Robustness to adversarial attacks is typically evaluated with adversarial accuracy. While essential, this metric does not capture all aspects of robustness and in particular leaves out the question of how many perturbations can be found for each point. In this work, we introduce an alternative approach, adversarial sparsity, which quantifies how difficult it is to find a successful perturbation given both an input point and a constraint on the direction of the perturbation. We show that sparsity provides valuable insight into neural networks in multiple ways: for instance, it illustrates important differences between current state-of-the-art robust models them that accuracy analysis does not, and suggests approaches for improving their robustness. When applying broken defenses effective against weak attacks but not strong ones, sparsity can discriminate between the totally ineffective and the partially effective defenses. Finally, with sparsity we can measure increases in robustness that do not affect accuracy: we show for example that data augmentation can by itself increase adversarial robustness, without using adversarial training.
Temporal analysis of products (TAP) reactors enable experiments that probe numerous kinetic processes within a single set of experimental data through variations in pulse intensity, delay, or temperature. Selecting additional TAP experiments often involves arbitrary selection of reaction conditions or the use of chemical intuition. To make experiment selection in TAP more robust, we explore the efficacy of model-based design of experiments (MBDoE) for precision in TAP reactor kinetic modeling. We successfully applied this approach to a case study of synthetic oxidative propane dehydrogenation (OPDH) that involves pulses of propane and oxygen. We found that experiments identified as optimal through the MBDoE for precision generally reduce parameter uncertainties to a higher degree than alternative experiments. The performance of MBDoE for model divergence was also explored for OPDH, with the relevant active sites (catalyst structure) being unknown. An experiment that maximized the divergence between the three proposed mechanisms was identified and led to clear mechanism discrimination. However, re-optimization of kinetic parameters eliminated the ability to discriminate. The findings yield insight into the prospects and limitations of MBDoE for TAP and transient kinetic experiments.
Problems from metric graph theory such as Metric Dimension, Geodetic Set, and Strong Metric Dimension have recently had a strong impact on the field of parameterized complexity by being the first problems in NP to admit double-exponential lower bounds in the treewidth, and even in the vertex cover number for the latter. We initiate the study of enumerating minimal solution sets for these problems and show that they are also of great interest in enumeration. More specifically, we show that enumerating minimal resolving sets in graphs and minimal geodetic sets in split graphs are equivalent to hypergraph dualization, arguably one of the most important open problems in algorithmic enumeration. This provides two new natural examples to a question that emerged in different works this last decade: for which vertex (or edge) set graph property $\Pi$ is the enumeration of minimal (or maximal) subsets satisfying $\Pi$ equivalent to hypergraph dualization? As only very few properties are known to fit within this context -- namely, properties related to minimal domination -- our results make significant progress in characterizing such properties, and provide new angles of approach for tackling hypergraph dualization. In a second step, we consider cases where our reductions do not apply, namely graphs with no long induced paths, and show these cases to be mainly tractable.
In this paper, we propose the unfitted spectral element method for solving elliptic interface and corresponding eigenvalue problems. The novelty of the proposed method lies in its combination of the spectral accuracy of the spectral element method and the flexibility of the unfitted Nitsche's method. We also use tailored ghost penalty terms to enhance its robustness. We establish optimal $hp$ convergence rates for both elliptic interface problems and interface eigenvalue problems. Additionally, we demonstrate spectral accuracy for model problems in terms of polynomial degree.
This study analyzes the derivative-free loss method to solve a certain class of elliptic PDEs using neural networks. The derivative-free loss method uses the Feynman-Kac formulation, incorporating stochastic walkers and their corresponding average values. We investigate the effect of the time interval related to the Feynman-Kac formulation and the walker size in the context of computational efficiency, trainability, and sampling errors. Our analysis shows that the training loss bias is proportional to the time interval and the spatial gradient of the neural network while inversely proportional to the walker size. We also show that the time interval must be sufficiently long to train the network. These analytic results tell that we can choose the walker size as small as possible based on the optimal lower bound of the time interval. We also provide numerical tests supporting our analysis.
We investigate the frequentist guarantees of the variational sparse Gaussian process regression model. In the theoretical analysis, we focus on the variational approach with spectral features as inducing variables. We derive guarantees and limitations for the frequentist coverage of the resulting variational credible sets. We also derive sufficient and necessary lower bounds for the number of inducing variables required to achieve minimax posterior contraction rates. The implications of these results are demonstrated for different choices of priors. In a numerical analysis we consider a wider range of inducing variable methods and observe similar phenomena beyond the scope of our theoretical findings.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer high-energy neutrino detector deployed in the Antarctic ice. Two major event classes are charged-current electron and muon neutrino interactions. In this contribution, we discuss the inference of direction and energy for these classes using conditional normalizing flows. They allow to derive a posterior distribution for each individual event based on the raw data that can include systematic uncertainties, which makes them very promising for next-generation reconstructions. For each normalizing flow we use the differential entropy and the KL-divergence to its maximum entropy approximation to interpret the results. The normalizing flows correctly incorporate complex optical properties of the Antarctic ice and their relation to the embedded detector. For showers, the differential entropy increases in regions of high photon absorption and decreases in clear ice. For muons, the differential entropy strongly correlates with the contained track length. Coverage is maintained, even for low photon counts and highly asymmetrical contour shapes. For high-photon counts, the distributions get narrower and become more symmetrical, as expected from the asymptotic theorem of Bernstein-von-Mises. For shower directional reconstruction, we find the region between 1 TeV and 100 TeV to potentially benefit the most from normalizing flows because of azimuth-zenith asymmetries which have been neglected in previous analyses by assuming symmetrical contours. Events in this energy range play a vital role in the recent discovery of the galactic plane diffuse neutrino emission.
We present ReCAT, a recursive composition augmented Transformer that is able to explicitly model hierarchical syntactic structures of raw texts without relying on gold trees during both learning and inference. Existing research along this line restricts data to follow a hierarchical tree structure and thus lacks inter-span communications. To overcome the problem, we propose a novel contextual inside-outside (CIO) layer that learns contextualized representations of spans through bottom-up and top-down passes, where a bottom-up pass forms representations of high-level spans by composing low-level spans, while a top-down pass combines information inside and outside a span. By stacking several CIO layers between the embedding layer and the attention layers in Transformer, the ReCAT model can perform both deep intra-span and deep inter-span interactions, and thus generate multi-grained representations fully contextualized with other spans. Moreover, the CIO layers can be jointly pre-trained with Transformers, making ReCAT enjoy scaling ability, strong performance, and interpretability at the same time. We conduct experiments on various sentence-level and span-level tasks. Evaluation results indicate that ReCAT can significantly outperform vanilla Transformer models on all span-level tasks and baselines that combine recursive networks with Transformers on natural language inference tasks. More interestingly, the hierarchical structures induced by ReCAT exhibit strong consistency with human-annotated syntactic trees, indicating good interpretability brought by the CIO layers.
Run-times of quantum algorithms are often studied via an asymptotic, worst-case analysis. Whilst useful, such a comparison can often fall short: it is not uncommon for algorithms with a large worst-case run-time to end up performing well on instances of practical interest. To remedy this it is necessary to resort to run-time analyses of a more empirical nature, which for sufficiently small input sizes can be performed on a quantum device or a simulation thereof. For larger input sizes, alternative approaches are required. In this paper we consider an approach that combines classical emulation with detailed complexity bounds that include all constants. We simulate quantum algorithms by running classical versions of the sub-routines, whilst simultaneously collecting information about what the run-time of the quantum routine would have been if it were run instead. To do this accurately and efficiently for very large input sizes, we describe an estimation procedure and prove that it obtains upper bounds on the true expected complexity of the quantum algorithms. We apply our method to some simple quantum speedups of classical heuristic algorithms for solving the well-studied MAX-$k$-SAT optimization problem. This requires rigorous bounds (including all constants) on the expected- and worst-case complexities of two important quantum sub-routines: Grover search with an unknown number of marked items, and quantum maximum-finding. These improve upon existing results and might be of broader interest. Amongst other results, we found that the classical heuristic algorithms we studied did not offer significant quantum speedups despite the existence of a theoretical per-step speedup. This suggests that an empirical analysis such as the one we implement in this paper already yields insights beyond those that can be seen by an asymptotic analysis alone.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.
Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such they represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for end-to-end training. Here we propose knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then applies a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we use label smoothness, which assumes that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, we combine knowledge-aware graph neural networks and label smoothness and present the unified model. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. It also achieves strong performance in the scenario where user-item interactions are sparse.