This note shows how to compute, to high relative accuracy under mild assumptions, complex Jacobi rotations for diagonalization of Hermitian matrices of order two, using the correctly rounded functions $\mathtt{cr\_hypot}$ and $\mathtt{cr\_rsqrt}$, proposed for standardization in the C programming language as recommended by the IEEE-754 floating-point standard. The rounding to nearest (ties to even) and the non-stop arithmetic are assumed. The numerical examples compare the observed with theoretical bounds on the relative errors in the rotations' elements, and show that the maximal observed departure of the rotations' determinants from unity is smaller than that of the transformations computed by LAPACK.
To date, most methods for simulating conditioned diffusions are limited to the Euclidean setting. The conditioned process can be constructed using a change of measure known as Doob's $h$-transform. The specific type of conditioning depends on a function $h$ which is typically unknown in closed form. To resolve this, we extend the notion of guided processes to a manifold $M$, where one replaces $h$ by a function based on the heat kernel on $M$. We consider the case of a Brownian motion with drift, constructed using the frame bundle of $M$, conditioned to hit a point $x_T$ at time $T$. We prove equivalence of the laws of the conditioned process and the guided process with a tractable Radon-Nikodym derivative. Subsequently, we show how one can obtain guided processes on any manifold $N$ that is diffeomorphic to $M$ without assuming knowledge of the heat kernel on $N$. We illustrate our results with numerical simulations and an example of parameter estimation where a diffusion process on the torus is observed discretely in time.
Innovative solution for addressing the challenges in the legal records management system through a blockchain-based eVault platform. Our objective is to create a secure, transparent, and accessible ecosystem that caters to the needs of all stakeholders, including lawyers, judges, clients, and registrars. First and foremost, our solution is built on a robust blockchain platform like Ethereum harnessing the power of smart contracts to manage access, permissions, and transactions effectively. This ensures the utmost security and transparency in every interaction within the system. To make our eVault system user-friendly, we've developed intuitive interfaces for all stakeholders. Lawyers, judges, clients, and even registrars can effortlessly upload and retrieve legal documents, track changes, and share information within the platform. But that's not all; we've gone a step further by incorporating a document creation and saving feature within our app and website. This feature allows users to generate and securely store legal documents, streamlining the entire documentation process.
The field of Contextual Optimization (CO) integrates machine learning and optimization to solve decision making problems under uncertainty. Recently, a risk sensitive variant of CO, known as Conditional Robust Optimization (CRO), combines uncertainty quantification with robust optimization in order to promote safety and reliability in high stake applications. Exploiting modern differentiable optimization methods, we propose a novel end-to-end approach to train a CRO model in a way that accounts for both the empirical risk of the prescribed decisions and the quality of conditional coverage of the contextual uncertainty set that supports them. While guarantees of success for the latter objective are impossible to obtain from the point of view of conformal prediction theory, high quality conditional coverage is achieved empirically by ingeniously employing a logistic regression differentiable layer within the calculation of coverage quality in our training loss. We show that the proposed training algorithms produce decisions that outperform the traditional estimate then optimize approaches.
This paper presents a novel stochastic optimisation methodology to perform empirical Bayesian inference in semi-blind image deconvolution problems. Given a blurred image and a parametric class of possible operators, the proposed optimisation approach automatically calibrates the parameters of the blur model by maximum marginal likelihood estimation, followed by (non-blind) image deconvolution by maximum-a-posteriori estimation conditionally to the estimated model parameters. In addition to the blur model, the proposed approach also automatically calibrates the noise variance as well as any regularisation parameters. The marginal likelihood of the blur, noise variance, and regularisation parameters is generally computationally intractable, as it requires calculating several integrals over the entire solution space. Our approach addresses this difficulty by using a stochastic approximation proximal gradient optimisation scheme, which iteratively solves such integrals by using a Moreau-Yosida regularised unadjusted Langevin Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. This optimisation strategy can be easily and efficiently applied to any model that is log-concave, and by using the same gradient and proximal operators that are required to compute the maximum-a-posteriori solution by convex optimisation. We provide convergence guarantees for the proposed optimisation scheme under realistic and easily verifiable conditions and subsequently demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach with a series of deconvolution experiments and comparisons with alternative strategies from the state of the art.
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is known for average optimality (optimizing the long-run average of the rewards obtained over time) and Blackwell optimality (remaining discount optimal for all discount factors sufficiently close to 1). In this paper, we prove several foundational results for RMDPs beyond the discounted return. We show that average optimal policies can be chosen stationary and deterministic for sa-rectangular RMDPs but, perhaps surprisingly, that history-dependent (Markovian) policies strictly outperform stationary policies for average optimality in s-rectangular RMDPs. We also study Blackwell optimality for sa-rectangular RMDPs, where we show that {\em approximate} Blackwell optimal policies always exist, although Blackwell optimal policies may not exist. We also provide a sufficient condition for their existence, which encompasses virtually any examples from the literature. We then discuss the connection between average and Blackwell optimality, and we describe several algorithms to compute the optimal average return. Interestingly, our approach leverages the connections between RMDPs and stochastic games.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong results on a range of NLP tasks. Typically, outputs are obtained via autoregressive sampling from the LLM's underlying distribution. We show that this inference strategy can be suboptimal for a range of tasks and associated evaluation metrics. As a remedy, we propose metric aware LLM inference: a decision theoretic approach optimizing for custom metrics at inference time. We report improvements over baselines on academic benchmarks and publicly available models.
With the increasing availability of large scale datasets, computational power and tools like automatic differentiation and expressive neural network architectures, sequential data are now often treated in a data-driven way, with a dynamical model trained from the observation data. While neural networks are often seen as uninterpretable black-box architectures, they can still benefit from physical priors on the data and from mathematical knowledge. In this paper, we use a neural network architecture which leverages the long-known Koopman operator theory to embed dynamical systems in latent spaces where their dynamics can be described linearly, enabling a number of appealing features. We introduce methods that enable to train such a model for long-term continuous reconstruction, even in difficult contexts where the data comes in irregularly-sampled time series. The potential for self-supervised learning is also demonstrated, as we show the promising use of trained dynamical models as priors for variational data assimilation techniques, with applications to e.g. time series interpolation and forecasting.
Necessary and sufficient conditions of uniform consistency are explored. A hypothesis is simple. Nonparametric sets of alternatives are bounded convex sets in $\mathbb{L}_p$, $p >1$ with "small" balls deleted. The "small" balls have the center at the point of hypothesis and radii of balls tend to zero as sample size increases. For problem of hypothesis testing on a density, we show that, for the sets of alternatives, there are uniformly consistent tests for some sequence of radii of the balls, if and only if, convex set is relatively compact. The results are established for problem of hypothesis testing on a density, for signal detection in Gaussian white noise, for linear ill-posed problems with random Gaussian noise and so on.
This paper proposes a two-stage approach to formulate the time-optimal point-to-point motion planning problem, involving a first stage with a fixed time grid and a second stage with a variable time grid. The proposed approach brings benefits through its straightforward optimal control problem formulation with a fixed and low number of control steps for manageable computational complexity and the avoidance of interpolation errors associated with time scaling, especially when aiming to reach a distant goal. Additionally, an asynchronous nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) update scheme is integrated with this two-stage approach to address delayed and fluctuating computation times, facilitating online replanning. The effectiveness of the proposed two-stage approach and NMPC implementation is demonstrated through numerical examples centered on autonomous navigation with collision avoidance.
In recent years, operator learning, particularly the DeepONet, has received much attention for efficiently learning complex mappings between input and output functions across diverse fields. However, in practical scenarios with limited and noisy data, accessing the uncertainty in DeepONet predictions becomes essential, especially in mission-critical or safety-critical applications. Existing methods, either computationally intensive or yielding unsatisfactory uncertainty quantification, leave room for developing efficient and informative uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques tailored for DeepONets. In this work, we proposed a novel inference approach for efficient UQ for operator learning by harnessing the power of the Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI) approach. EKI, known for its derivative-free, noise-robust, and highly parallelizable feature, has demonstrated its advantages for UQ for physics-informed neural networks [28]. Our innovative application of EKI enables us to efficiently train ensembles of DeepONets while obtaining informative uncertainty estimates for the output of interest. We deploy a mini-batch variant of EKI to accommodate larger datasets, mitigating the computational demand due to large datasets during the training stage. Furthermore, we introduce a heuristic method to estimate the artificial dynamics covariance, thereby improving our uncertainty estimates. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our proposed methodology across various benchmark problems, showcasing its potential to address the pressing challenges of uncertainty quantification in DeepONets, especially for practical applications with limited and noisy data.