A conjecture attributed to Smith states that every pair of longest cycles in a $k$-connected graph intersect each other in at least $k$ vertices. In this paper, we show that every pair of longest cycles in a~$k$-connected graph on $n$ vertices intersect each other in at least~$\min\{n,8k-n-16\}$ vertices, which confirms Smith's conjecture when $k\geq (n+16)/7$. An analog conjecture for paths instead of cycles was stated by Hippchen. By a simple reduction, we relate both conjectures, showing that Hippchen's conjecture is valid when either $k \leq 6$ or $k \geq (n+9)/7$.
Mediation analysis assesses the extent to which the exposure affects the outcome indirectly through a mediator and the extent to which it operates directly through other pathways. As the most popular method in empirical mediation analysis, the Baron-Kenny approach estimates the indirect and direct effects of the exposure on the outcome based on linear structural equation models. However, when the exposure and the mediator are not randomized, the estimates may be biased due to unmeasured confounding among the exposure, mediator, and outcome. Building on Cinelli and Hazlett (2020), we derive general omitted-variable bias formulas in linear regressions with vector responses and regressors. We then use the formulas to develop a sensitivity analysis method for the Baron-Kenny approach to mediation in the presence of unmeasured confounding. To ensure interpretability, we express the sensitivity parameters to correspond to the natural factorization of the joint distribution of the direct acyclic graph for mediation analysis. They measure the partial correlation between the unmeasured confounder and the exposure, mediator, outcome, respectively. With the sensitivity parameters, we propose a novel measure called the "robustness value for mediation" or simply the "robustness value", to assess the robustness of results based on the Baron-Kenny approach with respect to unmeasured confounding. Intuitively, the robustness value measures the minimum value of the maximum proportion of variability explained by the unmeasured confounding, for the exposure, mediator and outcome, to overturn the results of the point estimate or confidence interval for the direct and indirect effects. Importantly, we prove that all our sensitivity bounds are attainable and thus sharp.
Miura surfaces are the solutions of a constrained nonlinear elliptic system of equations. This system is derived by homogenization from the Miura fold, which is a type of origami fold with multiple applications in engineering. A previous inquiry, gave suboptimal conditions for existence of solutions and proposed an $H^2$-conformal finite element method to approximate them. In this paper, the existence of Miura surfaces is studied using a mixed formulation. It is also proved that the constraints propagate from the boundary to the interior of the domain for well-chosen boundary conditions. Then, a numerical method based on a least-squares formulation, Taylor--Hood finite elements and a Newton method is introduced to approximate Miura surfaces. The numerical method is proved to converge and numerical tests are performed to demonstrate its robustness.
Consider a regression or some regression-type model for a certain response variable where the linear predictor includes an ordered factor among the explanatory variables. The inclusion of a factor of this type can take place is a few different ways, discussed in the pertaining literature. The present contribution proposes a different way of tackling this problem, by constructing a numeric variable in an alternative way with respect to the current methodology. The proposed techniques appears to retain the data fitting capability of the existing methodology, but with a simpler interpretation of the model components.
The simulation of geological facies in an unobservable volume is essential in various geoscience applications. Given the complexity of the problem, deep generative learning is a promising approach to overcome the limitations of traditional geostatistical simulation models, in particular their lack of physical realism. This research aims to investigate the application of generative adversarial networks and deep variational inference for conditionally simulating meandering channels in underground volumes. In this paper, we review the generative deep learning approaches, in particular the adversarial ones and the stabilization techniques that aim to facilitate their training. The proposed approach is tested on 2D and 3D simulations generated by the stochastic process-based model Flumy. Morphological metrics are utilized to compare our proposed method with earlier iterations of generative adversarial networks. The results indicate that by utilizing recent stabilization techniques, generative adversarial networks can efficiently sample from target data distributions. Moreover, we demonstrate the ability to simulate conditioned simulations through the latent variable model property of the proposed approach.
This paper develops an in-depth treatment concerning the problem of approximating the Gaussian smoothing and Gaussian derivative computations in scale-space theory for application on discrete data. With close connections to previous axiomatic treatments of continuous and discrete scale-space theory, we consider three main ways discretizing these scale-space operations in terms of explicit discrete convolutions, based on either (i) sampling the Gaussian kernels and the Gaussian derivative kernels, (ii) locally integrating the Gaussian kernels and the Gaussian derivative kernels over each pixel support region and (iii) basing the scale-space analysis on the discrete analogue of the Gaussian kernel, and then computing derivative approximations by applying small-support central difference operators to the spatially smoothed image data. We study the properties of these three main discretization methods both theoretically and experimentally, and characterize their performance by quantitative measures, including the results they give rise to with respect to the task of scale selection, investigated for four different use cases, and with emphasis on the behaviour at fine scales. The results show that the sampled Gaussian kernels and derivatives as well as the integrated Gaussian kernels and derivatives perform very poorly at very fine scales. At very fine scales, the discrete analogue of the Gaussian kernel with its corresponding discrete derivative approximations performs substantially better. The sampled Gaussian kernel and the sampled Gaussian derivatives do, on the other hand, lead to numerically very good approximations of the corresponding continuous results, when the scale parameter is sufficiently large, in the experiments presented in the paper, when the scale parameter is greater than a value of about 1, in units of the grid spacing.
The paper presents a numerical method for the simulation of flow and mechanics in fractured rock. The governing equations which couple the effects in the rock mass and in the fractures are obtained using the discrete fracture-matrix approach. The fracture flow is driven by the cubic law, and the non-penetration contact conditions prevent fractures from closing. A stable finite element discretization is proposed for the displacement-pressure-flux formulation. The resulting nonlinear algebraic system of equations and inequalities is decoupled using a robust iterative splitting into the linearized flow subproblem, and the quadratic programming problem for the mechanical part. The non-penetration conditions are solved by means of the MPGP algorithm. The capability of the numerical scheme is demonstrated on a benchmark problem for borehole excavation with hundreds of fractures in 3D. The paper's novelty consists in combination of three crucial ingredients: (i) application of discrete fracture matrix approach, (ii) robust iterative splitting of resulting nonlinear algebraic system working for real-world 3D problems and (iii) efficient solution of its mechanical quadratic programming part with large number of fractures in mutual contact by means of own solvers with known rate of convergence implemented into in-house PERMON library.
We give a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) for two terminal reliability in directed acyclic graphs.
We present the numerical analysis of a finite element method (FEM) for one-dimensional Dirichlet problems involving the logarithmic Laplacian (the pseudo-differential operator that appears as a first-order expansion of the fractional Laplacian as the exponent $s\to 0^+$). Our analysis exhibits new phenomena in this setting; in particular, using recently obtained regularity results, we prove rigorous error estimates and provide a logarithmic order of convergence in the energy norm using suitable \emph{log}-weighted spaces. Numerical evidence suggests that this type of rate cannot be improved. Moreover, we show that the stiffness matrix of logarithmic problems can be obtained as the derivative of the fractional stiffness matrix evaluated at $s=0$. Lastly, we investigate the relationship between the discrete eigenvalue problem and its convergence to the continuous one.
We observe a large variety of robots in terms of their bodies, sensors, and actuators. Given the commonalities in the skill sets, teaching each skill to each different robot independently is inefficient and not scalable when the large variety in the robotic landscape is considered. If we can learn the correspondences between the sensorimotor spaces of different robots, we can expect a skill that is learned in one robot can be more directly and easily transferred to other robots. In this paper, we propose a method to learn correspondences among two or more robots that may have different morphologies. To be specific, besides robots with similar morphologies with different degrees of freedom, we show that a fixed-based manipulator robot with joint control and a differential drive mobile robot can be addressed within the proposed framework. To set up the correspondence among the robots considered, an initial base task is demonstrated to the robots to achieve the same goal. Then, a common latent representation is learned along with the individual robot policies for achieving the goal. After the initial learning stage, the observation of a new task execution by one robot becomes sufficient to generate a latent space representation pertaining to the other robots to achieve the same task. We verified our system in a set of experiments where the correspondence between robots is learned (1) when the robots need to follow the same paths to achieve the same task, (2) when the robots need to follow different trajectories to achieve the same task, and (3) when complexities of the required sensorimotor trajectories are different for the robots. We also provide a proof-of-the-concept realization of correspondence learning between a real manipulator robot and a simulated mobile robot.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.