To succeed in their objectives, groups of individuals must be able to make quick and accurate collective decisions on the best among alternatives with different qualities. Group-living animals aim to do that all the time. Plants and fungi are thought to do so too. Swarms of autonomous robots can also be programmed to make best-of-n decisions for solving tasks collaboratively. Ultimately, humans critically need it and so many times they should be better at it! Despite their simplicity, mathematical tractability made models like the voter model (VM) and the local majority rule model (MR) useful to describe in simple terms such collective decision-making processes. To reach a consensus, individuals change their opinion by interacting with neighbours in their social network. At least among animals and robots, options with a better quality are exchanged more often and therefore spread faster than lower-quality options, leading to the collective selection of the best option. With our work, we study the impact of individuals making errors in pooling others' opinions caused, for example, to reduce the cognitive load. Our analysis in grounded on the introduction of a model that generalises the two existing VM and MR models, showing a speed-accuracy trade-off regulated by the cognitive effort of individuals. We also investigate the impact of the interaction network topology on the collective dynamics. To do so, we extend our model and, by using the heterogeneous mean-field approach, we show that another speed-accuracy trade-off is regulated by network connectivity. An interesting result is that reduced network connectivity corresponds to an increase in collective decision accuracy
This work puts forth low-complexity Riemannian subspace descent algorithms for the minimization of functions over the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. Different from the existing Riemannian gradient descent variants, the proposed approach utilizes carefully chosen subspaces that allow the update to be written as a product of the Cholesky factor of the iterate and a sparse matrix. The resulting updates avoid the costly matrix operations like matrix exponentiation and dense matrix multiplication, which are generally required in almost all other Riemannian optimization algorithms on SPD manifold. We further identify a broad class of functions, arising in diverse applications, such as kernel matrix learning, covariance estimation of Gaussian distributions, maximum likelihood parameter estimation of elliptically contoured distributions, and parameter estimation in Gaussian mixture model problems, over which the Riemannian gradients can be calculated efficiently. The proposed uni-directional and multi-directional Riemannian subspace descent variants incur per-iteration complexities of $\O(n)$ and $\O(n^2)$ respectively, as compared to the $\O(n^3)$ or higher complexity incurred by all existing Riemannian gradient descent variants. The superior runtime and low per-iteration complexity of the proposed algorithms is also demonstrated via numerical tests on large-scale covariance estimation and matrix square root problems.
We present a rigorous and precise analysis of the maximum degree and the average degree in a dynamic duplication-divergence graph model introduced by Sol\'e, Pastor-Satorras et al. in which the graph grows according to a duplication-divergence mechanism, i.e. by iteratively creating a copy of some node and then randomly alternating the neighborhood of a new node with probability $p$. This model captures the growth of some real-world processes e.g. biological or social networks. In this paper, we prove that for some $0 < p < 1$ the maximum degree and the average degree of a duplication-divergence graph on $t$ vertices are asymptotically concentrated with high probability around $t^p$ and $\max\{t^{2 p - 1}, 1\}$, respectively, i.e. they are within at most a polylogarithmic factor from these values with probability at least $1 - t^{-A}$ for any constant $A > 0$.
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is known for average optimality (optimizing the long-run average of the rewards obtained over time) and Blackwell optimality (remaining discount optimal for all discount factors sufficiently close to 1). In this paper, we prove several foundational results for RMDPs beyond the discounted return. We show that average optimal policies can be chosen stationary and deterministic for sa-rectangular RMDPs but, perhaps surprisingly, that history-dependent (Markovian) policies strictly outperform stationary policies for average optimality in s-rectangular RMDPs. We also study Blackwell optimality for sa-rectangular RMDPs, where we show that {\em approximate} Blackwell optimal policies always exist, although Blackwell optimal policies may not exist. We also provide a sufficient condition for their existence, which encompasses virtually any examples from the literature. We then discuss the connection between average and Blackwell optimality, and we describe several algorithms to compute the optimal average return. Interestingly, our approach leverages the connections between RMDPs and stochastic games.
Steepest descent methods combining complex contour deformation with numerical quadrature provide an efficient and accurate approach for the evaluation of highly oscillatory integrals. However, unless the phase function governing the oscillation is particularly simple, their application requires a significant amount of a priori analysis and expert user input, to determine the appropriate contour deformation, and to deal with the non-uniformity in the accuracy of standard quadrature techniques associated with the coalescence of stationary points (saddle points) with each other, or with the endpoints of the original integration contour. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for the numerical evaluation of oscillatory integrals with general polynomial phase functions, which automates the contour deformation process and avoids the difficulties typically encountered with coalescing stationary points and endpoints. The inputs to the algorithm are simply the phase and amplitude functions, the endpoints and orientation of the original integration contour, and a small number of numerical parameters. By a series of numerical experiments we demonstrate that the algorithm is accurate and efficient over a large range of frequencies, even for examples with a large number of coalescing stationary points and with endpoints at infinity. As a particular application, we use our algorithm to evaluate cuspoid canonical integrals from scattering theory. A Matlab implementation of the algorithm is made available and is called PathFinder.
The prediction accuracy of machine learning methods is steadily increasing, but the calibration of their uncertainty predictions poses a significant challenge. Numerous works focus on obtaining well-calibrated predictive models, but less is known about reliably assessing model calibration. This limits our ability to know when algorithms for improving calibration have a real effect, and when their improvements are merely artifacts due to random noise in finite datasets. In this work, we consider detecting mis-calibration of predictive models using a finite validation dataset as a hypothesis testing problem. The null hypothesis is that the predictive model is calibrated, while the alternative hypothesis is that the deviation from calibration is sufficiently large. We find that detecting mis-calibration is only possible when the conditional probabilities of the classes are sufficiently smooth functions of the predictions. When the conditional class probabilities are H\"older continuous, we propose T-Cal, a minimax optimal test for calibration based on a debiased plug-in estimator of the $\ell_2$-Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We further propose Adaptive T-Cal, a version that is adaptive to unknown smoothness. We verify our theoretical findings with a broad range of experiments, including with several popular deep neural net architectures and several standard post-hoc calibration methods. T-Cal is a practical general-purpose tool, which -- combined with classical tests for discrete-valued predictors -- can be used to test the calibration of virtually any probabilistic classification method.
We consider the low-rank alternating directions implicit (ADI) iteration for approximately solving large-scale algebraic Sylvester equations. Inside every iteration step of this iterative process a pair of linear systems of equations has to be solved. We investigate the situation when those inner linear systems are solved inexactly by an iterative methods such as, for example, preconditioned Krylov subspace methods. The main contribution of this work are thresholds for the required accuracies regarding the inner linear systems which dictate when the employed inner Krylov subspace methods can be safely terminated. The goal is to save computational effort by solving the inner linear system as inaccurate as possible without endangering the functionality of the low-rank Sylvester-ADI method. Ideally, the inexact ADI method mimics the convergence behaviour of the more expensive exact ADI method, where the linear systems are solved directly. Alongside the theoretical results, also strategies for an actual practical implementation of the stopping criteria are developed. Numerical experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategies.
Knowledge tracing consists in predicting the performance of some students on new questions given their performance on previous questions, and can be a prior step to optimizing assessment and learning. Deep knowledge tracing (DKT) is a competitive model for knowledge tracing relying on recurrent neural networks, even if some simpler models may match its performance. However, little is known about why DKT works so well. In this paper, we frame deep knowledge tracing as a encoderdecoder architecture. This viewpoint not only allows us to propose better models in terms of performance, simplicity or expressivity but also opens up promising avenues for future research directions. In particular, we show on several small and large datasets that a simpler decoder, with possibly fewer parameters than the one used by DKT, can predict student performance better.
Recent successes of massively overparameterized models have inspired a new line of work investigating the underlying conditions that enable overparameterized models to generalize well. This paper considers a framework where the possibly overparametrized model includes fake features, i.e., features that are present in the model but not in the data. We present a non-asymptotic high-probability bound on the generalization error of the ridge regression problem under the model misspecification of having fake features. Our highprobability results provide insights into the interplay between the implicit regularization provided by the fake features and the explicit regularization provided by the ridge parameter. Numerical results illustrate the trade-off between the number of fake features and how the optimal ridge parameter may heavily depend on the number of fake features.
We present the first higher-order approximation scheme for solutions of jump-diffusion stochastic differential equations with discontinuous drift. For this transformation-based jump-adapted quasi-Milstein scheme we prove $L^p$-convergence order 3/4. To obtain this result, we prove that under slightly stronger assumptions (but still weaker than anything known before) a related jump-adapted quasi-Milstein scheme has convergence order 3/4 - in a special case even order 1. Order 3/4 is conjectured to be optimal.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.