Let $L$ be a set of $n$ lines in $R^3$ that is contained, when represented as points in the four-dimensional Pl\"ucker space of lines in $R^3$, in an irreducible variety $T$ of constant degree which is \emph{non-degenerate} with respect to $L$ (see below). We show: \medskip \noindent{\bf (1)} If $T$ is two-dimensional, the number of $r$-rich points (points incident to at least $r$ lines of $L$) is $O(n^{4/3+\epsilon}/r^2)$, for $r \ge 3$ and for any $\epsilon>0$, and, if at most $n^{1/3}$ lines of $L$ lie on any common regulus, there are at most $O(n^{4/3+\epsilon})$ $2$-rich points. For $r$ larger than some sufficiently large constant, the number of $r$-rich points is also $O(n/r)$. As an application, we deduce (with an $\epsilon$-loss in the exponent) the bound obtained by Pach and de Zeeuw (2107) on the number of distinct distances determined by $n$ points on an irreducible algebraic curve of constant degree in the plane that is not a line nor a circle. \medskip \noindent{\bf (2)} If $T$ is two-dimensional, the number of incidences between $L$ and a set of $m$ points in $R^3$ is $O(m+n)$. \medskip \noindent{\bf (3)} If $T$ is three-dimensional and nonlinear, the number of incidences between $L$ and a set of $m$ points in $R^3$ is $O\left(m^{3/5}n^{3/5} + (m^{11/15}n^{2/5} + m^{1/3}n^{2/3})s^{1/3} + m + n \right)$, provided that no plane contains more than $s$ of the points. When $s = O(\min\{n^{3/5}/m^{2/5}, m^{1/2}\})$, the bound becomes $O(m^{3/5}n^{3/5}+m+n)$. As an application, we prove that the number of incidences between $m$ points and $n$ lines in $R^4$ contained in a quadratic hypersurface (which does not contain a hyperplane) is $O(m^{3/5}n^{3/5} + m + n)$. The proofs use, in addition to various tools from algebraic geometry, recent bounds on the number of incidences between points and algebraic curves in the plane.
We consider statistical models arising from the common set of solutions to a sparse polynomial system with general coefficients. The maximum likelihood degree counts the number of critical points of the likelihood function restricted to the model. We prove the maximum likelihood degree of a sparse polynomial system is determined by its Newton polytopes and equals the mixed volume of a related Lagrange system of equations.
We consider the question of adaptive data analysis within the framework of convex optimization. We ask how many samples are needed in order to compute $\epsilon$-accurate estimates of $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ gradients queried by gradient descent, and we provide two intermediate answers to this question. First, we show that for a general analyst (not necessarily gradient descent) $\Omega(1/\epsilon^3)$ samples are required. This rules out the possibility of a foolproof mechanism. Our construction builds upon a new lower bound (that may be of interest of its own right) for an analyst that may ask several non adaptive questions in a batch of fixed and known $T$ rounds of adaptivity and requires a fraction of true discoveries. We show that for such an analyst $\Omega (\sqrt{T}/\epsilon^2)$ samples are necessary. Second, we show that, under certain assumptions on the oracle, in an interaction with gradient descent $\tilde \Omega(1/\epsilon^{2.5})$ samples are necessary. Our assumptions are that the oracle has only \emph{first order access} and is \emph{post-hoc generalizing}. First order access means that it can only compute the gradients of the sampled function at points queried by the algorithm. Our assumption of \emph{post-hoc generalization} follows from existing lower bounds for statistical queries. More generally then, we provide a generic reduction from the standard setting of statistical queries to the problem of estimating gradients queried by gradient descent. These results are in contrast with classical bounds that show that with $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ samples one can optimize the population risk to accuracy of $O(\epsilon)$ but, as it turns out, with spurious gradients.
Certain simplicial complexes are used to construct a subset $D$ of $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}^m$ and $D$, in turn, defines the linear code $C_{D}$ over $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$ that consists of $(v\cdot d)_{d\in D}$ for $v\in \mathbb{F}_{2^n}^m$. Here we deal with the case $n=3$, that is, when $C_{D}$ is an octanary code. We establish a relation between $C_{D}$ and its binary subfield code $C_{D}^{(2)}$ with the help of a generator matrix. For a given length and dimension, a code is called distance optimal if it has the highest possible distance. With respect to the Griesmer bound, five infinite families of distance optimal codes are obtained, and sufficient conditions for certain linear codes to be minimal are established.
We study the problem of testing whether a function $f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$ in the \emph{distribution-free} testing model. Here, the distance between functions is measured with respect to an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^n$ from which we can draw samples. In contrast to previous work, we do not assume that $\mathcal{D}$ has finite support. We design a tester that given query access to $f$, and sample access to $\mathcal{D}$, makes $(d/\varepsilon)^{O(1)}$ many queries to $f$, accepts with probability $1$ if $f$ is a polynomial of degree $d$, and rejects with probability at least $2/3$ if every degree-$d$ polynomial $P$ disagrees with $f$ on a set of mass at least $\varepsilon$ with respect to $\mathcal{D}$. Our result also holds under mild assumptions when we receive only a polynomial number of bits of precision for each query to $f$, or when $f$ can only be queried on rational points representable using a logarithmic number of bits. Along the way, we prove a new stability theorem for multivariate polynomials that may be of independent interest.
Many existing algorithms for streaming geometric data analysis have been plagued by exponential dependencies in the space complexity, which are undesirable for processing high-dimensional data sets. In particular, once $d\geq\log n$, there are no known non-trivial streaming algorithms for problems such as maintaining convex hulls and L\"owner-John ellipsoids of $n$ points, despite a long line of work in streaming computational geometry since [AHV04]. We simultaneously improve these results to $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ bits of space by trading off with a $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ factor distortion. We achieve these results in a unified manner, by designing the first streaming algorithm for maintaining a coreset for $\ell_\infty$ subspace embeddings with $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ space and $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ distortion. Our algorithm also gives similar guarantees in the \emph{online coreset} model. Along the way, we sharpen results for online numerical linear algebra by replacing a log condition number dependence with a $\log n$ dependence, answering a question of [BDM+20]. Our techniques provide a novel connection between leverage scores, a fundamental object in numerical linear algebra, and computational geometry. For $\ell_p$ subspace embeddings, we give nearly optimal trade-offs between space and distortion for one-pass streaming algorithms. For instance, we give a deterministic coreset using $O(d^2\log n)$ space and $O((d\log n)^{1/2-1/p})$ distortion for $p>2$, whereas previous deterministic algorithms incurred a $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ factor in the space or the distortion [CDW18]. Our techniques have implications in the offline setting, where we give optimal trade-offs between the space complexity and distortion of subspace sketch data structures. To do this, we give an elementary proof of a "change of density" theorem of [LT80] and make it algorithmic.
Let $X^{(n)}$ be an observation sampled from a distribution $P_{\theta}^{(n)}$ with an unknown parameter $\theta,$ $\theta$ being a vector in a Banach space $E$ (most often, a high-dimensional space of dimension $d$). We study the problem of estimation of $f(\theta)$ for a functional $f:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ of some smoothness $s>0$ based on an observation $X^{(n)}\sim P_{\theta}^{(n)}.$ Assuming that there exists an estimator $\hat \theta_n=\hat \theta_n(X^{(n)})$ of parameter $\theta$ such that $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta)$ is sufficiently close in distribution to a mean zero Gaussian random vector in $E,$ we construct a functional $g:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ such that $g(\hat \theta_n)$ is an asymptotically normal estimator of $f(\theta)$ with $\sqrt{n}$ rate provided that $s>\frac{1}{1-\alpha}$ and $d\leq n^{\alpha}$ for some $\alpha\in (0,1).$ We also derive general upper bounds on Orlicz norm error rates for estimator $g(\hat \theta)$ depending on smoothness $s,$ dimension $d,$ sample size $n$ and the accuracy of normal approximation of $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta).$ In particular, this approach yields asymptotically efficient estimators in some high-dimensional exponential models.
Given a matrix $A$ and vector $b$ with polynomial entries in $d$ real variables $\delta=(\delta_1,\ldots,\delta_d)$ we consider the following notion of feasibility: the pair $(A,b)$ is locally feasible if there exists an open neighborhood $U$ of $0$ such that for every $\delta\in U$ there exists $x$ satisfying $A(\delta)x\ge b(\delta)$ entry-wise. For $d=1$ we construct a polynomial time algorithm for deciding local feasibility. For $d \ge 2$ we show local feasibility is NP-hard. As an application (which was the primary motivation for this work) we give a computer-assisted proof of ergodicity of the following elementary 1D cellular automaton: given the current state $\eta_t \in \{0,1\}^{\mathbb{Z}}$ the next state $\eta_{t+1}(n)$ at each vertex $n\in \mathbb{Z}$ is obtained by $\eta_{t+1}(n)= \text{NAND}\big(\text{BSC}_\delta(\eta_t(n-1)), \text{BSC}_\delta(\eta_t(n))\big)$. Here the binary symmetric channel $\text{BSC}_\delta$ takes a bit as input and flips it with probability $\delta$ (and leaves it unchanged with probability $1-\delta$). We also consider the problem of broadcasting information on the 2D-grid of noisy binary-symmetric channels $\text{BSC}_\delta$, where each node may apply an arbitrary processing function to its input bits. We prove that there exists $\delta_0'>0$ such that for all noise levels $0<\delta<\delta_0'$ it is impossible to broadcast information for any processing function, as conjectured in Makur, Mossel, Polyanskiy (ISIT 2021).
In this work, we develop quantization and variable-length source codecs for the feedback links in linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control systems. We prove that for any fixed control performance, the approaches we propose nearly achieve lower bounds on communication cost that have been established in prior work. In particular, we refine the analysis of a classical achievability approach with an eye towards more practical details. Notably, in the prior literature the source codecs used to demonstrate the (near) achievability of these lower bounds are often implicitly assumed to be time-varying. For single-input single-output (SISO) plants, we prove that it suffices to consider time-invariant quantization and source coding. This result follows from analyzing the long-term stochastic behavior of the system's quantized measurements and reconstruction errors. To our knowledge, this time-invariant achievability result is the first in the literature.
Universal coding of integers~(UCI) is a class of variable-length code, such that the ratio of the expected codeword length to $\max\{1,H(P)\}$ is within a constant factor, where $H(P)$ is the Shannon entropy of the decreasing probability distribution $P$. However, if we consider the ratio of the expected codeword length to $H(P)$, the ratio tends to infinity by using UCI, when $H(P)$ tends to zero. To solve this issue, this paper introduces a class of codes, termed generalized universal coding of integers~(GUCI), such that the ratio of the expected codeword length to $H(P)$ is within a constant factor $K$. First, the definition of GUCI is proposed and the coding structure of GUCI is introduced. Next, we propose a class of GUCI $\mathcal{C}$ to achieve the expansion factor $K_{\mathcal{C}}=2$ and show that the optimal GUCI is in the range $1\leq K_{\mathcal{C}}^{*}\leq 2$. Then, by comparing UCI and GUCI, we show that when the entropy is very large or $P(0)$ is not large, there are also cases where the average codeword length of GUCI is shorter. Finally, the asymptotically optimal GUCI is presented.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'