Consider the problem of covertly controlling a linear system. In this problem, Alice desires to control (stabilize or change the parameters of) a linear system, while keeping an observer, Willie, unable to decide if the system is indeed being controlled or not. We formally define the problem, under two different models: (i) When Willie can only observe the system's output (ii) When Willie can directly observe the control signal. Focusing on AR(1) systems, we show that when Willie observes the system's output through a clean channel, an inherently unstable linear system can not be covertly stabilized. However, an inherently stable linear system can be covertly controlled, in the sense of covertly changing its parameter. Moreover, we give direct and converse results for two important controllers: a minimal-information controller, where Alice is allowed to used only $1$ bit per sample, and a maximal-information controller, where Alice is allowed to view the real-valued output. Unlike covert communication, where the trade-off is between rate and covertness, the results reveal an interesting \emph{three--fold} trade--off in covert control: the amount of information used by the controller, control performance and covertness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study formally defining covert control.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
We introduce a new distortion measure for point processes called functional-covering distortion. It is inspired by intensity theory and is related to both the covering of point processes and logarithmic loss distortion. We obtain the distortion-rate function with feedforward under this distortion measure for a large class of point processes. For Poisson processes, the rate-distortion function is obtained under a general condition called constrained functional-covering distortion, of which both covering and functional-covering are special cases. Also for Poisson processes, we characterize the rate-distortion region for a two-encoder CEO problem and show that feedforward does not enlarge this region.
We introduce a subclass of concurrent game structures (CGS) with imperfect information in which agents are endowed with private data-sharing capabilities. Importantly, our CGSs are such that it is still decidable to model-check these CGSs against a relevant fragment of ATL. These systems can be thought as a generalisation of architectures allowing information forks, in the sense that, in the initial states of the system, we allow information forks from agents outside a given set A to agents inside this A. For this reason, together with the fact that the communication in our models underpins a specialised form of broadcast, we call our formalism A-cast systems. To underline, the fragment of ATL for which we show the model-checking problem to be decidable over A-cast is a large and significant one; it expresses coalitions over agents in any subset of the set A. Indeed, as we show, our systems and this ATL fragments can encode security problems that are notoriously hard to express faithfully: terrorist-fraud attacks in identity schemes.
While utilization of digital agents to support crucial decision making is increasing, trust in suggestions made by these agents is hard to achieve. However, it is essential to profit from their application, resulting in a need for explanations for both the decision making process and the model. For many systems, such as common black-box models, achieving at least some explainability requires complex post-processing, while other systems profit from being, to a reasonable extent, inherently interpretable. We propose a rule-based learning system specifically conceptualised and, thus, especially suited for these scenarios. Its models are inherently transparent and easily interpretable by design. One key innovation of our system is that the rules' conditions and which rules compose a problem's solution are evolved separately. We utilise independent rule fitnesses which allows users to specifically tailor their model structure to fit the given requirements for explainability.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
In this article we suggest two discretization methods based on isogeometric analysis (IGA) for planar linear elasticity. On the one hand, we apply the well-known ansatz of weakly imposed symmetry for the stress tensor and obtain a well-posed mixed formulation. Such modified mixed problems have been already studied by different authors. But we concentrate on the exploitation of IGA results to handle also curved boundary geometries. On the other hand, we consider the more complicated situation of strong symmetry, i.e. we discretize the mixed weak form determined by the so-called Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. We show the existence of suitable approximate fields leading to an inf-sup stable saddle-point problem. For both discretization approaches we prove convergence statements and in case of weak symmetry we illustrate the approximation behavior by means of several numerical experiments.
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have nowadays gained particular attention. In this paper, we study two variants of this kind, namely, the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics. We prove their convergence to the objective distribution in terms of KL-divergence under the sole assumptions of smoothness and Log-Sobolev inequality which are weaker conditions than those used in prior works for these algorithms. With the batch size and the inner loop length set to $\sqrt{n}$, the gradient complexity to achieve an $\epsilon$-precision is $\tilde{O}((n+dn^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})\gamma^2 L^2\alpha^{-2})$, which is an improvement from any previous analyses. We also show some essential applications of our result to non-convex optimization.
In this work, we develop quantization and variable-length source codecs for the feedback links in linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control systems. We prove that for any fixed control performance, the approaches we propose nearly achieve lower bounds on communication cost that have been established in prior work. In particular, we refine the analysis of a classical achievability approach with an eye towards more practical details. Notably, in the prior literature the source codecs used to demonstrate the (near) achievability of these lower bounds are often implicitly assumed to be time-varying. For single-input single-output (SISO) plants, we prove that it suffices to consider time-invariant quantization and source coding. This result follows from analyzing the long-term stochastic behavior of the system's quantized measurements and reconstruction errors. To our knowledge, this time-invariant achievability result is the first in the literature.
Dynamic Linear Models (DLMs) are commonly employed for time series analysis due to their versatile structure, simple recursive updating, ability to handle missing data, and probabilistic forecasting. However, the options for count time series are limited: Gaussian DLMs require continuous data, while Poisson-based alternatives often lack sufficient modeling flexibility. We introduce a novel semiparametric methodology for count time series by warping a Gaussian DLM. The warping function has two components: a (nonparametric) transformation operator that provides distributional flexibility and a rounding operator that ensures the correct support for the discrete data-generating process. We develop conjugate inference for the warped DLM, which enables analytic and recursive updates for the state space filtering and smoothing distributions. We leverage these results to produce customized and efficient algorithms for inference and forecasting, including Monte Carlo simulation for offline analysis and an optimal particle filter for online inference. This framework unifies and extends a variety of discrete time series models and is valid for natural counts, rounded values, and multivariate observations. Simulation studies illustrate the excellent forecasting capabilities of the warped DLM. The proposed approach is applied to a multivariate time series of daily overdose counts and demonstrates both modeling and computational successes.
The numerical solution of singular eigenvalue problems is complicated by the fact that small perturbations of the coefficients may have an arbitrarily bad effect on eigenvalue accuracy. However, it has been known for a long time that such perturbations are exceptional and standard eigenvalue solvers, such as the QZ algorithm, tend to yield good accuracy despite the inevitable presence of roundoff error. Recently, Lotz and Noferini quantified this phenomenon by introducing the concept of $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers. In this work, we consider singular quadratic eigenvalue problems and two popular linearizations. Our results show that a correctly chosen linearization increases $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers only marginally, justifying the use of these linearizations in numerical solvers also in the singular case. We propose a very simple but often effective algorithm for computing well-conditioned eigenvalues of a singular quadratic eigenvalue problems by adding small random perturbations to the coefficients. We prove that the eigenvalue condition number is, with high probability, a reliable criterion for detecting and excluding spurious eigenvalues created from the singular part.