative measure of direct discrimination. We prove that this criterion is satisfied by the knowledge returned by LD3, increasing the accessibility of the weighted CDE as a causal fairness measure. Taking liver transplant allocation as a case study, we highlight the potential impact of LD3 for modeling fairness in complex decision systems. Results on real-world data demonstrate more plausible causal relations than baselines, which took 197x to 5870x longer to execute.
We consider limit probabilities of first order properties in random graphs with a given degree sequence. Under mild conditions on the degree sequence, we show that the closure set of limit probabilities is a finite union of closed intervals. Moreover, we characterize the degree sequences for which this closure set is the interval $[0,1]$, a property that is intimately related with the probability that the random graph is acyclic. As a side result, we compile a full description of the cycle distribution of random graphs and study their fragment (disjoint union of unicyclic components) in the subcritical regime. Finally, we amend the proof of the existence of limit probabilities for first order properties in random graphs with a given degree sequence; this result was already claimed by Lynch~[IEEE LICS 2003] but his proof contained some inaccuracies.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability. In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of AlphaZero's representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
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.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.