We investigate the relationship between various isomorphism invariants for finite groups. Specifically, we use the Weisfeiler-Leman dimension (WL) to characterize, compare and quantify the effectiveness and complexity of invariants for group isomorphism. It turns out that a surprising number of invariants and characteristic subgroups that are classic to group theory can be detected and identified by a low dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm. These include the center, the inner automorphism group, the commutator subgroup and the derived series, the abelian radical, the solvable radical, the Fitting group and $\pi$-radicals. A low dimensional WL algorithm additionally determines the isomorphism type of the socle as well as the factors in the derived series and the upper and lower central series. We also analyze the behavior of the WL algorithm for group extensions and prove that a low dimensional WL algorithm determines the isomorphism types of the composition factors of a group. Finally we develop a new tool to define a canonical maximal central decomposition for groups. This allows us to show that the Weisfeiler-Leman dimension of a group is at most one larger than the dimensions of its direct indecomposable factors. In other words the Weisfeiler-Leman dimension increases by at most 1 when taking direct products.
In recent work (Maierhofer & Huybrechs, 2022, Adv. Comput. Math.), the authors showed that least-squares oversampling can improve the convergence properties of collocation methods for boundary integral equations involving operators of certain pseudo-differential form. The underlying principle is that the discrete method approximates a Bubnov$-$Galerkin method in a suitable sense. In the present work, we extend this analysis to the case when the integral operator is perturbed by a compact operator $\mathcal{K}$ which is continuous as a map on Sobolev spaces on the boundary, $\mathcal{K}:H^{p}\rightarrow H^{q}$ for all $p,q\in\mathbb{R}$. This study is complicated by the fact that both the test and trial functions in the discrete Bubnov-Galerkin orthogonality conditions are modified over the unperturbed setting. Our analysis guarantees that previous results concerning optimal convergence rates and sufficient rates of oversampling are preserved in the more general case. Indeed, for the first time, this analysis provides a complete explanation of the advantages of least-squares oversampled collocation for boundary integral formulations of the Laplace equation on arbitrary smooth Jordan curves in 2D. Our theoretical results are shown to be in very good agreement with numerical experiments.
Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown encouraging results in automating the architecture design. Recently, DARTS relaxes the search process with a differentiable formulation that leverages weight-sharing and SGD where all candidate operations are trained simultaneously. Our empirical results show that such procedure results in the co-adaption problem and Matthew Effect: operations with fewer parameters would be trained maturely earlier. This causes two problems: firstly, the operations with more parameters may never have the chance to express the desired function since those with less have already done the job; secondly, the system will punish those underperforming operations by lowering their architecture parameter, and they will get smaller loss gradients, which causes the Matthew Effect. In this paper, we systematically study these problems and propose a novel grouped operation dropout algorithm named DropNAS to fix the problems with DARTS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DropNAS solves the above issues and achieves promising performance. Specifically, DropNAS achieves 2.26% test error on CIFAR-10, 16.39% on CIFAR-100 and 23.4% on ImageNet (with the same training hyperparameters as DARTS for a fair comparison). It is also observed that DropNAS is robust across variants of the DARTS search space. Code is available at //github.com/wiljohnhong/DropNAS.
The phenomenon of benign overfitting, where a predictor perfectly fits noisy training data while attaining low expected loss, has received much attention in recent years, but still remains not fully understood beyond simple linear regression setups. In this paper, we show that for regression, benign overfitting is "biased" towards certain types of problems, in the sense that its existence on one learning problem excludes its existence on other learning problems. On the negative side, we use this to argue that one should not expect benign overfitting to occur in general, for several natural extensions of the plain linear regression problems studied so far. We then turn to classification problems, and show that the situation there is much more favorable. Specifically, we consider a model where an arbitrary input distribution of some fixed dimension $k$ is concatenated with a high-dimensional distribution, and prove that the max-margin predictor (to which gradient-based methods are known to converge in direction) is asymptotically biased towards minimizing the expected *squared hinge loss* w.r.t. the $k$-dimensional distribution. This allows us to reduce the question of benign overfitting in classification to the simpler question of whether this loss is a good surrogate for the prediction error, and use it to show benign overfitting in some new settings.
When a large number of robots try to reach a common area, congestions happen, causing severe delays. To minimise congestion in a robotic swarm system, traffic control algorithms must be employed in a decentralised manner. Based on strategies aimed to maximise the throughput of the common target area, we developed two novel algorithms for robots using artificial potential fields for obstacle avoidance and navigation. One algorithm is inspired by creating a queue to get to the target area (Single Queue Former -- SQF), while the other makes the robots touch the boundary of the circular area by using vector fields (Touch and Run Vector Fields -- TRVF). We performed simulation experiments to show that the proposed algorithms are bounded by the throughput of their inspired theoretical strategies and compare the two novel algorithms with state-of-art algorithms for the same problem (PCC, EE and PCC-EE). The SQF algorithm significantly outperforms all other algorithms for a large number of robots or when the circular target region radius is small. TRVF, on the other hand, is better than SQF only for a limited number of robots and outperforms only PCC for numerous robots. However, it allows us to analyse the potential impacts on the throughput when transferring an idea from a theoretical strategy to a concrete algorithm that considers changing velocities and distances between robots.
In the independent works by Kalgin and Idrisova and by Beierle, Leander and Perrin, it was observed that the Gold APN functions over $\mathbb{F}_{2^5}$ give rise to a quadratic APN function in dimension 6 having maximum possible linearity of $2^5$. In this note, we show that the case of $n \leq 5$ is quite special in the sense that Gold APN functions in dimension $n>5$ cannot be extended to quadratic APN functions in dimension $n+1$ having maximum possible linearity.
Although theoretical properties such as expressive power and over-smoothing of graph neural networks (GNN) have been extensively studied recently, its convergence property is a relatively new direction. In this paper, we investigate the convergence of one powerful GNN, Invariant Graph Network (IGN) over graphs sampled from graphons. We first prove the stability of linear layers for general $k$-IGN (of order $k$) based on a novel interpretation of linear equivariant layers. Building upon this result, we prove the convergence of $k$-IGN under the model of \citet{ruiz2020graphon}, where we access the edge weight but the convergence error is measured for graphon inputs. Under the more natural (and more challenging) setting of \citet{keriven2020convergence} where one can only access 0-1 adjacency matrix sampled according to edge probability, we first show a negative result that the convergence of any IGN is not possible. We then obtain the convergence of a subset of IGNs, denoted as IGN-small, after the edge probability estimation. We show that IGN-small still contains function class rich enough that can approximate spectral GNNs arbitrarily well. Lastly, we perform experiments on various graphon models to verify our statements.
The pairwise interaction paradigm of graph machine learning has predominantly governed the modelling of relational systems. However, graphs alone cannot capture the multi-level interactions present in many complex systems and the expressive power of such schemes was proven to be limited. To overcome these limitations, we propose Message Passing Simplicial Networks (MPSNs), a class of models that perform message passing on simplicial complexes (SCs) - topological objects generalising graphs to higher dimensions. To theoretically analyse the expressivity of our model we introduce a Simplicial Weisfeiler-Lehman (SWL) colouring procedure for distinguishing non-isomorphic SCs. We relate the power of SWL to the problem of distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs and show that SWL and MPSNs are strictly more powerful than the WL test and not less powerful than the 3-WL test. We deepen the analysis by comparing our model with traditional graph neural networks with ReLU activations in terms of the number of linear regions of the functions they can represent. We empirically support our theoretical claims by showing that MPSNs can distinguish challenging strongly regular graphs for which GNNs fail and, when equipped with orientation equivariant layers, they can improve classification accuracy in oriented SCs compared to a GNN baseline. Additionally, we implement a library for message passing on simplicial complexes that we envision to release in due course.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.
Learning structural representations of node sets from graph-structured data is crucial for applications ranging from node-role discovery to link prediction and molecule classification. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in structural representation learning. However, most GNNs are limited by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test and thus possible to generate identical representation for structures and graphs that are actually different. More powerful GNNs, proposed recently by mimicking higher-order-WL tests, only focus on entire-graph representations and cannot utilize sparsity of the graph structure to be computationally efficient. Here we propose a general class of structure-related features, termed Distance Encoding (DE), to assist GNNs in representing node sets with arbitrary sizes with strictly more expressive power than the 1-WL test. DE essentially captures the distance between the node set whose representation is to be learnt and each node in the graph, which includes important graph-related measures such as shortest-path-distance and generalized PageRank scores. We propose two general frameworks for GNNs to use DEs (1) as extra node attributes and (2) further as controllers of message aggregation in GNNs. Both frameworks may still utilize the sparse structure to keep scalability to process large graphs. In theory, we prove that these two frameworks can distinguish node sets embedded in almost all regular graphs where traditional GNNs always fail. We also rigorously analyze their limitations. Empirically, we evaluate these two frameworks on node structural roles prediction, link prediction and triangle prediction over six real networks. The results show that our models outperform GNNs without DEs by up-to 15% improvement in average accuracy and AUC. Our models also significantly outperform other SOTA baselines particularly designed for those tasks.
The use of orthogonal projections on high-dimensional input and target data in learning frameworks is studied. First, we investigate the relations between two standard objectives in dimension reduction, maximizing variance and preservation of pairwise relative distances. The derivation of their asymptotic correlation and numerical experiments tell that a projection usually cannot satisfy both objectives. In a standard classification problem we determine projections on the input data that balance them and compare subsequent results. Next, we extend our application of orthogonal projections to deep learning frameworks. We introduce new variational loss functions that enable integration of additional information via transformations and projections of the target data. In two supervised learning problems, clinical image segmentation and music information classification, the application of the proposed loss functions increase the accuracy.