This paper studies the sensitivity (or insensitivity) of a class of load balancing algorithms that achieve asymptotic zero-waiting in the sub-Halfin-Whitt regime, named LB-zero. Most existing results on zero-waiting load balancing algorithms assume the service time distribution is exponential. This paper establishes the {\em large-system insensitivity} of LB-zero for jobs whose service time follows a Coxian distribution with a finite number of phases. This result suggests that LB-zero achieves asymptotic zero-waiting for a large class of service time distributions, which is confirmed in our simulations. To prove this result, this paper develops a new technique, called "Iterative State-Space Peeling" (or ISSP for short). ISSP first identifies an iterative relation between the upper and lower bounds on the queue states and then proves that the system lives near the fixed point of the iterative bounds with a high probability. Based on ISSP, the steady-state distribution of the system is further analyzed by applying Stein's method in the neighborhood of the fixed point. ISSP, like state-space collapse in heavy-traffic analysis, is a general approach that may be used to study other complex stochastic systems.
The hard thresholding technique plays a vital role in the development of algorithms for sparse signal recovery. By merging this technique and heavy-ball acceleration method which is a multi-step extension of the traditional gradient descent method, we propose the so-called heavy-ball-based hard thresholding (HBHT) and heavy-ball-based hard thresholding pursuit (HBHTP) algorithms for signal recovery. It turns out that the HBHT and HBHTP can successfully recover a $k$-sparse signal if the restricted isometry constant of the measurement matrix satisfies $\delta_{3k}<0.618 $ and $\delta_{3k}<0.577,$ respectively. The guaranteed success of HBHT and HBHTP is also shown under the conditions $\delta_{2k}<0.356$ and $\delta_{2k}<0.377,$ respectively. Moreover, the finite convergence and stability of the two algorithms are also established in this paper. Simulations on random problem instances are performed to compare the performance of the proposed algorithms and several existing ones. Empirical results indicate that the HBHTP performs very comparably to a few existing algorithms and it takes less average time to achieve the signal recovery than these existing methods.
We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes popular algorithms such as the Subsampled Newton and Newton Sketch, which can efficiently construct stochastic Hessian estimates for many tasks. Despite using second-order information, these existing methods do not exhibit superlinear convergence, unless the stochastic noise is gradually reduced to zero during the iteration, which would lead to a computational blow-up in the per-iteration cost. We address this limitation with Hessian averaging: instead of using the most recent Hessian estimate, our algorithm maintains an average of all past estimates. This reduces the stochastic noise while avoiding the computational blow-up. We show that this scheme enjoys local $Q$-superlinear convergence with a non-asymptotic rate of $(\Upsilon\sqrt{\log (t)/t}\,)^{t}$, where $\Upsilon$ is proportional to the level of stochastic noise in the Hessian oracle. A potential drawback of this (uniform averaging) approach is that the averaged estimates contain Hessian information from the global phase of the iteration, i.e., before the iterates converge to a local neighborhood. This leads to a distortion that may substantially delay the superlinear convergence until long after the local neighborhood is reached. To address this drawback, we study a number of weighted averaging schemes that assign larger weights to recent Hessians, so that the superlinear convergence arises sooner, albeit with a slightly slower rate. Remarkably, we show that there exists a universal weighted averaging scheme that transitions to local convergence at an optimal stage, and still enjoys a superlinear convergence~rate nearly (up to a logarithmic factor) matching that of uniform Hessian averaging.
While algorithms for planar graphs have received a lot of attention, few papers have focused on the additional power that one gets from assuming an embedding of the graph is available. While in the classic sequential setting, this assumption gives no additional power (as a planar graph can be embedded in linear time), we show that this is far from being the case in other settings. We assume that the embedding is straight-line, but our methods also generalize to non-straight-line embeddings. Specifically, we focus on sublinear-time computation and massively parallel computation (MPC). Our main technical contribution is a sublinear-time algorithm for computing a relaxed version of an $r$-division. We then show how this can be used to estimate Lipschitz additive graph parameters. This includes, for example, the maximum matching, maximum independent set, or the minimum dominating set. We also show how this can be used to solve some property testing problems with respect to the vertex edit distance. In the second part of our paper, we show an MPC algorithm that computes an $r$-division of the input graph. We show how this can be used to solve various classical graph problems with space per machine of $O(n^{2/3+\epsilon})$ for some $\epsilon>0$, and while performing $O(1)$ rounds. This includes for example approximate shortest paths or the minimum spanning tree. Our results also imply an improved MPC algorithm for Euclidean minimum spanning tree.
We study the distributed minimum spanning tree (MST) problem, a fundamental problem in distributed computing. It is well-known that distributed MST can be solved in $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ rounds in the standard CONGEST model (where $n$ is the network size and $D$ is the network diameter) and this is essentially the best possible round complexity (up to logarithmic factors). However, in resource-constrained networks such as ad hoc wireless and sensor networks, nodes spending so much time can lead to significant spending of resources such as energy. Motivated by the above consideration, we study distributed algorithms for MST under the \emph{sleeping model} [Chatterjee et al., PODC 2020], a model for design and analysis of resource-efficient distributed algorithms. In the sleeping model, a node can be in one of two modes in any round -- \emph{sleeping} or \emph{awake} (unlike the traditional model where nodes are always awake). Only the rounds in which a node is \emph{awake} are counted, while \emph{sleeping} rounds are ignored. A node spends resources only in the awake rounds and hence the main goal is to minimize the \emph{awake complexity} of a distributed algorithm, the worst-case number of rounds any node is awake. We present deterministic and randomized distributed MST algorithms that have an \emph{optimal} awake complexity of $O(\log n)$ time with a matching lower bound. We also show that our randomized awake-optimal algorithm has essentially the best possible round complexity by presenting a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(n)$ on the product of the awake and round complexity of any distributed algorithm (including randomized) that outputs an MST, where $\tilde{\Omega}$ hides a $1/(\text{polylog } n)$ factor.
This paper studies the application of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) networks with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). We aim for maximizing the rate of the strong user with guaranteed weak user's quality of service (QoS) by jointly optimizing power splitting factors, beamforming coefficients, and RIS reflection coefficients in two transmission phases. The formulated problem is difficult to solve due to its complex and non-convex constraints. To tackle this challenging problem, we first use alternating optimization (AO) framework to transform it into three subproblems, and then use the penalty-based arithmetic-geometric mean approximation (PBAGM) algorithm and the successive convex approximation (SCA)-based method to solve them. Numerical results verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the baseline schemes.
We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. The setting corresponds to a dynamic programming problem, but solving this directly is typically infeasible. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for bandit experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a nonlinear second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distribution of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and therefore suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The upshot is that we can approximate the dynamic programming problem defining the bandit experiment with a PDE which can be efficiently solved using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from the numerical solutions to these equations. The proposed policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling. The framework also allows for substantial generalizations to the bandit problem such as time discounting and pure exploration motives.
Existing inferential methods for small area data involve a trade-off between maintaining area-level frequentist coverage rates and improving inferential precision via the incorporation of indirect information. In this article, we propose a method to obtain an area-level prediction region for a future observation which mitigates this trade-off. The proposed method takes a conformal prediction approach in which the conformity measure is the posterior predictive density of a working model that incorporates indirect information. The resulting prediction region has guaranteed frequentist coverage regardless of the working model, and, if the working model assumptions are accurate, the region has minimum expected volume compared to other regions with the same coverage rate. When constructed under a normal working model, we prove such a prediction region is an interval and construct an efficient algorithm to obtain the exact interval. We illustrate the performance of our method through simulation studies and an application to EPA radon survey data.
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.
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.
There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.