In many applications in data clustering, it is desirable to find not just a single partition into clusters but a sequence of partitions describing the data at different scales, or levels of coarseness. A natural problem then is to analyse and compare the (not necessarily hierarchical) sequences of partitions that underpin such multiscale descriptions of data. Here, we introduce a filtration of abstract simplicial complexes, denoted the Multiscale Clustering Filtration (MCF), which encodes arbitrary patterns of cluster assignments across scales, and we prove that the MCF produces stable persistence diagrams. We then show that the zero-dimensional persistent homology of the MCF measures the degree of hierarchy in the sequence of partitions, and that the higher-dimensional persistent homology tracks the emergence and resolution of conflicts between cluster assignments across the sequence of partitions. To broaden the theoretical foundations of the MCF, we also provide an equivalent construction via a nerve complex filtration, and we show that in the hierarchical case, the MCF reduces to a Vietoris-Rips filtration of an ultrametric space. We briefly illustrate how the MCF can serve to characterise multiscale clustering structures in numerical experiments on synthetic data.
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Selinger gave a superoperator model of a first-order quantum programming language and proved that it is fully definable and hence fully abstract. This paper proposes an extension of the superoperator model to higher-order programs based on modules over superoperators or, equivalently, enriched presheaves over the category of superoperators. The enriched presheaf category can be easily proved to be a model of intuitionistic linear logic with cofree exponential, from which one can cave out a model of classical linear logic by a kind of bi-orthogonality construction. Although the structures of an enriched presheaf category are usually rather complex, a morphism in the classical model can be expressed simply as a matrix of completely positive maps. The model inherits many desirable properties from the superoperator model. A conceptually interesting property is that our model has only a state whose "total probability" is bounded by 1, i.e. does not have a state where true and false each occur with probability 2/3. Another convenient property inherited from the superoperator model is a $\omega$CPO-enrichment. Remarkably, our model has a sufficient structure to interpret arbitrary recursive types by the standard domain theoretic technique. We introduce Quantum FPC, a quantum $\lambda$-calculus with recursive types, and prove that our model is a fully abstract model of Quantum FPC.
We extend classical methods of computational complexity to the setting of distributed computing, where they are sometimes more effective than in their original context. Our focus is on distributed decision in the LOCAL model, where multiple networked computers communicate via synchronous message-passing to collectively answer a question about their network topology. Rather unusually, we impose two orthogonal constraints on the running time of this model: the number of communication rounds is bounded by a constant, and the number of computation steps of each computer is polynomially bounded by the size of its local input and the messages it receives. By letting two players take turns assigning certificates to all computers in the network, we obtain a generalization of the polynomial hierarchy (and hence of the complexity classes $\mathbf{P}$ and $\mathbf{NP}$). We then extend some key results of complexity theory to this setting, in particular the Cook-Levin theorem (which identifies Boolean satisfiability as a complete problem for $\mathbf{NP}$), and Fagin's theorem (which characterizes $\mathbf{NP}$ as the problems expressible in existential second-order logic). The original results can be recovered as the special case where the network consists of a single computer. But perhaps more surprisingly, the task of separating complexity classes becomes easier in the general case: we can show that our hierarchy is infinite, while it remains notoriously open whether the same is true in the case of a single computer. (By contrast, a collapse of our hierarchy would have implied a collapse of the polynomial hierarchy.) As an application, we propose quantifier alternation as a new approach to measuring the locality of problems in distributed computing.
Commutativity has proven to be a powerful tool in reasoning about concurrent programs. Recent work has shown that a commutativity-based reduction of a program may admit simpler proofs than the program itself. The framework of lexicographical program reductions was introduced to formalize a broad class of reductions. Approaches based on this framework, however, were limited to program models with a fixed number of threads. In this paper, we show that it is possible to define an effective parametric family of program reductions that can be used to find simple proofs for parameterized programs, i.e., programs with an unbounded number of threads. We show that reductions are indeed useful for the simplification of proofs of parameterized programs, in a sense that can be made precise: A reduction of a parameterized program may admit a proof which uses fewer or less sophisticated ghost variables. The reduction may therefore be within reach of an automated verification technique, even when the original parameterized program is not. We introduce a notion of reductions for parameterized programs such that the reduction $\mathcal{R}$ of a parameterized program $\mathcal{P}$ is again a parameterized program (the thread template of $\mathcal{R}$ is obtained by source-to-source transformation of the thread template of $\mathcal{P}$). Consequently, existing techniques for the verification of parameterized programs can be directly applied to $\mathcal{R}$ instead of $\mathcal{P}$. We define an appropriate family of pairwise preference orders which can be used to produce different lexicographical reductions. To determine whether this theoretical foundation amounts to a usable solution in practice, we have implemented the approach, based on a recently proposed framework for parameterized program verification. The results of our preliminary experiments on a representative set of examples are encouraging.
Adversarial examples in machine learning has emerged as a focal point of research due to their remarkable ability to deceive models with seemingly inconspicuous input perturbations, potentially resulting in severe consequences. In this study, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of adversarial machine learning models, shedding light on their intrinsic complexity and interpretability. Our investigation reveals intriguing links between machine learning model complexity and Einstein's theory of special relativity, all through the lens of entanglement. While our work does not primarily center on quantum entanglement, we instead define the entanglement correlations we have discovered to be computational, and demonstrate that distant feature samples can be entangled, strongly resembling entanglement correlation in the quantum realm. This revelation bestows fresh insights for understanding the phenomenon of emergent adversarial examples in modern machine learning, potentially paving the way for more robust and interpretable models in this rapidly evolving field.
We show, using three empirical applications, that linear regression estimates which rely on the assumption of sparsity are fragile in two ways. First, we document that different choices of the regressor matrix that don't impact ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates, such as the choice of baseline category with categorical controls, can move sparsity-based estimates two standard errors or more. Second, we develop two tests of the sparsity assumption based on comparing sparsity-based estimators with OLS. The tests tend to reject the sparsity assumption in all three applications. Unless the number of regressors is comparable to or exceeds the sample size, OLS yields more robust results at little efficiency cost.
Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of probability measures open up new avenues for algorithm development. This paper makes three contributions to this sampling approach by scrutinizing the design components of such gradient flows. Any instantiation of a gradient flow for sampling needs an energy functional and a metric to determine the flow, as well as numerical approximations of the flow to derive algorithms. Our first contribution is to show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as an energy functional, has the unique property (among all f-divergences) that gradient flows resulting from it do not depend on the normalization constant of the target distribution. Our second contribution is to study the choice of metric from the perspective of invariance. The Fisher-Rao metric is known as the unique choice (up to scaling) that is diffeomorphism invariant. As a computationally tractable alternative, we introduce a relaxed, affine invariance property for the metrics and gradient flows. In particular, we construct various affine invariant Wasserstein and Stein gradient flows. Affine invariant gradient flows are shown to behave more favorably than their non-affine-invariant counterparts when sampling highly anisotropic distributions, in theory and by using particle methods. Our third contribution is to study, and develop efficient algorithms based on Gaussian approximations of the gradient flows; this leads to an alternative to particle methods. We establish connections between various Gaussian approximate gradient flows, discuss their relation to gradient methods arising from parametric variational inference, and study their convergence properties both theoretically and numerically.
Bayesian optimization is a framework for optimizing functions that are costly or time-consuming to evaluate. Recent work has considered Bayesian optimization of function networks (BOFN), where the objective function is computed via a network of functions, each taking as input the output of previous nodes in the network and additional parameters. Exploiting this network structure has been shown to yield significant performance improvements. Existing BOFN algorithms for general-purpose networks are required to evaluate the full network at each iteration. However, many real-world applications allow evaluating nodes individually. To take advantage of this opportunity, we propose a novel knowledge gradient acquisition function for BOFN that chooses which node to evaluate as well as the inputs for that node in a cost-aware fashion. This approach can dramatically reduce query costs by allowing the evaluation of part of the network at a lower cost relative to evaluating the entire network. We provide an efficient approach to optimizing our acquisition function and show it outperforms existing BOFN methods and other benchmarks across several synthetic and real-world problems. Our acquisition function is the first to enable cost-aware optimization of a broad class of function networks.
A recent development in Bayesian optimization is the use of local optimization strategies, which can deliver strong empirical performance on high-dimensional problems compared to traditional global strategies. The "folk wisdom" in the literature is that the focus on local optimization sidesteps the curse of dimensionality; however, little is known concretely about the expected behavior or convergence of Bayesian local optimization routines. We first study the behavior of the local approach, and find that the statistics of individual local solutions of Gaussian process sample paths are surprisingly good compared to what we would expect to recover from global methods. We then present the first rigorous analysis of such a Bayesian local optimization algorithm recently proposed by M\"uller et al. (2021), and derive convergence rates in both the noisy and noiseless settings.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
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.
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