Higher-order tensor datasets arise commonly in recommendation systems, neuroimaging, and social networks. Here we develop probable methods for estimating a possibly high rank signal tensor from noisy observations. We consider a generative latent variable tensor model that incorporates both high rank and low rank models, including but not limited to, simple hypergraphon models, single index models, low-rank CP models, and low-rank Tucker models. Comprehensive results are developed on both the statistical and computational limits for the signal tensor estimation. We find that high-dimensional latent variable tensors are of log-rank; the fact explains the pervasiveness of low-rank tensors in applications. Furthermore, we propose a polynomial-time spectral algorithm that achieves the computationally optimal rate. We show that the statistical-computational gap emerges only for latent variable tensors of order 3 or higher. Numerical experiments and two real data applications are presented to demonstrate the practical merits of our methods.
Bayesian optimization (BO) primarily uses Gaussian processes (GP) as the key surrogate model, mostly with a simple stationary and separable kernel function such as the squared-exponential kernel with automatic relevance determination (SE-ARD). However, such simple kernel specifications are deficient in learning functions with complex features, such as being nonstationary, nonseparable, and multimodal. Approximating such functions using a local GP, even in a low-dimensional space, requires a large number of samples, not to mention in a high-dimensional setting. In this paper, we propose to use Bayesian Kernelized Tensor Factorization (BKTF) -- as a new surrogate model -- for BO in a $D$-dimensional Cartesian product space. Our key idea is to approximate the underlying $D$-dimensional solid with a fully Bayesian low-rank tensor CP decomposition, in which we place GP priors on the latent basis functions for each dimension to encode local consistency and smoothness. With this formulation, information from each sample can be shared not only with neighbors but also across dimensions. Although BKTF no longer has an analytical posterior, we can still efficiently approximate the posterior distribution through Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and obtain prediction and full uncertainty quantification (UQ). We conduct numerical experiments on both standard BO test functions and machine learning hyperparameter tuning problems, and our results show that BKTF offers a flexible and highly effective approach for characterizing complex functions with UQ, especially in cases where the initial sample size and budget are severely limited.
Generating desirable molecular structures in 3D is a fundamental problem for drug discovery. Despite the considerable progress we have achieved, existing methods usually generate molecules in atom resolution and ignore intrinsic local structures such as rings, which leads to poor quality in generated structures, especially when generating large molecules. Fragment-based molecule generation is a promising strategy, however, it is nontrivial to be adapted for 3D non-autoregressive generations because of the combinational optimization problems. In this paper, we utilize a coarse-to-fine strategy to tackle this problem, in which a Hierarchical Diffusion-based model (i.e.~HierDiff) is proposed to preserve the validity of local segments without relying on autoregressive modeling. Specifically, HierDiff first generates coarse-grained molecule geometries via an equivariant diffusion process, where each coarse-grained node reflects a fragment in a molecule. Then the coarse-grained nodes are decoded into fine-grained fragments by a message-passing process and a newly designed iterative refined sampling module. Lastly, the fine-grained fragments are then assembled to derive a complete atomic molecular structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HierDiff consistently improves the quality of molecule generation over existing methods
Networks of spiking neurons underpin the extraordinary information-processing capabilities of the brain and have emerged as pillar models in neuromorphic intelligence. Despite extensive research on spiking neural networks (SNNs), most are established on deterministic models. Integrating noise into SNNs leads to biophysically more realistic neural dynamics and may benefit model performance. This work presents the noisy spiking neural network (NSNN) and the noise-driven learning rule (NDL) by introducing a spiking neuron model incorporating noisy neuronal dynamics. Our approach shows how noise may act as a resource for computation and learning and theoretically provides a framework for general SNNs. Moreover, NDL provides an insightful rationale for surrogate gradients. By incorporating various SNN architectures and algorithms, we show that our approach exhibits competitive performance and improved robustness against challenging perturbations than deterministic SNNs. Additionally, we demonstrate the utility of the NSNN model for neural coding studies. Overall, NSNN offers a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use tool for machine learning practitioners and computational neuroscience researchers.
Architectures that first convert point clouds to a grid representation and then apply convolutional neural networks achieve good performance for radar-based object detection. However, the transfer from irregular point cloud data to a dense grid structure is often associated with a loss of information, due to the discretization and aggregation of points. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, multi-scale KPPillarsBEV, that aims to mitigate the negative effects of grid rendering. Specifically, we propose a novel grid rendering method, KPBEV, which leverages the descriptive power of kernel point convolutions to improve the encoding of local point cloud contexts during grid rendering. In addition, we propose a general multi-scale grid rendering formulation to incorporate multi-scale feature maps into convolutional backbones of detection networks with arbitrary grid rendering methods. We perform extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and evaluate the methods in terms of detection performance and computational complexity. The proposed multi-scale KPPillarsBEV architecture outperforms the baseline by 5.37% and the previous state of the art by 2.88% in Car AP4.0 (average precision for a matching threshold of 4 meters) on the nuScenes validation set. Moreover, the proposed single-scale KPBEV grid rendering improves the Car AP4.0 by 2.90% over the baseline while maintaining the same inference speed.
Goal-oriented error estimation provides the ability to approximate the discretization error in a chosen functional quantity of interest. Adaptive mesh methods provide the ability to control this discretization error to obtain accurate quantity of interest approximations while still remaining computationally feasible. Traditional discrete goal-oriented error estimates incur linearization errors in their derivation. In this paper, we investigate the role of linearization errors in adaptive goal-oriented error simulations. In particular, we develop a novel two-level goal-oriented error estimate that is free of linearization errors. Additionally, we highlight how linearization errors can facilitate the verification of the adjoint solution used in goal-oriented error estimation. We then verify the newly proposed error estimate by applying it to a model nonlinear problem for several quantities of interest and further highlight its asymptotic effectiveness as mesh sizes are reduced. In an adaptive mesh context, we then compare the newly proposed estimate to a more traditional two-level goal-oriented error estimate. We highlight that accounting for linearization errors in the error estimate can improve its effectiveness in certain situations and demonstrate that localizing linearization errors can lead to more optimal adapted meshes.
The outer Lowner-John method is widely used in sensor fusion applications to find the smallest ellipsoid that can approximate the intersection of a set of ellipsoids, described by positive definite covariance matrices modeling the quality of each sensor. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve this problem when these matrices are defined over the network's nodes. This is of particular significance as it is the first decentralized algorithm capable of computing the covariance intersection ellipsoid by combining information from the entire network using only local interactions. The solution is based on a reformulation of the centralized problem, leading to a local protocol based on exact dynamic consensus tools. After reaching consensus, the protocol converges to an outer Lowner-John ellipsoid in finite time, and to the global optimum asymptotically. Formal convergence analysis and numerical experiments are provided to validate the proposal's advantages.
Millions of users are active on social media. To allow users to better showcase themselves and network with others, we explore the auto-generation of social media self-introduction, a short sentence outlining a user's personal interests. While most prior work profiles users with tags (e.g., ages), we investigate sentence-level self-introductions to provide a more natural and engaging way for users to know each other. Here we exploit a user's tweeting history to generate their self-introduction. The task is non-trivial because the history content may be lengthy, noisy, and exhibit various personal interests. To address this challenge, we propose a novel unified topic-guided encoder-decoder (UTGED) framework; it models latent topics to reflect salient user interest, whose topic mixture then guides encoding a user's history and topic words control decoding their self-introduction. For experiments, we collect a large-scale Twitter dataset, and extensive results show the superiority of our UTGED to the advanced encoder-decoder models without topic modeling.
We propose a new formulation for the multi-robot task planning and allocation problem that incorporates (a) precedence relationships between tasks; (b) coordination for tasks allowing multiple robots to achieve increased efficiency; and (c) cooperation through the formation of robot coalitions for tasks that cannot be performed by individual robots alone. In our formulation, the tasks and the relationships between the tasks are specified by a task graph. We define a set of reward functions over the task graph's nodes and edges. These functions model the effect of robot coalition size on the task performance, and incorporate the influence of one task's performance on a dependent task. Solving this problem optimally is NP-hard. However, using the task graph formulation allows us to leverage min-cost network flow approaches to obtain approximate solutions efficiently. Additionally, we explore a mixed integer programming approach, which gives optimal solutions for small instances of the problem but is computationally expensive. We also develop a greedy heuristic algorithm as a baseline. Our modeling and solution approaches result in task plans that leverage task precedence relationships and robot coordination and cooperation to achieve high mission performance, even in large missions with many agents.
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.