We investigate opinion dynamics in a fully-connected system, consisting of $n$ identical and anonymous agents, where one of the opinions (which is called correct) represents a piece of information to disseminate. In more detail, one source agent initially holds the correct opinion and remains with this opinion throughout the execution. The goal for non-source agents is to quickly agree on this correct opinion, and do that robustly, i.e., from any initial configuration. The system evolves in rounds. In each round, one agent chosen uniformly at random is activated: unless it is the source, the agent pulls the opinions of $\ell$ random agents and then updates its opinion according to some rule. We consider a restricted setting, in which agents have no memory and they only revise their opinions on the basis of those of the agents they currently sample. As restricted as it is, this setting encompasses very popular opinion dynamics, such as the voter model and best-of-$k$ majority rules. Qualitatively speaking, we show that lack of memory prevents efficient convergence. Specifically, we prove that no dynamics can achieve correct convergence in an expected number of steps that is sub-quadratic in $n$, even under a strong version of the model in which activated agents have complete access to the current configuration of the entire system, i.e., the case $\ell=n$. Conversely, we prove that the simple voter model (in which $\ell=1$) correctly solves the problem, while almost matching the aforementioned lower bound. These results suggest that, in contrast to symmetric consensus problems (that do not involve a notion of correct opinion), fast convergence on the correct opinion using stochastic opinion dynamics may indeed require the use of memory. This insight may reflect on natural information dissemination processes that rely on a few knowledgeable individuals.
This paper studies the finite-time horizon Markov games where the agents' dynamics are decoupled but the rewards can possibly be coupled across agents. The policy class is restricted to local policies where agents make decisions using their local state. We first introduce the notion of smooth Markov games which extends the smoothness argument for normal form games to our setting, and leverage the smoothness property to bound the price of anarchy of the Markov game. For a specific type of Markov game called the Markov potential game, we also develop a distributed learning algorithm, multi-agent soft policy iteration (MA-SPI), which provably converges to a Nash equilibrium. Sample complexity of the algorithm is also provided. Lastly, our results are validated using a dynamic covering game.
Recently, contrastive learning approaches (e.g., CLIP (Radford et al., 2021)) have received huge success in multimodal learning, where the model tries to minimize the distance between the representations of different views (e.g., image and its caption) of the same data point while keeping the representations of different data points away from each other. However, from a theoretical perspective, it is unclear how contrastive learning can learn the representations from different views efficiently, especially when the data is not isotropic. In this work, we analyze the training dynamics of a simple multimodal contrastive learning model and show that contrastive pairs are important for the model to efficiently balance the learned representations. In particular, we show that the positive pairs will drive the model to align the representations at the cost of increasing the condition number, while the negative pairs will reduce the condition number, keeping the learned representations balanced.
We present a multi-agent decision-making framework for the emergent coordination of autonomous agents whose intents are initially undecided. Dynamic non-cooperative games have been used to encode multi-agent interaction, but ambiguity arising from factors such as goal preference or the presence of multiple equilibria may lead to coordination issues, ranging from the "freezing robot" problem to unsafe behavior in safety-critical events. The recently developed nonlinear opinion dynamics (NOD) provide guarantees for breaking deadlocks. However, choosing the appropriate model parameters automatically in general multi-agent settings remains a challenge. In this paper, we first propose a novel and principled procedure for synthesizing NOD based on the value functions of dynamic games conditioned on agents' intents. In particular, we provide for the two-player two-option case precise stability conditions for equilibria of the game-induced NOD based on the mismatch between agents' opinions and their game values. We then propose an optimization-based trajectory optimization algorithm that computes agents' policies guided by the evolution of opinions. The efficacy of our method is illustrated with a simulated toll station coordination example.
We consider the classic 1-center problem: Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in a metric space find the point in $P$ that minimizes the maximum distance to the other points of $P$. We study the complexity of this problem in $d$-dimensional $\ell_p$-metrics and in edit and Ulam metrics over strings of length $d$. Our results for the 1-center problem may be classified based on $d$ as follows. $\bullet$ Small $d$: Assuming the hitting set conjecture (HSC), we show that when $d=\omega(\log n)$, no subquadratic algorithm can solve 1-center problem in any of the $\ell_p$-metrics, or in edit or Ulam metrics. $\bullet$ Large $d$: When $d=\Omega(n)$, we extend our conditional lower bound to rule out subquartic algorithms for 1-center problem in edit metric (assuming Quantified SETH). On the other hand, we give a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation for 1-center in Ulam metric with running time $\tilde{O_{\varepsilon}}(nd+n^2\sqrt{d})$. We also strengthen some of the above lower bounds by allowing approximations or by reducing the dimension $d$, but only against a weaker class of algorithms which list all requisite solutions. Moreover, we extend one of our hardness results to rule out subquartic algorithms for the well-studied 1-median problem in the edit metric, where given a set of $n$ strings each of length $n$, the goal is to find a string in the set that minimizes the sum of the edit distances to the rest of the strings in the set.
We investigate the complexity of the reachability problem for (deep) neural networks: does it compute valid output given some valid input? It was recently claimed that the problem is NP-complete for general neural networks and specifications over the input/output dimension given by conjunctions of linear inequalities. We recapitulate the proof and repair some flaws in the original upper and lower bound proofs. Motivated by the general result, we show that NP-hardness already holds for restricted classes of simple specifications and neural networks. Allowing for a single hidden layer and an output dimension of one as well as neural networks with just one negative, zero and one positive weight or bias is sufficient to ensure NP-hardness. Additionally, we give a thorough discussion and outlook of possible extensions for this direction of research on neural network verification.
We investigate the power of some common change-point tests as a function of the location of the change-point. The test statistics are maxima of weighted U-statistics, with the CUSUM test and the Wilcoxon change-point test as special examples. We study the power under local alternatives, where we vary both the location of the change-point and the magnitude of the change. We quantify in which way weighted versions of the tests are more powerful when the change occurs near the beginning or the end of the time interval, while losing power against changes in the center.
Modern SAT solvers are designed to handle problems expressed in Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) so that non-CNF problems must be CNF-ized upfront, typically by using variants of either Tseitin or Plaisted&Greenbaum transformations. When passing from solving to enumeration, however, the capability of producing partial satisfying assignment that are as small as possible becomes crucial, which raises the question of whether such CNF encodings are also effective for enumeration. In this paper, we investigate both theoretically and empirically the effectiveness of CNF conversions for SAT enumeration. On the negative side, we show that: (i) Tseitin transformation prevents the solver from producing short partial assignments, thus seriously affecting the effectiveness of enumeration; (ii) Plaisted&Greenbaum transformation overcomes this problem only in part. On the positive side, we show that combining Plaisted&Greenbaum transformation with NNF preprocessing upfront -- which is typically not used in solving -- can fully overcome the problem and can drastically reduce both the number of partial assignments and the execution time.
In this work, we investigate applications of no-collision transportation maps introduced in [Nurbekyan et. al., 2020] in manifold learning for image data. Recently, there has been a surge in applying transportation-based distances and features for data representing motion-like or deformation-like phenomena. Indeed, comparing intensities at fixed locations often does not reveal the data structure. No-collision maps and distances developed in [Nurbekyan et. al., 2020] are sensitive to geometric features similar to optimal transportation (OT) maps but much cheaper to compute due to the absence of optimization. In this work, we prove that no-collision distances provide an isometry between translations (respectively dilations) of a single probability measure and the translation (respectively dilation) vectors equipped with a Euclidean distance. Furthermore, we prove that no-collision transportation maps, as well as OT and linearized OT maps, do not in general provide an isometry for rotations. The numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings and show that no-collision distances achieve similar or better performance on several manifold learning tasks compared to other OT and Euclidean-based methods at a fraction of a computational cost.
Recent advances of data-driven machine learning have revolutionized fields like computer vision, reinforcement learning, and many scientific and engineering domains. In many real-world and scientific problems, systems that generate data are governed by physical laws. Recent work shows that it provides potential benefits for machine learning models by incorporating the physical prior and collected data, which makes the intersection of machine learning and physics become a prevailing paradigm. In this survey, we present this learning paradigm called Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) which is to build a model that leverages empirical data and available physical prior knowledge to improve performance on a set of tasks that involve a physical mechanism. We systematically review the recent development of physics-informed machine learning from three perspectives of machine learning tasks, representation of physical prior, and methods for incorporating physical prior. We also propose several important open research problems based on the current trends in the field. We argue that encoding different forms of physical prior into model architectures, optimizers, inference algorithms, and significant domain-specific applications like inverse engineering design and robotic control is far from fully being explored in the field of physics-informed machine learning. We believe that this study will encourage researchers in the machine learning community to actively participate in the interdisciplinary research of physics-informed machine learning.
We propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.