The Iterated Immediate Snapshot model (IIS) is a central model in the message adversary setting. We consider general message adversaries whose executions are arbitrary subsets of the executions of the IIS message adversary. We present a new topological approach for such general adversaries, based upon geometric simplicial complexes. We are able to define a topology directly on the considered sets of executions, which gives both simpler and more powerful ways of using topology for distributed computability. As application of this new framework, we present a complete characterization and lower bounds for solving set-agreement for general sub-IIS message adversaries.
This is a tutorial text giving an advanced introduction to the diagrammatic syntax of monoidal (and Cartesian) closed categories in the style of "functorial boxes". This syntax can be efficiently represented as a data structure which we call hierarchical hypergraphs, the systematic rewriting of which represents a way of deriving abstract machines for higher-order programming languages directly from their operational semantics. To arrive at this main intended application we pay attention in particular to the diagrammatic language of adjunctions and explicit strictifications. Finally, we present new proof techniques made possible by a quasi-canonical presentation of terms in monoidal closed categories called foliations which are useful in the case of complicated program transformations such as automatic differentiation and closure conversion.
Online allocation is a broad class of problems where items arriving online have to be allocated to agents who have a fixed utility/cost for each assigned item so to maximize/minimize some objective. This framework captures a broad range of fundamental problems such as the Santa Claus problem (maximizing minimum utility), Nash welfare maximization (maximizing geometric mean of utilities), makespan minimization (minimizing maximum cost), minimization of $\ell_p$-norms, and so on. We focus on divisible items (i.e., fractional allocations) in this paper. Even for divisible items, these problems are characterized by strong super-constant lower bounds in the classical worst-case online model. In this paper, we study online allocations in the {\em learning-augmented} setting, i.e., where the algorithm has access to some additional (machine-learned) information about the problem instance. We introduce a {\em general} algorithmic framework for learning-augmented online allocation that produces nearly optimal solutions for this broad range of maximization and minimization objectives using only a single learned parameter for every agent. As corollaries of our general framework, we improve prior results of Lattanzi et al. (SODA 2020) and Li and Xian (ICML 2021) for learning-augmented makespan minimization, and obtain the first learning-augmented nearly-optimal algorithms for the other objectives such as Santa Claus, Nash welfare, $\ell_p$-minimization, etc. We also give tight bounds on the resilience of our algorithms to errors in the learned parameters, and study the learnability of these parameters.
Deflation techniques are typically used to shift isolated clusters of small eigenvalues in order to obtain a tighter distribution and a smaller condition number. Such changes induce a positive effect in the convergence behavior of Krylov subspace methods, which are among the most popular iterative solvers for large sparse linear systems. We develop a deflation strategy for symmetric saddle point matrices by taking advantage of their underlying block structure. The vectors used for deflation come from an elliptic singular value decomposition relying on the generalized Golub-Kahan bidiagonalization process. The block targeted by deflation is the off-diagonal one since it features a problematic singular value distribution for certain applications. One example is the Stokes flow in elongated channels, where the off-diagonal block has several small, isolated singular values, depending on the length of the channel. Applying deflation to specific parts of the saddle point system is important when using solvers such as CRAIG, which operates on individual blocks rather than the whole system. The theory is developed by extending the existing framework for deflating square matrices before applying a Krylov subspace method like MINRES. Numerical experiments confirm the merits of our strategy and lead to interesting questions about using approximate vectors for deflation.
This work proposes a solution for the problem of training physics informed networks under partial integro-differential equations. These equations require infinite or a large number of neural evaluations to construct a single residual for training. As a result, accurate evaluation may be impractical, and we show that naive approximations at replacing these integrals with unbiased estimates lead to biased loss functions and solutions. To overcome this bias, we investigate three types of solutions: the deterministic sampling approach, the double-sampling trick, and the delayed target method. We consider three classes of PDEs for benchmarking; one defining a Poisson problem with singular charges and weak solutions, another involving weak solutions on electro-magnetic fields and a Maxwell equation, and a third one defining a Smoluchowski coagulation problem. Our numerical results confirm the existence of the aforementioned bias in practice, and also show that our proposed delayed target approach can lead to accurate solutions with comparable quality to ones estimated with a large number of samples. Our implementation is open-source and available at //github.com/ehsansaleh/btspinn.
Federated Learning, as a popular paradigm for collaborative training, is vulnerable against privacy attacks. Different privacy levels regarding users' attitudes need to be satisfied locally, while a strict privacy guarantee for the global model is also required centrally. Personalized Local Differential Privacy (PLDP) is suitable for preserving users' varying local privacy, yet only provides a central privacy guarantee equivalent to the worst-case local privacy level. Thus, achieving strong central privacy as well as personalized local privacy with a utility-promising model is a challenging problem. In this work, a general framework (APES) is built up to strengthen model privacy under personalized local privacy by leveraging the privacy amplification effect of the shuffle model. To tighten the privacy bound, we quantify the heterogeneous contributions to the central privacy user by user. The contributions are characterized by the ability of generating "echos" from the perturbation of each user, which is carefully measured by proposed methods Neighbor Divergence and Clip-Laplace Mechanism. Furthermore, we propose a refined framework (S-APES) with the post-sparsification technique to reduce privacy loss in high-dimension scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of shuffling on personalized local privacy is considered for the first time. We provide a strong privacy amplification effect, and the bound is tighter than the baseline result based on existing methods for uniform local privacy. Experiments demonstrate that our frameworks ensure comparable or higher accuracy for the global model.
We present an additive approach for the inverse design of kirigami-based mechanical metamaterials by focusing on the empty (negative) spaces instead of the solid tiles. By considering each negative space as a four-bar linkage, we identify a simple recursive relationship between adjacent linkages, yielding an efficient method for creating kirigami patterns. This allows us to solve the kirigami design problem using elementary linear algebra, with compatibility, reconfigurability and rigid-deployability encoded into an iterative procedure involving simple matrix multiplications. The resulting linear design strategy circumvents the solution of a non-convex global optimization problem and allows us to control the degrees of freedom in the deployment angle field, linkage offsets and boundary conditions. We demonstrate this by creating a large variety of rigid-deployable, compact, reconfigurable kirigami patterns. We then realize our kirigami designs physically using two simple but effective fabrication strategies with very different materials. Altogether, our additive approaches present routes for efficient mechanical metamaterial design and fabrication based on ori/kirigami art forms.
Many scientific problems require to process data in the form of geometric graphs. Unlike generic graph data, geometric graphs exhibit symmetries of translations, rotations, and/or reflections. Researchers have leveraged such inductive bias and developed geometrically equivariant Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to better characterize the geometry and topology of geometric graphs. Despite fruitful achievements, it still lacks a survey to depict how equivariant GNNs are progressed, which in turn hinders the further development of equivariant GNNs. To this end, based on the necessary but concise mathematical preliminaries, we analyze and classify existing methods into three groups regarding how the message passing and aggregation in GNNs are represented. We also summarize the benchmarks as well as the related datasets to facilitate later researches for methodology development and experimental evaluation. The prospect for future potential directions is also provided.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
We present self-supervised geometric perception (SGP), the first general framework to learn a feature descriptor for correspondence matching without any ground-truth geometric model labels (e.g., camera poses, rigid transformations). Our first contribution is to formulate geometric perception as an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the feature descriptor and the geometric models given a large corpus of visual measurements (e.g., images, point clouds). Under this optimization formulation, we show that two important streams of research in vision, namely robust model fitting and deep feature learning, correspond to optimizing one block of the unknown variables while fixing the other block. This analysis naturally leads to our second contribution -- the SGP algorithm that performs alternating minimization to solve the joint optimization. SGP iteratively executes two meta-algorithms: a teacher that performs robust model fitting given learned features to generate geometric pseudo-labels, and a student that performs deep feature learning under noisy supervision of the pseudo-labels. As a third contribution, we apply SGP to two perception problems on large-scale real datasets, namely relative camera pose estimation on MegaDepth and point cloud registration on 3DMatch. We demonstrate that SGP achieves state-of-the-art performance that is on-par or superior to the supervised oracles trained using ground-truth labels.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.