We revisit the satisfiability problem for two-variable logic, denoted by SAT(FO2), which is known to be NEXP-complete. The upper bound is usually derived from its well known Exponential Size Model (ESM) property. Whether it can be determinized efficiently is still an open question. In this paper we present a different approach by reducing it to a novel graph-theoretic problem that we call Conditional Independent Set (CIS). We show that CIS is NP-complete and present two simple algorithms for it with run time O(1.4423^n) and O(1.6181^n), where n is the number of vertices in the graph. We also show that unless the "Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis" (SETH) fails, there is no algorithm for CIS with run time O(1.4141^n). We show that without the equality predicate SAT(FO2) is in fact equivalent to CIS in succinct representation. This yields two algorithms for SAT(FO2) without the equality predicate with run time O(1.4423^{2^n}) and O(1.6181^{2^n}), where n is the number of predicates. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first exact algorithms for an NEXP-complete decidable logic with run time significantly lower than O(2^{2^n}). We also identify a few lower complexity fragments of FO2 which correspond to the tractable fragments of CIS. Similar to CIS, unless SETH fails, there is no algorithm for SAT(FO2) with run time O(1.4141^{2^n}). For the fragment with the equality predicate, we present a linear time many-one reduction to the fragment without the equality predicate. The reduction yields equi-satisfiable formulas with a small constant blow-up in the number of predicates. Finally, we also perform some small experiments which show that our approach is indeed more promising than the existing method (based on the ESM property). The experiments also show that although theoretically it has the worse run time, the second algorithm in general performs better than the first one.
Formalisms based on temporal logics interpreted over finite strict linear orders, known in the literature as finite traces, have been used for temporal specification in automated planning, process modelling, (runtime) verification and synthesis of programs, as well as in knowledge representation and reasoning. In this paper, we focus on first-order temporal logic on finite traces. We first investigate preservation of equivalences and satisfiability of formulas between finite and infinite traces, by providing a set of semantic and syntactic conditions to guarantee when the distinction between reasoning in the two cases can be blurred. Moreover, we show that the satisfiability problem on finite traces for several decidable fragments of first-order temporal logic is ExpSpace-complete, as in the infinite trace case, while it decreases to NExpTime when finite traces bounded in the number of instants are considered. This leads also to new complexity results for temporal description logics over finite traces. Finally, we investigate applications to planning and verification, in particular by establishing connections with the notions of insensitivity to infiniteness and safety from the literature.
LU and Cholesky matrix factorization algorithms are core subroutines used to solve systems of linear equations (SLEs) encountered while solving an optimization problem. Standard factorization algorithms are highly efficient but remain susceptible to the accumulation roundoff errors, which can lead solvers to return feasibility and optimality certificates that are actually invalid. This paper introduces a novel approach for solving sequences of closely related SLEs encountered in nonlinear programming efficiently and without roundoff errors. Specifically, it introduces rank-one update algorithms for the roundoff-error-free (REF) factorization framework, a toolset built on integer-preserving arithmetic that has led to the development and implementation of fail-proof SLE solution subroutines for linear programming. The formal guarantees of the proposed algorithms are formally established through the derivation of theoretical insights. Their computational advantages are supported with computational experiments, which demonstrate upwards of 75x-improvements over exact factorization run-times on fully dense matrices with over one million entries. A significant advantage of the proposed methodology is that the length of any coefficient calculated via the associated algorithms is bounded polynomially in the size of the inputs without having to resort to greatest common divisor operations, which are required by and thereby hinder an efficient implementation of exact rational arithmetic approaches.
It is common practice to use Laplace approximations to compute marginal likelihoods in Bayesian versions of generalised linear models (GLM). Marginal likelihoods combined with model priors are then used in different search algorithms to compute the posterior marginal probabilities of models and individual covariates. This allows performing Bayesian model selection and model averaging. For large sample sizes, even the Laplace approximation becomes computationally challenging because the optimisation routine involved needs to evaluate the likelihood on the full set of data in multiple iterations. As a consequence, the algorithm is not scalable for large datasets. To address this problem, we suggest using a version of a popular batch stochastic gradient descent (BSGD) algorithm for estimating the marginal likelihood of a GLM by subsampling from the data. We further combine the algorithm with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods for Bayesian model selection and provide some theoretical results on the convergence of the estimates. Finally, we report results from experiments illustrating the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Mixtures of ranking models are standard tools for ranking problems. However, even the fundamental question of parameter identifiability is not fully understood: the identifiability of a mixture model with two Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) components has remained open. In this work, we show that popular mixtures of ranking models with two components (Plackett-Luce, multinomial logistic model with slates of size 3, or BTL) are generically identifiable, i.e., the ground-truth parameters can be identified except when they are from a pathological subset of measure zero. We provide a framework for verifying the number of solutions in a general family of polynomial systems using algebraic geometry, and apply it to these mixtures of ranking models. The framework can be applied more broadly to other learning models and may be of independent interest.
The expressive power of interval temporal logics (ITLs) makes them one of the most natural choices in a number of application domains, ranging from the specification and verification of complex reactive systems to automated planning. However, for a long time, because of their high computational complexity, they were considered not suitable for practical purposes. The recent discovery of several computationally well-behaved ITLs has finally changed the scenario. In this paper, we investigate the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the ITL D, that has a single modality for the sub-interval relation, under the homogeneity assumption (that constrains a proposition letter to hold over an interval if and only if it holds over all its points). We first prove that the satisfiability problem for D, over finite linear orders, is PSPACE-complete, and then we show that the same holds for its model checking problem, over finite Kripke structures. In such a way, we enrich the set of tractable interval temporal logics with a new meaningful representative.
In this paper, some preliminaries about signal flow graph, linear time-invariant system on F(z) and computational complexity are first introduced in detail. In order to synthesize the necessary and sufficient condition on F(z) for a general 2-path problem, the sufficient condition on F(z) or R and necessary conditions on F(z) for a general 2-path problem are secondly analyzed respectively. Moreover, an equivalent sufficient and necessary condition on R whether there exists a general 2-path is deduced in detail. Finally, the computational complexity of the algorithm for this equivalent sufficient and necessary condition is introduced so that it means that the general 2-path problem is a P problem.
The $p$-center problem (pCP) is a fundamental problem in location science, where we are given customer demand points and possible facility locations, and we want to choose $p$ of these locations to open a facility such that the maximum distance of any customer demand point to its closest open facility is minimized. State-of-the-art solution approaches of pCP use its connection to the set cover problem to solve pCP in an iterative fashion by repeatedly solving set cover problems. The classical textbook integer programming (IP) formulation of pCP is usually dismissed due to its size and bad linear programming (LP)-relaxation bounds. We present a novel solution approach that works on a new IP formulation that can be obtained by a projection from the classical formulation. The formulation is solved by means of branch-and-cut, where cuts for demand points are iteratively generated. Moreover, the formulation can be strengthened with combinatorial information to obtain a much tighter LP-relaxation. In particular, we present a novel way to use lower bound information to obtain stronger cuts. We show that the LP-relaxation bound of our strengthened formulation has the same strength as the best known bound in literature, which is based on a semi-relaxation. Finally, we also present a computational study on instances from the literature with up to more than 700000 customers and locations. Our solution algorithm is competitive with highly sophisticated set-cover-based solution algorithms, which depend on various components and parameters.
Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. We present a simple BERT-based LS approach that makes use of the pre-trained unsupervised deep bidirectional representations BERT. We feed the given sentence masked the complex word into the masking language model of BERT to generate candidate substitutions. By considering the whole sentence, the generated simpler alternatives are easier to hold cohesion and coherence of a sentence. Experimental results show that our approach obtains obvious improvement on standard LS benchmark.
This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying desirable properties of neural networks, i.e., obtaining provable guarantees that neural networks satisfy specifications relating their inputs and outputs (robustness to bounded norm adversarial perturbations, for example). Most previous work on this topic was limited in its applicability by the size of the network, network architecture and the complexity of properties to be verified. In contrast, our framework applies to a general class of activation functions and specifications on neural network inputs and outputs. We formulate verification as an optimization problem (seeking to find the largest violation of the specification) and solve a Lagrangian relaxation of the optimization problem to obtain an upper bound on the worst case violation of the specification being verified. Our approach is anytime i.e. it can be stopped at any time and a valid bound on the maximum violation can be obtained. We develop specialized verification algorithms with provable tightness guarantees under special assumptions and demonstrate the practical significance of our general verification approach on a variety of verification tasks.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.