Given an input graph $G = (V, E)$, an additive emulator $H = (V, E', w)$ is a sparse weighted graph that preserves all distances in $G$ with small additive error. A recent line of inquiry has sought to determine the best additive error achievable in the sparsest setting, when $H$ has a linear number of edges. In particular, the work of [Kogan and Parter, ICALP 2023], following [Pettie, ICALP 2007], constructed linear size emulators with $+O(n^{0.222})$ additive error. It is known that the worst-case additive error must be at least $+\Omega(n^{2/29})$ due to [Lu, Vassilevska Williams, Wein, and Xu, SODA 2022]. We present a simple linear-size emulator construction that achieves additive error $+O(n^{0.191})$. Our approach extends the path-buying framework developed by [Baswana, Kavitha, Mehlhorn, and Pettie, SODA 2005] and [Vassilevska Williams and Bodwin, SODA 2016] to the setting of sparse additive emulators.
Despite weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) being a promising step toward evading strong instance-level annotations, its capability is confined to closed-set categories within a single training dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised open-vocabulary object detection framework, namely WSOVOD, to extend traditional WSOD to detect novel concepts and utilize diverse datasets with only image-level annotations. To achieve this, we explore three vital strategies, including dataset-level feature adaptation, image-level salient object localization, and region-level vision-language alignment. First, we perform data-aware feature extraction to produce an input-conditional coefficient, which is leveraged into dataset attribute prototypes to identify dataset bias and help achieve cross-dataset generalization. Second, a customized location-oriented weakly supervised region proposal network is proposed to utilize high-level semantic layouts from the category-agnostic segment anything model to distinguish object boundaries. Lastly, we introduce a proposal-concept synchronized multiple-instance network, i.e., object mining and refinement with visual-semantic alignment, to discover objects matched to the text embeddings of concepts. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that the proposed WSOVOD achieves new state-of-the-art compared with previous WSOD methods in both close-set object localization and detection tasks. Meanwhile, WSOVOD enables cross-dataset and open-vocabulary learning to achieve on-par or even better performance than well-established fully-supervised open-vocabulary object detection (FSOVOD).
High-dimensional datasets often contain multiple meaningful clusterings in different subspaces. For example, objects can be clustered either by color, weight, or size, revealing different interpretations of the given dataset. A variety of approaches are able to identify such non-redundant clusterings. However, most of these methods require the user to specify the expected number of subspaces and clusters for each subspace. Stating these values is a non-trivial problem and usually requires detailed knowledge of the input dataset. In this paper, we propose a framework that utilizes the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL) to detect the number of subspaces and clusters per subspace automatically. We describe an efficient procedure that greedily searches the parameter space by splitting and merging subspaces and clusters within subspaces. Additionally, an encoding strategy is introduced that allows us to detect outliers in each subspace. Extensive experiments show that our approach is highly competitive to state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce Functional Diffusion Processes (FDPs), which generalize score-based diffusion models to infinite-dimensional function spaces. FDPs require a new mathematical framework to describe the forward and backward dynamics, and several extensions to derive practical training objectives. These include infinite-dimensional versions of Girsanov theorem, in order to be able to compute an ELBO, and of the sampling theorem, in order to guarantee that functional evaluations in a countable set of points are equivalent to infinite-dimensional functions. We use FDPs to build a new breed of generative models in function spaces, which do not require specialized network architectures, and that can work with any kind of continuous data. Our results on real data show that FDPs achieve high-quality image generation, using a simple MLP architecture with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than existing diffusion models.
We present a randomized algorithm that computes single-source shortest paths (SSSP) in $O(m\log^8(n)\log W)$ time when edge weights are integral and can be negative. This essentially resolves the classic negative-weight SSSP problem. The previous bounds are $\tilde O((m+n^{1.5})\log W)$ [BLNPSSSW FOCS'20] and $m^{4/3+o(1)}\log W$ [AMV FOCS'20]. Near-linear time algorithms were known previously only for the special case of planar directed graphs [Fakcharoenphol and Rao FOCS'01]. In contrast to all recent developments that rely on sophisticated continuous optimization methods and dynamic algorithms, our algorithm is simple: it requires only a simple graph decomposition and elementary combinatorial tools. In fact, ours is the first combinatorial algorithm for negative-weight SSSP to break through the classic $\tilde O(m\sqrt{n}\log W)$ bound from over three decades ago [Gabow and Tarjan SICOMP'89].
Samplers are the backbone of the implementations of any randomised algorithm. Unfortunately, obtaining an efficient algorithm to test the correctness of samplers is very hard to find. Recently, in a series of works, testers like $\mathsf{Barbarik}$, $\mathsf{Teq}$, $\mathsf{Flash}$ for testing of some particular kinds of samplers, like CNF-samplers and Horn-samplers, were obtained. But their techniques have a significant limitation because one can not expect to use their methods to test for other samplers, such as perfect matching samplers or samplers for sampling linear extensions in posets. In this paper, we present a new testing algorithm that works for such samplers and can estimate the distance of a new sampler from a known sampler (say, uniform sampler). Testing the identity of distributions is the heart of testing the correctness of samplers. This paper's main technical contribution is developing a new distance estimation algorithm for distributions over high-dimensional cubes using the recently proposed sub-cube conditioning sampling model. Given subcube conditioning access to an unknown distribution $P$, and a known distribution $Q$ defined over $\{0,1\}^n$, our algorithm $\mathsf{CubeProbeEst}$ estimates the variation distance between $P$ and $Q$ within additive error $\zeta$ using $O\left({n^2}/{\zeta^4}\right)$ subcube conditional samples from $P$. Following the testing-via-learning paradigm, we also get a tester which distinguishes between the cases when $P$ and $Q$ are $\varepsilon$-close or $\eta$-far in variation distance with probability at least $0.99$ using $O({n^2}/{(\eta-\varepsilon)^4})$ subcube conditional samples. The estimation algorithm in the sub-cube conditioning sampling model helps us to design the first tester for self-reducible samplers.
We present a modular approach to \emph{reinforcement learning} (RL) in environments consisting of simpler components evolving in parallel. A monolithic view of such modular environments may be prohibitively large to learn, or may require unrealizable communication between the components in the form of a centralized controller. Our proposed approach is based on the assume-guarantee paradigm where the optimal control for the individual components is synthesized in isolation by making \emph{assumptions} about the behaviors of neighboring components, and providing \emph{guarantees} about their own behavior. We express these \emph{assume-guarantee contracts} as regular languages and provide automatic translations to scalar rewards to be used in RL. By combining local probabilities of satisfaction for each component, we provide a lower bound on the probability of satisfaction of the complete system. By solving a Markov game for each component, RL can produce a controller for each component that maximizes this lower bound. The controller utilizes the information it receives through communication, observations, and any knowledge of a coarse model of other agents. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach on a variety of case studies.
The debiased estimator is a crucial tool in statistical inference for high-dimensional model parameters. However, constructing such an estimator involves estimating the high-dimensional inverse Hessian matrix, incurring significant computational costs. This challenge becomes particularly acute in distributed setups, where traditional methods necessitate computing a debiased estimator on every machine. This becomes unwieldy, especially with a large number of machines. In this paper, we delve into semi-supervised sparse statistical inference in a distributed setup. An efficient multi-round distributed debiased estimator, which integrates both labeled and unlabelled data, is developed. We will show that the additional unlabeled data helps to improve the statistical rate of each round of iteration. Our approach offers tailored debiasing methods for $M$-estimation and generalized linear models according to the specific form of the loss function. Our method also applies to a non-smooth loss like absolute deviation loss. Furthermore, our algorithm is computationally efficient since it requires only one estimation of a high-dimensional inverse covariance matrix. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by presenting simulation studies and real data applications that highlight the benefits of incorporating unlabeled data.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.
Learning latent representations of nodes in graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with widespread applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph visualization. Previous methods on graph representation learning mainly focus on static graphs, however, many real-world graphs are dynamic and evolve over time. In this paper, we present Dynamic Self-Attention Network (DySAT), a novel neural architecture that operates on dynamic graphs and learns node representations that capture both structural properties and temporal evolutionary patterns. Specifically, DySAT computes node representations by jointly employing self-attention layers along two dimensions: structural neighborhood and temporal dynamics. We conduct link prediction experiments on two classes of graphs: communication networks and bipartite rating networks. Our experimental results show that DySAT has a significant performance gain over several different state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines.