In this paper, we investigate the problem of deciding whether two standard normal random vectors $\mathsf{X}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and $\mathsf{Y}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ are correlated or not. This is formulated as a hypothesis testing problem, where under the null hypothesis, these vectors are statistically independent, while under the alternative, $\mathsf{X}$ and a randomly and uniformly permuted version of $\mathsf{Y}$, are correlated with correlation $\rho$. We analyze the thresholds at which optimal testing is information-theoretically impossible and possible, as a function of $n$ and $\rho$. To derive our information-theoretic lower bounds, we develop a novel technique for evaluating the second moment of the likelihood ratio using an orthogonal polynomials expansion, which among other things, reveals a surprising connection to integer partition functions. We also study a multi-dimensional generalization of the above setting, where rather than two vectors we observe two databases/matrices, and furthermore allow for partial correlations between these two.
An open stochastic system \`a la Willems is a system affected two qualitatively different kinds of uncertainty -- one is probabilistic fluctuation, and the other one is nondeterminism caused by lack of information. We give a formalization of open stochastic systems in the language of category theory. A new construction, which we term copartiality, is needed to model the propagating lack of information (which corresponds to varying sigma-algebras). As a concrete example, we discuss extended Gaussian distributions, which combine Gaussian probability with nondeterminism and correspond precisely to Willems' notion of Gaussian linear systems. We describe them both as measure-theoretic and abstract categorical entities, which enables us to rigorously describe a variety of phenomena like noisy physical laws and uninformative priors in Bayesian statistics. The category of extended Gaussian maps can be seen as a mutual generalization of Gaussian probability and linear relations, which connects the literature on categorical probability with ideas from control theory like signal-flow diagrams.
Euler diagrams are a tool for the graphical representation of set relations. Due to their simple way of visualizing elements in the sets by geometric containment, they are easily readable by an inexperienced reader. Euler diagrams where the sets are visualized as aligned rectangles are of special interest. In this work, we link the existence of such rectangular Euler diagrams to the order dimension of an associated order relation. For this, we consider Euler diagrams in one and two dimensions. In the one-dimensional case, this correspondence provides us with a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the Euler diagrams, while the two-dimensional case results in an exponential-time algorithm.
Topic models are a popular tool for clustering and analyzing textual data. They allow texts to be classified on the basis of their affiliation to the previously calculated topics. Despite their widespread use in research and application, an in-depth analysis of topic models is still an open research topic. State-of-the-art methods for interpreting topic models are based on simple visualizations, such as similarity matrices, top-term lists or embeddings, which are limited to a maximum of three dimensions. In this paper, we propose an incidence-geometric method for deriving an ordinal structure from flat topic models, such as non-negative matrix factorization. These enable the analysis of the topic model in a higher (order) dimension and the possibility of extracting conceptual relationships between several topics at once. Due to the use of conceptual scaling, our approach does not introduce any artificial topical relationships, such as artifacts of feature compression. Based on our findings, we present a new visualization paradigm for concept hierarchies based on ordinal motifs. These allow for a top-down view on topic spaces. We introduce and demonstrate the applicability of our approach based on a topic model derived from a corpus of scientific papers taken from 32 top machine learning venues.
We study the problem of maintaining a lightweight bounded-degree $(1+\varepsilon)$-spanner of a dynamic point set in a $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, where $\varepsilon>0$ and $d$ are arbitrary constants. In our fully-dynamic setting, points are allowed to be inserted as well as deleted, and our objective is to maintain a $(1+\varepsilon)$-spanner that has constant bounds on its maximum degree and its lightness (the ratio of its weight to that of the minimum spanning tree), while minimizing the recourse, which is the number of edges added or removed by each point insertion or deletion. We present a fully-dynamic algorithm that handles point insertion with amortized constant recourse and point deletion with amortized $O(\log\Delta)$ recourse, where $\Delta$ is the aspect ratio of the point set.
In this paper, we examine the role of stochastic quantizers for privacy preservation. We first employ a static stochastic quantizer and investigate its corresponding privacy-preserving properties. Specifically, we demonstrate that a sufficiently large quantization step guarantees $(0, \delta)$ differential privacy. Additionally, the degradation of control performance caused by quantization is evaluated as the tracking error of output regulation. These two analyses characterize the trade-off between privacy and control performance, determined by the quantization step. This insight enables us to use quantization intentionally as a means to achieve the seemingly conflicting two goals of maintaining control performance and preserving privacy at the same time; towards this end, we further investigate a dynamic stochastic quantizer. Under a stability assumption, the dynamic stochastic quantizer can enhance privacy, more than the static one, while achieving the same control performance. We further handle the unstable case by additionally applying input Gaussian noise.
The $(k, z)$-Clustering problem in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ has been extensively studied. Given the scale of data involved, compression methods for the Euclidean $(k, z)$-Clustering problem, such as data compression and dimension reduction, have received significant attention in the literature. However, the space complexity of the clustering problem, specifically, the number of bits required to compress the cost function within a multiplicative error $\varepsilon$, remains unclear in existing literature. This paper initiates the study of space complexity for Euclidean $(k, z)$-Clustering and offers both upper and lower bounds. Our space bounds are nearly tight when $k$ is constant, indicating that storing a coreset, a well-known data compression approach, serves as the optimal compression scheme. Furthermore, our lower bound result for $(k, z)$-Clustering establishes a tight space bound of $\Theta( n d )$ for terminal embedding, where $n$ represents the dataset size. Our technical approach leverages new geometric insights for principal angles and discrepancy methods, which may hold independent interest.
Face morphing is a problem in computer graphics with numerous artistic and forensic applications. It is challenging due to variations in pose, lighting, gender, and ethnicity. This task consists of a warping for feature alignment and a blending for a seamless transition between the warped images. We propose to leverage coord-based neural networks to represent such warpings and blendings of face images. During training, we exploit the smoothness and flexibility of such networks by combining energy functionals employed in classical approaches without discretizations. Additionally, our method is time-dependent, allowing a continuous warping/blending of the images. During morphing inference, we need both direct and inverse transformations of the time-dependent warping. The first (second) is responsible for warping the target (source) image into the source (target) image. Our neural warping stores those maps in a single network dismissing the need for inverting them. The results of our experiments indicate that our method is competitive with both classical and generative models under the lens of image quality and face-morphing detectors. Aesthetically, the resulting images present a seamless blending of diverse faces not yet usual in the literature.
The solution of a sparse system of linear equations is ubiquitous in scientific applications. Iterative methods, such as the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method (PCG), are normally chosen over direct methods due to memory and computational complexity constraints. However, the efficiency of these methods depends on the preconditioner utilized. The development of the preconditioner normally requires some insight into the sparse linear system and the desired trade-off of generating the preconditioner and the reduction in the number of iterations. Incomplete factorization methods tend to be black box methods to generate these preconditioners but may fail for a number of reasons. These reasons include numerical issues that require searching for adequate scaling, shifting, and fill-in while utilizing a difficult to parallelize algorithm. With a move towards heterogeneous computing, many sparse applications find GPUs that are optimized for dense tensor applications like training neural networks being underutilized. In this work, we demonstrate that a simple artificial neural network trained either at compile time or in parallel to the running application on a GPU can provide an incomplete sparse Cholesky factorization that can be used as a preconditioner. This generated preconditioner is as good or better in terms of reduction of iterations than the one found using multiple preconditioning techniques such as scaling and shifting. Moreover, the generated method also works and never fails to produce a preconditioner that does not reduce the iteration count.
It is well known that any graph admits a crossing-free straight-line drawing in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and that any planar graph admits the same even in $\mathbb{R}^2$. For a graph $G$ and $d \in \{2,3\}$, let $\rho^1_d(G)$ denote the smallest number of lines in $\mathbb{R}^d$ whose union contains a crossing-free straight-line drawing of $G$. For $d=2$, $G$ must be planar. Similarly, let $\rho^2_3(G)$ denote the smallest number of planes in $\mathbb{R}^3$ whose union contains a crossing-free straight-line drawing of $G$. We investigate the complexity of computing these three parameters and obtain the following hardness and algorithmic results. - For $d\in\{2,3\}$, we prove that deciding whether $\rho^1_d(G)\le k$ for a given graph $G$ and integer $k$ is ${\exists\mathbb{R}}$-complete. - Since $\mathrm{NP}\subseteq{\exists\mathbb{R}}$, deciding $\rho^1_d(G)\le k$ is NP-hard for $d\in\{2,3\}$. On the positive side, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to $k$. - Since ${\exists\mathbb{R}}\subseteq\mathrm{PSPACE}$, both $\rho^1_2(G)$ and $\rho^1_3(G)$ are computable in polynomial space. On the negative side, we show that drawings that are optimal with respect to $\rho^1_2$ or $\rho^1_3$ sometimes require irrational coordinates. - We prove that deciding whether $\rho^2_3(G)\le k$ is NP-hard for any fixed $k \ge 2$. Hence, the problem is not fixed-parameter tractable with respect to $k$ unless $\mathrm{P}=\mathrm{NP}$.
We describe the new field of mathematical analysis of deep learning. This field emerged around a list of research questions that were not answered within the classical framework of learning theory. These questions concern: the outstanding generalization power of overparametrized neural networks, the role of depth in deep architectures, the apparent absence of the curse of dimensionality, the surprisingly successful optimization performance despite the non-convexity of the problem, understanding what features are learned, why deep architectures perform exceptionally well in physical problems, and which fine aspects of an architecture affect the behavior of a learning task in which way. We present an overview of modern approaches that yield partial answers to these questions. For selected approaches, we describe the main ideas in more detail.