The Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) belongs to the class of iterative particle filtering methods and can be used for solving control--to--observable inverse problems. In this context, the EnKF is known as Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI). In recent years several continuous limits in the number of iteration and particles have been performed in order to study properties of the method. In particular, a one--dimensional linear stability analysis reveals possible drawbacks in the phase space of moments provided by the continuous limits of the EKI, but observed also in the multi--dimensional setting. In this work we address this issue by introducing a stabilization of the dynamics which leads to a method with globally asymptotically stable solutions. We illustrate the performance of the stabilized version by using test inverse problems from the literature and comparing it with the classical continuous limit formulation of the method.
Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) are the mathematical tool of choice for modelling spatiotemporal PDE-dynamics under the influence of randomness. Based on the notion of mild solution of an SPDE, we introduce a novel neural architecture to learn solution operators of PDEs with (possibly stochastic) forcing from partially observed data. The proposed Neural SPDE model provides an extension to two popular classes of physics-inspired architectures. On the one hand, it extends Neural CDEs and variants -- continuous-time analogues of RNNs -- in that it is capable of processing incoming sequential information arriving irregularly in time and observed at arbitrary spatial resolutions. On the other hand, it extends Neural Operators -- generalizations of neural networks to model mappings between spaces of functions -- in that it can parameterize solution operators of SPDEs depending simultaneously on the initial condition and a realization of the driving noise. By performing operations in the spectral domain, we show how a Neural SPDE can be evaluated in two ways, either by calling an ODE solver (emulating a spectral Galerkin scheme), or by solving a fixed point problem. Experiments on various semilinear SPDEs, including the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations, demonstrate how the Neural SPDE model is capable of learning complex spatiotemporal dynamics in a resolution-invariant way, with better accuracy and lighter training data requirements compared to alternative models, and up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than traditional solvers.
The problem of continuous inverse optimal control (over finite time horizon) is to learn the unknown cost function over the sequence of continuous control variables from expert demonstrations. In this article, we study this fundamental problem in the framework of energy-based model, where the observed expert trajectories are assumed to be random samples from a probability density function defined as the exponential of the negative cost function up to a normalizing constant. The parameters of the cost function are learned by maximum likelihood via an "analysis by synthesis" scheme, which iterates (1) synthesis step: sample the synthesized trajectories from the current probability density using the Langevin dynamics via back-propagation through time, and (2) analysis step: update the model parameters based on the statistical difference between the synthesized trajectories and the observed trajectories. Given the fact that an efficient optimization algorithm is usually available for an optimal control problem, we also consider a convenient approximation of the above learning method, where we replace the sampling in the synthesis step by optimization. Moreover, to make the sampling or optimization more efficient, we propose to train the energy-based model simultaneously with a top-down trajectory generator via cooperative learning, where the trajectory generator is used to fast initialize the synthesis step of the energy-based model. We demonstrate the proposed methods on autonomous driving tasks, and show that they can learn suitable cost functions for optimal control.
This paper establishes the asymptotic independence between the quadratic form and maximum of a sequence of independent random variables. Based on this theoretical result, we find the asymptotic joint distribution for the quadratic form and maximum, which can be applied into the high-dimensional testing problems. By combining the sum-type test and the max-type test, we propose the Fisher's combination tests for the one-sample mean test and two-sample mean test. Under this novel general framework, several strong assumptions in existing literature have been relaxed. Monte Carlo simulation has been done which shows that our proposed tests are strongly robust to both sparse and dense data.
We investigate the feature compression of high-dimensional ridge regression using the optimal subsampling technique. Specifically, based on the basic framework of random sampling algorithm on feature for ridge regression and the A-optimal design criterion, we first obtain a set of optimal subsampling probabilities. Considering that the obtained probabilities are uneconomical, we then propose the nearly optimal ones. With these probabilities, a two step iterative algorithm is established which has lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments to support the proposed methods. Numerical results demonstrate the decent performance of our methods.
We consider M-estimation problems, where the target value is determined using a minimizer of an expected functional of a Levy process. With discrete observations from the Levy process, we can produce a "quasi-path" by shuffling increments of the Levy process, we call it a quasi-process. Under a suitable sampling scheme, a quasi-process can converge weakly to the true process according to the properties of the stationary and independent increments. Using this resampling technique, we can estimate objective functionals similar to those estimated using the Monte Carlo simulations, and it is available as a contrast function. The M-estimator based on these quasi-processes can be consistent and asymptotically normal.
Existing inferential methods for small area data involve a trade-off between maintaining area-level frequentist coverage rates and improving inferential precision via the incorporation of indirect information. In this article, we propose a method to obtain an area-level prediction region for a future observation which mitigates this trade-off. The proposed method takes a conformal prediction approach in which the conformity measure is the posterior predictive density of a working model that incorporates indirect information. The resulting prediction region has guaranteed frequentist coverage regardless of the working model, and, if the working model assumptions are accurate, the region has minimum expected volume compared to other regions with the same coverage rate. When constructed under a normal working model, we prove such a prediction region is an interval and construct an efficient algorithm to obtain the exact interval. We illustrate the performance of our method through simulation studies and an application to EPA radon survey data.
Works on quantum computing and cryptanalysis has increased significantly in the past few years. Various constructions of quantum arithmetic circuits, as one of the essential components in the field, has also been proposed. However, there has only been a few studies on finite field inversion despite its essential use in realizing quantum algorithms, such as in Shor's algorithm for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarith Problem (ECDLP). In this study, we propose to reduce the depth of the existing quantum Fermat's Little Theorem (FLT)-based inversion circuit for binary finite field. In particular, we propose follow a complete waterfall approach to translate the Itoh-Tsujii's variant of FLT to the corresponding quantum circuit and remove the inverse squaring operations employed in the previous work by Banegas et al., lowering the number of CNOT gates (CNOT count), which contributes to reduced overall depth and gate count. Furthermore, compare the cost by firstly constructing our method and previous work's in Qiskit quantum computer simulator and perform the resource analysis. Our approach can serve as an alternative for a time-efficient implementation.
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal likelihood (model evidence), which is computationally challenging, prohibiting its use in many high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems. With Bayesian imaging applications in mind, in this work we present the proximal nested sampling methodology to objectively compare alternative Bayesian imaging models for applications that use images to inform decisions under uncertainty. The methodology is based on nested sampling, a Monte Carlo approach specialised for model comparison, and exploits proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to scale efficiently to large problems and to tackle models that are log-concave and not necessarily smooth (e.g., involving l_1 or total-variation priors). The proposed approach can be applied computationally to problems of dimension O(10^6) and beyond, making it suitable for high-dimensional inverse imaging problems. It is validated on large Gaussian models, for which the likelihood is available analytically, and subsequently illustrated on a range of imaging problems where it is used to analyse different choices of dictionary and measurement model.
We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global minimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We further show that the trained weights, as a function of the layer index, admits a scaling limit which is H\"older continuous as the depth of the network tends to infinity. The proofs are based on non-asymptotic estimates of the loss function and of norms of the network weights along the gradient descent path. We illustrate the relevance of our theoretical results to practical settings using detailed numerical experiments on supervised learning problems.
This paper proposes an active learning algorithm for solving regression and classification problems based on inverse-distance weighting functions for selecting the feature vectors to query. The algorithm has the following features: (i) supports both pool-based and population-based sampling; (ii) is independent of the type of predictor used; (iii) can handle known and unknown constraints on the queryable feature vectors; and (iv) can run either sequentially, or in batch mode, depending on how often the predictor is retrained. The method's potential is shown in numerical tests on illustrative synthetic problems and real-world regression and classification datasets from the UCI repository. A Python implementation of the algorithm that we call IDEAL (Inverse-Distance based Exploration for Active Learning), is available at \url{//cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/ideal}.