We implement an algorithm RSHT (Random Simple-Homotopy) to study the simple-homotopy types of simplicial complexes, with a particular focus on contractible spaces and on finding substructures in higher-dimensional complexes. The algorithm combines elementary simplicial collapses with pure elementary expansions. For triangulated d-manifolds with d < 7, we show that RSHT reduces to (random) bistellar flips. Among the many examples on which we test RSHT, we describe an explicit 15-vertex triangulation of the Abalone, and more generally, (14k+1)-vertex triangulations of Bing's houses with k rooms, which all can be deformed to a point using only six pure elementary expansions.
Motivated by applications to topological data analysis, we give an efficient algorithm for computing a (minimal) presentation of a bigraded $K[x,y]$-module $M$, where $K$ is a field. The algorithm takes as input a short chain complex of free modules $X\xrightarrow{f} Y \xrightarrow{g} Z$ such that $M\cong \ker{g}/\mathrm{im}{f}$. It runs in time $O(|X|^3+|Y|^3+|Z|^3)$ and requires $O(|X|^2+|Y|^2+|Z|^2)$ memory, where $|\cdot |$ denotes the rank. Given the presentation computed by our algorithm, the bigraded Betti numbers of $M$ are readily computed. Our approach is based on a simple matrix reduction algorithm, slight variants of which compute kernels of morphisms between free modules, minimal generating sets, and Gr\"obner bases. Our algorithm for computing minimal presentations has been implemented in RIVET, a software tool for the visualization and analysis of two-parameter persistent homology. In experiments on topological data analysis problems, our implementation outperforms the standard computational commutative algebra packages Singular and Macaulay2 by a wide margin.
We propose a simple technique that, if combined with algorithms for computing functions of triangular matrices, can make them more efficient. Basically, such a technique consists in a specific scaling similarity transformation that reduces the departure from normality of a triangular matrix, thus decreasing its norm and in general its function condition number. It can easily be extended to non-triangular matrices, provided that it is combined with algorithms involving a prior Schur decomposition. Situations where the technique should be used or not will be discussed in detail. Special attention is devoted to particular algorithms like the inverse scaling and squaring to the matrix logarithm and the scaling and squaring to the matrix exponential. The advantages of our proposal are supported by theoretical results and illustrated with numerical experiments.
We show that the natural Glauber dynamics mixes rapidly and generates a random proper edge-coloring of a graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ whenever the number of colors is at least $q\geq (\frac{10}{3} + \epsilon)\Delta$, where $\epsilon>0$ is arbitrary and the maximum degree satisfies $\Delta \geq C$ for a constant $C = C(\epsilon)$ depending only on $\epsilon$. For edge-colorings, this improves upon prior work \cite{Vig99, CDMPP19} which show rapid mixing when $q\geq (\frac{11}{3}-\epsilon_0 ) \Delta$, where $\epsilon_0 \approx 10^{-5}$ is a small fixed constant. At the heart of our proof, we establish a matrix trickle-down theorem, generalizing Oppenheim's influential result, as a new technique to prove that a high dimensional simplical complex is a local spectral expander.
This article is motivated by studying multisensory effects on brain activities in intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) experiments. Differential brain activities to multisensory stimulus presentations are zero in most regions and non-zero in some local regions, yielding locally sparse functions. Such studies are essentially a function-on-scalar regression problem, with interest being focused not only on estimating nonparametric functions but also on recovering the function supports. We propose a weighted group bridge approach for simultaneous function estimation and support recovery in function-on-scalar mixed effect models, while accounting for heterogeneity present in functional data. We use B-splines to transform sparsity of functions to its sparse vector counterpart of increasing dimension, and propose a fast non-convex optimization algorithm using nested alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for estimation. Large sample properties are established. In particular, we show that the estimated coefficient functions are rate optimal in the minimax sense under the $L_2$ norm and resemble a phase transition phenomenon. For support estimation, we derive a convergence rate under the $L_{\infty}$ norm that leads to a sparsistency property under $\delta$-sparsity, and provide a simple sufficient regularity condition under which a strict sparsistency property is established. An adjusted extended Bayesian information criterion is proposed for parameter tuning. The developed method is illustrated through simulation and an application to a novel iEEG dataset to study multisensory integration. We integrate the proposed method into RAVE, an R package that gains increasing popularity in the iEEG community.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
When and why can a neural network be successfully trained? This article provides an overview of optimization algorithms and theory for training neural networks. First, we discuss the issue of gradient explosion/vanishing and the more general issue of undesirable spectrum, and then discuss practical solutions including careful initialization and normalization methods. Second, we review generic optimization methods used in training neural networks, such as SGD, adaptive gradient methods and distributed methods, and theoretical results for these algorithms. Third, we review existing research on the global issues of neural network training, including results on bad local minima, mode connectivity, lottery ticket hypothesis and infinite-width analysis.
Graph convolution is the core of most Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and usually approximated by message passing between direct (one-hop) neighbors. In this work, we remove the restriction of using only the direct neighbors by introducing a powerful, yet spatially localized graph convolution: Graph diffusion convolution (GDC). GDC leverages generalized graph diffusion, examples of which are the heat kernel and personalized PageRank. It alleviates the problem of noisy and often arbitrarily defined edges in real graphs. We show that GDC is closely related to spectral-based models and thus combines the strengths of both spatial (message passing) and spectral methods. We demonstrate that replacing message passing with graph diffusion convolution consistently leads to significant performance improvements across a wide range of models on both supervised and unsupervised tasks and a variety of datasets. Furthermore, GDC is not limited to GNNs but can trivially be combined with any graph-based model or algorithm (e.g. spectral clustering) without requiring any changes to the latter or affecting its computational complexity. Our implementation is available online.
A core capability of intelligent systems is the ability to quickly learn new tasks by drawing on prior experience. Gradient (or optimization) based meta-learning has recently emerged as an effective approach for few-shot learning. In this formulation, meta-parameters are learned in the outer loop, while task-specific models are learned in the inner-loop, by using only a small amount of data from the current task. A key challenge in scaling these approaches is the need to differentiate through the inner loop learning process, which can impose considerable computational and memory burdens. By drawing upon implicit differentiation, we develop the implicit MAML algorithm, which depends only on the solution to the inner level optimization and not the path taken by the inner loop optimizer. This effectively decouples the meta-gradient computation from the choice of inner loop optimizer. As a result, our approach is agnostic to the choice of inner loop optimizer and can gracefully handle many gradient steps without vanishing gradients or memory constraints. Theoretically, we prove that implicit MAML can compute accurate meta-gradients with a memory footprint that is, up to small constant factors, no more than that which is required to compute a single inner loop gradient and at no overall increase in the total computational cost. Experimentally, we show that these benefits of implicit MAML translate into empirical gains on few-shot image recognition benchmarks.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.
Deep learning has made remarkable achievement in many fields. However, learning the parameters of neural networks usually demands a large amount of labeled data. The algorithms of deep learning, therefore, encounter difficulties when applied to supervised learning where only little data are available. This specific task is called few-shot learning. To address it, we propose a novel algorithm for few-shot learning using discrete geometry, in the sense that the samples in a class are modeled as a reduced simplex. The volume of the simplex is used for the measurement of class scatter. During testing, combined with the test sample and the points in the class, a new simplex is formed. Then the similarity between the test sample and the class can be quantized with the ratio of volumes of the new simplex to the original class simplex. Moreover, we present an approach to constructing simplices using local regions of feature maps yielded by convolutional neural networks. Experiments on Omniglot and miniImageNet verify the effectiveness of our simplex algorithm on few-shot learning.