This paper presents a new parameter estimation algorithm for the adaptive control of a class of time-varying plants. The main feature of this algorithm is a matrix of time-varying learning rates, which enables parameter estimation error trajectories to tend exponentially fast towards a compact set whenever excitation conditions are satisfied. This algorithm is employed in a large class of problems where unknown parameters are present and are time-varying. It is shown that this algorithm guarantees global boundedness of the state and parameter errors of the system, and avoids an often used filtering approach for constructing key regressor signals. In addition, intervals of time over which these errors tend exponentially fast toward a compact set are provided, both in the presence of finite and persistent excitation. A projection operator is used to ensure the boundedness of the learning rate matrix, as compared to a time-varying forgetting factor. Numerical simulations are provided to complement the theoretical analysis.
Continuous determinantal point processes (DPPs) are a class of repulsive point processes on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with many statistical applications. Although an explicit expression of their density is known, it is too complicated to be used directly for maximum likelihood estimation. In the stationary case, an approximation using Fourier series has been suggested, but it is limited to rectangular observation windows and no theoretical results support it. In this contribution, we investigate a different way to approximate the likelihood by looking at its asymptotic behaviour when the observation window grows towards $\mathbb{R}^d$. This new approximation is not limited to rectangular windows, is faster to compute than the previous one, does not require any tuning parameter, and some theoretical justifications are provided. It moreover provides an explicit formula for estimating the asymptotic variance of the associated estimator. The performances are assessed in a simulation study on standard parametric models on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and compare favourably to common alternative estimation methods for continuous DPPs.
We derive a posteriori error estimates for a fully discrete finite element approximation of the stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equation. The a posteriori bound is obtained by a splitting of the equation into a linear stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) and a nonlinear random partial differential equation (RPDE). The resulting estimate is robust with respect to the interfacial width parameter and is computable since it involves the discrete principal eigenvalue of a linearized (stochastic) Cahn-Hilliard operator. Furthermore, the estimate is robust with respect to topological changes as well as the intensity of the stochastic noise. We provide numerical simulations to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed adaptive algorithm.
This paper considers the problem of real-time control and learning in dynamic systems subjected to parametric uncertainties and proposes a controller that combines Adaptive Control (AC) in the inner loop and a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy in the outer loop. Two classes of nonlinear dynamic systems are considered, both of which are control-affine. The first class of dynamic systems utilizes equilibrium points with expansion forms around these points and employs a Lyapunov approach. The second class of nonlinear systems uses contraction theory as the underlying framework. For both classes of systems, the AC-RL controller is shown to lead to online policies that guarantee stability, and leverage accelerated convergence properties using a high-order tuner. Additionally, for the second class of systems, the AC-RL controller is shown to lead to parameter learning with persistent excitation. Numerical validations of all algorithms are carried out using a quadrotor landing task on a moving platform and other academic examples. All results clearly point out the advantage of the proposed integrative AC-RL approach.
The undecidability of basic decision problems for general FIFO machines such as reachability and unboundedness is well-known. In this paper, we provide an underapproximation for the general model by considering only runs that are input-bounded (i.e. the sequence of messages sent through a particular channel belongs to a given bounded language). We prove, by reducing this model to a counter machine with restricted zero tests, that the rational-reachability problem (and by extension, control-state reachability, unboundedness, deadlock, etc.) is decidable. This class of machines subsumes input-letter-bounded machines, flat machines, linear FIFO nets, and monogeneous machines, for which some of these problems were already shown to be decidable. These theoretical results can form the foundations to build a tool to verify general FIFO machines based on the analysis of input-bounded machines.
We present a framework to address a class of sequential decision making problems. Our framework features learning the optimal control policy with robustness to noisy data, determining the unknown state and action parameters, and performing sensitivity analysis with respect to problem parameters. We consider two broad categories of sequential decision making problems modelled as infinite horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with (and without) an absorbing state. The central idea underlying our framework is to quantify exploration in terms of the Shannon Entropy of the trajectories under the MDP and determine the stochastic policy that maximizes it while guaranteeing a low value of the expected cost along a trajectory. This resulting policy enhances the quality of exploration early on in the learning process, and consequently allows faster convergence rates and robust solutions even in the presence of noisy data as demonstrated in our comparisons to popular algorithms such as Q-learning, Double Q-learning and entropy regularized Soft Q-learning. The framework extends to the class of parameterized MDP and RL problems, where states and actions are parameter dependent, and the objective is to determine the optimal parameters along with the corresponding optimal policy. Here, the associated cost function can possibly be non-convex with multiple poor local minima. Simulation results applied to a 5G small cell network problem demonstrate successful determination of communication routes and the small cell locations. We also obtain sensitivity measures to problem parameters and robustness to noisy environment data.
We determine the exact minimax rate of a Gaussian sequence model under bounded convex constraints, purely in terms of the local geometry of the given constraint set $K$. Our main result shows that the minimax risk (up to constant factors) under the squared $L_2$ loss is given by $\epsilon^{*2} \wedge \operatorname{diam}(K)^2$ with \begin{align*} \epsilon^* = \sup \bigg\{\epsilon : \frac{\epsilon^2}{\sigma^2} \leq \log M^{\operatorname{loc}}(\epsilon)\bigg\}, \end{align*} where $\log M^{\operatorname{loc}}(\epsilon)$ denotes the local entropy of the set $K$, and $\sigma^2$ is the variance of the noise. We utilize our abstract result to re-derive known minimax rates for some special sets $K$ such as hyperrectangles, ellipses, and more generally quadratically convex orthosymmetric sets. Finally, we extend our results to the unbounded case with known $\sigma^2$ to show that the minimax rate in that case is $\epsilon^{*2}$.
Influence maximization is the task of selecting a small number of seed nodes in a social network to maximize the spread of the influence from these seeds, and it has been widely investigated in the past two decades. In the canonical setting, the whole social network as well as its diffusion parameters is given as input. In this paper, we consider the more realistic sampling setting where the network is unknown and we only have a set of passively observed cascades that record the set of activated nodes at each diffusion step. We study the task of influence maximization from these cascade samples (IMS), and present constant approximation algorithms for this task under mild conditions on the seed set distribution. To achieve the optimization goal, we also provide a novel solution to the network inference problem, that is, learning diffusion parameters and the network structure from the cascade data. Comparing with prior solutions, our network inference algorithm requires weaker assumptions and does not rely on maximum-likelihood estimation and convex programming. Our IMS algorithms enhance the learning-and-then-optimization approach by allowing a constant approximation ratio even when the diffusion parameters are hard to learn, and we do not need any assumption related to the network structure or diffusion parameters.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Many resource allocation problems in the cloud can be described as a basic Virtual Network Embedding Problem (VNEP): finding mappings of request graphs (describing the workloads) onto a substrate graph (describing the physical infrastructure). In the offline setting, the two natural objectives are profit maximization, i.e., embedding a maximal number of request graphs subject to the resource constraints, and cost minimization, i.e., embedding all requests at minimal overall cost. The VNEP can be seen as a generalization of classic routing and call admission problems, in which requests are arbitrary graphs whose communication endpoints are not fixed. Due to its applications, the problem has been studied intensively in the networking community. However, the underlying algorithmic problem is hardly understood. This paper presents the first fixed-parameter tractable approximation algorithms for the VNEP. Our algorithms are based on randomized rounding. Due to the flexible mapping options and the arbitrary request graph topologies, we show that a novel linear program formulation is required. Only using this novel formulation the computation of convex combinations of valid mappings is enabled, as the formulation needs to account for the structure of the request graphs. Accordingly, to capture the structure of request graphs, we introduce the graph-theoretic notion of extraction orders and extraction width and show that our algorithms have exponential runtime in the request graphs' maximal width. Hence, for request graphs of fixed extraction width, we obtain the first polynomial-time approximations. Studying the new notion of extraction orders we show that (i) computing extraction orders of minimal width is NP-hard and (ii) that computing decomposable LP solutions is in general NP-hard, even when restricting request graphs to planar ones.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.