The Euclidean algorithm is the oldest algorithms known to mankind. Given two integral numbers $a_1$ and $a_2$, it computes the greatest common divisor (gcd) of $a_1$ and $a_2$ in a very elegant way. From a lattice perspective, it computes a basis of the sum of two one-dimensional lattices $a_1 \mathbb{Z}$ and $a_2 \mathbb{Z}$ as $\gcd(a_1,a_2) \mathbb{Z} = a_1 \mathbb{Z} + a_2 \mathbb{Z}$. In this paper, we show that the classical Euclidean algorithm can be adapted in a very natural way to compute a basis of a general lattice $L(A_1, \ldots , A_n)$ given vectors $A_1, \ldots , A_n \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ with $n> \mathrm{rank}(a_1, \ldots ,a_d)$. Similar to the Euclidean algorithm, our algorithm is very easy to describe and implement and can be written within 12 lines of pseudocode. As our main result, we obtain an algorithm to compute a lattice basis for given vectors $A_1, \ldots , A_n \in \mathbb{Z}^d$ in time (counting bit operations) $LS + \tilde{O}((n-d)d^2 \cdot \log(||A||)$, where $LS$ is the time required to obtain the exact fractional solution of a certain system of linear equalities. The analysis of the running time of our algorithms relies on fundamental statements on the fractionality of solutions of linear systems of equations. So far, the fastest algorithm for lattice basis computation was due to Storjohann and Labhan [SL96] having a running time of $\tilde{O}(nd^\omega\log ||A||)$. For current upper bounds of $LS$, our algorithm has a running time improvement of a factor of at least $d^{0.12}$ over [SL96]. Our algorithm is therefore the first general algorithmic improvement to this classical problem in nearly 30 years. At last, we present a postprocessing procedure which yields an improved size bound of $\sqrt{d} ||A||$ for vectors of the resulting basis matrix.
Guessing Codeword Decoding (GCD) is a recently proposed soft-input forward error correction decoder for arbitrary binary linear codes. Inspired by recent proposals that leverage binary linear codebook structure to reduce the number of queries made by Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND), for binary linear codes that include a full-message single parity-check (SPC) bit, we show that it is possible to reduce the number of queries made by GCD by a factor of up to 2 with the greatest guesswork reduction realized at lower SNRs, without impacting decoding precision. Codes without a full-message SPC can be modified to include one by changing a column of the generator matrix to obtain a decoding complexity advantage, and we demonstrate that this can often be done without losing decoding precision. To practically avail of the complexity advantage, a noise effect pattern generator capable of producing sequences for given Hamming weights, such as the landslide algorithm developed for ORBGRAND, is necessary.
Stablecoins are digital assets designed to maintain a stable value, typically pegged to traditional currencies. Despite their growing prominence, many stablecoins have struggled to consistently meet stability expectations, and their underlying mechanisms often remain opaque and challenging to analyze. This paper focuses on the DAI stablecoin, which combines crypto-collateralization and algorithmic mechanisms. We propose a formal logic-based framework for representing the policies and operations of DAI, implemented in Prolog and released as open-source software. Our framework enables detailed analysis and simulation of DAI's stability mechanisms, providing a foundation for understanding its robustness and identifying potential vulnerabilities.
Julia has been heralded as a potential successor to Python for scientific machine learning and numerical computing, boasting ergonomic and performance improvements. Since Julia's inception in 2012 and declaration of language goals in 2017, its ecosystem and language-level features have grown tremendously. In this paper, we take a modern look at Julia's features and ecosystem, assess the current state of the language, and discuss its viability and pitfalls as a replacement for Python as the de-facto scientific machine learning language. We call for the community to address Julia's language-level issues that are preventing further adoption.
Neural operators effectively solve PDE problems from data without knowing the explicit equations, which learn the map from the input sequences of observed samples to the predicted values. Most existing works build the model in the original geometric space, leading to high computational costs when the number of sample points is large. We present the Latent Neural Operator (LNO) solving PDEs in the latent space. In particular, we first propose Physics-Cross-Attention (PhCA) transforming representation from the geometric space to the latent space, then learn the operator in the latent space, and finally recover the real-world geometric space via the inverse PhCA map. Our model retains flexibility that can decode values in any position not limited to locations defined in the training set, and therefore can naturally perform interpolation and extrapolation tasks particularly useful for inverse problems. Moreover, the proposed LNO improves both prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. Experiments show that LNO reduces the GPU memory by 50%, speeds up training 1.8 times, and reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on four out of six benchmarks for forward problems and a benchmark for inverse problem. Code is available at //github.com/L-I-M-I-T/LatentNeuralOperator.
Let $G$ be a graph of a network system with vertices, $V(G)$, representing physical locations and edges, $E(G)$, representing informational connectivity. A \emph{locating-dominating (LD)} set $S \subseteq V(G)$ is a subset of vertices representing detectors capable of sensing an "intruder" at precisely their location or somewhere in their open-neighborhood -- an LD set must be capable of locating an intruder anywhere in the graph. We explore three types of fault-tolerant LD sets: \emph{redundant LD} sets, which allow a detector to be removed, \emph{error-detecting LD} sets, which allow at most one false negative, and \emph{error-correcting LD} sets, which allow at most one error (false positive or negative). In particular, we determine lower and upper bounds for the minimum density of these three fault-tolerant locating-dominating sets in the \emph{infinite king grid}.
In a graph bisection problem, we are given a graph $G$ with two equally-sized unlabeled communities, and the goal is to recover the vertices in these communities. A popular heuristic, known as spectral clustering, is to output an estimated community assignment based on the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian of $G$. Spectral algorithms can be shown to provably recover the cluster structure for graphs generated from certain probabilistic models, such as the Stochastic Block Model (SBM). However, spectral clustering is known to be non-robust to model mis-specification. Techniques based on semidefinite programming have been shown to be more robust, but they incur significant computational overheads. In this work, we study the robustness of spectral algorithms against semirandom adversaries. Informally, a semirandom adversary is allowed to ``helpfully'' change the specification of the model in a way that is consistent with the ground-truth solution. Our semirandom adversaries in particular are allowed to add edges inside clusters or increase the probability that an edge appears inside a cluster. Semirandom adversaries are a useful tool to determine the extent to which an algorithm has overfit to statistical assumptions on the input. On the positive side, we identify classes of semirandom adversaries under which spectral bisection using the _unnormalized_ Laplacian is strongly consistent, i.e., it exactly recovers the planted partitioning. On the negative side, we show that in these classes spectral bisection with the _normalized_ Laplacian outputs a partitioning that makes a classification mistake on a constant fraction of the vertices. Finally, we demonstrate numerical experiments that complement our theoretical findings.
The Bayesian Mallows model is a flexible tool for analyzing data in the form of complete or partial rankings, and transitive or intransitive pairwise preferences. In many potential applications of preference learning, data arrive sequentially and it is of practical interest to update posterior beliefs and predictions efficiently, based on the currently available data. Despite this, most algorithms proposed so far have focused on batch inference. In this paper we present an algorithm for sequentially estimating the posterior distributions of the Bayesian Mallows model using nested sequential Monte Carlo. As it requires minimum user input in form of tuning parameters, is straightforward to parallelize, and returns the marginal likelihood as a direct byproduct of estimation, the algorithm is an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques also in batch estimation settings.
Neural machine translation (NMT) is a deep learning based approach for machine translation, which yields the state-of-the-art translation performance in scenarios where large-scale parallel corpora are available. Although the high-quality and domain-specific translation is crucial in the real world, domain-specific corpora are usually scarce or nonexistent, and thus vanilla NMT performs poorly in such scenarios. Domain adaptation that leverages both out-of-domain parallel corpora as well as monolingual corpora for in-domain translation, is very important for domain-specific translation. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques for NMT.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.