Methods and algorithms that work with data on nonlinear manifolds are collectively summarised under the term `Riemannian computing'. In practice, curvature can be a key limiting factor for the performance of Riemannian computing methods. Yet, curvature can also be a powerful tool in the theoretical analysis of Riemannian algorithms. In this work, we investigate the sectional curvature of the Stiefel and Grassmann manifold from the quotient space view point. On the Grassmannian, tight curvature bounds are known since the late 1960ies. On the Stiefel manifold under the canonical metric, it was believed that the sectional curvature does not exceed 5/4. For both of these manifolds, the sectional curvature is given by the Frobenius norm of certain structured commutator brackets of skew-symmetric matrices. We provide refined inequalities for such terms and pay special attention to the maximizers of the curvature bounds. In this way, we prove that the global bound of 5/4 for Stiefel holds indeed. With this addition, a complete account of the curvature bounds in all admissible dimensions is obtained. We observe that `high curvature means low-rank', more precisely, for the Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds, the global curvature maximum is attained at tangent plane sections that are spanned by rank-two matrices. Numerical examples are included for illustration purposes.
We introduce the R package clrng which leverages the gpuR package and is able to generate random numbers in parallel on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with the clRNG (OpenCL) library. Parallel processing with GPU's can speed up computationally intensive tasks, which when combined with R, it can largely improve R's downsides in terms of slow speed, memory usage and computation mode. clrng enables reproducible research by setting random initial seeds for streams on GPU and CPU, and can thus accelerate several types of statistical simulation and modelling. The random number generator in clrng guarantees independent parallel samples even when R is used interactively in an ad-hoc manner, with sessions being interrupted and restored. This package is portable and flexible, developers can use its random number generation kernel for various other purposes and applications.
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a class of Bayesian inference algorithms that targets for problems with intractable or {unavailable} likelihood function. It uses synthetic data drawn from the simulation model to approximate the posterior distribution. However, ABC is computationally intensive for complex models in which simulating synthetic data is very expensive. In this article, we propose an early rejection Markov chain Monte Carlo (ejMCMC) sampler based on Gaussian processes to accelerate inference speed. We early reject samples in the first stage of the kernel using a discrepancy model, in which the discrepancy between the simulated and observed data is modeled by Gaussian process (GP). Hence, the synthetic data is generated only if the parameter space is worth exploring. We demonstrate from theory, simulation experiments, and real data analysis that the new algorithm significantly improves inference efficiency compared to existing early-rejection MCMC algorithms. In addition, we employ our proposed method within an ABC sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler. In our numerical experiments, we use examples of ordinary differential equations, stochastic differential equations, and delay differential equations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. We develop an R package that is available at //github.com/caofff/ejMCMC.
We consider the bit complexity of computing Chow forms and their generalization to multiprojective spaces. We develop a deterministic algorithm using resultants and obtain a single exponential complexity upper bound. Earlier computational results for Chow forms were in the arithmetic complexity model, and our result represents the first bit complexity bound. We also extend our algorithm to Hurwitz forms in projective space, and explore connections between multiprojective Hurwitz forms and matroid theory. The motivation for our work comes from incidence geometry where intriguing computational algebra problems remain open.
Baker and Norine initiated the study of graph divisors as a graph-theoretic analogue of the Riemann-Roch theory for Riemann surfaces. One of the key concepts of graph divisor theory is the {\it rank} of a divisor on a graph. The importance of the rank is well illustrated by Baker's {\it Specialization lemma}, stating that the dimension of a linear system can only go up under specialization from curves to graphs, leading to a fruitful interaction between divisors on graphs and curves. Due to its decisive role, determining the rank is a central problem in graph divisor theory. Kiss and T\'othm\'eresz reformulated the problem using chip-firing games, and showed that computing the rank of a divisor on a graph is NP-hard via reduction from the Minimum Feedback Arc Set problem. In this paper, we strengthen their result by establishing a connection between chip-firing games and the Minimum Target Set Selection problem. As a corollary, we show that the rank is difficult to approximate to within a factor of $O(2^{\log^{1-\varepsilon}n})$ for any $\varepsilon > 0$ unless $P=NP$. Furthermore, assuming the Planted Dense Subgraph Conjecture, the rank is difficult to approximate to within a factor of $O(n^{1/4-\varepsilon})$ for any $\varepsilon>0$.
Traditional recommender systems heavily rely on ID features, which often encounter challenges related to cold-start and generalization. Modeling pre-extracted content features can mitigate these issues, but is still a suboptimal solution due to the discrepancies between training tasks and model parameters. End-to-end training presents a promising solution for these problems, yet most of the existing works mainly focus on retrieval models, leaving the multimodal techniques under-utilized. In this paper, we propose an industrial multimodal recommendation framework named EM3: End-to-end training of Multimodal Model and ranking Model, which sufficiently utilizes multimodal information and allows personalized ranking tasks to directly train the core modules in the multimodal model to obtain more task-oriented content features, without overburdening resource consumption. First, we propose Fusion-Q-Former, which consists of transformers and a set of trainable queries, to fuse different modalities and generate fixed-length and robust multimodal embeddings. Second, in our sequential modeling for user content interest, we utilize Low-Rank Adaptation technique to alleviate the conflict between huge resource consumption and long sequence length. Third, we propose a novel Content-ID-Contrastive learning task to complement the advantages of content and ID by aligning them with each other, obtaining more task-oriented content embeddings and more generalized ID embeddings. In experiments, we implement EM3 on different ranking models in two scenario, achieving significant improvements in both offline evaluation and online A/B test, verifying the generalizability of our method. Ablation studies and visualization are also performed. Furthermore, we also conduct experiments on two public datasets to show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce the R package clrng which leverages the gpuR package and is able to generate random numbers in parallel on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with the clRNG (OpenCL) library. Parallel processing with GPU's can speed up computationally intensive tasks, which when combined with R, it can largely improve R's downsides in terms of slow speed, memory usage and computation mode. clrng enables reproducible research by setting random initial seeds for streams on GPU and CPU, and can thus accelerate several types of statistical simulation and modelling. The random number generator in clrng guarantees independent parallel samples even when R is used interactively in an ad-hoc manner, with sessions being interrupted and restored. This package is portable and flexible, developers can use its random number generation kernel for various other purposes and applications.
This paper shows how to use the shooting method, a classical numerical algorithm for solving boundary value problems, to compute the Riemannian distance on the Stiefel manifold $ \mathrm{St}(n,p) $, the set of $ n \times p $ matrices with orthonormal columns. The proposed method is a shooting method in the sense of the classical shooting methods for solving boundary value problems; see, e.g., Stoer and Bulirsch, 1991. The main feature is that we provide an approximate formula for the Fr\'{e}chet derivative of the geodesic involved in our shooting method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the algorithms' accuracy and performance. Comparisons with existing state-of-the-art algorithms for solving the same problem show that our method is competitive and even beats several algorithms in many cases.
Iterative parallel-in-time algorithms like Parareal can extend scaling beyond the saturation of purely spatial parallelization when solving initial value problems. However, they require the user to build coarse models to handle the inevitably serial transport of information in time.This is a time consuming and difficult process since there is still only limited theoretical insight into what constitutes a good and efficient coarse model. Novel approaches from machine learning to solve differential equations could provide a more generic way to find coarse level models for parallel-in-time algorithms. This paper demonstrates that a physics-informed Fourier Neural Operator (PINO) is an effective coarse model for the parallelization in time of the two-asset Black-Scholes equation using Parareal. We demonstrate that PINO-Parareal converges as fast as a bespoke numerical coarse model and that, in combination with spatial parallelization by domain decomposition, it provides better overall speedup than both purely spatial parallelization and space-time parallelizaton with a numerical coarse propagator.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged in recent years as a powerful tool to learn tasks across a wide range of graph domains in a data-driven fashion; based on a message passing mechanism, GNNs have gained increasing popularity due to their intuitive formulation, closely linked with the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test for graph isomorphism, to which they have proven equivalent. From a theoretical point of view, GNNs have been shown to be universal approximators, and their generalization capability (namely, bounds on the Vapnik Chervonekis (VC) dimension) has recently been investigated for GNNs with piecewise polynomial activation functions. The aim of our work is to extend this analysis on the VC dimension of GNNs to other commonly used activation functions, such as sigmoid and hyperbolic tangent, using the framework of Pfaffian function theory. Bounds are provided with respect to architecture parameters (depth, number of neurons, input size) as well as with respect to the number of colors resulting from the 1-WL test applied on the graph domain. The theoretical analysis is supported by a preliminary experimental study.
Large particle systems are often described by high-dimensional (linear) kinetic equations that are simulated using Monte Carlo methods for which the asymptotic convergence rate is independent of the dimensionality. Even though the asymptotic convergence rate is known, predicting the actual value of the statistical error remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show how the statistical error of an analog particle tracing Monte Carlo method can be calculated (expensive) and predicted a priori (cheap) when estimating quantities of interest (QoI) on a histogram. We consider two types of QoI estimators: point estimators for which each particle provides one independent contribution to the QoI estimates, and analog estimators for which each particle provides multiple correlated contributions to the QoI estimates. The developed statistical error predictors can be applied to other QoI estimators and nonanalog simulation routines as well. The error analysis is based on interpreting the number of particle visits to a histogram bin as the result of a (correlated) binomial experiment. The resulting expressions can be used to optimize (non)analog particle tracing Monte Carlo methods and hybrid simulation methods involving a Monte Carlo component, as well as to select an optimal particle tracing Monte Carlo method from several available options. Additionally, the cheap statistical error predictors can be used to determine a priori the number of particles N that is needed to reach a desired accuracy. We illustrate the theory using a linear kinetic equation describing neutral particles in the plasma edge of a fusion device and show numerical results. The code used to perform the numerical experiments is openly available.