The nonlinear space-fractional problems often allow multiple stationary solutions, which can be much more complicated than the corresponding integer-order problems. In this paper, we systematically compute the solution landscapes of nonlinear constant/variable-order space-fractional problems. A fast approximation algorithm is developed to deal with the variable-order spectral fractional Laplacian by approximating the variable-indexing Fourier modes, and then combined with saddle dynamics to construct the solution landscape of variable-order space-fractional phase field model. Numerical experiments are performed to substantiate the accuracy and efficiency of fast approximation algorithm and elucidate essential features of the stationary solutions of space-fractional phase field model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the solution landscapes of spectral fractional Laplacian problems can be reconfigured by varying the diffusion coefficients in the corresponding integer-order problems.
This paper considers a novel multi-agent linear stochastic approximation algorithm driven by Markovian noise and general consensus-type interaction, in which each agent evolves according to its local stochastic approximation process which depends on the information from its neighbors. The interconnection structure among the agents is described by a time-varying directed graph. While the convergence of consensus-based stochastic approximation algorithms when the interconnection among the agents is described by doubly stochastic matrices (at least in expectation) has been studied, less is known about the case when the interconnection matrix is simply stochastic. For any uniformly strongly connected graph sequences whose associated interaction matrices are stochastic, the paper derives finite-time bounds on the mean-square error, defined as the deviation of the output of the algorithm from the unique equilibrium point of the associated ordinary differential equation. For the case of interconnection matrices being stochastic, the equilibrium point can be any unspecified convex combination of the local equilibria of all the agents in the absence of communication. Both the cases with constant and time-varying step-sizes are considered. In the case when the convex combination is required to be a straight average and interaction between any pair of neighboring agents may be uni-directional, so that doubly stochastic matrices cannot be implemented in a distributed manner, the paper proposes a push-sum-type distributed stochastic approximation algorithm and provides its finite-time bound for the time-varying step-size case by leveraging the analysis for the consensus-type algorithm with stochastic matrices and developing novel properties of the push-sum algorithm.
Constrained tensor and matrix factorization models allow to extract interpretable patterns from multiway data. Therefore identifiability properties and efficient algorithms for constrained low-rank approximations are nowadays important research topics. This work deals with columns of factor matrices of a low-rank approximation being sparse in a known and possibly overcomplete basis, a model coined as Dictionary-based Low-Rank Approximation (DLRA). While earlier contributions focused on finding factor columns inside a dictionary of candidate columns, i.e. one-sparse approximations, this work is the first to tackle DLRA with sparsity larger than one. I propose to focus on the sparse-coding subproblem coined Mixed Sparse-Coding (MSC) that emerges when solving DLRA with an alternating optimization strategy. Several algorithms based on sparse-coding heuristics (greedy methods, convex relaxations) are provided to solve MSC. The performance of these heuristics is evaluated on simulated data. Then, I show how to adapt an efficient MSC solver based on the LASSO to compute Dictionary-based Matrix Factorization and Canonical Polyadic Decomposition in the context of hyperspectral image processing and chemometrics. These experiments suggest that DLRA extends the modeling capabilities of low-rank approximations, helps reducing estimation variance and enhances the identifiability and interpretability of estimated factors.
Bregman proximal point algorithm (BPPA), as one of the centerpieces in the optimization toolbox, has been witnessing emerging applications. With simple and easy to implement update rule, the algorithm bears several compelling intuitions for empirical successes, yet rigorous justifications are still largely unexplored. We study the computational properties of BPPA through classification tasks with separable data, and demonstrate provable algorithmic regularization effects associated with BPPA. We show that BPPA attains non-trivial margin, which closely depends on the condition number of the distance generating function inducing the Bregman divergence. We further demonstrate that the dependence on the condition number is tight for a class of problems, thus showing the importance of divergence in affecting the quality of the obtained solutions. In addition, we extend our findings to mirror descent (MD), for which we establish similar connections between the margin and Bregman divergence. We demonstrate through a concrete example, and show BPPA/MD converges in direction to the maximal margin solution with respect to the Mahalanobis distance. Our theoretical findings are among the first to demonstrate the benign learning properties BPPA/MD, and also provide corroborations for a careful choice of divergence in the algorithmic design.
Tensors, which provide a powerful and flexible model for representing multi-attribute data and multi-way interactions, play an indispensable role in modern data science across various fields in science and engineering. A fundamental task is to faithfully recover the tensor from highly incomplete measurements in a statistically and computationally efficient manner. Harnessing the low-rank structure of tensors in the Tucker decomposition, this paper develops a scaled gradient descent (ScaledGD) algorithm to directly recover the tensor factors with tailored spectral initializations, and shows that it provably converges at a linear rate independent of the condition number of the ground truth tensor for two canonical problems -- tensor completion and tensor regression -- as soon as the sample size is above the order of $n^{3/2}$ ignoring other parameter dependencies, where $n$ is the dimension of the tensor. This leads to an extremely scalable approach to low-rank tensor estimation compared with prior art, which suffers from at least one of the following drawbacks: extreme sensitivity to ill-conditioning, high per-iteration costs in terms of memory and computation, or poor sample complexity guarantees. To the best of our knowledge, ScaledGD is the first algorithm that achieves near-optimal statistical and computational complexities simultaneously for low-rank tensor completion with the Tucker decomposition. Our algorithm highlights the power of appropriate preconditioning in accelerating nonconvex statistical estimation, where the iteration-varying preconditioners promote desirable invariance properties of the trajectory with respect to the underlying symmetry in low-rank tensor factorization.
Fractional order models have proven to be a very useful tool for the modeling of the mechanical behaviour of viscoelastic materials. Traditional numerical solution methods exhibit various undesired properties due to the non-locality of the fractional differential operators, in particular regarding the high computational complexity and the high memory requirements. The infinite state representation is an approach on which one can base numerical methods that overcome these obstacles. Such algorithms contain a number of parameters that influence the final result in nontrivial ways. Based on numerical experiments, we initiate a study leading to good choices of these 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.
In this paper, from a theoretical perspective, we study how powerful graph neural networks (GNNs) can be for learning approximation algorithms for combinatorial problems. To this end, we first establish a new class of GNNs that can solve strictly a wider variety of problems than existing GNNs. Then, we bridge the gap between GNN theory and the theory of distributed local algorithms to theoretically demonstrate that the most powerful GNN can learn approximation algorithms for the minimum dominating set problem and the minimum vertex cover problem with some approximation ratios and that no GNN can perform better than with these ratios. This paper is the first to elucidate approximation ratios of GNNs for combinatorial problems. Furthermore, we prove that adding coloring or weak-coloring to each node feature improves these approximation ratios. This indicates that preprocessing and feature engineering theoretically strengthen model capabilities.
In order to avoid the curse of dimensionality, frequently encountered in Big Data analysis, there was a vast development in the field of linear and nonlinear dimension reduction techniques in recent years. These techniques (sometimes referred to as manifold learning) assume that the scattered input data is lying on a lower dimensional manifold, thus the high dimensionality problem can be overcome by learning the lower dimensionality behavior. However, in real life applications, data is often very noisy. In this work, we propose a method to approximate $\mathcal{M}$ a $d$-dimensional $C^{m+1}$ smooth submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^n$ ($d \ll n$) based upon noisy scattered data points (i.e., a data cloud). We assume that the data points are located "near" the lower dimensional manifold and suggest a non-linear moving least-squares projection on an approximating $d$-dimensional manifold. Under some mild assumptions, the resulting approximant is shown to be infinitely smooth and of high approximation order (i.e., $O(h^{m+1})$, where $h$ is the fill distance and $m$ is the degree of the local polynomial approximation). The method presented here assumes no analytic knowledge of the approximated manifold and the approximation algorithm is linear in the large dimension $n$. Furthermore, the approximating manifold can serve as a framework to perform operations directly on the high dimensional data in a computationally efficient manner. This way, the preparatory step of dimension reduction, which induces distortions to the data, can be avoided altogether.
Many problems on signal processing reduce to nonparametric function estimation. We propose a new methodology, piecewise convex fitting (PCF), and give a two-stage adaptive estimate. In the first stage, the number and location of the change points is estimated using strong smoothing. In the second stage, a constrained smoothing spline fit is performed with the smoothing level chosen to minimize the MSE. The imposed constraint is that a single change point occurs in a region about each empirical change point of the first-stage estimate. This constraint is equivalent to requiring that the third derivative of the second-stage estimate has a single sign in a small neighborhood about each first-stage change point. We sketch how PCF may be applied to signal recovery, instantaneous frequency estimation, surface reconstruction, image segmentation, spectral estimation and multivariate adaptive regression.
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.