In PODS'21, Hu presented an algorithm in the massively parallel computation (MPC) model that processes any acyclic join with an asymptotically optimal load. In this paper, we present an alternative analysis of her algorithm. The novelty of our analysis is in the revelation of a new mathematical structure -- which we name "canonical edge cover" -- for acyclic hypergraphs. We prove non-trivial properties for canonical edge covers that offer us a graph-theoretic perspective about why Hu's algorithm works.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
In this paper we present a proof system that operates on graphs instead of formulas. Starting from the well-known relationship between formulas and cographs, we drop the cograph-conditions and look at arbitrary undirected) graphs. This means that we lose the tree structure of the formulas corresponding to the cographs, and we can no longer use standard proof theoretical methods that depend on that tree structure. In order to overcome this difficulty, we use a modular decomposition of graphs and some techniques from deep inference where inference rules do not rely on the main connective of a formula. For our proof system we show the admissibility of cut and a generalization of the splitting property. Finally, we show that our system is a conservative extension of multiplicative linear logic with mix, and we argue that our graphs form a notion of generalized connective.
While algorithms for planar graphs have received a lot of attention, few papers have focused on the additional power that one gets from assuming an embedding of the graph is available. While in the classic sequential setting, this assumption gives no additional power (as a planar graph can be embedded in linear time), we show that this is far from being the case in other settings. We assume that the embedding is straight-line, but our methods also generalize to non-straight-line embeddings. Specifically, we focus on sublinear-time computation and massively parallel computation (MPC). Our main technical contribution is a sublinear-time algorithm for computing a relaxed version of an $r$-division. We then show how this can be used to estimate Lipschitz additive graph parameters. This includes, for example, the maximum matching, maximum independent set, or the minimum dominating set. We also show how this can be used to solve some property testing problems with respect to the vertex edit distance. In the second part of our paper, we show an MPC algorithm that computes an $r$-division of the input graph. We show how this can be used to solve various classical graph problems with space per machine of $O(n^{2/3+\epsilon})$ for some $\epsilon>0$, and while performing $O(1)$ rounds. This includes for example approximate shortest paths or the minimum spanning tree. Our results also imply an improved MPC algorithm for Euclidean minimum spanning tree.
Conditional independence models associated with directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) may be characterized in at least three different ways: via a factorization, the global Markov property (given by the d-separation criterion), and the local Markov property. Marginals of DAG models also imply equality constraints that are not conditional independences; the well-known `Verma constraint' is an example. Constraints of this type are used for testing edges, and in a computationally efficient marginalization scheme via variable elimination. We show that equality constraints like the `Verma constraint' can be viewed as conditional independences in kernel objects obtained from joint distributions via a fixing operation that generalizes conditioning and marginalization. We use these constraints to define, via ordered local and global Markov properties, and a factorization, a graphical model associated with acyclic directed mixed graphs (ADMGs). We prove that marginal distributions of DAG models lie in this model, and that a set of these constraints given by Tian provides an alternative definition of the model. Finally, we show that the fixing operation used to define the model leads to a particularly simple characterization of identifiable causal effects in hidden variable causal DAG models.
In the realm of unsupervised learning, Bayesian nonparametric mixture models, exemplified by the Dirichlet Process Mixture Model (DPMM), provide a principled approach for adapting the complexity of the model to the data. Such models are particularly useful in clustering tasks where the number of clusters is unknown. Despite their potential and mathematical elegance, however, DPMMs have yet to become a mainstream tool widely adopted by practitioners. This is arguably due to a misconception that these models scale poorly as well as the lack of high-performance (and user-friendly) software tools that can handle large datasets efficiently. In this paper we bridge this practical gap by proposing a new, easy-to-use, statistical software package for scalable DPMM inference. More concretely, we provide efficient and easily-modifiable implementations for high-performance distributed sampling-based inference in DPMMs where the user is free to choose between either a multiple-machine, multiple-core, CPU implementation (written in Julia) and a multiple-stream GPU implementation (written in CUDA/C++). Both the CPU and GPU implementations come with a common (and optional) python wrapper, providing the user with a single point of entry with the same interface. On the algorithmic side, our implementations leverage a leading DPMM sampler from (Chang and Fisher III, 2013). While Chang and Fisher III's implementation (written in MATLAB/C++) used only CPU and was designed for a single multi-core machine, the packages we proposed here distribute the computations efficiently across either multiple multi-core machines or across mutiple GPU streams. This leads to speedups, alleviates memory and storage limitations, and lets us fit DPMMs to significantly larger datasets and of higher dimensionality than was possible previously by either (Chang and Fisher III, 2013) or other DPMM methods.
This paper presents new deterministic and distributed low-diameter decomposition algorithms for weighted graphs. In particular, we show that if one can efficiently compute approximate distances in a parallel or a distributed setting, one can also efficiently compute low-diameter decompositions. This consequently implies solutions to many fundamental distance based problems using a polylogarithmic number of approximate distance computations. Our low-diameter decomposition generalizes and extends the line of work starting from [Rozho\v{n}, Ghaffari STOC 2020] to weighted graphs in a very model-independent manner. Moreover, our clustering results have additional useful properties, including strong-diameter guarantees, separation properties, restricting cluster centers to specified terminals, and more. Applications include: -- The first near-linear work and polylogarithmic depth randomized and deterministic parallel algorithm for low-stretch spanning trees (LSST) with polylogarithmic stretch. Previously, the best parallel LSST algorithm required $m \cdot n^{o(1)}$ work and $n^{o(1)}$ depth and was inherently randomized. No deterministic LSST algorithm with truly sub-quadratic work and sub-linear depth was known. -- The first near-linear work and polylogarithmic depth deterministic algorithm for computing an $\ell_1$-embedding into polylogarithmic dimensional space with polylogarithmic distortion. The best prior deterministic algorithms for $\ell_1$-embeddings either require large polynomial work or are inherently sequential. Even when we apply our techniques to the classical problem of computing a ball-carving with strong-diameter $O(\log^2 n)$ in an unweighted graph, our new clustering algorithm still leads to an improvement in round complexity from $O(\log^{10} n)$ rounds [Chang, Ghaffari PODC 21] to $O(\log^{4} n)$.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, which is inefficient and time-consuming during postprocessing. In this paper, we propose a Global Association Network (GANet) to formulate the lane detection problem from a new perspective, where each keypoint is directly regressed to the starting point of the lane line instead of point-by-point extension. Concretely, the association of keypoints to their belonged lane line is conducted by predicting their offsets to the corresponding starting points of lanes globally without dependence on each other, which could be done in parallel to greatly improve efficiency. In addition, we further propose a Lane-aware Feature Aggregator (LFA), which adaptively captures the local correlations between adjacent keypoints to supplement local information to the global association. Extensive experiments on two popular lane detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms previous methods with F1 score of 79.63% on CULane and 97.71% on Tusimple dataset with high FPS. The code will be released at //github.com/Wolfwjs/GANet.
We present a novel static analysis technique to derive higher moments for program variables for a large class of probabilistic loops with potentially uncountable state spaces. Our approach is fully automatic, meaning it does not rely on externally provided invariants or templates. We employ algebraic techniques based on linear recurrences and introduce program transformations to simplify probabilistic programs while preserving their statistical properties. We develop power reduction techniques to further simplify the polynomial arithmetic of probabilistic programs and define the theory of moment-computable probabilistic loops for which higher moments can precisely be computed. Our work has applications towards recovering probability distributions of random variables and computing tail probabilities. The empirical evaluation of our results demonstrates the applicability of our work on many challenging examples.
Structural data well exists in Web applications, such as social networks in social media, citation networks in academic websites, and threads data in online forums. Due to the complex topology, it is difficult to process and make use of the rich information within such data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great advantages on learning representations for structural data. However, the non-transparency of the deep learning models makes it non-trivial to explain and interpret the predictions made by GNNs. Meanwhile, it is also a big challenge to evaluate the GNN explanations, since in many cases, the ground-truth explanations are unavailable. In this paper, we take insights of Counterfactual and Factual (CF^2) reasoning from causal inference theory, to solve both the learning and evaluation problems in explainable GNNs. For generating explanations, we propose a model-agnostic framework by formulating an optimization problem based on both of the two casual perspectives. This distinguishes CF^2 from previous explainable GNNs that only consider one of them. Another contribution of the work is the evaluation of GNN explanations. For quantitatively evaluating the generated explanations without the requirement of ground-truth, we design metrics based on Counterfactual and Factual reasoning to evaluate the necessity and sufficiency of the explanations. Experiments show that no matter ground-truth explanations are available or not, CF^2 generates better explanations than previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. Moreover, the statistic analysis justifies the correlation between the performance on ground-truth evaluation and our proposed metrics.