We establish tight bi-Lipschitz bounds certifying quasi-universality (universality up to a constant factor) for various distances between Reeb graphs: the interleaving distance, the functional distortion distance, and the functional contortion distance. The definition of the latter distance is a novel contribution, and for the special case of contour trees we also prove strict universality of this distance. Furthermore, we prove that for the special case of merge trees the functional contortion distance coincides with the interleaving distance, yielding universality of all four distances in this case.
We analyse a second-order SPDE model in multiple space dimensions and develop estimators for the parameters of this model based on discrete observations of a solution in time and space on a bounded domain. While parameter estimation for one and two spatial dimensions was established in recent literature, this is the first work which generalizes the theory to a general, multi-dimensional framework. Our approach builds upon realized volatilities, enabling the construction of an oracle estimator for volatility within the underlying model. Furthermore, we show that the realized volatilities have an asymptotic illustration as response of a log-linear model with spatial explanatory variable. This yields novel and efficient estimators based on realized volatilities with optimal rates of convergence and minimal variances. For proving central limit theorems, we use a high-frequency observation scheme. To showcase our results, we conduct a Monte Carlo simulation.
A large literature specifies conditions under which the information complexity for a sequence of numerical problems defined for dimensions $1, 2, \ldots$ grows at a moderate rate, i.e., the sequence of problems is tractable. Here, we focus on the situation where the space of available information consists of all linear functionals and the problems are defined as linear operator mappings between Hilbert spaces. We unify the proofs of known tractability results and generalize a number of existing results. These generalizations are expressed as five theorems that provide equivalent conditions for (strong) tractability in terms of sums of functions of the singular values of the solution operators.
We consider gradient flow/gradient descent and heavy ball/accelerated gradient descent optimization for convex objective functions. In the gradient flow case, we prove the following: 1. If $f$ does not have a minimizer, the convergence $f(x_t)\to \inf f$ can be arbitrarily slow. 2. If $f$ does have a minimizer, the excess energy $f(x_t) - \inf f$ is integrable/summable in time. In particular, $f(x_t) - \inf f = o(1/t)$ as $t\to\infty$. 3. In Hilbert spaces, this is optimal: $f(x_t) - \inf f$ can decay to $0$ as slowly as any given function which is monotone decreasing and integrable at $\infty$, even for a fixed quadratic objective. 4. In finite dimension (or more generally, for all gradient flow curves of finite length), this is not optimal: We prove that there are convex monotone decreasing integrable functions $g(t)$ which decrease to zero slower than $f(x_t)-\inf f$ for the gradient flow of any convex function on $\mathbb R^d$. For instance, we show that any gradient flow $x_t$ of a convex function $f$ in finite dimension satisfies $\liminf_{t\to\infty} \big(t\cdot \log^2(t)\cdot \big\{f(x_t) -\inf f\big\}\big)=0$. This improves on the commonly reported $O(1/t)$ rate and provides a sharp characterization of the energy decay law. We also note that it is impossible to establish a rate $O(1/(t\phi(t))$ for any function $\phi$ which satisfies $\lim_{t\to\infty}\phi(t) = \infty$, even asymptotically. Similar results are obtained in related settings for (1) discrete time gradient descent, (2) stochastic gradient descent with multiplicative noise and (3) the heavy ball ODE. In the case of stochastic gradient descent, the summability of $\mathbb E[f(x_n) - \inf f]$ is used to prove that $f(x_n)\to \inf f$ almost surely - an improvement on the convergence almost surely up to a subsequence which follows from the $O(1/n)$ decay estimate.
A novel spatial autoregressive model for panel data is introduced, which incorporates multilayer networks and accounts for time-varying relationships. Moreover, the proposed approach allows the structural variance to evolve smoothly over time and enables the analysis of shock propagation in terms of time-varying spillover effects. The framework is applied to analyse the dynamics of international relationships among the G7 economies and their impact on stock market returns and volatilities. The findings underscore the substantial impact of cooperative interactions and highlight discernible disparities in network exposure across G7 nations, along with nuanced patterns in direct and indirect spillover effects.
Generative diffusion models have achieved spectacular performance in many areas of generative modeling. While the fundamental ideas behind these models come from non-equilibrium physics, in this paper we show that many aspects of these models can be understood using the tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using this reformulation, we show that generative diffusion models undergo second-order phase transitions corresponding to symmetry breaking phenomena. We argue that this lead to a form of instability that lies at the heart of their generative capabilities and that can be described by a set of mean field critical exponents. We conclude by analyzing recent work connecting diffusion models and associative memory networks in view of the thermodynamic formulations.
Uniform continuity bounds on entropies are generally expressed in terms of a single distance measure between a pair of probability distributions or quantum states, typically, the total variation distance or trace distance. However, if an additional distance measure between the probability distributions or states is known, then the continuity bounds can be significantly strengthened. Here, we prove a tight uniform continuity bound for the Shannon entropy in terms of both the local- and total variation distances, sharpening an inequality proven in [I. Sason, IEEE Trans. Inf. Th., 59, 7118 (2013)]. We also obtain a uniform continuity bound for the von Neumann entropy in terms of both the operator norm- and trace distances. The bound is tight when the quotient of the trace distance by the operator norm distance is an integer. We then apply our results to compute upper bounds on the quantum- and private classical capacities of channels. We begin by refining the concept of approximate degradable channels, namely, $\varepsilon$-degradable channels, which are, by definition, $\varepsilon$-close in diamond norm to their complementary channel when composed with a degrading channel. To this end, we introduce the notion of $(\varepsilon,\nu)$-degradable channels; these are $\varepsilon$-degradable channels that are, in addition, $\nu$-close in completely bounded spectral norm to their complementary channel, when composed with the same degrading channel. This allows us to derive improved upper bounds to the quantum- and private classical capacities of such channels. Moreover, these bounds can be further improved by considering certain unstabilized versions of the above norms. We show that upper bounds on the latter can be efficiently expressed as semidefinite programs. We illustrate our results by obtaining a new upper bound on the quantum capacity of the qubit depolarizing channel.
We study parallel fault-tolerant quantum computing for families of homological quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes defined on 3-manifolds with constant or almost-constant encoding rate. We derive generic formula for a transversal $T$ gate of color codes on general 3-manifolds, which acts as collective non-Clifford logical CCZ gates on any triplet of logical qubits with their logical-$X$ membranes having a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ triple intersection at a single point. The triple intersection number is a topological invariant, which also arises in the path integral of the emergent higher symmetry operator in a topological quantum field theory: the $\mathbb{Z}_2^3$ gauge theory. Moreover, the transversal $S$ gate of the color code corresponds to a higher-form symmetry supported on a codimension-1 submanifold, giving rise to exponentially many addressable and parallelizable logical CZ gates. We have developed a generic formalism to compute the triple intersection invariants for 3-manifolds and also study the scaling of the Betti number and systoles with volume for various 3-manifolds, which translates to the encoding rate and distance. We further develop three types of LDPC codes supporting such logical gates: (1) A quasi-hyperbolic code from the product of 2D hyperbolic surface and a circle, with almost-constant rate $k/n=O(1/\log(n))$ and $O(\log(n))$ distance; (2) A homological fibre bundle code with $O(1/\log^{\frac{1}{2}}(n))$ rate and $O(\log^{\frac{1}{2}}(n))$ distance; (3) A specific family of 3D hyperbolic codes: the Torelli mapping torus code, constructed from mapping tori of a pseudo-Anosov element in the Torelli subgroup, which has constant rate while the distance scaling is currently unknown. We then show a generic constant-overhead scheme for applying a parallelizable universal gate set with the aid of logical-$X$ measurements.
Whittle-Mat\'ern fields are a recently introduced class of Gaussian processes on metric graphs, which are specified as solutions to a fractional-order stochastic differential equation. Unlike earlier covariance-based approaches for specifying Gaussian fields on metric graphs, the Whittle-Mat\'ern fields are well-defined for any compact metric graph and can provide Gaussian processes with differentiable sample paths. We derive the main statistical properties of the model class, particularly the consistency and asymptotic normality of maximum likelihood estimators of model parameters and the necessary and sufficient conditions for asymptotic optimality properties of linear prediction based on the model with misspecified parameters. The covariance function of the Whittle-Mat\'ern fields is generally unavailable in closed form, and they have therefore been challenging to use for statistical inference. However, we show that for specific values of the fractional exponent, when the fields have Markov properties, likelihood-based inference and spatial prediction can be performed exactly and computationally efficiently. This facilitates using the Whittle-Mat\'ern fields in statistical applications involving big datasets without the need for any approximations. The methods are illustrated via an application to modeling of traffic data, where allowing for differentiable processes dramatically improves the results.
The multispecies Landau collision operator describes the two-particle, small scattering angle or grazing collisions in a plasma made up of different species of particles such as electrons and ions. Recently, a structure preserving deterministic particle method arXiv:1910.03080 has been developed for the single species spatially homogeneous Landau equation. This method relies on a regularization of the Landau collision operator so that an approximate solution, which is a linear combination of Dirac delta distributions, is well-defined. Based on a weak form of the regularized Landau equation, the time dependent locations of the Dirac delta functions satisfy a system of ordinary differential equations. In this work, we extend this particle method to the multispecies case, and examine its conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, and decay of entropy properties. We show that the equilibrium distribution of the regularized multispecies Landau equation is a Maxwellian distribution, and state a critical condition on the regularization parameters that guarantees a species independent equilibrium temperature. A convergence study comparing an exact multispecies BKW solution to the particle solution shows approximately 2nd order accuracy. Important physical properties such as conservation, decay of entropy, and equilibrium distribution of the particle method are demonstrated with several numerical examples.
Knowledge graphs contain rich semantic relationships related to items and incorporating such semantic relationships into recommender systems helps to explore the latent connections of items, thus improving the accuracy of prediction and enhancing the explainability of recommendations. However, such explainability is not adapted to users' contexts, which can significantly influence their preferences. In this work, we propose CA-KGCN (Context-Aware Knowledge Graph Convolutional Network), an end-to-end framework that can model users' preferences adapted to their contexts and can incorporate rich semantic relationships in the knowledge graph related to items. This framework captures users' attention to different factors: contexts and features of items. More specifically, the framework can model users' preferences adapted to their contexts and provide explanations adapted to the given context. Experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our framework: modeling users' preferences adapted to their contexts and explaining the recommendations generated.