We study the problem of finding the smallest graph that does not occur as an induced subgraph of a given graph. This missing induced subgraph has at most logarithmic size and can be found by a brute-force search, in an $n$-vertex graph, in time $n^{O(\log n)}$. We show that under the Exponential Time Hypothesis this quasipolynomial time bound is optimal. We also consider variations of the problem in which either the missing subgraph or the given graph comes from a restricted graph family; for instance, we prove that the smallest missing planar induced subgraph of a given planar graph can be found in polynomial time.
A geometric graph is an abstract graph along with an embedding of the graph into the Euclidean plane which can be used to model a wide range of data sets. The ability to compare and cluster such objects is required in a data analysis pipeline, leading to a need for distances or metrics on these objects. In this work, we study the interleaving distance on geometric graphs, where functor representations of data can be compared by finding pairs of natural transformations between them. However, in many cases, particularly those of the set-valued functor variety, computation of the interleaving distance is NP-hard. For this reason, we take inspiration from the work of Robinson to find quality measures for families of maps that do not rise to the level of a natural transformation. Specifically, we call collections $\phi = \{\phi_U\mid U\}$ and $\psi = \{\psi_U\mid U\}$ which do not necessarily form a true interleaving an \textit{assignment}. In the case of embedded graphs, we impose a grid structure on the plane, treat this as a poset endowed with the Alexandroff topology $K$, and encode the embedded graph data as functors $F: \mathbf{Open}(K) \to \mathbf{Set}$ where $F(U)$ is the set of connected components of the graph inside of the geometric realization of the set $U$. We then endow the image with the extra structure of a metric space and define a loss function $L(\phi,\psi)$ which measures how far the required diagrams of an interleaving are from commuting. Then for a pair of assignments, we use this loss function to bound the interleaving distance, with an eye toward computation and approximation of the distance. We expect these ideas are not only useful in our particular use case of embedded graphs, but can be extended to a larger class of interleaving distance problems where computational complexity creates a barrier to use in practice.
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a pivotal technique in modern recommender systems. The learning process of CF models typically consists of three components: interaction encoder, loss function, and negative sampling. Although many existing studies have proposed various CF models to design sophisticated interaction encoders, recent work shows that simply reformulating the loss functions can achieve significant performance gains. This paper delves into analyzing the relationship among existing loss functions. Our mathematical analysis reveals that the previous loss functions can be interpreted as alignment and uniformity functions: (i) the alignment matches user and item representations, and (ii) the uniformity disperses user and item distributions. Inspired by this analysis, we propose a novel loss function that improves the design of alignment and uniformity considering the unique patterns of datasets called Margin-aware Alignment and Weighted Uniformity (MAWU). The key novelty of MAWU is two-fold: (i) margin-aware alignment (MA) mitigates user/item-specific popularity biases, and (ii) weighted uniformity (WU) adjusts the significance between user and item uniformities to reflect the inherent characteristics of datasets. Extensive experimental results show that MF and LightGCN equipped with MAWU are comparable or superior to state-of-the-art CF models with various loss functions on three public datasets.
In a Lombardi drawing of a graph the vertices are drawn as points and the edges are drawn as circular arcs connecting their respective endpoints. Additionally, all vertices have perfect angular resolution, i.e., all angles incident to a vertex $v$ have size $2\pi/\mathrm{deg}(v)$. We prove that it is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete to determine whether a given graph admits a Lombardi drawing respecting a fixed cyclic ordering of the incident edges around each vertex. In particular, this implies NP-hardness. While most previous work studied the (non-)existence of Lombardi drawings for different graph classes, our result is the first on the computational complexity of finding Lombardi drawings of general graphs.
We show that the essential properties of entropy (monotonicity, additivity and subadditivity) are consequences of entropy being a monoidal natural transformation from the under category functor $-/\mathsf{LProb}_{\rho}$ (where $\mathsf{LProb}_{\rho}$ is category of $\ell_{\rho}$ discrete probability spaces) to $\Delta_{\mathbb{R}}$. Moreover, the Shannon entropy can be characterized as the universal monoidal natural transformation from $-/\mathsf{LProb}_{\rho}$ to the category of "strongly regularly ordered" vector spaces (a reflective subcategory of the lax-slice 2-category over $\mathsf{MonCat}_{\ell}$ in the 2-category of monoidal categories), providing a succinct characterization of Shannon entropy as a reflection arrow. We can likewise define entropy for every category with a monoidal structure on its under categories (e.g. the category of finite abelian groups, the category of finite inhabited sets, the category of finite dimensional vector spaces, and the augmented simplex category) via the reflection arrow to the reflective subcategory of strongly regularly ordered vector spaces. This implies that all these entropies over different categories are components of a single natural transformation (the unit of the idempotent monad), allowing us to connect these entropies in a natural manner. We also provide a universal characterization of the conditional Shannon entropy based on the chain rule which, unlike the characterization of information loss by Baez, Fritz and Leinster, does not require any continuity assumption.
The Skolem problem is a long-standing open problem in linear dynamical systems: can a linear recurrence sequence (LRS) ever reach 0 from a given initial configuration? Similarly, the positivity problem asks whether the LRS stays positive from an initial configuration. Deciding Skolem (or positivity) has been open for half a century: the best known decidability results are for LRS with special properties (e.g., low order recurrences). But these problems are easier for "uninitialized" variants, where the initial configuration is not fixed but can vary arbitrarily: checking if there is an initial configuration from which the LRS stays positive can be decided in polynomial time (Tiwari in 2004, Braverman in 2006). In this paper, we consider problems that lie between the initialized and uninitialized variant. More precisely, we ask if 0 (resp. negative numbers) can be avoided from every initial configuration in a neighborhood of a given initial configuration. This can be considered as a robust variant of the Skolem (resp. positivity) problem. We show that these problems lie at the frontier of decidability: if the neighbourhood is given as part of the input, then robust Skolem and robust positivity are Diophantine hard, i.e., solving either would entail major breakthrough in Diophantine approximations, as happens for (non-robust) positivity. However, if one asks whether such a neighbourhood exists, then the problems turn out to be decidable with PSPACE complexity. Our techniques also allow us to tackle robustness for ultimate positivity, which asks whether there is a bound on the number of steps after which the LRS remains positive. There are two variants depending on whether we ask for a "uniform" bound on this number of steps. For the non-uniform variant, when the neighbourhood is open, the problem turns out to be tractable, even when the neighbourhood is given as input.
Factor graphs are a very powerful graphical representation, used to model many problems in robotics. They are widely spread in the areas of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), computer vision, and localization. In this paper we describe an approach to fill the gap with other areas, such as optimal control, by presenting an extension of Factor Graph Solvers to constrained optimization. The core idea of our method is to encapsulate the Augmented Lagrangian (AL) method in factors of the graph that can be integrated straightforwardly in existing factor graph solvers. We show the generality of our approach by addressing three applications, arising from different areas: pose estimation, rotation synchronization and Model Predictive Control (MPC) of a pseudo-omnidirectional platform. We implemented our approach using C++ and ROS. Besides the generality of the approach, application results show that we can favorably compare against domain specific approaches.
We study the critical window of the symmetric binary perceptron, or equivalently, combinatorial discrepancy. Consider the problem of finding a binary vector $\sigma$ satisfying $\|A\sigma\|_\infty \le K$, where $A$ is an $\alpha n \times n$ matrix with iid Gaussian entries. For fixed $K$, at which densities $\alpha$ is this constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) satisfiable? A sharp threshold was recently established by Perkins and Xu, and Abbe, Li, and Sly , answering this to first order. Namely, for each $K$ there exists an explicit critical density $\alpha_c$ so that for any fixed $\epsilon > 0$, with high probability the CSP is satisfiable for $\alpha n < (\alpha_c - \epsilon ) n$ and unsatisfiable for $\alpha n > (\alpha_c + \epsilon) n$. This corresponds to a bound of $o(n)$ on the size of the critical window. We sharpen these results significantly, as well as provide exponential tail bounds. Our main result is that, perhaps surprisingly, the critical window is actually at most $O(\log n)$. More precisely, with high probability the CSP is satisfiable for $\alpha n < \alpha_c n -O(\log n)$ and unsatisfiable for any $\alpha n > \alpha_c n + \omega(1)$. This implies the symmetric perceptron has nearly the "sharpest possible transition," adding it to a short list of CSP for which the critical window is rigorously known to be of near-constant width.
We study a generalization of the classic Spanning Tree problem that allows for a non-uniform failure model. More precisely, edges are either \emph{safe} or \emph{unsafe} and we assume that failures only affect unsafe edges. In Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity we are given an undirected graph $G = (V,E)$ in which the edge set $E$ is partitioned into a set $S$ of safe edges and a set $U$ of unsafe edges and the task is to find a set $T$ of at most $k$ edges such that $T - \{u\}$ is connected and spans $V$ for any unsafe edge $u \in T$. Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity generalizes both Spanning Tree and Hamiltonian Cycle. We study Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity in terms of fixed-parameter tractability (FPT). We show an almost complete dichotomy on which parameters lead to fixed-parameter tractability and which lead to hardness. To this end, we obtain FPT-time algorithms with respect to the vertex deletion distance to cluster graphs and with respect to the treewidth. By exploiting the close relationship to Hamiltonian Cycle, we show that FPT-time algorithms for many smaller parameters are unlikely under standard parameterized complexity assumptions. Regarding problem-specific parameters, we observe that Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity} admits an FPT-time algorithm when parameterized by the number of unsafe edges. Furthermore, we investigate a below-upper-bound parameter for the number of edges of a solution. We show that this parameter also leads to an FPT-time algorithm.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.