Minimization of cortical prediction errors has been considered a key computational goal of the cerebral cortex underlying perception, action and learning. However, it is still unclear how the cortex should form and use information about uncertainty in this process of prediction error minimization. Here we derive neural dynamics that minimize prediction errors under the assumption that cortical areas must not only predict the activity in other areas and sensory streams, but also jointly estimate the precision of their predictions. This results in a dynamic modulatory balancing of cortical streams based on context-dependent precision estimates. Moreover, the theory predicts the existence of cortical second-order errors, comparing estimated and actual precision, propagated through the cortical hierarchy alongside classical prediction errors. These second-order errors are used to learn weights of synapses responsible for precision estimation through an error-correcting synaptic learning rule. Finally, we propose a detailed mapping of the theory to cortical circuitry.
A statistical emulator can be used as a surrogate of complex physics-based calculations to drastically reduce the computational cost. Its successful implementation hinges on an accurate representation of the nonlinear response surface with a high-dimensional input space. Conventional "space-filling" designs, including random sampling and Latin hypercube sampling, become inefficient as the dimensionality of the input variables increases, and the predictive accuracy of the emulator can degrade substantially for a test input distant from the training input set. To address this fundamental challenge, we develop a reliable emulator for predicting complex functionals by active learning with error control (ALEC). The algorithm is applicable to infinite-dimensional mapping with high-fidelity predictions and a controlled predictive error. The computational efficiency has been demonstrated by emulating the classical density functional theory (cDFT) calculations, a statistical-mechanical method widely used in modeling the equilibrium properties of complex molecular systems. We show that ALEC is much more accurate than conventional emulators based on the Gaussian processes with "space-filling" designs and alternative active learning methods. Besides, it is computationally more efficient than direct cDFT calculations. ALEC can be a reliable building block for emulating expensive functionals owing to its minimal computational cost, controllable predictive error, and fully automatic features.
The modification of Amdahl's law for the case of increment of processor elements in a computer system is considered. The coefficient $k$ linking accelerations of parallel and parallel specialized computer systems is determined. The limiting values of the coefficient are investigated and its theoretical maximum is calculated. It is proved that $k$ > 1 for any positive increment of processor elements. The obtained formulas are combined into a single method allowing to determine the maximum theoretical acceleration of a parallel specialized computer system in comparison with the acceleration of a minimal parallel computer system. The method is tested on Apriori, k-nearest neighbors, CDF 9/7, fast Fourier transform and naive Bayesian classifier algorithms.
We introduce the higher-order refactoring problem, where the goal is to compress a logic program by discovering higher-order abstractions, such as map, filter, and fold. We implement our approach in Stevie, which formulates the refactoring problem as a constraint optimisation problem. Our experiments on multiple domains, including program synthesis and visual reasoning, show that refactoring can improve the learning performance of an inductive logic programming system, specifically improving predictive accuracies by 27% and reducing learning times by 47%. We also show that Stevie can discover abstractions that transfer to multiple domains.
Faithfully summarizing the knowledge encoded by a deep neural network (DNN) into a few symbolic primitive patterns without losing much information represents a core challenge in explainable AI. To this end, Ren et al. (2023c) have derived a series of theorems to prove that the inference score of a DNN can be explained as a small set of interactions between input variables. However, the lack of generalization power makes it still hard to consider such interactions as faithful primitive patterns encoded by the DNN. Therefore, given different DNNs trained for the same task, we develop a new method to extract interactions that are shared by these DNNs. Experiments show that the extracted interactions can better reflect common knowledge shared by different DNNs.
It is a challenge to manage infinite- or high-dimensional data in situations where storage, transmission, or computation resources are constrained. In the simplest scenario when the data consists of a noisy infinite-dimensional signal, we introduce the notion of local \emph{effective dimension} (i.e., pertinent to the underlying signal), formulate and study the problem of its recovery on the basis of noisy data. This problem can be associated to the problems of adaptive quantization, (lossy) data compression, oracle signal estimation. We apply a Bayesian approach and study frequentists properties of the resulting posterior, a purely frequentist version of the results is also proposed. We derive certain upper and lower bounds results about identifying the local effective dimension which show that only the so called \emph{one-sided inference} on the local effective dimension can be ensured whereas the \emph{two-sided inference}, on the other hand, is in general impossible. We establish the \emph{minimal} conditions under which two-sided inference can be made. Finally, connection to the problem of smoothness estimation for some traditional smoothness scales (Sobolev scales) is considered.
Mixtures of regression are a powerful class of models for regression learning with respect to a highly uncertain and heterogeneous response variable of interest. In addition to being a rich predictive model for the response given some covariates, the parameters in this model class provide useful information about the heterogeneity in the data population, which is represented by the conditional distributions for the response given the covariates associated with a number of distinct but latent subpopulations. In this paper, we investigate conditions of strong identifiability, rates of convergence for conditional density and parameter estimation, and the Bayesian posterior contraction behavior arising in finite mixture of regression models, under exact-fitted and over-fitted settings and when the number of components is unknown. This theory is applicable to common choices of link functions and families of conditional distributions employed by practitioners. We provide simulation studies and data illustrations, which shed some light on the parameter learning behavior found in several popular regression mixture models reported in the literature.
In the first part of the paper we study absolute error of sampling discretization of the integral $L_p$-norm for functional classes of continuous functions. We use chaining technique to provide a general bound for the error of sampling discretization of the $L_p$-norm on a given functional class in terms of entropy numbers in the uniform norm of this class. The general result yields new error bounds for sampling discretization of the $L_p$-norms on classes of multivariate functions with mixed smoothness. In the second part of the paper we study universal sampling discretization and the problem of optimal sampling recovery.
Any interactive protocol between a pair of parties can be reliably simulated in the presence of noise with a multiplicative overhead on the number of rounds (Schulman 1996). The reciprocal of the best (least) overhead is called the interactive capacity of the noisy channel. In this work, we present lower bounds on the interactive capacity of the binary erasure channel. Our lower bound improves the best known bound due to Ben-Yishai et al. 2021 by roughly a factor of 1.75. The improvement is due to a tighter analysis of the correctness of the simulation protocol using error pattern analysis. More precisely, instead of using the well-known technique of bounding the least number of erasures needed to make the simulation fail, we identify and bound the probability of specific erasure patterns causing simulation failure. We remark that error pattern analysis can be useful in solving other problems involving stochastic noise, such as bounding the interactive capacity of different channels.
Most existing neural network-based approaches for solving stochastic optimal control problems using the associated backward dynamic programming principle rely on the ability to simulate the underlying state variables. However, in some problems, this simulation is infeasible, leading to the discretization of state variable space and the need to train one neural network for each data point. This approach becomes computationally inefficient when dealing with large state variable spaces. In this paper, we consider a class of this type of stochastic optimal control problems and introduce an effective solution employing multitask neural networks. To train our multitask neural network, we introduce a novel scheme that dynamically balances the learning across tasks. Through numerical experiments on real-world derivatives pricing problems, we prove that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
We study the problem of parameter estimation for large exchangeable interacting particle systems when a sample of discrete observations from a single particle is known. We propose a novel method based on martingale estimating functions constructed by employing the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the generator of the mean field limit, where the law of the process is replaced by the (unique) invariant measure of the mean field dynamics. We then prove that our estimator is asymptotically unbiased and asymptotically normal when the number of observations and the number of particles tend to infinity, and we provide a rate of convergence towards the exact value of the parameters. Finally, we present several numerical experiments which show the accuracy of our estimator and corroborate our theoretical findings, even in the case the mean field dynamics exhibit more than one steady states.