Penrose tilings are the most famous aperiodic tilings, and they have been studied extensively. In particular, patterns composed with hexagons ($H$), boats ($B$) and stars ($S$) were soon exhibited and many physicists published on what they later called $HBS$ tilings, but no article or book combines all we know about them. This work is done here, before introducing new decorations and properties including explicit substitutions. For the latter, the star comes in three versions so we have 5 prototiles in what we call the Star tileset. Yet this set yields exactly the strict $HBS$ tilings formed using 3 tiles decorated with either the usual decorations (arrows) or Ammann bar markings for instance. Another new tileset called Gemstones is also presented, derived from the Star tileset.
Nowadays, while the demand for capacity continues to expand, the blossoming of Internet of Everything is bringing in a paradigm shift to new perceptions of communication networks, ushering in a plethora of totally unique services. To provide these services, Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) must be established and reachable by end-users, which will generate and consume massive volumes of data that must be processed locally for service responsiveness and scalability. For this to be realized, a solid cloud-network Integrated infrastructure is a necessity, and since cloud and network domains would be diverse in terms of characteristics but limited in terms of capability, communication and computing resources should be jointly controlled to unleash its full potential. Although several innovative methods have been proposed to allocate the resources, most of them either ignored network resources or relaxed the network as a simple graph, which are not applicable to Beyond 5G because of its dynamism and stringent QoS requirements. This paper fills in the gap by studying the joint problem of communication and computing resource allocation, dubbed CCRA, including VNF placement and assignment, traffic prioritization, and path selection considering capacity constraints as well as link and queuing delays, with the goal of minimizing overall cost. We formulate the problem as a non-linear programming model, and propose two approaches, dubbed B\&B-CCRA and WF-CCRA respectively, based on the Branch \& Bound and Water-Filling algorithms. Numerical simulations show that B\&B-CCRA can solve the problem optimally, whereas WF-CCRA can provide near-optimal solutions in significantly less time.
We introduce new discrete best approximation problems, formulated and solved in the framework of tropical algebra, which deals with semirings and semifields with idempotent addition. Given a set of samples, each consisting of the input and output of an unknown function defined on an idempotent semifield, the problem is to find a best approximation of the function, by tropical Puiseux polynomial and rational functions. A new solution approach is proposed, which involves the reduction of the problem of polynomial approximation to the best approximate solution of a tropical linear vector equation with an unknown vector on one side (a one-sided equation). We derive a best approximate solution to the one-sided equation, and we evaluate the inherent approximation error in a direct analytical form. Furthermore, we reduce the rational approximation problem to the best approximate solution of an equation with unknown vectors on both sides (a two-sided equation). A best approximate solution to the two-sided equation is obtained in numerical form, by using an iterative alternating algorithm. To illustrate the new technique developed, we solve example approximation problems in terms of a real semifield, where addition is defined as maximum and multiplication as arithmetic addition (max-plus algebra), which corresponds to the best Chebyshev approximation by piecewise linear functions.
The initial motivation for this work was the linguistic case of the spread of Germanic syntactic features into Romance dialects of North-Eastern Italy, which occurred after the immigration of German people to Tyrol during the High Middle Ages. To obtain a representation of the data over the territory suitable for a mathematical formulation, an interactive map is produced as a first step, using tools of what is called Geographic Data Science. A smooth two-dimensional surface G is introduced, expressing locally which fraction of territory uses a given German language feature: it is obtained by a piecewise cubic curvature minimizing interpolant of the discrete function that says if at any surveyed locality that feature is used or not. This surface G is thought of as the value at the present time of a function describing a diffusion-convection phenomenon in two dimensions (here said tidal mode), which is subjected in a very natural way to the same equation used in physics, introducing a contextual diffusivity concept: it is shown that with two different assumptions about diffusivity, solutions of this equation, evaluated at the present time, fit well with the data interpolated by G, thus providing two convincing different pictures of diffusion-convection in the case under study, albeit simplifications and approximations. Very importantly, it is shown that the linguistic diffusion model known to linguists as Schmidt waves can be counted among the solutions of the diffusion equation
Symmetry is a unifying concept in physics. In quantum information and beyond, it is known that quantum states possessing symmetry are not useful for certain information-processing tasks. For example, states that commute with a Hamiltonian realizing a time evolution are not useful for timekeeping during that evolution, and bipartite states that are highly extendible are not strongly entangled and thus not useful for basic tasks like teleportation. Motivated by this perspective, this paper details several quantum algorithms that test the symmetry of quantum states and channels. For the case of testing Bose symmetry of a state, we show that there is a simple and efficient quantum algorithm, while the tests for other kinds of symmetry rely on the aid of a quantum prover. We prove that the acceptance probability of each algorithm is equal to the maximum symmetric fidelity of the state being tested, thus giving a firm operational meaning to these latter resource quantifiers. Special cases of the algorithms test for incoherence or separability of quantum states. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms on choice examples by using the variational approach to quantum algorithms, replacing the quantum prover with a parameterized circuit. We demonstrate this approach for numerous examples using the IBM quantum noiseless and noisy simulators, and we observe that the algorithms perform well in the noiseless case and exhibit noise resilience in the noisy case. We also show that the maximum symmetric fidelities can be calculated by semi-definite programs, which is useful for benchmarking the performance of these algorithms for sufficiently small examples. Finally, we establish various generalizations of the resource theory of asymmetry, with the upshot being that the acceptance probabilities of the algorithms are resource monotones and thus well motivated from the resource-theoretic perspective.
Optimal transport and Wasserstein distances are flourishing in many scientific fields as a means for comparing and connecting random structures. Here we pioneer the use of an optimal transport distance between L\'{e}vy measures to solve a statistical problem. Dependent Bayesian nonparametric models provide flexible inference on distinct, yet related, groups of observations. Each component of a vector of random measures models a group of exchangeable observations, while their dependence regulates the borrowing of information across groups. We derive the first statistical index of dependence in $[0,1]$ for (completely) random measures that accounts for their whole infinite-dimensional distribution, which is assumed to be equal across different groups. This is accomplished by using the geometric properties of the Wasserstein distance to solve a max-min problem at the level of the underlying L\'{e}vy measures. The Wasserstein index of dependence sheds light on the models' deep structure and has desirable properties: (i) it is $0$ if and only if the random measures are independent; (ii) it is $1$ if and only if the random measures are completely dependent; (iii) it simultaneously quantifies the dependence of $d \ge 2$ random measures, avoiding the need for pairwise comparisons; (iv) it can be evaluated numerically. Moreover, the index allows for informed prior specifications and fair model comparisons for Bayesian nonparametric models.
Recommender systems are used to provide relevant suggestions on various matters. Although these systems are a classical research topic, knowledge is still limited regarding the public opinion about these systems. Public opinion is also important because the systems are known to cause various problems. To this end, this paper presents a qualitative analysis of the perceptions of ordinary citizens, civil society groups, businesses, and others on recommender systems in Europe. The dataset examined is based on the answers submitted to a consultation about the Digital Services Act (DSA) recently enacted in the European Union (EU). Therefore, not only does the paper contribute to the pressing question about regulating new technologies and online platforms, but it also reveals insights about the policy-making of the DSA. According to the qualitative results, Europeans have generally negative opinions about recommender systems and the quality of their recommendations. The systems are widely seen to violate privacy and other fundamental rights. According to many Europeans, these also cause various societal problems, including even threats to democracy. Furthermore, existing regulations in the EU are commonly seen to have failed due to a lack of proper enforcement. Numerous suggestions were made by the respondents to the consultation for improving the situation, but only a few of these ended up to the DSA.
Speech emotion conversion is the task of converting the expressed emotion of a spoken utterance to a target emotion while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. While most existing works in speech emotion conversion rely on acted-out datasets and parallel data samples, in this work we specifically focus on more challenging in-the-wild scenarios and do not rely on parallel data. To this end, we propose a diffusion-based generative model for speech emotion conversion, the EmoConv-Diff, that is trained to reconstruct an input utterance while also conditioning on its emotion. Subsequently, at inference, a target emotion embedding is employed to convert the emotion of the input utterance to the given target emotion. As opposed to performing emotion conversion on categorical representations, we use a continuous arousal dimension to represent emotions while also achieving intensity control. We validate the proposed methodology on a large in-the-wild dataset, the MSP-Podcast v1.10. Our results show that the proposed diffusion model is indeed capable of synthesizing speech with a controllable target emotion. Crucially, the proposed approach shows improved performance along the extreme values of arousal and thereby addresses a common challenge in the speech emotion conversion literature.
Telemanipulation has become a promising technology that combines human intelligence with robotic capabilities to perform tasks remotely. However, it faces several challenges such as insufficient transparency, low immersion, and limited feedback to the human operator. Moreover, the high cost of haptic interfaces is a major limitation for the application of telemanipulation in various fields, including elder care, where our research is focused. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the usage of nonlinear model predictive control for telemanipulation using low-cost virtual reality controllers, including multiple control goals in the objective function. The framework utilizes models for human input prediction and taskrelated models of the robot and the environment. The proposed framework is validated on an UR5e robot arm in the scenario of handling liquid without spilling. Further extensions of the framework such as pouring assistance and collision avoidance can easily be included.
Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in location-based services that aim to provide personalized suggestions for the user's next destination. Previous works on POI recommendation have laid focused on modeling the user's spatial preference. However, existing works that leverage spatial information are only based on the aggregation of users' previous visited positions, which discourages the model from recommending POIs in novel areas. This trait of position-based methods will harm the model's performance in many situations. Additionally, incorporating sequential information into the user's spatial preference remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Diff-POI: a Diffusion-based model that samples the user's spatial preference for the next POI recommendation. Inspired by the wide application of diffusion algorithm in sampling from distributions, Diff-POI encodes the user's visiting sequence and spatial character with two tailor-designed graph encoding modules, followed by a diffusion-based sampling strategy to explore the user's spatial visiting trends. We leverage the diffusion process and its reversed form to sample from the posterior distribution and optimized the corresponding score function. We design a joint training and inference framework to optimize and evaluate the proposed Diff-POI. Extensive experiments on four real-world POI recommendation datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Diff-POI over state-of-the-art baseline methods. Further ablation and parameter studies on Diff-POI reveal the functionality and effectiveness of the proposed diffusion-based sampling strategy for addressing the limitations of existing methods.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.