Join query evaluation with ordering is a fundamental data processing task in relational database management systems. SQL and custom graph query languages such as Cypher offer this functionality by allowing users to specify the order via the ORDER BY clause. In many scenarios, the users also want to see the first $k$ results quickly (expressed by the LIMIT clause), but the value of $k$ is not predetermined as user queries are arriving in an online fashion. Recent work has made considerable progress in identifying optimal algorithms for ranked enumeration of join queries that do not contain any projections. In this paper, we initiate the study of the problem of enumerating results in ranked order for queries with projections. Our main result shows that for any acyclic query, it is possible to obtain a near-linear (in the size of the database) delay algorithm after only a linear time preprocessing step for two important ranking functions: sum and lexicographic ordering. For a practical subset of acyclic queries known as star queries, we show an even stronger result that allows a user to obtain a smooth tradeoff between faster answering time guarantees using more preprocessing time. Our results are also extensible to queries containing cycles and unions. We also perform a comprehensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate that our algorithms, which are simple to implement, improve up to three orders of magnitude in the running time over state-of-the-art algorithms implemented within open-source RDBMS and specialized graph databases.
Vision Transformers (ViT) serve as powerful vision models. Unlike convolutional neural networks, which dominated vision research in previous years, vision transformers enjoy the ability to capture long-range dependencies in the data. Nonetheless, an integral part of any transformer architecture, the self-attention mechanism, suffers from high latency and inefficient memory utilization, making it less suitable for high-resolution input images. To alleviate these shortcomings, hierarchical vision models locally employ self-attention on non-interleaving windows. This relaxation reduces the complexity to be linear in the input size; however, it limits the cross-window interaction, hurting the model performance. In this paper, we propose a new shift-invariant local attention layer, called query and attend (QnA), that aggregates the input locally in an overlapping manner, much like convolutions. The key idea behind QnA is to introduce learned queries, which allow fast and efficient implementation. We verify the effectiveness of our layer by incorporating it into a hierarchical vision transformer model. We show improvements in speed and memory complexity while achieving comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art models. Finally, our layer scales especially well with window size, requiring up-to x10 less memory while being up-to x5 faster than existing methods. The code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/moabarar/qna}.
We consider the question of adaptive data analysis within the framework of convex optimization. We ask how many samples are needed in order to compute $\epsilon$-accurate estimates of $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ gradients queried by gradient descent, and we provide two intermediate answers to this question. First, we show that for a general analyst (not necessarily gradient descent) $\Omega(1/\epsilon^3)$ samples are required. This rules out the possibility of a foolproof mechanism. Our construction builds upon a new lower bound (that may be of interest of its own right) for an analyst that may ask several non adaptive questions in a batch of fixed and known $T$ rounds of adaptivity and requires a fraction of true discoveries. We show that for such an analyst $\Omega (\sqrt{T}/\epsilon^2)$ samples are necessary. Second, we show that, under certain assumptions on the oracle, in an interaction with gradient descent $\tilde \Omega(1/\epsilon^{2.5})$ samples are necessary. Our assumptions are that the oracle has only \emph{first order access} and is \emph{post-hoc generalizing}. First order access means that it can only compute the gradients of the sampled function at points queried by the algorithm. Our assumption of \emph{post-hoc generalization} follows from existing lower bounds for statistical queries. More generally then, we provide a generic reduction from the standard setting of statistical queries to the problem of estimating gradients queried by gradient descent. These results are in contrast with classical bounds that show that with $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ samples one can optimize the population risk to accuracy of $O(\epsilon)$ but, as it turns out, with spurious gradients.
We present a technique to study normalizing strategies when termination is asymptotic, that is, it appears as a limit, as opposite to reaching a normal form in a finite number of steps. Asymptotic termination occurs in several settings, such as effectful, and in particular probabilistic computation -- where the limits are distributions over the possible outputs -- or infinitary lambda-calculi -- where the limits are infinitary normal forms such as Boehm trees. As a concrete application, we obtain a result which is of independent interest: a normalization theorem for Call-by-Value (and -- in a uniform way -- for Call-by-Name) probabilistic lambda-calculus.
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, the $k$-center problem is to find $k$ congruent disks of minimum possible radius such that their union covers all the points in $P$. The $2$-center problem is a special case of the $k$-center problem that has been extensively studied in the recent past \cite{CAHN,HT,SH}. In this paper, we consider a generalized version of the $2$-center problem called \textit{proximity connected} $2$-center (PCTC) problem. In this problem, we are also given a parameter $\delta\geq 0$ and we have the additional constraint that the distance between the centers of the disks should be at most $\delta$. Note that when $\delta=0$, the PCTC problem is reduced to the $1$-center(minimum enclosing disk) problem and when $\delta$ tends to infinity, it is reduced to the $2$-center problem. The PCTC problem first appeared in the context of wireless networks in 1992 \cite{ACN0}, but obtaining a nontrivial deterministic algorithm for the problem remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by providing a deterministic $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm for the problem.
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.
Despite the recent advancements in abstractive summarization systems leveraged from large-scale datasets and pre-trained language models, the factual correctness of the summary is still insufficient. One line of trials to mitigate this problem is to include a post-editing process that can detect and correct factual errors in the summary. In building such a post-editing system, it is strongly required that 1) the process has a high success rate and interpretability and 2) has a fast running time. Previous approaches focus on regeneration of the summary using the autoregressive models, which lack interpretability and require high computing resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient factual error correction system RFEC based on entities retrieval post-editing process. RFEC first retrieves the evidence sentences from the original document by comparing the sentences with the target summary. This approach greatly reduces the length of text for a system to analyze. Next, RFEC detects the entity-level errors in the summaries by considering the evidence sentences and substitutes the wrong entities with the accurate entities from the evidence sentences. Experimental results show that our proposed error correction system shows more competitive performance than baseline methods in correcting the factual errors with a much faster speed.
This paper makes the first attempt to apply newly developed upwind GFDM for the meshless solution of two-phase porous flow equations. In the presented method, node cloud is used to flexibly discretize the computational domain, instead of complicated mesh generation. Combining with moving least square approximation and local Taylor expansion, spatial derivatives of oil-phase pressure at a node are approximated by generalized difference operators in the local influence domain of the node. By introducing the first-order upwind scheme of phase relative permeability, and combining the discrete boundary conditions, fully-implicit GFDM-based nonlinear discrete equations of the immiscible two-phase porous flow are obtained and solved by the nonlinear solver based on the Newton iteration method with the automatic differentiation, to avoid the additional computational cost and possible computational instability caused by sequentially coupled scheme. Two numerical examples are implemented to test the computational performances of the presented method. Detailed error analysis finds the two sources of the calculation error, roughly studies the convergence order thus find that the low-order error of GFDM makes the convergence order of GFDM lower than that of FDM when node spacing is small, and points out the significant effect of the symmetry or uniformity of the node collocation in the node influence domain on the accuracy of generalized difference operators, and the radius of the node influence domain should be small to achieve high calculation accuracy, which is a significant difference between the studied hyperbolic two-phase porous flow problem and the elliptic problems when GFDM is applied.
Dynamic Linear Models (DLMs) are commonly employed for time series analysis due to their versatile structure, simple recursive updating, ability to handle missing data, and probabilistic forecasting. However, the options for count time series are limited: Gaussian DLMs require continuous data, while Poisson-based alternatives often lack sufficient modeling flexibility. We introduce a novel semiparametric methodology for count time series by warping a Gaussian DLM. The warping function has two components: a (nonparametric) transformation operator that provides distributional flexibility and a rounding operator that ensures the correct support for the discrete data-generating process. We develop conjugate inference for the warped DLM, which enables analytic and recursive updates for the state space filtering and smoothing distributions. We leverage these results to produce customized and efficient algorithms for inference and forecasting, including Monte Carlo simulation for offline analysis and an optimal particle filter for online inference. This framework unifies and extends a variety of discrete time series models and is valid for natural counts, rounded values, and multivariate observations. Simulation studies illustrate the excellent forecasting capabilities of the warped DLM. The proposed approach is applied to a multivariate time series of daily overdose counts and demonstrates both modeling and computational successes.
Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
A palindromic substring $T[i.. j]$ of a string $T$ is said to be a shortest unique palindromic substring (SUPS) in $T$ for an interval $[p, q]$ if $T[i.. j]$ is a shortest one such that $T[i.. j]$ occurs only once in $T$, and $[i, j]$ contains $[p, q]$. The SUPS problem is, given a string $T$ of length $n$, to construct a data structure that can compute all the SUPSs for any given query interval. It is known that any SUPS query can be answered in $O(\alpha)$ time after $O(n)$-time preprocessing, where $\alpha$ is the number of SUPSs to output [Inoue et al., 2018]. In this paper, we first show that $\alpha$ is at most $4$, and the upper bound is tight. Also, we present an algorithm to solve the SUPS problem for a sliding window that can answer any query in $O(\log\log W)$ time and update data structures in amortized $O(\log\sigma)$ time, where $W$ is the size of the window, and $\sigma$ is the alphabet size. Furthermore, we consider the SUPS problem in the after-edit model and present an efficient algorithm. Namely, we present an algorithm that uses $O(n)$ time for preprocessing and answers any $k$ SUPS queries in $O(\log n\log\log n + k\log\log n)$ time after single character substitution. As a by-product, we propose a fully-dynamic data structure for range minimum queries (RmQs) with a constraint where the width of each query range is limited to polylogarithmic. The constrained RmQ data structure can answer such a query in constant time and support a single-element edit operation in amortized constant time.