In a variety of application areas, there is interest in assessing evidence of differences in the intensity of event realizations between groups. For example, in cancer genomic studies collecting data on rare variants, the focus is on assessing whether and how the variant profile changes with the disease subtype. Motivated by this application, we develop multiresolution nonparametric Bayes tests for differential mutation rates across groups. The multiresolution approach yields fast and accurate detection of spatial clusters of rare variants, and our nonparametric Bayes framework provides great flexibility for modeling the intensities of rare variants. Some theoretical properties are also assessed, including weak consistency of our Dirichlet Process-Poisson-Gamma mixture over multiple resolutions. Simulation studies illustrate excellent small sample properties relative to competitors, and we apply the method to detect rare variants related to common variable immunodeficiency from whole exome sequencing data on 215 patients and over 60,027 control subjects.
Motivated by the problem of compressing point sets into as few bits as possible while maintaining information about approximate distances between points, we construct random nonlinear maps $\varphi_\ell$ that compress point sets in the following way. For a point set $S$, the map $\varphi_\ell:\mathbb{R}^d \to N^{-1/2}\{-1,1\}^N$ has the property that storing $\varphi_\ell(S)$ (a \emph{sketch} of $S$) allows one to report pairwise squared distances between points in $S$ up to some multiplicative $(1\pm \epsilon)$ error with high probability as long as the minimum distance is not too small compared to $\epsilon$. The maps $\varphi_\ell$ are the $\ell$-fold composition of a certain type of random feature mapping. Moreover, we determine how large $N$ needs to be as a function of $\epsilon$ and other parameters of the point set. Compared to existing techniques, our maps offer several advantages. The standard method for compressing point sets by random mappings relies on the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma which implies that if a set of $n$ points is mapped by a Gaussian random matrix to $\mathbb{R}^k$ with $k =\Theta(\epsilon^{-2}\log n)$, then pairwise distances between points are preserved up to a multiplicative $(1\pm \epsilon)$ error with high probability. The main advantage of our maps $\varphi_\ell$ over random linear maps is that ours map point sets directly into the discrete cube $N^{-1/2}\{-1,1\}^N$ and so there is no additional step needed to convert the sketch to bits. For some range of parameters, our maps $\varphi_\ell$ produce sketches which require fewer bits of storage space.
We present some basic elements of the theory of generalised Br\`{e}gman relative entropies over nonreflexive Banach spaces. Using nonlinear embeddings of Banach spaces together with the Euler--Legendre functions, this approach unifies two former approaches to Br\`{e}gman relative entropy: one based on reflexive Banach spaces, another based on differential geometry. This construction allows to extend Br\`{e}gman relative entropies, and related geometric and operator structures, to arbitrary-dimensional state spaces of probability, quantum, and postquantum theory. We give several examples, not considered previously in the literature.
Probabilistic model checking is a widely used formal verification technique to automatically verify qualitative and quantitative properties for probabilistic models. However, capturing such systems, writing corresponding properties, and verifying them require domain knowledge. This makes it not accessible for researchers and engineers who may not have the required knowledge. Previous studies have extended UML activity diagrams (ADs), developed transformations, and implemented accompanying tools for automation. The research, however, is incomprehensive and not fully open, which makes it hard to be evaluated, extended, adapted, and accessed. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive verification framework for ADs, including a new profile for probability, time, and quality annotations, a semantics interpretation of ADs in three Markov models, and a set of transformation rules from activity diagrams to the PRISM language, supported by PRISM and Storm. Most importantly, we developed algorithms for transformation and implemented them in a tool, called QASCAD, using model-based techniques, for fully automated verification. We evaluated one case study where multiple robots are used for delivery in a hospital and further evaluated six other examples from the literature. With all these together, this work makes noteworthy contributions to the verification of ADs by improving evaluation, extensibility, adaptability, and accessibility.
Quantum entanglement is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics and plays a crucial role in quantum computation and information. We study entanglement via the lens of computational complexity by considering quantum generalizations of the class NP with multiple unentangled quantum proofs, the so-called QMA(2) and its variants. The complexity of QMA(2) is a longstanding open problem, and only the trivial bounds QMA $\subseteq$ QMA(2) $\subseteq$ NEXP are known. In this work, we study the power of unentangled quantum proofs with non-negative amplitudes, a class which we denote $\text{QMA}^+(2)$. In this setting, we are able to design proof verification protocols for problems both using logarithmic size quantum proofs and having a constant probability gap in distinguishing yes from no instances. In particular, we design global protocols for small set expansion, unique games, and PCP verification. As a consequence, we obtain NP $\subseteq \text{QMA}^+_{\log}(2)$ with a constant gap. By virtue of the new constant gap, we are able to ``scale up'' this result to $\text{QMA}^+(2)$, obtaining the full characterization $\text{QMA}^+(2)$=NEXP by establishing stronger explicitness properties of the PCP for NEXP. One key novelty of these protocols is the manipulation of quantum proofs in a global and coherent way yielding constant gaps. Previous protocols (only available for general amplitudes) are either local having vanishingly small gaps or treat the quantum proofs as classical probability distributions requiring polynomially many proofs thereby not implying non-trivial bounds on QMA(2). Finally, we show that QMA(2) is equal to $\text{QMA}^+(2)$ provided the gap of the latter is a sufficiently large constant. In particular, if $\text{QMA}^+(2)$ admits gap amplification, then QMA(2)=NEXP.
3D articulated objects are inherently challenging for manipulation due to the varied geometries and intricate functionalities associated with articulated objects.Point-level affordance, which predicts the per-point actionable score and thus proposes the best point to interact with, has demonstrated excellent performance and generalization capabilities in articulated object manipulation. However, a significant challenge remains: while previous works use perfect point cloud generated in simulation, the models cannot directly apply to the noisy point cloud in the real-world.To tackle this challenge, we leverage the property of real-world scanned point cloud that, the point cloud becomes less noisy when the camera is closer to the object. Therefore, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine affordance learning pipeline to mitigate the effect of point cloud noise in two stages. In the first stage, we learn the affordance on the noisy far point cloud which includes the whole object to propose the approximated place to manipulate. Then, we move the camera in front of the approximated place, scan a less noisy point cloud containing precise local geometries for manipulation, and learn affordance on such point cloud to propose fine-grained final actions. The proposed method is thoroughly evaluated both using large-scale simulated noisy point clouds mimicking real-world scans, and in the real world scenarios, with superiority over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness in tackling the noisy real-world point cloud problem.
Tactile sensing in mobile robots remains under-explored, mainly due to challenges related to sensor integration and the complexities of distributed sensing. In this work, we present a tactile sensing architecture for mobile robots based on wheel-mounted acoustic waveguides. Our sensor architecture enables tactile sensing along the entire circumference of a wheel with a single active component: an off-the-shelf acoustic rangefinder. We present findings showing that our sensor, mounted on the wheel of a mobile robot, is capable of discriminating between different terrains, detecting and classifying obstacles with different geometries, and performing collision detection via contact localization. We also present a comparison between our sensor and sensors traditionally used in mobile robots, and point to the potential for sensor fusion approaches that leverage the unique capabilities of our tactile sensing architecture. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous mobile robots can further leverage our sensor architecture for diverse mapping tasks requiring knowledge of terrain material, surface topology, and underlying structure.
Fully decentralized learning is gaining momentum for training AI models at the Internet's edge, addressing infrastructure challenges and privacy concerns. In a decentralized machine learning system, data is distributed across multiple nodes, with each node training a local model based on its respective dataset. The local models are then shared and combined to form a global model capable of making accurate predictions on new data. Our exploration focuses on how different types of network structures influence the spreading of knowledge - the process by which nodes incorporate insights gained from learning patterns in data available on other nodes across the network. Specifically, this study investigates the intricate interplay between network structure and learning performance using three network topologies and six data distribution methods. These methods consider different vertex properties, including degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and clustering coefficient, along with whether nodes exhibit high or low values of these metrics. Our findings underscore the significance of global centrality metrics (degree, betweenness) in correlating with learning performance, while local clustering proves less predictive. We highlight the challenges in transferring knowledge from peripheral to central nodes, attributed to a dilution effect during model aggregation. Additionally, we observe that central nodes exert a pull effect, facilitating the spread of knowledge. In examining degree distribution, hubs in Barabasi-Albert networks positively impact learning for central nodes but exacerbate dilution when knowledge originates from peripheral nodes. Finally, we demonstrate the formidable challenge of knowledge circulation outside of segregated communities.
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus via self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Research has been dedicated to incorporating knowledge into PLMs to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight these two main tasks of NLP. For NLU, we divide the types of knowledge into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.