Deadlocks are one of the most notorious concurrency bugs, and significant research has focused on detecting them efficiently. Dynamic predictive analyses work by observing concurrent executions, and reason about alternative interleavings that can witness concurrency bugs. Such techniques offer scalability and sound bug reports, and have emerged as an effective approach for concurrency bug detection, such as data races. Effective dynamic deadlock prediction, however, has proven a challenging task, as no deadlock predictor currently meets the requirements of soundness, high-precision, and efficiency. In this paper, we first formally establish that this tradeoff is unavoidable, by showing that (a) sound and complete deadlock prediction is intractable, in general, and (b) even the seemingly simpler task of determining the presence of potential deadlocks, which often serve as unsound witnesses for actual predictable deadlocks, is intractable. The main contribution of this work is a new class of predictable deadlocks, called sync(hronization)-preserving deadlocks. Informally, these are deadlocks that can be predicted by reordering the observed execution while preserving the relative order of conflicting critical sections. We present two algorithms for sound deadlock prediction based on this notion. Our first algorithm SPDOffline detects all sync-preserving deadlocks, with running time that is linear per abstract deadlock pattern, a novel notion also introduced in this work. Our second algorithm SPDOnline predicts all sync-preserving deadlocks that involve two threads in a strictly online fashion, runs in overall linear time, and is better suited for a runtime monitoring setting. We implemented both our algorithms and evaluated their ability to perform offline and online deadlock-prediction on a large dataset of standard benchmarks.
Classification is a classic problem but encounters lots of challenges when dealing with a large number of features, which is common in many modern applications, such as identifying tumor sub-types from genomic data or categorizing customer attitudes based on on-line reviews. We propose a new framework that utilizes the ranks of pairwise distances among observations and identifies a common pattern under moderate to high dimensions that has been overlooked before. The proposed method exhibits superior classification power over existing methods under a variety of scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied to non-Euclidean data objects, such as network data. We illustrate the method through an analysis of Neuropixels data where neurons are classified based on their firing activities. Additionally, we explore a related approach that is simpler to understand and investigates key quantities that play essential roles in our novel approach.
In the autonomous driving system, trajectory prediction plays a vital role in ensuring safety and facilitating smooth navigation. However, we observe a substantial discrepancy between the accuracy of predictors on fixed datasets and their driving performance when used in downstream tasks. This discrepancy arises from two overlooked factors in the current evaluation protocols of trajectory prediction: 1) the dynamics gap between the dataset and real driving scenario; and 2) the computational efficiency of predictors. In real-world scenarios, prediction algorithms influence the behavior of autonomous vehicles, which, in turn, alter the behaviors of other agents on the road. This interaction results in predictor-specific dynamics that directly impact prediction results. As other agents' responses are predetermined on datasets, a significant dynamics gap arises between evaluations conducted on fixed datasets and actual driving scenarios. Furthermore, focusing solely on accuracy fails to address the demand for computational efficiency, which is critical for the real-time response required by the autonomous driving system. Therefore, in this paper, we demonstrate that an interactive, task-driven evaluation approach for trajectory prediction is crucial to reflect its efficacy for autonomous driving.
Vehicle performance metrics analyze data sets consisting of subject vehicle's interactions with other road users in a nominal driving environment and provide certain performance measures as outputs. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the vehicle safety performance metrics research dates back to at least 1967. To date, there still does not exist a community-wide accepted metric or a set of metrics for vehicle safety performance assessment and justification. This issue gets further amplified with the evolving interest in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Automated Driving Systems. In this paper, the authors seek to perform a unified study that facilitates an improved community-wide understanding of vehicle performance metrics using the lead-vehicle interaction operational design domain as a common means of performance comparison. In particular, the authors study the diversity (including constructive formulation discrepancies and empirical performance differences) among 33 base metrics with up to 51 metric variants (with different choices of hyper-parameters) in the existing literature, published between 1967 and 2022. Two data sets are adopted for the empirical performance diversity analysis, including vehicle trajectories from normal highway driving environment and relatively high-risk incidents with collisions and near-miss cases. The analysis further implies that (i) the conceptual acceptance of a safety metric proposal can be problematic if the assumptions, conditions, and types of outcome assurance are not justified properly, and (ii) the empirical performance justification of an acceptable metric can also be problematic as a dominant consensus is not observed among metrics empirically.
The stochastic dynamic matching problem has recently drawn attention in the stochastic-modeling community due to its numerous applications, ranging from supply-chain management to kidney exchange programs. In this paper, we consider a matching problem in which items of different classes arrive according to independent Poisson processes. Unmatched items are stored in a queue, and compatibility constraints are described by a simple graph on the classes, so that two items can be matched if their classes are neighbors in the graph. We analyze the efficiency of matching policies, not only in terms of system stability, but also in terms of matching rates between different classes. Our results rely on the observation that, under any stable policy, the matching rates satisfy a conservation equation that equates the arrival and departure rates of each item class. Our main contributions are threefold. We first introduce a mapping between the dimension of the solution set of this conservation equation, the structure of the compatibility graph, and the existence of a stable policy. In particular, this allows us to derive a necessary and sufficient stability condition that is verifiable in polynomial time. Secondly, we describe the convex polytope of non-negative solutions of the conservation equation. When this polytope is reduced to a single point, we give a closed-form expression of the solution; in general, we characterize the vertices of this polytope using again the graph structure. Lastly, we show that greedy policies cannot, in general, achieve every point in the polytope. In contrast, non-greedy policies can reach any point of the interior of this polytope, and we give a condition for these policies to also reach the boundary of the polytope.
Tensor train decomposition is widely used in machine learning and quantum physics due to its concise representation of high-dimensional tensors, overcoming the curse of dimensionality. Cross approximation-originally developed for representing a matrix from a set of selected rows and columns-is an efficient method for constructing a tensor train decomposition of a tensor from few of its entries. While tensor train cross approximation has achieved remarkable performance in practical applications, its theoretical analysis, in particular regarding the error of the approximation, is so far lacking. To our knowledge, existing results only provide element-wise approximation accuracy guarantees, which lead to a very loose bound when extended to the entire tensor. In this paper, we bridge this gap by providing accuracy guarantees in terms of the entire tensor for both exact and noisy measurements. Our results illustrate how the choice of selected subtensors affects the quality of the cross approximation and that the approximation error caused by model error and/or measurement error may not grow exponentially with the order of the tensor. These results are verified by numerical experiments, and may have important implications for the usefulness of cross approximations for high-order tensors, such as those encountered in the description of quantum many-body states.
We study a dynamic allocation problem in which $T$ sequentially arriving divisible resources are to be allocated to a number of agents with linear utilities. The marginal utilities of each resource to the agents are drawn stochastically from a known joint distribution, independently and identically across time, and the central planner makes immediate and irrevocable allocation decisions. Most works on dynamic resource allocation aim to maximize the utilitarian welfare, i.e., the efficiency of the allocation, which may result in unfair concentration of resources on certain high-utility agents while leaving others' demands under-fulfilled. In this paper, aiming at balancing efficiency and fairness, we instead consider a broad collection of welfare metrics, the H\"older means, which includes the Nash social welfare and the egalitarian welfare. To this end, we first study a fluid-based policy derived from a deterministic surrogate to the underlying problem and show that for all smooth H\"older mean welfare metrics it attains an $O(1)$ regret over the time horizon length $T$ against the hindsight optimum, i.e., the optimal welfare if all utilities were known in advance of deciding on allocations. However, when evaluated under the non-smooth egalitarian welfare, the fluid-based policy attains a regret of order $\Theta(\sqrt{T})$. We then propose a new policy built thereupon, called Backward Infrequent Re-solving with Thresholding ($\mathsf{BIRT}$), which consists of re-solving the deterministic surrogate problem at most $O(\log\log T)$ times. We prove the $\mathsf{BIRT}$ policy attains an $O(1)$ regret against the hindsight optimal egalitarian welfare, independently of the time horizon length $T$. We conclude by presenting numerical experiments to corroborate our theoretical claims and to illustrate the significant performance improvement against several benchmark policies.
Data efficiency, or the ability to generalize from a few labeled data, remains a major challenge in deep learning. Semi-supervised learning has thrived in traditional recognition tasks alleviating the need for large amounts of labeled data, yet it remains understudied in image-to-image translation (I2I) tasks. In this work, we introduce the first semi-supervised (semi-paired) framework for label-to-image translation, a challenging subtask of I2I which generates photorealistic images from semantic label maps. In the semi-paired setting, the model has access to a small set of paired data and a larger set of unpaired images and labels. Instead of using geometrical transformations as a pretext task like previous works, we leverage an input reconstruction task by exploiting the conditional discriminator on the paired data as a reverse generator. We propose a training algorithm for this shared network, and we present a rare classes sampling algorithm to focus on under-represented classes. Experiments on 3 standard benchmarks show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, as well as some fully supervised approaches while using a much smaller number of paired samples.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
While deep learning strategies achieve outstanding results in computer vision tasks, one issue remains. The current strategies rely heavily on a huge amount of labeled data. In many real-world problems it is not feasible to create such an amount of labeled training data. Therefore, researchers try to incorporate unlabeled data into the training process to reach equal results with fewer labels. Due to a lot of concurrent research, it is difficult to keep track of recent developments. In this survey we provide an overview of often used techniques and methods in image classification with fewer labels. We compare 21 methods. In our analysis we identify three major trends. 1. State-of-the-art methods are scaleable to real world applications based on their accuracy. 2. The degree of supervision which is needed to achieve comparable results to the usage of all labels is decreasing. 3. All methods share common techniques while only few methods combine these techniques to achieve better performance. Based on all of these three trends we discover future research opportunities.