The last decade has seen many attempts to generalise the definition of modes, or MAP estimators, of a probability distribution $\mu$ on a space $X$ to the case that $\mu$ has no continuous Lebesgue density, and in particular to infinite-dimensional Banach and Hilbert spaces $X$. This paper examines the properties of and connections among these definitions. We construct a systematic taxonomy -- or `periodic table' -- of modes that includes the established notions as well as large hitherto-unexplored classes. We establish implications between these definitions and provide counterexamples to distinguish them. We also distinguish those definitions that are merely `grammatically correct' from those that are `meaningful' in the sense of satisfying certain `common-sense' axioms for a mode, among them the correct handling of discrete measures and those with continuous Lebesgue densities. However, despite there being 17 such `meaningful' definitions of mode, we show that none of them satisfy the `merging property', under which the modes of $\mu|_{A}$, $\mu|_{B}$ and $\mu|_{A \cup B}$ enjoy a straightforward relationship for well-separated positive-mass events $A,B \subseteq X$.
We prove a discrete analogue for the composition of the fractional integral and Caputo derivative. This result is relevant in numerical analysis of fractional PDEs when one discretizes the Caputo derivative with the so-called L1 scheme. The proof is based on asymptotic evaluation of the discrete sums with the use of the Euler-Maclaurin summation formula.
Several new network information dimension definitions have been proposed in recent decades, expanding the scope of applicability of this seminal tool. This paper proposes a new definition based on Deng entropy and d-summability (a concept from geometric measure theory). We will prove to what extent the new formulation will be useful in the theoretical and applied points of view.
The LATIN method has been developed and successfully applied to a variety of deterministic problems, but few work has been developed for nonlinear stochastic problems. This paper presents a stochastic LATIN method to solve stochastic and/or parameterized elastoplastic problems. To this end, the stochastic solution is decoupled into spatial, temporal and stochastic spaces, and approximated by the sum of a set of products of triplets of spatial functions, temporal functions and random variables. Each triplet is then calculated in a greedy way using a stochastic LATIN iteration. The high efficiency of the proposed method relies on two aspects: The nonlinearity is efficiently handled by inheriting advantages of the classical LATIN method, and the randomness and/or parameters are effectively treated by a sample-based approximation of stochastic spaces. Further, the proposed method is not sensitive to the stochastic and/or parametric dimensions of inputs due to the sample description of stochastic spaces. It can thus be applied to high-dimensional stochastic and parameterized problems. Four numerical examples demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed stochastic LATIN method.
Equilibrium propagation (EP) is a compelling alternative to the backpropagation of error algorithm (BP) for computing gradients of neural networks on biological or analog neuromorphic substrates. Still, the algorithm requires weight symmetry and infinitesimal equilibrium perturbations, i.e., nudges, to estimate unbiased gradients efficiently. Both requirements are challenging to implement in physical systems. Yet, whether and how weight asymmetry affects its applicability is unknown because, in practice, it may be masked by biases introduced through the finite nudge. To address this question, we study generalized EP, which can be formulated without weight symmetry, and analytically isolate the two sources of bias. For complex-differentiable non-symmetric networks, we show that the finite nudge does not pose a problem, as exact derivatives can still be estimated via a Cauchy integral. In contrast, weight asymmetry introduces bias resulting in low task performance due to poor alignment of EP's neuronal error vectors compared to BP. To mitigate this issue, we present a new homeostatic objective that directly penalizes functional asymmetries of the Jacobian at the network's fixed point. This homeostatic objective dramatically improves the network's ability to solve complex tasks such as ImageNet 32x32. Our results lay the theoretical groundwork for studying and mitigating the adverse effects of imperfections of physical networks on learning algorithms that rely on the substrate's relaxation dynamics.
Stochastic optimization methods have been hugely successful in making large-scale optimization problems feasible when computing the full gradient is computationally prohibitive. Using the theory of modified equations for numerical integrators, we propose a class of stochastic differential equations that approximate the dynamics of general stochastic optimization methods more closely than the original gradient flow. Analyzing a modified stochastic differential equation can reveal qualitative insights about the associated optimization method. Here, we study mean-square stability of the modified equation in the case of stochastic coordinate descent.
Correlation matrix visualization is essential for understanding the relationships between variables in a dataset, but missing data can pose a significant challenge in estimating correlation coefficients. In this paper, we compare the effects of various missing data methods on the correlation plot, focusing on two common missing patterns: random and monotone. We aim to provide practical strategies and recommendations for researchers and practitioners in creating and analyzing the correlation plot. Our experimental results suggest that while imputation is commonly used for missing data, using imputed data for plotting the correlation matrix may lead to a significantly misleading inference of the relation between the features. We recommend using DPER, a direct parameter estimation approach, for plotting the correlation matrix based on its performance in the experiments.
Trojans are one of the most threatening network attacks currently. HTTP-based Trojan, in particular, accounts for a considerable proportion of them. Moreover, as the network environment becomes more complex, HTTP-based Trojan is more concealed than others. At present, many intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are increasingly difficult to effectively detect such Trojan traffic due to the inherent shortcomings of the methods used and the backwardness of training data. Classical anomaly detection and traditional machine learning-based (TML-based) anomaly detection are highly dependent on expert knowledge to extract features artificially, which is difficult to implement in HTTP-based Trojan traffic detection. Deep learning-based (DL-based) anomaly detection has been locally applied to IDSs, but it cannot be transplanted to HTTP-based Trojan traffic detection directly. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a neural network detection model (HSTF-Model) based on hierarchical spatiotemporal features of traffic. Meanwhile, we combine deep learning algorithms with expert knowledge through feature encoders and statistical characteristics to improve the self-learning ability of the model. Experiments indicate that F1 of HSTF-Model can reach 99.4% in real traffic. In addition, we present a dataset BTHT consisting of HTTP-based benign and Trojan traffic to facilitate related research in the field.
Deep neural networks have shown remarkable performance when trained on independent and identically distributed data from a fixed set of classes. However, in real-world scenarios, it can be desirable to train models on a continuous stream of data where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially. This scenario, known as Continual Learning (CL) poses challenges to standard learning algorithms which struggle to maintain knowledge of old tasks while learning new ones. This stability-plasticity dilemma remains central to CL and multiple metrics have been proposed to adequately measure stability and plasticity separately. However, none considers the increasing difficulty of the classification task, which inherently results in performance loss for any model. In that sense, we analyze some limitations of current metrics and identify the presence of setup-induced forgetting. Therefore, we propose new metrics that account for the task's increasing difficulty. Through experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed metrics can provide new insights into the stability-plasticity trade-off achieved by models in the continual learning environment.
A significant limitation of one-class classification anomaly detection methods is their reliance on the assumption that unlabeled training data only contains normal instances. To overcome this impractical assumption, we propose two novel classification-based anomaly detection methods. Firstly, we introduce a semi-supervised shallow anomaly detection method based on an unbiased risk estimator. Secondly, we present a semi-supervised deep anomaly detection method utilizing a nonnegative (biased) risk estimator. We establish estimation error bounds and excess risk bounds for both risk minimizers. Additionally, we propose techniques to select appropriate regularization parameters that ensure the nonnegativity of the empirical risk in the shallow model under specific loss functions. Our extensive experiments provide strong evidence of the effectiveness of the risk-based anomaly detection methods.
We introduce new control-volume finite-element discretization schemes suitable for solving the Stokes problem. Within a common framework, we present different approaches for constructing such schemes. The first and most established strategy employs a non-overlapping partitioning into control volumes. The second represents a new idea by splitting into two sets of control volumes, the first set yielding a partition of the domain and the second containing the remaining overlapping control volumes required for stability. The third represents a hybrid approach where finite volumes are combined with finite elements based on a hierarchical splitting of the ansatz space. All approaches are based on typical finite element function spaces but yield locally mass and momentum conservative discretization schemes that can be interpreted as finite volume schemes. We apply all strategies to the inf-sub stable MINI finite-element pair. Various test cases, including convergence tests and the numerical observation of the boundedness of the number of preconditioned Krylov solver iterations, as well as more complex scenarios of flow around obstacles or through a three-dimensional vessel bifurcation, demonstrate the stability and robustness of the schemes.