Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes the impact on a single outcome to multiple treatments, allowing estimating latent variables for confounding control. Nevertheless, these methods primarily focus on a single outcome, whereas in many real-world scenarios, there is greater interest in studying the effects on multiple outcomes. Besides, these outcomes are often coupled with multiple treatments. Examples include the intensive care unit (ICU), where health providers evaluate the effectiveness of therapies on multiple health indicators. To accommodate these scenarios, we consider a new setting dubbed as multiple treatments and multiple outcomes. We then show that parallel studies of multiple outcomes involved in this setting can assist each other in causal identification, in the sense that we can exploit other treatments and outcomes as proxies for each treatment effect under study. We proceed with a causal discovery method that can effectively identify such proxies for causal estimation. The utility of our method is demonstrated in synthetic data and sepsis disease.
Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in societal systems is relatively underdeveloped. The goal of this study is to explore whether the dynamics of collective civil unrest can be plausibly characterized as a sequence of recurrent phase shifts, with each phase having measurable and identifiable latent characteristics. Building on previous efforts to characterize civil unrest as a self-organized critical system, we introduce a macro-level statistical model of civil unrest and evaluate its plausibility using a comprehensive dataset of civil unrest events in 170 countries from 1946 to 2017. Our findings demonstrate that the macro-level phase model effectively captures the characteristics of civil unrest data from diverse countries globally and that universal mechanisms may underlie certain aspects of the dynamics of civil unrest. We also introduce a scale to quantify a country's long-term unrest per unit of time and show that civil unrest events tend to cluster geographically, with the magnitude of civil unrest concentrated in specific regions. Our approach has the potential to identify and measure phase transitions in various collective human phenomena beyond civil unrest, contributing to a better understanding of complex social systems.
Efficiently approximating the probability of system failure has gained increasing importance as expensive simulations begin to play a larger role in reliability quantification tasks in areas such as structural design, power grid design, and safety certification among others. This work derives credible intervals on the probability of failure for a simulation which we assume is a realizations of a Gaussian process. We connect these intervals to binary classification error and comment on their applicability to a broad class of iterative schemes proposed throughout the literature. A novel iterative sampling scheme is proposed which can suggest multiple samples per batch for simulations with parallel implementations. We empirically test our scalable, open-source implementation on a variety simulations including a Tsunami model where failure is quantified in terms of maximum wave hight.
Fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) is capable of exploiting the high spatial diversity of wireless channels to mitigate multi-user interference via flexible port switching, which achieves a better performance than traditional multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems. Moreover, integrated data and energy transfer (IDET) is able to provide both the wireless data transfer (WDT) and wireless energy transfer (WET) services towards low-power devices. In this paper, a FAMA assisted IDET system is studied, where $N$ access points (APs) provide dedicated IDET services towards $N$ user equipments (UEs). Each UE is equipped with a single fluid antenna. The performance of WDT and WET , \textit{i.e.}, the WDT outage probability, the WET outage probability, the reliable throughput and the average energy harvesting amount, are analysed theoretically by using time switching (TS) between WDT and WET. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis, which reveals that the number of UEs and TS ratio should be optimized to achieve a trade-off between the WDT and WET performance. Moreover, FAMA assisted IDET achieves a better performance in terms of both WDT and WET than traditional MIMO with the same antenna size.
We demonstrate a high-performance vendor-agnostic method for massively parallel solving of ensembles of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and stochastic differential equations (SDEs) on GPUs. The method is integrated with a widely used differential equation solver library in a high-level language (Julia's DifferentialEquations.jl) and enables GPU acceleration without requiring code changes by the user. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to hand-optimized CUDA-C++ kernels while performing 20--100$\times$ faster than the vectorizing map (vmap) approach implemented in JAX and PyTorch. Performance evaluation on NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple GPUs demonstrates performance portability and vendor-agnosticism. We show composability with MPI to enable distributed multi-GPU workflows. The implemented solvers are fully featured -- supporting event handling, automatic differentiation, and incorporation of datasets via the GPU's texture memory -- allowing scientists to take advantage of GPU acceleration on all major current architectures without changing their model code and without loss of performance. We distribute the software as an open-source library //github.com/SciML/DiffEqGPU.jl
Integrating different functionalities, conventionally implemented as dedicated systems, into a single platform allows utilising the available resources more efficiently. We consider an integrated sensing and power transfer (ISAPT) system and propose the joint optimisation of the rectangular pulse-shaped transmit signal and the beamforming vector to combine sensing and wireless power transfer (WPT) functionalities efficiently. In contrast to prior works, we adopt an accurate non-linear circuit-based energy harvesting (EH) model. We formulate and solve a non-convex optimisation problem for a general number of EH receivers to maximise a weighted sum of the average harvested powers at the EH receivers while ensuring the received echo signal reflected by a sensing target (ST) has sufficient power for estimating the range to the ST with a prescribed accuracy within the considered coverage region. The average harvested power is shown to monotonically increase with the pulse duration when the average transmit power budget is sufficiently large. We discuss the trade-off between sensing performance and power transfer for the considered ISAPT system. The proposed approach significantly outperforms a heuristic baseline scheme based on a linear EH model, which linearly combines energy beamforming with the beamsteering vector in the direction to the ST as its transmit strategy.
Recent advances in large language models elicit reasoning in a chain of thought that allows models to decompose problems in a human-like fashion. Though this paradigm improves multi-step reasoning ability in language models, it is limited by being unimodal and applied mainly to question-answering tasks. We claim that incorporating visual augmentation into reasoning is essential, especially for complex, imaginative tasks. Consequently, we introduce VCoT, a novel method that leverages chain of thought prompting with vision-language grounding to recursively bridge the logical gaps within sequential data. Our method uses visual guidance to generate synthetic multimodal infillings that add consistent and novel information to reduce the logical gaps for downstream tasks that can benefit from temporal reasoning, as well as provide interpretability into models' multi-step reasoning. We apply VCoT to the Visual Storytelling and WikiHow summarization datasets and demonstrate through human evaluation that VCoT offers novel and consistent synthetic data augmentation beating chain of thought baselines, which can be used to enhance downstream performance.
Arrival of multicore systems has enforced a new scenario in computing, the parallel and distributed algorithms are fast replacing the older sequential algorithms, with many challenges of these techniques. The distributed algorithms provide distributed processing using distributed file systems and processing units, while network is modeled as minimum cost spanning tree. On the other hand, the parallel processing chooses different language platforms, data parallel vs. parallel programming, and GPUs. Processing units, memory elements and storage are connected through dynamic distributed networks in the form of spanning trees. The article presents foundational algorithms, analysis, and efficiency considerations.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to be a powerful algorithmic model in broad application fields for their effectiveness in learning over graphs. To scale GNN training up for large-scale and ever-growing graphs, the most promising solution is distributed training which distributes the workload of training across multiple computing nodes. However, the workflows, computational patterns, communication patterns, and optimization techniques of distributed GNN training remain preliminarily understood. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of distributed GNN training by investigating various optimization techniques used in distributed GNN training. First, distributed GNN training is classified into several categories according to their workflows. In addition, their computational patterns and communication patterns, as well as the optimization techniques proposed by recent work are introduced. Second, the software frameworks and hardware platforms of distributed GNN training are also introduced for a deeper understanding. Third, distributed GNN training is compared with distributed training of deep neural networks, emphasizing the uniqueness of distributed GNN training. Finally, interesting issues and opportunities in this field are discussed.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.