We consider the clustering of extremes for stationary regularly varying random fields over arbitrary growing index sets. We study sufficient assumptions on the index set such that the limit of the point random fields of the exceedances above a high threshold exists. Under the so-called anti-clustering condition, the extremal dependence is only local. Thus the index set can have a general form compared to previous literature [3, 21]. However, we cannot describe the clustering of extreme values in terms of the usual spectral tail measure [23] except for hyperrectangles or index sets in the lattice case. Using the recent extension of the spectral measure for star-shaped equipped space [18], the $\upsilon$-spectral tail measure provides a natural extension that describes the clustering effect in full generality.
The practical importance of coherent forecasts in hierarchical forecasting has inspired many studies on forecast reconciliation. Under this approach, so-called base forecasts are produced for every series in the hierarchy and are subsequently adjusted to be coherent in a second reconciliation step. Reconciliation methods have been shown to improve forecast accuracy, but will, in general, adjust the base forecast of every series. However, in an operational context, it is sometimes necessary or beneficial to keep forecasts of some variables unchanged after forecast reconciliation. In this paper, we formulate reconciliation methodology that keeps forecasts of a pre-specified subset of variables unchanged or "immutable". In contrast to existing approaches, these immutable forecasts need not all come from the same level of a hierarchy, and our method can also be applied to grouped hierarchies. We prove that our approach preserves unbiasedness in base forecasts. Our method can also account for correlations between base forecasting errors and ensure non-negativity of forecasts. We also perform empirical experiments, including an application to sales of a large scale online retailer, to assess the impacts of our proposed methodology.
The monotone variational inequality is a central problem in mathematical programming that unifies and generalizes many important settings such as smooth convex optimization, two-player zero-sum games, convex-concave saddle point problems, etc. The extragradient method by Korpelevich [1976] is one of the most popular methods for solving monotone variational inequalities. Despite its long history and intensive attention from the optimization and machine learning community, the following major problem remains open. What is the last-iterate convergence rate of the extragradient method for monotone and Lipschitz variational inequalities with constraints? We resolve this open problem by showing a tight $O\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ last-iterate convergence rate for arbitrary convex feasible sets, which matches the lower bound by Golowich et al. [2020]. Our rate is measured in terms of the standard gap function. The technical core of our result is the monotonicity of a new performance measure -- the tangent residual, which can be viewed as an adaptation of the norm of the operator that takes the local constraints into account. To establish the monotonicity, we develop a new approach that combines the power of the sum-of-squares programming with the low dimensionality of the update rule of the extragradient method. We believe our approach has many additional applications in the analysis of iterative methods.
Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a challenging task where a document can be assigned to multiple hierarchically structured categories within a taxonomy. The majority of prior studies consider HTC as a flat multi-label classification problem, which inevitably leads to "label inconsistency" problem. In this paper, we formulate HTC as a sequence generation task and introduce a sequence-to-tree framework (Seq2Tree) for modeling the hierarchical label structure. Moreover, we design a constrained decoding strategy with dynamic vocabulary to secure the label consistency of the results. Compared with previous works, the proposed approach achieves significant and consistent improvements on three benchmark datasets.
Many existing algorithms for streaming geometric data analysis have been plagued by exponential dependencies in the space complexity, which are undesirable for processing high-dimensional data sets. In particular, once $d\geq\log n$, there are no known non-trivial streaming algorithms for problems such as maintaining convex hulls and L\"owner-John ellipsoids of $n$ points, despite a long line of work in streaming computational geometry since [AHV04]. We simultaneously improve these results to $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ bits of space by trading off with a $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ factor distortion. We achieve these results in a unified manner, by designing the first streaming algorithm for maintaining a coreset for $\ell_\infty$ subspace embeddings with $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ space and $\mathrm{poly}(d,\log n)$ distortion. Our algorithm also gives similar guarantees in the \emph{online coreset} model. Along the way, we sharpen results for online numerical linear algebra by replacing a log condition number dependence with a $\log n$ dependence, answering a question of [BDM+20]. Our techniques provide a novel connection between leverage scores, a fundamental object in numerical linear algebra, and computational geometry. For $\ell_p$ subspace embeddings, we give nearly optimal trade-offs between space and distortion for one-pass streaming algorithms. For instance, we give a deterministic coreset using $O(d^2\log n)$ space and $O((d\log n)^{1/2-1/p})$ distortion for $p>2$, whereas previous deterministic algorithms incurred a $\mathrm{poly}(n)$ factor in the space or the distortion [CDW18]. Our techniques have implications in the offline setting, where we give optimal trade-offs between the space complexity and distortion of subspace sketch data structures. To do this, we give an elementary proof of a "change of density" theorem of [LT80] and make it algorithmic.
Requirements engineering (RE) activities for Machine Learning (ML) are not well-established and researched in the literature. Many issues and challenges exist when specifying, designing, and developing ML-enabled systems. Adding more focus on RE for ML can help to develop more reliable ML-enabled systems. Based on insights collected from previous work and industrial experiences, we propose a catalogue of 45 concerns to be considered when specifying ML-enabled systems, covering five different perspectives we identified as relevant for such systems: objectives, user experience, infrastructure, model, and data. Examples of such concerns include the execution engine and telemetry for the infrastructure perspective, and explainability and reproducibility for the model perspective. We conducted a focus group session with eight software professionals with experience developing ML-enabled systems to validate the importance, quality and feasibility of using our catalogue. The feedback allowed us to improve the catalogue and confirmed its practical relevance. The main research contribution of this work consists in providing a validated set of concerns grouped into perspectives that can be used by requirements engineers to support the specification of ML-enabled systems.
Vector Perturbation Precoding (VPP) can speed up downlink data transmissions in Large and Massive Multi-User MIMO systems but is known to be NP-hard. While there are several algorithms in the literature for VPP under total power constraint, they are not applicable for VPP under per-antenna power constraint. This paper proposes a novel, parallel tree search algorithm for VPP under per-antenna power constraint, called \emph{\textbf{TreeStep}}, to find good quality solutions to the VPP problem with practical computational complexity. We show that our method can provide huge performance gain over simple linear precoding like Regularised Zero Forcing. We evaluate TreeStep for several large MIMO~($16\times16$ and $24\times24$) and massive MIMO~($16\times32$ and $24\times 48$) and demonstrate that TreeStep outperforms the popular polynomial-time VPP algorithm, the Fixed Complexity Sphere Encoder, by achieving the extremely low BER of $10^{-6}$ at a much lower SNR.
The minimum energy path (MEP) describes the mechanism of reaction, and the energy barrier along the path can be used to calculate the reaction rate in thermal systems. The nudged elastic band (NEB) method is one of the most commonly used schemes to compute MEPs numerically. It approximates an MEP by a discrete set of configuration images, where the discretization size determines both computational cost and accuracy of the simulations. In this paper, we consider a discrete MEP to be a stationary state of the NEB method and prove an optimal convergence rate of the discrete MEP with respect to the number of images. Numerical simulations for the transitions of some several proto-typical model systems are performed to support the theory.
There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'