Hypergraph clustering is a basic algorithmic primitive for analyzing complex datasets and systems characterized by multiway interactions, such as group email conversations, groups of co-purchased retail products, and co-authorship data. This paper presents a practical $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm for a broad class of hypergraph ratio cut clustering objectives. This includes objectives involving generalized hypergraph cut functions, which allow a user to penalize cut hyperedges differently depending on the number of nodes in each cluster. Our method is a generalization of the cut-matching framework for graph ratio cuts, and relies only on solving maximum s-t flow problems in a special reduced graph. It is significantly faster than existing hypergraph ratio cut algorithms, while also solving a more general problem. In numerical experiments on various types of hypergraphs, we show that it quickly finds ratio cut solutions within a small factor of optimality.
Pruning schemes have been widely used in practice to reduce the complexity of trained models with a massive number of parameters. Several practical studies have shown that pruning an overparameterized model and fine-tuning generalizes well to new samples. Although the above pipeline, which we refer to as pruning + fine-tuning, has been extremely successful in lowering the complexity of trained models, there is very little known about the theory behind this success. In this paper we address this issue by investigating the pruning + fine-tuning framework on the overparameterized matrix sensing problem, with the ground truth denoted $U_\star \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times r}$ and the overparameterized model $U \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times k}$ with $k \gg r$. We study the approximate local minima of the empirical mean square error, augmented with a smooth version of a group Lasso regularizer, $\sum_{i=1}^k \| U e_i \|_2$ and show that pruning the low $\ell_2$-norm columns results in a solution $U_{\text{prune}}$ which has the minimum number of columns $r$, yet is close to the ground truth in training loss. Initializing the subsequent fine-tuning phase from $U_{\text{prune}}$, the resulting solution converges linearly to a generalization error of $O(\sqrt{rd/n})$ ignoring lower order terms, which is statistically optimal. While our analysis provides insights into the role of regularization in pruning, we also show that running gradient descent in the absence of regularization results in models which {are not suitable for greedy pruning}, i.e., many columns could have their $\ell_2$ norm comparable to that of the maximum. Lastly, we extend our results for the training and pruning of two-layer neural networks with quadratic activation functions. Our results provide the first rigorous insights on why greedy pruning + fine-tuning leads to smaller models which also generalize well.
Online mental health communities (OMHCs) are an effective and accessible channel to give and receive social support for individuals with mental and emotional issues. However, a key challenge on these platforms is finding suitable partners to interact with given that mechanisms to match users are currently underdeveloped. In this paper, we collaborate with one of the world's largest OMHC to develop an agent-based simulation framework and explore the trade-offs in different matching algorithms. The simulation framework allows us to compare current mechanisms and new algorithmic matching policies on the platform, and observe their differing effects on a variety of outcome metrics. Our findings include that usage of the deferred-acceptance algorithm can significantly better the experiences of support-seekers in one-on-one chats while maintaining low waiting time. We note key design considerations that agent-based modeling reveals in the OMHC context, including the potential benefits of algorithmic matching on marginalized communities.
When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in the population underlying a study may be different from that in the target population. If some covariates are effect modifiers, the average treatment effect (ATE) may not generalize to the target population. To tackle this problem, we propose new methods to generalize or transport the ATE from a source population to a target population, in the case where the source and target populations have different sets of covariates. When the ATE in the target population is identified, we propose new doubly robust estimators and establish their rates of convergence and limiting distributions. Under regularity conditions, the doubly robust estimators provably achieve the efficiency bound and are locally asymptotic minimax optimal. A sensitivity analysis is provided when the identification assumptions fail. Simulation studies show the advantages of the proposed doubly robust estimator over simple plug-in estimators. Importantly, we also provide minimax lower bounds and higher-order estimators of the target functionals. The proposed methods are applied in transporting causal effects of dietary intake on adverse pregnancy outcomes from an observational study to the whole U.S. female population.
In applications of group testing in networks, e.g. identifying individuals who are infected by a disease spread over a network, exploiting correlation among network nodes provides fundamental opportunities in reducing the number of tests needed. We model and analyze group testing on $n$ correlated nodes whose interactions are specified by a graph $G$. We model correlation through an edge-faulty random graph formed from $G$ in which each edge is dropped with probability $1-r$, and all nodes in the same component have the same state. We consider three classes of graphs: cycles and trees, $d$-regular graphs and stochastic block models or SBM, and obtain lower and upper bounds on the number of tests needed to identify the defective nodes. Our results are expressed in terms of the number of tests needed when the nodes are independent and they are in terms of $n$, $r$, and the target error. In particular, we quantify the fundamental improvements that exploiting correlation offers by the ratio between the total number of nodes $n$ and the equivalent number of independent nodes in a classic group testing algorithm. The lower bounds are derived by illustrating a strong dependence of the number of tests needed on the expected number of components. In this regard, we establish a new approximation for the distribution of component sizes in "$d$-regular trees" which may be of independent interest and leads to a lower bound on the expected number of components in $d$-regular graphs. The upper bounds are found by forming dense subgraphs in which nodes are more likely to be in the same state. When $G$ is a cycle or tree, we show an improvement by a factor of $log(1/r)$. For grid, a graph with almost $2n$ edges, the improvement is by a factor of ${(1-r) \log(1/r)}$, indicating drastic improvement compared to trees. When $G$ has a larger number of edges, as in SBM, the improvement can scale in $n$.
In this paper, we consider numerical approximations for solving the inductionless magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. By utilizing the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach for dealing with the convective and coupling terms, we propose some first- and second-order schemes for this system. These schemes are linear, decoupled, unconditionally energy stable, and only require solving a sequence of differential equations with constant coefficients at each time step. We further derive a rigorous error analysis for the first-order scheme, establishing optimal convergence rates for the velocity, pressure, current density and electric potential in the two-dimensional case. Numerical examples are presented to verify the theoretical findings and show the performances of the schemes.
We study the sample complexity of identifying an approximate equilibrium for two-player zero-sum $n\times 2$ matrix games. That is, in a sequence of repeated game plays, how many rounds must the two players play before reaching an approximate equilibrium (e.g., Nash)? We derive instance-dependent bounds that define an ordering over game matrices that captures the intuition that the dynamics of some games converge faster than others. Specifically, we consider a stochastic observation model such that when the two players choose actions $i$ and $j$, respectively, they both observe each other's played actions and a stochastic observation $X_{ij}$ such that $\mathbb E[ X_{ij}] = A_{ij}$. To our knowledge, our work is the first case of instance-dependent lower bounds on the number of rounds the players must play before reaching an approximate equilibrium in the sense that the number of rounds depends on the specific properties of the game matrix $A$ as well as the desired accuracy. We also prove a converse statement: there exist player strategies that achieve this lower bound.
The flocking motion control is concerned with managing the possible conflicts between local and team objectives of multi-agent systems. The overall control process guides the agents while monitoring the flock-cohesiveness and localization. The underlying mechanisms may degrade due to overlooking the unmodeled uncertainties associated with the flock dynamics and formation. On another side, the efficiencies of the various control designs rely on how quickly they can adapt to different dynamic situations in real-time. An online model-free policy iteration mechanism is developed here to guide a flock of agents to follow an independent command generator over a time-varying graph topology. The strength of connectivity between any two agents or the graph edge weight is decided using a position adjacency dependent function. An online recursive least squares approach is adopted to tune the guidance strategies without knowing the dynamics of the agents or those of the command generator. It is compared with another reinforcement learning approach from the literature which is based on a value iteration technique. The simulation results of the policy iteration mechanism revealed fast learning and convergence behaviors with less computational effort.
The focus of this work is to investigate unsupervised approaches to overcome quintessential challenges in designing task-oriented dialog schema: assigning intent labels to each dialog turn (intent clustering) and generating a set of intents based on the intent clustering methods (intent induction). We postulate there are two salient factors for automatic induction of intents: (1) clustering algorithm for intent labeling and (2) user utterance embedding space. We compare existing off-the-shelf clustering models and embeddings based on DSTC11 evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the combined selection of utterance embedding and clustering method in the intent induction task should be carefully considered. We also present that pretrained MiniLM with Agglomerative clustering shows significant improvement in NMI, ARI, F1, accuracy and example coverage in intent induction tasks. The source codes are available at //github.com/Jeiyoon/dstc11-track2.
Given two matroids $\mathcal{M}_1 = (V, \mathcal{I}_1)$ and $\mathcal{M}_2 = (V, \mathcal{I}_2)$ over an $n$-element integer-weighted ground set $V$, the weighted matroid intersection problem aims to find a common independent set $S^{*} \in \mathcal{I}_1 \cap \mathcal{I}_2$ maximizing the weight of $S^{*}$. In this paper, we present a simple deterministic algorithm for weighted matroid intersection using $\tilde{O}(nr^{3/4}\log{W})$ rank queries, where $r$ is the size of the largest intersection of $\mathcal{M}_1$ and $\mathcal{M}_2$ and $W$ is the maximum weight. This improves upon the best previously known $\tilde{O}(nr\log{W})$ algorithm given by Lee, Sidford, and Wong [FOCS'15], and is the first subquadratic algorithm for polynomially-bounded weights under the standard independence or rank oracle models. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient algorithm that computes shortest-path trees in weighted exchange graphs.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.