Identifying a biclique with the maximum number of edges bears considerable implications for numerous fields of application, such as detecting anomalies in E-commerce transactions, discerning protein-protein interactions in biology, and refining the efficacy of social network recommendation algorithms. However, the inherent NP-hardness of this problem significantly complicates the matter. The prohibitive time complexity of existing algorithms is the primary bottleneck constraining the application scenarios. Aiming to address this challenge, we present an unprecedented exploration of a quantum computing approach. Efficient quantum algorithms, as a crucial future direction for handling NP-hard problems, are presently under intensive investigation, of which the potential has already been proven in practical arenas such as cybersecurity. However, in the field of quantum algorithms for graph databases, little work has been done due to the challenges presented by the quantum representation of complex graph topologies. In this study, we delve into the intricacies of encoding a bipartite graph on a quantum computer. Given a bipartite graph with n vertices, we propose a ground-breaking algorithm qMBS with time complexity O^*(2^(n/2)), illustrating a quadratic speed-up in terms of complexity compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we detail two variants tailored for the maximum vertex biclique problem and the maximum balanced biclique problem. To corroborate the practical performance and efficacy of our proposed algorithms, we have conducted proof-of-principle experiments utilizing IBM quantum simulators, of which the results provide a substantial validation of our approach to the extent possible to date.
Graph generative model evaluation necessitates understanding differences between graphs on the distributional level. This entails being able to harness salient attributes of graphs in an efficient manner. Curvature constitutes one such property that has recently proved its utility in characterising graphs. Its expressive properties, stability, and practical utility in model evaluation remain largely unexplored, however. We combine graph curvature descriptors with emerging methods from topological data analysis to obtain robust, expressive descriptors for evaluating graph generative models.
This paper extends the linear grouped fixed effects (GFE) panel model to allow for heteroskedasticity from a discrete latent group variable. Key features of GFE are preserved, such as individuals belonging to one of a finite number of groups and group membership is unrestricted and estimated. Ignoring group heteroskedasticity may lead to poor classification, which is detrimental to finite sample bias and standard errors of estimators. I introduce the "weighted grouped fixed effects" (WGFE) estimator that minimizes a weighted average of group sum of squared residuals. I establish $\sqrt{NT}$-consistency and normality under a concept of group separation based on second moments. A test of group homoskedasticity is discussed. A fast computation procedure is provided. Simulations show that WGFE outperforms alternatives that exclude second moment information. I demonstrate this approach by considering the link between income and democracy and the effect of unionization on earnings.
Hyperparameter optimization is an important subfield of machine learning that focuses on tuning the hyperparameters of a chosen algorithm to achieve peak performance. Recently, there has been a stream of methods that tackle the issue of hyperparameter optimization, however, most of the methods do not exploit the dominant power law nature of learning curves for Bayesian optimization. In this work, we propose Deep Power Laws (DPL), an ensemble of neural network models conditioned to yield predictions that follow a power-law scaling pattern. Our method dynamically decides which configurations to pause and train incrementally by making use of gray-box evaluations. We compare our method against 7 state-of-the-art competitors on 3 benchmarks related to tabular, image, and NLP datasets covering 59 diverse tasks. Our method achieves the best results across all benchmarks by obtaining the best any-time results compared to all competitors.
Sparse high-dimensional functions have arisen as a rich framework to study the behavior of gradient-descent methods using shallow neural networks, showcasing their ability to perform feature learning beyond linear models. Amongst those functions, the simplest are single-index models $f(x) = \phi( x \cdot \theta^*)$, where the labels are generated by an arbitrary non-linear scalar link function $\phi$ applied to an unknown one-dimensional projection $\theta^*$ of the input data. By focusing on Gaussian data, several recent works have built a remarkable picture, where the so-called information exponent (related to the regularity of the link function) controls the required sample complexity. In essence, these tools exploit the stability and spherical symmetry of Gaussian distributions. In this work, building from the framework of \cite{arous2020online}, we explore extensions of this picture beyond the Gaussian setting, where both stability or symmetry might be violated. Focusing on the planted setting where $\phi$ is known, our main results establish that Stochastic Gradient Descent can efficiently recover the unknown direction $\theta^*$ in the high-dimensional regime, under assumptions that extend previous works \cite{yehudai2020learning,wu2022learning}.
In numerical linear algebra, considerable effort has been devoted to obtaining faster algorithms for linear systems whose underlying matrices exhibit structural properties. A prominent success story is the method of generalized nested dissection~[Lipton-Rose-Tarjan'79] for separable matrices. On the other hand, the majority of recent developments in the design of efficient linear program (LP) solves do not leverage the ideas underlying these faster linear system solvers nor consider the separable structure of the constraint matrix. We give a faster algorithm for separable linear programs. Specifically, we consider LPs of the form $\min_{\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}=\mathbf{b}, \mathbf{l}\leq\mathbf{x}\leq\mathbf{u}} \mathbf{c}^\top\mathbf{x}$, where the graphical support of the constraint matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times m}$ is $O(n^\alpha)$-separable. These include flow problems on planar graphs and low treewidth matrices among others. We present an $\tilde{O}((m+m^{1/2 + 2\alpha}) \log(1/\epsilon))$ time algorithm for these LPs, where $\epsilon$ is the relative accuracy of the solution. Our new solver has two important implications: for the $k$-multicommodity flow problem on planar graphs, we obtain an algorithm running in $\tilde{O}(k^{5/2} m^{3/2})$ time in the high accuracy regime; and when the support of $\mathbf{A}$ is $O(n^\alpha)$-separable with $\alpha \leq 1/4$, our algorithm runs in $\tilde{O}(m)$ time, which is nearly optimal. The latter significantly improves upon the natural approach of combining interior point methods and nested dissection, whose time complexity is lower bounded by $\Omega(\sqrt{m}(m+m^{\alpha\omega}))=\Omega(m^{3/2})$, where $\omega$ is the matrix multiplication constant. Lastly, in the setting of low-treewidth LPs, we recover the results of [DLY,STOC21] and [GS,22] with significantly simpler data structure machinery.
Hypergraphs naturally represent group interactions, which are omnipresent in many domains: collaborations of researchers, co-purchases of items, and joint interactions of proteins, to name a few. In this work, we propose tools for answering the following questions: (Q1) what are the structural design principles of real-world hypergraphs? (Q2) how can we compare local structures of hypergraphs of different sizes? (Q3) how can we identify domains from which hypergraphs are? We first define hypergraph motifs (h-motifs), which describe the overlapping patterns of three connected hyperedges. Then, we define the significance of each h-motif in a hypergraph as its occurrences relative to those in properly randomized hypergraphs. Lastly, we define the characteristic profile (CP) as the vector of the normalized significance of every h-motif. Regarding Q1, we find that h-motifs' occurrences in 11 real-world hypergraphs from 5 domains are clearly distinguished from those of randomized hypergraphs. Then, we demonstrate that CPs capture local structural patterns unique to each domain, and thus comparing CPs of hypergraphs addresses Q2 and Q3. The concept of CP is extended to represent the connectivity pattern of each node or hyperedge as a vector, which proves useful in node classification and hyperedge prediction. Our algorithmic contribution is to propose MoCHy, a family of parallel algorithms for counting h-motifs' occurrences in a hypergraph. We theoretically analyze their speed and accuracy and show empirically that the advanced approximate version MoCHy-A+ is more accurate and faster than the basic approximate and exact versions, respectively. Furthermore, we explore ternary hypergraph motifs that extends h-motifs by taking into account not only the presence but also the cardinality of intersections among hyperedges. This extension proves beneficial for all previously mentioned applications.
Most of existing neural methods for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) problems solely rely on decomposition, which often leads to repetitive solutions for the respective subproblems, thus a limited Pareto set. Beyond decomposition, we propose a novel neural heuristic with diversity enhancement (NHDE) to produce more Pareto solutions from two perspectives. On the one hand, to hinder duplicated solutions for different subproblems, we propose an indicator-enhanced deep reinforcement learning method to guide the model, and design a heterogeneous graph attention mechanism to capture the relations between the instance graph and the Pareto front graph. On the other hand, to excavate more solutions in the neighborhood of each subproblem, we present a multiple Pareto optima strategy to sample and preserve desirable solutions. Experimental results on classic MOCO problems show that our NHDE is able to generate a Pareto front with higher diversity, thereby achieving superior overall performance. Moreover, our NHDE is generic and can be applied to different neural methods for MOCO.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).