We introduce a geometric stencil selection algorithm for Laplacian in 3D that significantly improves octant-based selection considered earlier. The goal of the algorithm is to choose a small subset from a set of irregular points surrounding a given point that admits an accurate numerical differentiation formula. The subset serves as an influence set for the numerical approximation of the Laplacian in meshless finite difference methods using either polynomial or kernel-based techniques. Numerical experiments demonstrate a competitive performance of this method in comparison to the finite element method and to other selection methods for solving the Dirichlet problems for the Poisson equation on several STL models. Discretization nodes for these domains are obtained either by 3D triangulations or from Cartesian grids or Halton quasi-random sequences.
Three-player Number On the Forehead communication may be thought of as a three-player Number In the Hand promise model, in which each player is given the inputs that are supposedly on the other two players' heads, and promised that they are consistent with the inputs of of the other players. The set of all allowed inputs under this promise may be thought of as an order-3 tensor. We surprisingly observe that this tensor is exactly the matrix multiplication tensor, which is widely studied in the design of fast matrix multiplication algorithms. Using this connection, we prove a number of results about both Number On the Forehead communication and matrix multiplication, each by using known results or techniques about the other. For example, we show how the Laser method, a key technique used to design the best matrix multiplication algorithms, can also be used to design communication protocols for a variety of problems. We also show how known lower bounds for Number On the Forehead communication can be used to bound properties of the matrix multiplication tensor such as its zeroing out subrank. Finally, we substantially generalize known methods based on slice-rank for studying communication, and show how they directly relate to the matrix multiplication exponent $\omega$.
Differential games, in particular two-player sequential zero-sum games (a.k.a. minimax optimization), have been an important modeling tool in applied science and received renewed interest in machine learning due to many recent applications, such as adversarial training, generative models and reinforcement learning. However, existing theory mostly focuses on convex-concave functions with few exceptions. In this work, we propose two novel Newton-type algorithms for nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization. We prove their local convergence at strict local minimax points, which are surrogates of global solutions. We argue that our Newton-type algorithms nicely complement existing ones in that (a) they converge faster to strict local minimax points; (b) they are much more effective when the problem is ill-conditioned; (c) their computational complexity remains similar. We verify the effectiveness of our Newton-type algorithms through experiments on training GANs which are intrinsically nonconvex and ill-conditioned. Our code is available at //github.com/watml/min-max-2nd-order.
Due to its highly oscillating solution, the Helmholtz equation is numerically challenging to solve. To obtain a reasonable solution, a mesh size that is much smaller than the reciprocal of the wavenumber is typically required (known as the pollution effect). High order schemes are desirable, because they are better in mitigating the pollution effect. In this paper, we present a high order compact finite difference method for 2D Helmholtz equations with singular sources, which can also handle any possible combinations of boundary conditions (Dirichlet, Neumann, and impedance) on a rectangular domain. Our method achieves a sixth order consistency for a constant wavenumber, and a fifth order consistency for a piecewise constant wavenumber. To reduce the pollution effect, we propose a new pollution minimization strategy that is based on the average truncation error of plane waves. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed finite difference scheme with reduced pollution effect to several state-of-the-art finite difference schemes, particularly in the critical pre-asymptotic region where $\textsf{k} h$ is near $1$ with $\textsf{k}$ being the wavenumber and $h$ the mesh size.
In this paper we develop finite difference schemes for elliptic problems with piecewise continuous coefficients that have (possibly huge) jumps across fixed internal interfaces. In contrast with such problems involving one smooth non-intersecting interface, that have been extensively studied, there are very few papers addressing elliptic interface problems with intersecting interfaces of coefficient jumps. It is well known that if the values of the permeability in the four subregions around a point of intersection of two such internal interfaces are all different, the solution has a point singularity that significantly affects the accuracy of the approximation in the vicinity of the intersection point. In the present paper we propose a fourth-order 9-point finite difference scheme on uniform Cartesian meshes for an elliptic problem whose coefficient is piecewise constant in four rectangular subdomains of the overall two-dimensional rectangular domain. Moreover, for the special case when the intersecting point of the two lines of coefficient jumps is a grid point, such a compact scheme, involving relatively simple formulas for computation of the stencil coefficients, can even reach sixth order of accuracy. Furthermore, we show that the resulting linear system for the special case has an M-matrix, and prove the theoretical sixth order convergence rate using the discrete maximum principle. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the fourth (for the general case) and sixth (for the special case) accuracy orders of the proposed schemes. In the general case, we derive a compact third-order finite difference scheme, also yielding a linear system with an M-matrix. In addition, using the discrete maximum principle, we prove the third order convergence rate of the scheme for the general elliptic cross-interface problem.
It is often unnoticed that the predominant way to use collocation methods is fundamentally flawed when applied to optimal control in robotics. Such methods assume that the system dynamics is given by a first order ODE, whereas robots are often governed by a second or higher order ODE involving configuration variables and their time derivatives. To apply a collocation method, therefore, the usual practice is to resort to the well known procedure of casting an M th order ODE into M first order ones. This manipulation, which in the continuous domain is perfectly valid, leads to inconsistencies when the problem is discretized. Since the configuration variables and their time derivatives are approximated with polynomials of the same degree, their differential dependencies cannot be fulfilled, and the actual dynamics is not satisfied, not even at the collocation points. This paper draws attention to this problem, and develops improved versions of the trapezoidal and Hermite-Simpson collocation methods that do not present these inconsistencies. In many cases, the new methods reduce the dynamic transcription error in one order of magnitude, or even more, without noticeably increasing the cost of computing the solutions.
Semiparametric inference on average causal effects from observational data is based on assumptions yielding identification of the effects. In practice, several distinct identifying assumptions may be plausible; an analyst has to make a delicate choice between these models. In this paper, we study three identifying assumptions based on the potential outcome framework: the back-door assumption, which uses pre-treatment covariates, the front-door assumption, which uses mediators, and the two-door assumption using pre-treatment covariates and mediators simultaneously. We provide the efficient influence functions and the corresponding semiparametric efficiency bounds that hold under these assumptions, and their combinations. We demonstrate that neither of the identification models provides uniformly the most efficient estimation and give conditions under which some bounds are lower than others. We show when semiparametric estimating equation estimators based on influence functions attain the bounds, and study the robustness of the estimators to misspecification of the nuisance models. The theory is complemented with simulation experiments on the finite sample behavior of the estimators. The results obtained are relevant for an analyst facing a choice between several plausible identifying assumptions and corresponding estimators. Our results show that this choice implies a trade-off between efficiency and robustness to misspecification of the nuisance models.
Photometric stereo refers to the process to compute the 3D shape of an object using information on illumination and reflectance from several input images from the same point of view. The most often used reflectance model is the Lambertian reflectance, however this does not include specular highlights in input images. In this paper we consider the arising non-linear optimisation problem when employing Blinn-Phong reflectance for modeling specular effects. To this end we focus on the regularising Levenberg-Marquardt scheme. We show how to derive an explicit bound that gives information on the convergence reliability of the method depending on given data, and we show how to gain experimental evidence of numerical correctness of the iteration by making use of the Scherzer condition. The theoretical investigations that are at the heart of this paper are supplemented by some tests with real-world imagery.
Currently, great numbers of efforts have been put into improving the effectiveness of 3D model quality assessment (3DQA) methods. However, little attention has been paid to the computational costs and inference time, which is also important for practical applications. Unlike 2D media, 3D models are represented by more complicated and irregular digital formats, such as point cloud and mesh. Thus it is normally difficult to perform an efficient module to extract quality-aware features of 3D models. In this paper, we address this problem from the aspect of projection-based 3DQA and develop a no-reference (NR) \underline{E}fficient and \underline{E}ffective \underline{P}rojection-based \underline{3D} Model \underline{Q}uality \underline{A}ssessment (\textbf{EEP-3DQA}) method. The input projection images of EEP-3DQA are randomly sampled from the six perpendicular viewpoints of the 3D model and are further spatially downsampled by the grid-mini patch sampling strategy. Further, the lightweight Swin-Transformer tiny is utilized as the backbone to extract the quality-aware features. Finally, the proposed EEP-3DQA and EEP-3DQA-t (tiny version) achieve the best performance than the existing state-of-the-art NR-3DQA methods and even outperforms most full-reference (FR) 3DQA methods on the point cloud and mesh quality assessment databases while consuming less inference time than the compared 3DQA methods.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks have reported outstanding performance in tasks like community detection, molecule classification and link prediction. However, the black-box nature of these models prevents their application in domains like health and finance, where understanding the models' decisions is essential. Counterfactual Explanations (CE) provide these understandings through examples. Moreover, the literature on CE is flourishing with novel explanation methods which are tailored to graph learning. In this survey, we analyse the existing Graph Counterfactual Explanation methods, by providing the reader with an organisation of the literature according to a uniform formal notation for definitions, datasets, and metrics, thus, simplifying potential comparisons w.r.t to the method advantages and disadvantages. We discussed seven methods and sixteen synthetic and real datasets providing details on the possible generation strategies. We highlight the most common evaluation strategies and formalise nine of the metrics used in the literature. We first introduce the evaluation framework GRETEL and how it is possible to extend and use it while providing a further dimension of comparison encompassing reproducibility aspects. Finally, we provide a discussion on how counterfactual explanation interplays with privacy and fairness, before delving into open challenges and future works.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.