In this paper, we study the shape reconstruction problem, when the shape we wish to reconstruct is an orientable smooth d-dimensional submanifold of the Euclidean space. Assuming we have as input a simplicial complex K that approximates the submanifold (such as the Cech complex or the Rips complex), we recast the problem of reconstucting the submanifold from K as a L1-norm minimization problem in which the optimization variable is a d-chain of K. Providing that K satisfies certain reasonable conditions, we prove that the considered minimization problem has a unique solution which triangulates the submanifold and coincides with the flat Delaunay complex introduced and studied in a companion paper. Since the objective is a weighted L1-norm and the contraints are linear, the triangulation process can thus be implemented by linear programming.
In this work, our goal is to develop a theoretical framework that can eventually be used for analyzing the effectiveness of visual stories such as feature films to comic books. To develop this theoretical framework, we introduce a new story element called moments. Our conjecture is that any linear story such as the story of a feature film can be decomposed into a set of moments that follow each other. Moments are defined as the perception of the actions, interactions, and expressions of all characters or a single character during a given time period. We categorize the moments into two major types: story moments and discourse moments. Each type of moment can further be classified into three types, which we call universal storytelling moments. We believe these universal moments foster or deteriorate the emotional attachment of the audience to a particular character or the story. We present a methodology to catalog the occurrences of these universal moments as they are found in the story. The cataloged moments can be represented using curves or color strips. Therefore, we can visualize a character's journey through the story as either a 3D curve or a color strip. We also demonstrated that both story and discourse moments can be transformed into one lump-sum attraction parameter. The attraction parameter in time provides a function that can be plotted graphically onto a timeline illustrating changes in the emotional attachment of audience to a character or the story. By inspecting these functions the story analyst can analytically decipher the moments in the story where the attachment is being established, maintained, strengthened, or conversely where it is languishing.
Motivated by hiring pipelines, we study three selection and ordering problems in which applicants for a finite set of positions must be interviewed or sent offers. There is a finite time budget for interviewing/sending offers, and every interview/offer is followed by a stochastic realization of discovering the applicant's quality or acceptance decision, leading to computationally challenging problems. In the first problem, we study sequential interviewing and show that a computationally tractable, non-adaptive policy that must make offers immediately after interviewing is near-optimal, assuming offers are always accepted. We further show how to use this policy as a subroutine for obtaining a PTAS. In the second problem, we assume that applicants have already been interviewed but only accept offers with some probability; we develop a computationally tractable policy that makes offers for the different positions in parallel, which can be used even if positions are heterogeneous, and is near-optimal relative to a policy that can make the same total number of offers one by one. In the third problem, we introduce a parsimonious model of overbooking where all offers must be sent simultaneously and a linear penalty is incurred for each acceptance beyond the number of positions; we provide nearly tight bounds on the performance of practically motivated value-ordered policies. All in all, our paper takes a unified approach to three different hiring problems, based on linear programming. Our results in the first two problems generalize and improve the existing guarantees due to Purohit et al. (2019) that were between 1/8 and 1/2 to new guarantees that are at least 1-1/e. We also numerically compare three different settings of making offers to candidates (sequentially, in parallel, or simultaneously), providing insight into when a firm should favor each one.
Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.
We consider contextual bandit problems with knapsacks [CBwK], a problem where at each round, a scalar reward is obtained and vector-valued costs are suffered. The learner aims to maximize the cumulative rewards while ensuring that the cumulative costs are lower than some predetermined cost constraints. We assume that contexts come from a continuous set, that costs can be signed, and that the expected reward and cost functions, while unknown, may be uniformly estimated -- a typical assumption in the literature. In this setting, total cost constraints had so far to be at least of order $T^{3/4}$, where $T$ is the number of rounds, and were even typically assumed to depend linearly on $T$. We are however motivated to use CBwK to impose a fairness constraint of equalized average costs between groups: the budget associated with the corresponding cost constraints should be as close as possible to the natural deviations, of order $\sqrt{T}$. To that end, we introduce a dual strategy based on projected-gradient-descent updates, that is able to deal with total-cost constraints of the order of $\sqrt{T}$ up to poly-logarithmic terms. This strategy is more direct and simpler than existing strategies in the literature. It relies on a careful, adaptive, tuning of the step size.
In this paper, we study a spline collocation method for a numerical solution to the optimal transport problem We mainly solve the \MAE with the second boundary condition numerically by proposing a center matching algorithm. We prove a pointwise convergence of our iterative algorithm under the assumption the boundedness of spline iterates. We use the \MAE with Dirichlet boundary condition and some known solutions to the \MAE with second boundary condition to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Then we use our method to solve some real-life problems. One application problem is to use the optimal transportation for the conversion of fisheye view images into standard rectangular images.
Matroid intersection is a classical optimization problem where, given two matroids over the same ground set, the goal is to find the largest common independent set. In this paper, we show that there exists a certain "sparsifer": a subset of elements, of size $O(|S^{opt}| \cdot 1/\varepsilon)$, where $S^{opt}$ denotes the optimal solution, that is guaranteed to contain a $3/2 + \varepsilon$ approximation, while guaranteeing certain robustness properties. We call such a small subset a Density Constrained Subset (DCS), which is inspired by the Edge-Degree Constrained Subgraph (EDCS) [Bernstein and Stein, 2015], originally designed for the maximum cardinality matching problem in a graph. Our proof is constructive and hinges on a greedy decomposition of matroids, which we call the density-based decomposition. We show that this sparsifier has certain robustness properties that can be used in one-way communication and random-order streaming models.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of stochasticity and large stepsizes on the implicit regularisation of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over diagonal linear networks. We prove the convergence of GD and SGD with macroscopic stepsizes in an overparametrised regression setting and characterise their solutions through an implicit regularisation problem. Our crisp characterisation leads to qualitative insights about the impact of stochasticity and stepsizes on the recovered solution. Specifically, we show that large stepsizes consistently benefit SGD for sparse regression problems, while they can hinder the recovery of sparse solutions for GD. These effects are magnified for stepsizes in a tight window just below the divergence threshold, in the "edge of stability" regime. Our findings are supported by experimental results.
In this paper we fully describe the trajectory of gradient flow over diagonal linear networks in the limit of vanishing initialisation. We show that the limiting flow successively jumps from a saddle of the training loss to another until reaching the minimum $\ell_1$-norm solution. This saddle-to-saddle dynamics translates to an incremental learning process as each saddle corresponds to the minimiser of the loss constrained to an active set outside of which the coordinates must be zero. We explicitly characterise the visited saddles as well as the jumping times through a recursive algorithm reminiscent of the LARS algorithm used for computing the Lasso path. Our proof leverages a convenient arc-length time-reparametrisation which enables to keep track of the heteroclinic transitions between the jumps. Our analysis requires negligible assumptions on the data, applies to both under and overparametrised settings and covers complex cases where there is no monotonicity of the number of active coordinates. We provide numerical experiments to support our findings.
We study transformational program logics for correctness and incorrectness that we extend to explicitly handle both termination and nontermination. We show that the logics are abstract interpretations of the right image transformer for a natural relational semantics covering both finite and infinite executions. This understanding of logics as abstractions of a semantics facilitates their comparisons through their respective abstractions of the semantics (rather that the much more difficult comparison through their formal proof systems). More importantly, the formalization provides a calculational method for constructively designing the sound and complete formal proof system by abstraction of the semantics. As an example, we extend Hoare logic to cover all possible behaviors of nondeterministic programs and design a new precondition (in)correctness logic.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.