Interpolatory necessary optimality conditions for $\mathcal{H}_2$-optimal reduced-order modeling of non-parametric linear time-invariant (LTI) systems are known and well-investigated. In this work, using the general framework of $\mathcal{L}_2$-optimal reduced-order modeling of parametric stationary problems, we derive interpolatory $\mathcal{H}_2 \otimes \mathcal{L}_2$-optimality conditions for parametric LTI systems with a general pole-residue form. We then specialize this result to recover known conditions for systems with parameter-independent poles and develop new conditions for a certain class of systems with parameter-dependent poles.
Let $X$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and $\mathcal{O}$ be a set of geometric objects in $\mathbb{R}^2$, where $|X| + |\mathcal{O}| = n$. We study the problem of computing a minimum subset $\mathcal{O}^* \subseteq \mathcal{O}$ that encloses all points in $X$. Here a point $x \in X$ is enclosed by $\mathcal{O}^*$ if it lies in a bounded connected component of $\mathbb{R}^2 \backslash (\bigcup_{O \in \mathcal{O}^*} O)$. We propose two algorithmic frameworks to design polynomial-time approximation algorithms for the problem. The first framework is based on sparsification and min-cut, which results in $O(1)$-approximation algorithms for unit disks, unit squares, etc. The second framework is based on LP rounding, which results in an $O(\alpha(n)\log n)$-approximation algorithm for segments, where $\alpha(n)$ is the inverse Ackermann function, and an $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm for disks.
Integer linear programming (ILP) models a wide range of practical combinatorial optimization problems and significantly impacts industry and management sectors. This work proposes new characterizations of ILP with the concept of boundary solutions. Motivated by the new characterizations, we develop a new local search algorithm Local-ILP, which is efficient for solving general ILP validated on a large heterogeneous problem dataset. We propose a new local search framework that switches between three modes, namely Search, Improve, and Restore modes. Two new operators are proposed, namely the tight move and the lift move operators, which are associated with appropriate scoring functions. Different modes apply different operators to realize different search strategies and the algorithm switches between three modes according to the current search state. Putting these together, we develop a local search ILP solver called Local-ILP. Experiments conducted on the MIPLIB dataset show the effectiveness of our algorithm in solving large-scale hard ILP problems. In the aspect of finding a good feasible solution quickly, Local-ILP is competitive and complementary to the state-of-the-art commercial solver Gurobi and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art non-commercial solver SCIP. Moreover, our algorithm establishes new records for 6 MIPLIB open instances. The theoretical analysis of our algorithm is also presented, which shows our algorithm could avoid visiting unnecessary regions.
Given an attributed graph $G$ and a query node $q$, \underline{C}ommunity \underline{S}earch over \underline{A}ttributed \underline{G}raphs (CS-AG) aims to find a structure- and attribute-cohesive subgraph from $G$ that contains $q$. Although CS-AG has been widely studied, they still face three challenges. (1) Exact methods based on graph traversal are time-consuming, especially for large graphs. Some tailored indices can improve efficiency, but introduce nonnegligible storage and maintenance overhead. (2) Approximate methods with a loose approximation ratio only provide a coarse-grained evaluation of a community's quality, rather than a reliable evaluation with an accuracy guarantee in runtime. (3) Attribute cohesiveness metrics often ignores the important correlation with the query node $q$. We formally define our CS-AG problem atop a $q$-centric attribute cohesiveness metric considering both textual and numerical attributes, for $k$-core model on homogeneous graphs. We show the problem is NP-hard. To solve it, we first propose an exact baseline with three pruning strategies. Then, we propose an index-free sampling-estimation-based method to quickly return an approximate community with an accuracy guarantee, in the form of a confidence interval. Once a good result satisfying a user-desired error bound is reached, we terminate it early. We extend it to heterogeneous graphs, $k$-truss model, and size-bounded CS. Comprehensive experimental studies on ten real-world datasets show its superiority, e.g., at least 1.54$\times$ (41.1$\times$ on average) faster in response time and a reliable relative error (within a user-specific error bound) of attribute cohesiveness is achieved.
Leaf powers and $k$-leaf powers have been studied for over 20 years, but there are still several aspects of this graph class that are poorly understood. One such aspect is the leaf rank of leaf powers, i.e. the smallest number $k$ such that a graph $G$ is a $k$-leaf power. Computing the leaf rank of leaf powers has proved a hard task, and furthermore, results about the asymptotic growth of the leaf rank as a function of the number of vertices in the graph have been few and far between. We present an infinite family of rooted directed path graphs that are leaf powers, and prove that they have leaf rank exponential in the number of vertices (utilizing a type of subtree model first presented by Rautenbach [Some remarks about leaf roots. Discrete mathematics, 2006]). This answers an open question by Brandst\"adt et al. [Rooted directed path graphs are leaf powers. Discrete mathematics, 2010].
A coding lattice $\Lambda_c$ and a shaping lattice $\Lambda_s$ forms a nested lattice code $\mathcal{C}$ if $\Lambda_s \subseteq \Lambda_c$. Under some conditions, $\mathcal{C}$ is a finite cyclic group formed by rectangular encoding. This paper presents the conditions for the existence of such $\mathcal{C}$ and provides some designs. These designs correspond to solutions to linear Diophantine equations so that a cyclic lattice code $\mathcal C$ of arbitrary codebook size $M$ can possess group isomorphism, which is an essential property for a nested lattice code to be applied in physical layer network relaying techniques such as compute and forward.
What is a time-varying graph, or a time-varying topological space and more generally what does it mean for a mathematical structure to vary over time? Here we introduce categories of narratives: powerful tools for studying temporal graphs and other time-varying data structures. Narratives are sheaves on posets of intervals of time which specify snapshots of a temporal object as well as relationships between snapshots over the course of any given interval of time. This approach offers two significant advantages. First, when restricted to the base category of graphs, the theory is consistent with the well-established theory of temporal graphs, enabling the reproduction of results in this field. Second, the theory is general enough to extend results to a wide range of categories used in data analysis, such as groups, topological spaces, databases, Petri nets, simplicial complexes and many more. The approach overcomes the challenge of relating narratives of different types to each other and preserves the structure over time in a compositional sense. Furthermore our approach allows for the systematic relation of different kinds of narratives. In summary, this theory provides a consistent and general framework for analyzing dynamic systems, offering an essential tool for mathematicians and data scientists alike.
We study computationally-hard fundamental motion planning problems where the goal is to translate $k$ axis-aligned rectangular robots from their initial positions to their final positions without collision, and with the minimum number of translation moves. Our aim is to understand the interplay between the number of robots and the geometric complexity of the input instance measured by the input size, which is the number of bits needed to encode the coordinates of the rectangles' vertices. We focus on axis-aligned translations, and more generally, translations restricted to a given set of directions, and we study the two settings where the robots move in the free plane, and where they are confined to a bounding box. We obtain fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms parameterized by $k$ for all the settings under consideration. In the case where the robots move serially (i.e., one in each time step) and axis-aligned, we prove a structural result stating that every problem instance admits an optimal solution in which the moves are along a grid, whose size is a function of $k$, that can be defined based on the input instance. This structural result implies that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by $k$. We also consider the case in which the robots move in parallel (i.e., multiple robots can move during the same time step), and which falls under the category of Coordinated Motion Planning problems. Finally, we show that, when the robots move in the free plane, the FPT results for the serial motion case carry over to the case where the translations are restricted to any given set of directions.
Simulation-based inference (SBI) is constantly in search of more expressive algorithms for accurately inferring the parameters of complex models from noisy data. We present consistency models for neural posterior estimation (CMPE), a new free-form conditional sampler for scalable, fast, and amortized SBI with generative neural networks. CMPE combines the advantages of normalizing flows and flow matching methods into a single generative architecture: It essentially distills a continuous probability flow and enables rapid few-shot inference with an unconstrained architecture that can be tailored to the structure of the estimation problem. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CMPE not only outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms on three hard low-dimensional problems but also achieves competitive performance in a high-dimensional Bayesian denoising experiment and in estimating a computationally demanding multi-scale model of tumor spheroid growth.
We propose a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based model for building forward and inverse structure-property linkages, a problem of paramount importance in computational materials science. Our model systematically combines VAE with regression, linking the two models through a two-level prior conditioned on the regression variables. The regression loss is optimized jointly with the reconstruction loss of the variational autoencoder, learning microstructure features relevant for property prediction and reconstruction. The resultant model can be used for both forward and inverse prediction i.e., for predicting the properties of a given microstructure as well as for predicting the microstructure required to obtain given properties. Since the inverse problem is ill-posed (one-to-many), we derive the objective function using a multi-modal Gaussian mixture prior enabling the model to infer multiple microstructures for a target set of properties. We show that for forward prediction, our model is as accurate as state-of-the-art forward-only models. Additionally, our method enables direct inverse inference. We show that the microstructures inferred using our model achieve desired properties reasonably accurately, avoiding the need for expensive optimization loops.
We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.