Gaussian graphical models emerge in a wide range of fields. They model the statistical relationships between variables as a graph, where an edge between two variables indicates conditional dependence. Unfortunately, well-established estimators, such as the graphical lasso or neighborhood selection, are known to be susceptible to a high prevalence of false edge detections. False detections may encourage inaccurate or even incorrect scientific interpretations, with major implications in applications, such as biomedicine or healthcare. In this paper, we introduce a nodewise variable selection approach to graph learning and provably control the false discovery rate of the selected edge set at a self-estimated level. A novel fusion method of the individual neighborhoods outputs an undirected graph estimate. The proposed method is parameter-free and does not require tuning by the user. Benchmarks against competing false discovery rate controlling methods in numerical experiments considering different graph topologies show a significant gain in performance.
Integer linear programming (ILP) models a wide range of practical combinatorial optimization problems and significantly impacts industry and management sectors. This work proposes new characterizations of ILP with the concept of boundary solutions. Motivated by the new characterizations, we develop a new local search algorithm Local-ILP, which is efficient for solving general ILP validated on a large heterogeneous problem dataset. We propose a new local search framework that switches between three modes, namely Search, Improve, and Restore modes. Two new operators are proposed, namely the tight move and the lift move operators, which are associated with appropriate scoring functions. Different modes apply different operators to realize different search strategies and the algorithm switches between three modes according to the current search state. Putting these together, we develop a local search ILP solver called Local-ILP. Experiments conducted on the MIPLIB dataset show the effectiveness of our algorithm in solving large-scale hard ILP problems. In the aspect of finding a good feasible solution quickly, Local-ILP is competitive and complementary to the state-of-the-art commercial solver Gurobi and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art non-commercial solver SCIP. Moreover, our algorithm establishes new records for 6 MIPLIB open instances. The theoretical analysis of our algorithm is also presented, which shows our algorithm could avoid visiting unnecessary regions.
Structured state-space models (SSMs) such as S4, stemming from the seminal work of Gu et al., are gaining popularity as effective approaches for modeling sequential data. Deep SSMs demonstrate outstanding performance across a diverse set of domains, at a reduced training and inference cost compared to attention-based transformers. Recent developments show that if the linear recurrence powering SSMs allows for multiplicative interactions between inputs and hidden states (e.g. GateLoop, Mamba, GLA), then the resulting architecture can surpass in both in accuracy and efficiency attention-powered foundation models trained on text, at scales of billion parameters. In this paper, we give theoretical grounding to this recent finding using tools from Rough Path Theory: we show that when random linear recurrences are equipped with simple input-controlled transitions (selectivity mechanism), then the hidden state is provably a low-dimensional projection of a powerful mathematical object called the signature of the input -- capturing non-linear interactions between tokens at distinct timescales. Our theory not only motivates the success of modern selective state-space models such as Mamba but also provides a solid framework to understand the expressive power of future SSM variants.
Advancing robotic grasping and manipulation requires the ability to test algorithms and/or train learning models on large numbers of grasps. Towards the goal of more advanced grasping, we present the Grasp Reset Mechanism (GRM), a fully automated apparatus for conducting large-scale grasping trials. The GRM automates the process of resetting a grasping environment, repeatably placing an object in a fixed location and controllable 1-D orientation. It also collects data and swaps between multiple objects enabling robust dataset collection with no human intervention. We also present a standardized state machine interface for control, which allows for integration of most manipulators with minimal effort. In addition to the physical design and corresponding software, we include a dataset of 1,020 grasps. The grasps were created with a Kinova Gen3 robot arm and Robotiq 2F-85 Adaptive Gripper to enable training of learning models and to demonstrate the capabilities of the GRM. The dataset includes ranges of grasps conducted across four objects and a variety of orientations. Manipulator states, object pose, video, and grasp success data are provided for every trial.
The human cognitive system exhibits remarkable flexibility and generalization capabilities, partly due to its ability to form low-dimensional, compositional representations of the environment. In contrast, standard neural network architectures often struggle with abstract reasoning tasks, overfitting, and requiring extensive data for training. This paper investigates the impact of the relational bottleneck -- a mechanism that focuses processing on relations among inputs -- on the learning of factorized representations conducive to compositional coding and the attendant flexibility of processing. We demonstrate that such a bottleneck not only improves generalization and learning efficiency, but also aligns network performance with human-like behavioral biases. Networks trained with the relational bottleneck developed orthogonal representations of feature dimensions latent in the dataset, reflecting the factorized structure thought to underlie human cognitive flexibility. Moreover, the relational network mimics human biases towards regularity without pre-specified symbolic primitives, suggesting that the bottleneck fosters the emergence of abstract representations that confer flexibility akin to symbols.
Computing the core decomposition of a graph is a fundamental problem that has recently been studied in the differentially private setting, motivated by practical applications in data mining. In particular, Dhulipala et al. [FOCS 2022] gave the first mechanism for approximate core decomposition in the challenging and practically relevant setting of local differential privacy. One of the main open problems left by their work is whether the accuracy, i.e., the approximation ratio and additive error, of their mechanism can be improved. We show the first lower bounds on the additive error of approximate and exact core decomposition mechanisms in the centralized and local model of differential privacy, respectively. We also give mechanisms for exact and approximate core decomposition in the local model, with almost matching additive error bounds. Our mechanisms are based on a black-box application of continual counting. They also yield improved mechanisms for the approximate densest subgraph problem in the local model.
Prediction methods for time-to-event outcomes often utilize survival models that rely on strong assumptions about noninformative censoring or on how individual-level covariates and survival functions are related. When the main interest is in predicting individual-level restricted mean survival times (RMST), reliance on such assumptions can lead to poor predictive performance if these assumptions are not satisfied. We propose a generalized Bayes framework that avoids full probability modeling of all survival outcomes by using an RMST-targeted loss function that depends on a collection of inverse probability of censoring weights (IPCW). In our generalized Bayes formulation, we utilize a flexible additive tree regression model for the RMST function, and the posterior distribution of interest is obtained through model-averaging IPCW-conditional loss function-based pseudo-Bayesian posteriors. Because informative censoring can be captured by the IPCW-dependent loss function, our approach only requires one to specify a model for the censoring distribution, thereby obviating the need for complex joint modeling to handle informative censoring. We evaluate the performance of our method through a series of simulations that compare it with several well-known survival machine learning methods, and we illustrate the application of our method using a multi-site cohort of breast cancer patients with clinical and genomic covariates.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.