Multilevel lattice codes, such as the associated to Constructions $C$, $\overline{D}$, D and D', have relevant applications in communications. In this paper, we investigate some properties of lattices obtained via Constructions D and D' from $q$-ary linear codes. Connections with Construction A, generator matrices, expressions and bounds for the lattice volume and minimum distances are derived. Extensions of previous results regarding construction and decoding of binary and $p$-ary linear codes ($p$ prime) are also presented.
We introduce an iterative solver named MINARES for symmetric linear systems $Ax \approx b$, where $A$ is possibly singular. MINARES is based on the symmetric Lanczos process, like MINRES and MINRES-QLP, but it minimizes $\|Ar_k\|$ in each Krylov subspace rather than $\|r_k\|$, where $r_k$ is the current residual vector. When $A$ is symmetric, MINARES minimizes the same quantity $\|Ar_k\|$ as LSMR, but in more relevant Krylov subspaces, and it requires only one matrix-vector product $Av$ per iteration, whereas LSMR would need two. Our numerical experiments with MINRES-QLP and LSMR show that MINARES is a pertinent alternative on consistent symmetric systems and the most suitable Krylov method for inconsistent symmetric systems. We derive properties of MINARES from an equivalent solver named CAR that is to MINARES as CR is to MINRES, is not based on the Lanczos process, and minimizes $\|Ar_k\|$ in the same Krylov subspace as MINARES. We establish that MINARES and CAR generate monotonic $\|x_k - x_{\star}\|$, $\|x_k - x_{\star}\|_A$ and $\|r_k\|$ when $A$ is positive definite.
We propose a volumetric formulation for computing the Optimal Transport problem defined on surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$, found in disciplines like optics, computer graphics, and computational methodologies. Instead of directly tackling the original problem on the surface, we define a new Optimal Transport problem on a thin tubular region, $T_{\epsilon}$, adjacent to the surface. This extension offers enhanced flexibility and simplicity for numerical discretization on Cartesian grids. The Optimal Transport mapping and potential function computed on $T_{\epsilon}$ are consistent with the original problem on surfaces. We demonstrate that, with the proposed volumetric approach, it is possible to use simple and straightforward numerical methods to solve Optimal Transport for $\Gamma = \mathbb{S}^2$.
We present the Fast Chebyshev Transform (FCT), a fast, randomized algorithm to compute a Chebyshev approximation of functions in high-dimensions from the knowledge of the location of its nonzero Chebyshev coefficients. Rather than sampling a full-resolution Chebyshev grid in each dimension, we randomly sample several grids with varied resolutions and solve a least-squares problem in coefficient space in order to compute a polynomial approximating the function of interest across all grids simultaneously. We theoretically and empirically show that the FCT exhibits quasi-linear scaling and high numerical accuracy on challenging and complex high-dimensional problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to alternative Chebyshev approximation schemes. In particular, we highlight our algorithm's effectiveness in high dimensions, demonstrating significant speedups over commonly-used alternative techniques.
As a parametric motion representation, B\'ezier curves have significant applications in polynomial trajectory optimization for safe and smooth motion planning of various robotic systems, including flying drones, autonomous vehicles, and robotic manipulators. An essential component of B\'ezier curve optimization is the optimization objective, as it significantly influences the resulting robot motion. Standard physical optimization objectives, such as minimizing total velocity, acceleration, jerk, and snap, are known to yield quadratic optimization of B\'ezier curve control points. In this paper, we present a unifying graph-theoretic perspective for defining and understanding B\'ezier curve optimization objectives using a consensus distance of B\'ezier control points derived based on their interaction graph Laplacian. In addition to demonstrating how standard physical optimization objectives define a consensus distance between B\'ezier control points, we also introduce geometric and statistical optimization objectives as alternative consensus distances, constructed using finite differencing and differential variance. To compare these optimization objectives, we apply B\'ezier curve optimization over convex polygonal safe corridors that are automatically constructed around a maximal-clearance minimal-length reference path. We provide an explicit analytical formulation for quadratic optimization of B\'ezier curves using B\'ezier matrix operations. We conclude that the norm and variance of the finite differences of B\'ezier control points lead to simpler and more intuitive interaction graphs and optimization objectives compared to B\'ezier derivative norms, despite having similar robot motion profiles.
We present the first fully abstract normal form bisimulation for call-by-value PCF (PCF$_{\textsf{v}}$). Our model is based on a labelled transition system (LTS) that combines elements from applicative bisimulation, environmental bisimulation and game semantics. In order to obtain completeness while avoiding the use of semantic quotiening, the LTS constructs traces corresponding to interactions with possible functional contexts. The model gives rise to a sound and complete technique for checking of PCF$_{\textsf{v}}$ program equivalence, which we implement in a bounded bisimulation checking tool. We test our tool on known equivalences from the literature and new examples.
The Geometric Bin Packing (GBP) problem is a generalization of Bin Packing where the input is a set of $d$-dimensional rectangles, and the goal is to pack them into unit $d$-dimensional cubes efficiently. It is NP-Hard to obtain a PTAS for the problem, even when $d=2$. For general $d$, the best-known approximation algorithm has an approximation guarantee exponential in $d$, while the best hardness of approximation is still a small constant inapproximability from the case when $d=2$. In this paper, we show that the problem cannot be approximated within $d^{1-\epsilon}$ factor unless NP=ZPP. Recently, $d$-dimensional Vector Bin Packing, a closely related problem to the GBP, was shown to be hard to approximate within $\Omega(\log d)$ when $d$ is a fixed constant, using a notion of Packing Dimension of set families. In this paper, we introduce a geometric analog of it, the Geometric Packing Dimension of set families. While we fall short of obtaining similar inapproximability results for the Geometric Bin Packing problem when $d$ is fixed, we prove a couple of key properties of the Geometric Packing Dimension which highlight fundamental differences between Geometric Bin Packing and Vector Bin Packing.
Recently, large language models (LLMs), especially those that are pretrained on code, have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating programs from natural language inputs in a few-shot or even zero-shot manner. Despite promising results, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive evaluation of these models language-to-code generation capabilities. Existing studies often focus on specific tasks, model architectures, or learning paradigms, leading to a fragmented understanding of the overall landscape. In this work, we present L2CEval, a systematic evaluation of the language-to-code generation capabilities of LLMs on 7 tasks across the domain spectrum of semantic parsing, math reasoning and Python programming, analyzing the factors that potentially affect their performance, such as model size, pretraining data, instruction tuning, and different prompting methods. In addition to assessing model performance, we measure confidence calibration for the models and conduct human evaluations of the output programs. This enables us to identify and analyze the typical failure modes across various tasks and models. L2CEval offers a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in language-to-code generation. We also release the evaluation framework and all model outputs, hoping to lay the groundwork for further future research in this domain.
For any fixed positive integer $r$ and a given budget $k$, the $r$-\textsc{Eigenvalue Vertex Deletion} ($r$-EVD) problem asks if a graph $G$ admits a subset $S$ of at most $k$ vertices such that the adjacency matrix of $G\setminus S$ has at most $r$ distinct eigenvalues. The edge deletion, edge addition, and edge editing variants are defined analogously. For $r = 1$, $r$-EVD is equivalent to the Vertex Cover problem. For $r = 2$, it turns out that $r$-EVD amounts to removing a subset $S$ of at most $k$ vertices so that $G\setminus S$ is a cluster graph where all connected components have the same size. We show that $r$-EVD is NP-complete even on bipartite graphs with maximum degree four for every fixed $r > 2$, and FPT when parameterized by the solution size and the maximum degree of the graph. We also establish several results for the special case when $r = 2$. For the vertex deletion variant, we show that $2$-EVD is NP-complete even on triangle-free and $3d$-regular graphs for any $d\geq 2$, and also NP-complete on $d$-regular graphs for any $d\geq 8$. The edge deletion, addition, and editing variants are all NP-complete for $r = 2$. The edge deletion problem admits a polynomial time algorithm if the input is a cluster graph, while the edge addition variant is hard even when the input is a cluster graph. We show that the edge addition variant has a quadratic kernel. The edge deletion and vertex deletion variants are FPT when parameterized by the solution size alone. Our main contribution is to develop the complexity landscape for the problem of modifying a graph with the aim of reducing the number of distinct eigenvalues in the spectrum of its adjacency matrix. It turns out that this captures, apart from Vertex Cover, also a natural variation of the problem of modifying to a cluster graph as a special case, which we believe may be of independent interest.
Large language models (large LMs) are increasingly trained on massive codebases and used to generate code. However, LMs lack awareness of security and are found to frequently produce unsafe code. This work studies the security of LMs along two important axes: (i) security hardening, which aims to enhance LMs' reliability in generating secure code, and (ii) adversarial testing, which seeks to evaluate LMs' security at an adversarial standpoint. We address both of these by formulating a new security task called controlled code generation. The task is parametric and takes as input a binary property to guide the LM to generate secure or unsafe code, while preserving the LM's capability of generating functionally correct code. We propose a novel learning-based approach called SVEN to solve this task. SVEN leverages property-specific continuous vectors to guide program generation towards the given property, without modifying the LM's weights. Our training procedure optimizes these continuous vectors by enforcing specialized loss terms on different regions of code, using a high-quality dataset carefully curated by us. Our extensive evaluation shows that SVEN is highly effective in achieving strong security control. For instance, a state-of-the-art CodeGen LM with 2.7B parameters generates secure code for 59.1% of the time. When we employ SVEN to perform security hardening (or adversarial testing) on this LM, the ratio is significantly boosted to 92.3% (or degraded to 36.8%). Importantly, SVEN closely matches the original LMs in functional correctness.
Large language models (LLMs) typically employ sampling or beam search, accompanied by prompts such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), to boost reasoning and decoding ability. Recent work like Tree-of-Thought (ToT) and Reasoning via Planning (RAP) aim to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs by utilizing tree-search algorithms to guide multi-step reasoning. These methods mainly focus on LLMs' reasoning ability during inference and heavily rely on human-designed prompts to activate LLM as a value function, which lacks general applicability and scalability. To address these limitations, we present an AlphaZero-like tree-search framework for LLMs (termed TS-LLM), systematically illustrating how tree-search with a learned value function can guide LLMs' decoding ability. TS-LLM distinguishes itself in two key ways: (1) Leveraging a learned value function, our approach can be generally applied to different tasks beyond reasoning (such as RLHF alignment), and LLMs of any size, without prompting advanced, large-scale models. (2) It can guide LLM's decoding during both inference and training. Empirical evaluations across reasoning, planning, and RLHF alignment tasks validate the effectiveness of TS-LLM, even on trees with a depth of 64.