The algebraic flux correction (AFC) schemes presented in this work constrain a standard continuous finite element discretization of a nonlinear hyperbolic problem to satisfy relevant maximum principles and entropy stability conditions. The desired properties are enforced by applying a limiter to antidiffusive fluxes that represent the difference between the high-order baseline scheme and a property-preserving approximation of Lax--Friedrichs type. In the first step of the limiting procedure, the given target fluxes are adjusted in a way that guarantees preservation of local and/or global bounds. In the second step, additional limiting is performed, if necessary,to ensure the validity of fully discrete and/or semi-discrete entropy inequalities. The limiter-based entropy fixes considered in this work are applicable to finite element discretizations of scalar hyperbolic equations and systems alike. The underlying inequality constraints are formulated using Tadmor's entropy stability theory. The proposed limiters impose entropy-conservative or entropy-dissipative bounds on the rate of entropy production by antidiffusive fluxes and Runge--Kutta (RK) time discretizations. Two versions of the fully discrete entropy fix are developed for this purpose. To motivate the use of limiter-based entropy fixes, we prove a finite element version of the Lax--Wendroff theorem and perform numerical studies for standard test problems. In our numerical experiments, entropy-dissipative schemes converge to correct weak solutions of scalar conservation laws, of the Euler equations, and of the shallow water equations.
We present a framework that allows for the non-asymptotic study of the $2$-Wasserstein distance between the invariant distribution of an ergodic stochastic differential equation and the distribution of its numerical approximation in the strongly log-concave case. This allows us to study in a unified way a number of different integrators proposed in the literature for the overdamped and underdamped Langevin dynamics. In addition, we analyse a novel splitting method for the underdamped Langevin dynamics which only requires one gradient evaluation per time step. Under an additional smoothness assumption on a $d$--dimensional strongly log-concave distribution with condition number $\kappa$, the algorithm is shown to produce with an $\mathcal{O}\big(\kappa^{5/4} d^{1/4}\epsilon^{-1/2} \big)$ complexity samples from a distribution that, in Wasserstein distance, is at most $\epsilon>0$ away from the target distribution.
The hyperbolic random graph model (HRG) has proven useful in the analysis of scale-free networks, which are ubiquitous in many fields, from social network analysis to biology. However, working with this model is algorithmically and conceptually challenging because of the nature of the distances in the hyperbolic plane. In this paper, we propose a discrete variant of the HRG model where nodes are mapped to the vertices of a triangulation; our algorithms allow us to work with this model in a simple yet efficient way. We present experimental results conducted on networks, both real-world and simulated, to evaluate the practical benefits of DHRG in comparison to the HRG model.
We investigate the application of ensemble transform approaches to Bayesian inference of logistic regression problems. Our approach relies on appropriate extensions of the popular ensemble Kalman filter and the feedback particle filter to the cross entropy loss function and is based on a well-established homotopy approach to Bayesian inference. The arising finite particle evolution equations as well as their mean-field limits are affine-invariant. Furthermore, the proposed methods can be implemented in a gradient-free manner in case of nonlinear logistic regression and the data can be randomly subsampled similar to mini-batching of stochastic gradient descent. We also propose a closely related SDE-based sampling method which again is affine-invariant and can easily be made gradient-free. Numerical examples demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed methodologies.
Much recent research effort has been directed to the development of efficient algorithms for solving minimax problems with theoretical convergence guarantees due to the relevance of these problems to a few emergent applications. In this paper, we propose a unified single-loop alternating gradient projection (AGP) algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex-nonconcave minimax problems. AGP employs simple gradient projection steps for updating the primal and dual variables alternatively at each iteration. We show that it can find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of the objective function in $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-2} \right)$ (resp. $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-4} \right)$) iterations under nonconvex-strongly concave (resp. nonconvex-concave) setting. Moreover, its gradient complexity to obtain an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of the objective function is bounded by $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-2} \right)$ (resp., $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-4} \right)$) under the strongly convex-nonconcave (resp., convex-nonconcave) setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a simple and unified single-loop algorithm is developed for solving both nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex-nonconcave minimax problems. Moreover, the complexity results for solving the latter (strongly) convex-nonconcave minimax problems have never been obtained before in the literature. Numerical results show the efficiency of the proposed AGP algorithm. Furthermore, we extend the AGP algorithm by presenting a block alternating proximal gradient (BAPG) algorithm for solving more general multi-block nonsmooth nonconvex-(strongly) concave and (strongly) convex-nonconcave minimax problems. We can similarly establish the gradient complexity of the proposed algorithm under these four different settings.
Heat Equation Driven Area Coverage (HEDAC) is a state-of-the-art multi-agent ergodic motion control guided by a gradient of a potential field. A finite element method is hereby implemented to obtain a solution of Helmholtz partial differential equation, which models the potential field for surveying motion control. This allows us to survey arbitrarily shaped domains and to include obstacles in an elegant and robust manner intrinsic to HEDAC's fundamental idea. For a simple kinematic motion, the obstacles and boundary avoidance constraints are successfully handled by directing the agent motion with the gradient of the potential. However, including additional constraints, such as the minimal clearance dsitance from stationary and moving obstacles and the minimal path curvature radius, requires further alternations of the control algorithm. We introduce a relatively simple yet robust approach for handling these constraints by formulating a straightforward optimization problem based on collision-free escapes route maneuvers. This approach provides a guaranteed collision avoidance mechanism, while being computationally inexpensive as a result of the optimization problem partitioning. The proposed motion control is evaluated in three realistic surveying scenarios simulations, showing the effectiveness of the surveying and the robustness of the control algorithm. Furthermore, potential maneuvering difficulties due to improperly defined surveying scenarios are highlighted and we provide guidelines on how to overpass them. The results are promising and indiacate real-world applicability of proposed constrained multi-agent motion control for autonomous surveying and potentially other HEDAC utilizations.
We establish the error bounds of fourth-order compact finite difference (4cFD) methods for the Dirac equation in the massless and nonrelativistic regime, which involves a small dimensionless parameter $0 < \varepsilon \le 1$ inversely proportional to the speed of light. In this regime, the solution propagates waves with wavelength $O(\varepsilon)$ in time and $O(1)$ in space, as well as with the wave speed $O(1/\varepsilon)$ rapid outgoing waves. We adapt the conservative and semi-implicit 4cFD methods to discretize the Dirac equation and rigorously carry out their error bounds depending explicitly on the mesh size $h$, time step $\tau$ and the small parameter $\varepsilon$. Based on the error bounds, the $\varepsilon$-scalability of the 4cFD methods is $h = O(\varepsilon^{1/4})$ and $\tau = O(\varepsilon^{3/2})$, which not only improves the spatial resolution capacity but also has superior accuracy than classical second-order finite difference methods. Furthermore, physical observables including the total density and current density have the same conclusions. Numerical results are provided to validate the error bounds and the dynamics of the Dirac equation with different potentials in 2D is presented.
This paper studies distributed binary test of statistical independence under communication (information bits) constraints. While testing independence is very relevant in various applications, distributed independence test is particularly useful for event detection in sensor networks where data correlation often occurs among observations of devices in the presence of a signal of interest. By focusing on the case of two devices because of their tractability, we begin by investigating conditions on Type I error probability restrictions under which the minimum Type II error admits an exponential behavior with the sample size. Then, we study the finite sample-size regime of this problem. We derive new upper and lower bounds for the gap between the minimum Type II error and its exponential approximation under different setups, including restrictions imposed on the vanishing Type I error probability. Our theoretical results shed light on the sample-size regimes at which approximations of the Type II error probability via error exponents became informative enough in the sense of predicting well the actual error probability. We finally discuss an application of our results where the gap is evaluated numerically, and we show that exponential approximations are not only tractable but also a valuable proxy for the Type II probability of error in the finite-length regime.
Influence maximization is the task of selecting a small number of seed nodes in a social network to maximize the spread of the influence from these seeds, and it has been widely investigated in the past two decades. In the canonical setting, the whole social network as well as its diffusion parameters is given as input. In this paper, we consider the more realistic sampling setting where the network is unknown and we only have a set of passively observed cascades that record the set of activated nodes at each diffusion step. We study the task of influence maximization from these cascade samples (IMS), and present constant approximation algorithms for this task under mild conditions on the seed set distribution. To achieve the optimization goal, we also provide a novel solution to the network inference problem, that is, learning diffusion parameters and the network structure from the cascade data. Comparing with prior solutions, our network inference algorithm requires weaker assumptions and does not rely on maximum-likelihood estimation and convex programming. Our IMS algorithms enhance the learning-and-then-optimization approach by allowing a constant approximation ratio even when the diffusion parameters are hard to learn, and we do not need any assumption related to the network structure or diffusion parameters.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Methods that align distributions by minimizing an adversarial distance between them have recently achieved impressive results. However, these approaches are difficult to optimize with gradient descent and they often do not converge well without careful hyperparameter tuning and proper initialization. We investigate whether turning the adversarial min-max problem into an optimization problem by replacing the maximization part with its dual improves the quality of the resulting alignment and explore its connections to Maximum Mean Discrepancy. Our empirical results suggest that using the dual formulation for the restricted family of linear discriminators results in a more stable convergence to a desirable solution when compared with the performance of a primal min-max GAN-like objective and an MMD objective under the same restrictions. We test our hypothesis on the problem of aligning two synthetic point clouds on a plane and on a real-image domain adaptation problem on digits. In both cases, the dual formulation yields an iterative procedure that gives more stable and monotonic improvement over time.