Selfadhesivity is a property of entropic polymatroids which guarantees that the polymatroid can be glued to an identical copy of itself along arbitrary restrictions such that the two pieces are independent given the common restriction. We show that positive definite matrices satisfy this condition as well and examine consequences for Gaussian conditional independence structures. New axioms of Gaussian CI are obtained by applying selfadhesivity to the previously known axioms of structural semigraphoids and orientable gaussoids.
Social behavior, defined as the process by which individuals act and react in response to others, is crucial for the function of societies and holds profound implications for mental health. To fully grasp the intricacies of social behavior and identify potential therapeutic targets for addressing social deficits, it is essential to understand its core principles. Although machine learning algorithms have made it easier to study specific aspects of complex behavior, current methodologies tend to focus primarily on single-animal behavior. In this study, we introduce LISBET (seLf-supervIsed Social BEhavioral Transformer), a model designed to detect and segment social interactions. Our model eliminates the need for feature selection and extensive human annotation by using self-supervised learning to detect and quantify social behaviors from dynamic body parts tracking data. LISBET can be used in hypothesis-driven mode to automate behavior classification using supervised finetuning, and in discovery-driven mode to segment social behavior motifs using unsupervised learning. We found that motifs recognized using the discovery-driven approach not only closely match the human annotations but also correlate with the electrophysiological activity of dopaminergic neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA). We hope LISBET will help the community improve our understanding of social behaviors and their neural underpinnings.
This paper considers image change detection with only a small number of samples, which is a significant problem in terms of a few annotations available. A major impediment of image change detection task is the lack of large annotated datasets covering a wide variety of scenes. Change detection models trained on insufficient datasets have shown poor generalization capability. To address the poor generalization issue, we propose using simple image processing methods for generating synthetic but informative datasets, and design an early fusion network based on object detection which could outperform the siamese neural network. Our key insight is that the synthetic data enables the trained model to have good generalization ability for various scenarios. We compare the model trained on the synthetic data with that on the real-world data captured from a challenging dataset, CDNet, using six different test sets. The results demonstrate that the synthetic data is informative enough to achieve higher generalization ability than the insufficient real-world data. Besides, the experiment shows that utilizing a few (often tens of) samples to fine-tune the model trained on the synthetic data will achieve excellent results.
We consider the problem of solving a family of parametric mixed-integer linear optimization problems where some entries in the input data change. We introduce the concept of $cutting-plane$ $layer$ (CPL), $i.e.$, a differentiable cutting-plane generator mapping the problem data and previous iterates to cutting planes. We propose a CPL implementation to generate split cuts, and by combining several CPLs, we devise a differentiable cutting-plane algorithm that exploits the repeated nature of parametric instances. In an offline phase, we train our algorithm by updating the parameters controlling the CPLs, thus altering cut generation. Once trained, our algorithm computes, with predictable execution times and a fixed number of cuts, solutions with low integrality gaps. Preliminary computational tests show that our algorithm generalizes on unseen instances and captures underlying parametric structures.
We import the algebro-geometric notion of a complete collineation into the study of maximum likelihood estimation in directed Gaussian graphical models. A complete collineation produces a perturbation of sample data, which we call a stabilisation of the sample. While a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) may not exist or be unique given sample data, it is always unique given a stabilisation. We relate the MLE given a stabilisation to the MLE given original sample data, when one exists, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the MLE given a stabilisation to be one given the original sample. For linear regression models, we show that the MLE given any stabilisation is the minimal norm choice among the MLEs given an original sample. We show that the MLE has a well-defined limit as the stabilisation of a sample tends to the original sample, and that the limit is an MLE given the original sample, when one exists. Finally, we study which MLEs given a sample can arise as such limits. We reduce this to a question regarding the non-emptiness of certain algebraic varieties.
Batch effects are pervasive in biomedical studies. One approach to address the batch effects is repeatedly measuring a subset of samples in each batch. These remeasured samples are used to estimate and correct the batch effects. However, rigorous statistical methods for batch effect correction with remeasured samples are severely under-developed. In this study, we developed a framework for batch effect correction using remeasured samples in highly confounded case-control studies. We provided theoretical analyses of the proposed procedure, evaluated its power characteristics, and provided a power calculation tool to aid in the study design. We found that the number of samples that need to be remeasured depends strongly on the between-batch correlation. When the correlation is high, remeasuring a small subset of samples is possible to rescue most of the power.
Scale-free dynamics, formalized by selfsimilarity, provides a versatile paradigm massively and ubiquitously used to model temporal dynamics in real-world data. However, its practical use has mostly remained univariate so far. By contrast, modern applications often demand multivariate data analysis. Accordingly, models for multivariate selfsimilarity were recently proposed. Nevertheless, they have remained rarely used in practice because of a lack of available robust estimation procedures for the vector of selfsimilarity parameters. Building upon recent mathematical developments, the present work puts forth an efficient estimation procedure based on the theoretical study of the multiscale eigenstructure of the wavelet spectrum of multivariate selfsimilar processes. The estimation performance is studied theoretically in the asymptotic limits of large scale and sample sizes, and computationally for finite-size samples. As a practical outcome, a fully operational and documented multivariate signal processing estimation toolbox is made freely available and is ready for practical use on real-world data. Its potential benefits are illustrated in epileptic seizure prediction from multi-channel EEG data.
We propose a data-driven approach to explicitly learn the progressive encoding of a continuous source, which is successively decoded with increasing levels of quality and with the aid of correlated side information. This setup refers to the successive refinement of the Wyner-Ziv coding problem. Assuming ideal Slepian-Wolf coding, our approach employs recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to learn layered encoders and decoders for the quadratic Gaussian case. The models are trained by minimizing a variational bound on the rate-distortion function of the successively refined Wyner-Ziv coding problem. We demonstrate that RNNs can explicitly retrieve layered binning solutions akin to scalable nested quantization. Moreover, the rate-distortion performance of the scheme is on par with the corresponding monolithic Wyner-Ziv coding approach and is close to the rate-distortion bound.
Quantum computing has recently emerged as a transformative technology. Yet, its promised advantages rely on efficiently translating quantum operations into viable physical realizations. In this work, we use generative machine learning models, specifically denoising diffusion models (DMs), to facilitate this transformation. Leveraging text-conditioning, we steer the model to produce desired quantum operations within gate-based quantum circuits. Notably, DMs allow to sidestep during training the exponential overhead inherent in the classical simulation of quantum dynamics -- a consistent bottleneck in preceding ML techniques. We demonstrate the model's capabilities across two tasks: entanglement generation and unitary compilation. The model excels at generating new circuits and supports typical DM extensions such as masking and editing to, for instance, align the circuit generation to the constraints of the targeted quantum device. Given their flexibility and generalization abilities, we envision DMs as pivotal in quantum circuit synthesis, enhancing both practical applications but also insights into theoretical quantum computation.
We determine the minimum possible column multiplicity of even, doubly-, and triply-even codes given their length. This refines a classification result for the possible lengths of $q^r$-divisible codes over $\mathbb{F}_q$. We also give a few computational results for field sizes $q>2$. Non-existence results of divisible codes with restricted column multiplicities for a given length have applications e.g. in Galois geometry and can be used for upper bounds on the maximum cardinality of subspace codes.
We establish conditions under which latent causal graphs are nonparametrically identifiable and can be reconstructed from unknown interventions in the latent space. Our primary focus is the identification of the latent structure in measurement models without parametric assumptions such as linearity or Gaussianity. Moreover, we do not assume the number of hidden variables is known, and we show that at most one unknown intervention per hidden variable is needed. This extends a recent line of work on learning causal representations from observations and interventions. The proofs are constructive and introduce two new graphical concepts -- imaginary subsets and isolated edges -- that may be useful in their own right. As a matter of independent interest, the proofs also involve a novel characterization of the limits of edge orientations within the equivalence class of DAGs induced by unknown interventions. These are the first results to characterize the conditions under which causal representations are identifiable without making any parametric assumptions in a general setting with unknown interventions and without faithfulness.