Let $P$ be a linear differential operator over $\mathcal{D} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and $U = (U_x)_{x \in \mathcal{D}}$ a second order stochastic process. In the first part of this article, we prove a new simple necessary and sufficient condition for all the trajectories of $U$ to verify the partial differential equation (PDE) $T(U) = 0$. This condition is formulated in terms of the covariance kernel of $U$. The novelty of this result is that the equality $T(U) = 0$ is understood in the sense of distributions, which is a functional analysis framework particularly adapted to the study of PDEs. This theorem provides precious insights during the second part of this article, which is dedicated to performing "physically informed" machine learning on data that is solution to the homogeneous 3 dimensional free space wave equation. We perform Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) on this data, which is a kernel based machine learning technique. To do so, we model the solution of this PDE as a trajectory drawn from a well-chosen Gaussian process (GP). We obtain explicit formulas for the covariance kernel of the corresponding stochastic process; this kernel can then be used for GPR. We explore two particular cases : the radial symmetry and the point source. In the case of radial symmetry, we derive "fast to compute" GPR formulas; in the case of the point source, we show a direct link between GPR and the classical triangulation method for point source localization used e.g. in GPS systems. We also show that this use of GPR can be interpreted as a new answer to the ill-posed inverse problem of reconstructing initial conditions for the wave equation with finite dimensional data, and also provides a way of estimating physical parameters from this data as in [Raissi et al,2017]. We finish by showcasing this physically informed GPR on a number of practical examples.
Iterative distributed optimization algorithms involve multiple agents that communicate with each other, over time, in order to minimize/maximize a global objective. In the presence of unreliable communication networks, the Age-of-Information (AoI), which measures the freshness of data received, may be large and hence hinder algorithmic convergence. In this paper, we study the convergence of general distributed gradient-based optimization algorithms in the presence of communication that neither happens periodically nor at stochastically independent points in time. We show that convergence is guaranteed provided the random variables associated with the AoI processes are stochastically dominated by a random variable with finite first moment. This improves on previous requirements of boundedness of more than the first moment. We then introduce stochastically strongly connected (SSC) networks, a new stochastic form of strong connectedness for time-varying networks. We show: If for any $p \ge0$ the processes that describe the success of communication between agents in a SSC network are $\alpha$-mixing with $n^{p-1}\alpha(n)$ summable, then the associated AoI processes are stochastically dominated by a random variable with finite $p$-th moment. In combination with our first contribution, this implies that distributed stochastic gradient descend converges in the presence of AoI, if $\alpha(n)$ is summable.
We study the fundamental problem of ReLU regression, where the goal is to fit Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) to data. This supervised learning task is efficiently solvable in the realizable setting, but is known to be computationally hard with adversarial label noise. In this work, we focus on ReLU regression in the Massart noise model, a natural and well-studied semi-random noise model. In this model, the label of every point is generated according to a function in the class, but an adversary is allowed to change this value arbitrarily with some probability, which is {\em at most} $\eta < 1/2$. We develop an efficient algorithm that achieves exact parameter recovery in this model under mild anti-concentration assumptions on the underlying distribution. Such assumptions are necessary for exact recovery to be information-theoretically possible. We demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms naive applications of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ regression on both synthetic and real data.
We study the problem of estimating the diagonal of an implicitly given matrix $A$. For such a matrix we have access to an oracle that allows us to evaluate the matrix vector product $Av$. For random variable $v$ drawn from an appropriate distribution, this may be used to return an estimate of the diagonal of the matrix $A$. Whilst results exist for probabilistic guarantees relating to the error of estimates of the trace of $A$, no such results have yet been derived for the diagonal. We analyse the number of queries $s$ required to guarantee that with probability at least $1-\delta$ the estimates of the relative error of the diagonal entries is at most $\varepsilon$. We extend this analysis to the 2-norm of the difference between the estimate and the diagonal of $A$. We prove, discuss and experiment with bounds on the number of queries $s$ required to guarantee a probabilistic bound on the estimates of the diagonal by employing Rademacher and Gaussian random variables. Two sufficient upper bounds on the minimum number of query vectors are proved, extending the work of Avron and Toledo [JACM 58(2)8, 2011], and later work of Roosta-Khorasani and Ascher [FoCM 15, 1187-1212, 2015]. We find that, generally, there is little difference between the two, with convergence going as $O(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon^2)$ for individual diagonal elements. However for small $s$, we find that the Rademacher estimator is superior. These results allow us to then extend the ideas of Meyer, Musco, Musco and Woodruff [SOSA, 142-155, 2021], suggesting algorithm Diag++, to speed up the convergence of diagonal estimation from $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ to $O(1/\varepsilon)$ and make it robust to the spectrum of any positive semi-definite matrix $A$.
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a widely used method to evaluate policies in reinforcement learning. While many TD learning methods have been developed in recent years, little attention has been paid to preserving privacy and most of the existing approaches might face the concerns of data privacy from users. To enable complex representative abilities of policies, in this paper, we consider preserving privacy in TD learning with nonlinear value function approximation. This is challenging because such a nonlinear problem is usually studied in the formulation of stochastic nonconvex-strongly-concave optimization to gain finite-sample analysis, which would require simultaneously preserving the privacy on primal and dual sides. To this end, we employ a momentum-based stochastic gradient descent ascent to achieve a single-timescale algorithm, and achieve a good trade-off between meaningful privacy and utility guarantees of both the primal and dual sides by perturbing the gradients on both sides using well-calibrated Gaussian noises. As a result, our DPTD algorithm could provide $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy (DP) guarantee for the sensitive information encoded in transitions and retain the original power of TD learning, with the utility upper bounded by $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{(d\log(1/\delta))^{1/8}}{(n\epsilon)^{1/4}})$ (The tilde in this paper hides the log factor.), where $n$ is the trajectory length and $d$ is the dimension. Extensive experiments conducted in OpenAI Gym show the advantages of our proposed algorithm.
Optimal linear prediction (aka. kriging) of a random field $\{Z(x)\}_{x\in\mathcal{X}}$ indexed by a compact metric space $(\mathcal{X},d_{\mathcal{X}})$ can be obtained if the mean value function $m\colon\mathcal{X}\to\mathbb{R}$ and the covariance function $\varrho\colon\mathcal{X}\times\mathcal{X}\to\mathbb{R}$ of $Z$ are known. We consider the problem of predicting the value of $Z(x^*)$ at some location $x^*\in\mathcal{X}$ based on observations at locations $\{x_j\}_{j=1}^n$ which accumulate at $x^*$ as $n\to\infty$ (or, more generally, predicting $\varphi(Z)$ based on $\{\varphi_j(Z)\}_{j=1}^n$ for linear functionals $\varphi,\varphi_1,\ldots,\varphi_n$). Our main result characterizes the asymptotic performance of linear predictors (as $n$ increases) based on an incorrect second order structure $(\tilde{m},\tilde{\varrho})$, without any restrictive assumptions on $\varrho,\tilde{\varrho}$ such as stationarity. We, for the first time, provide necessary and sufficient conditions on $(\tilde{m},\tilde{\varrho})$ for asymptotic optimality of the corresponding linear predictor holding uniformly with respect to $\varphi$. These general results are illustrated by weakly stationary random fields on $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ with Mat\'ern or periodic covariance functions, and on the sphere $\mathcal{X}=\mathbb{S}^2$ for the case of two isotropic covariance functions.
We develop a novel procedure for estimating the optimizer of general convex stochastic optimization problems of the form $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \mathbb{E}[F(x,\xi)]$, when the given data is a finite independent sample selected according to $\xi$. The procedure is based on a median-of-means tournament, and is the first procedure that exhibits the optimal statistical performance in heavy tailed situations: we recover the asymptotic rates dictated by the central limit theorem in a non-asymptotic manner once the sample size exceeds some explicitly computable threshold. Additionally, our results apply in the high-dimensional setup, as the threshold sample size exhibits the optimal dependence on the dimension (up to a logarithmic factor). The general setting allows us to recover recent results on multivariate mean estimation and linear regression in heavy-tailed situations and to prove the first sharp, non-asymptotic results for the portfolio optimization problem.
Determining process-structure-property linkages is one of the key objectives in material science, and uncertainty quantification plays a critical role in understanding both process-structure and structure-property linkages. In this work, we seek to learn a distribution of microstructure parameters that are consistent in the sense that the forward propagation of this distribution through a crystal plasticity finite element model (CPFEM) matches a target distribution on materials properties. This stochastic inversion formulation infers a distribution of acceptable/consistent microstructures, as opposed to a deterministic solution, which expands the range of feasible designs in a probabilistic manner. To solve this stochastic inverse problem, we employ a recently developed uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework based on push-forward probability measures, which combines techniques from measure theory and Bayes rule to define a unique and numerically stable solution. This approach requires making an initial prediction using an initial guess for the distribution on model inputs and solving a stochastic forward problem. To reduce the computational burden in solving both stochastic forward and stochastic inverse problems, we combine this approach with a machine learning (ML) Bayesian regression model based on Gaussian processes and demonstrate the proposed methodology on two representative case studies in structure-property linkages.
We construct a family of genealogy-valued Markov processes that are induced by a continuous-time Markov population process. We derive exact expressions for the likelihood of a given genealogy conditional on the history of the underlying population process. These lead to a nonlinear filtering equation which can be used to design efficient Monte Carlo inference algorithms. We demonstrate these calculations with several examples. Existing full-information approaches for phylodynamic inference are special cases of the theory.
Time warping function provides a mathematical representation to measure phase variability in functional data. Recent studies have developed various approaches to estimate optimal warping between functional observations. However, a principled, generative model on time warping functions is still under-explored. This is a challenging problem because the space of warping functions is non-linear with the conventional Euclidean metric. To address this problem, we propose a stochastic process model for time warping functions, where the key is to transform the warping function space into an inner-product space with the L2 metric. With certain constraints on the warping functions, the transformation is an isometric isomorphism. In the transformed space, we adopt the L2 basis in Hilbert space for representation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new framework using three applications: (1) We build a stochastic process model on observed warping functions with estimated basis functions, and then use the model to resample warping functions. (2) The proposed model is used as a prior term in Bayesian registration, which results in reasonable alignment performance. (3) We apply the modeling framework to the Berkeley growth dataset to conduct resampling and perform statistical testing using functional ANOVA on the transformed data in Euclidean space.
We consider the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning and we show that an agent imbued with a risk-seeking utility function is able to explore efficiently, as measured by regret. The parameter that controls how risk-seeking the agent is can be optimized exactly, or annealed according to a schedule. We call the resulting algorithm K-learning and show that the corresponding K-values are optimistic for the expected Q-values at each state-action pair. The K-values induce a natural Boltzmann exploration policy for which the `temperature' parameter is equal to the risk-seeking parameter. This policy achieves an expected regret bound of $\tilde O(L^{3/2} \sqrt{S A T})$, where $L$ is the time horizon, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, and $T$ is the total number of elapsed time-steps. This bound is only a factor of $L$ larger than the established lower bound. K-learning can be interpreted as mirror descent in the policy space, and it is similar to other well-known methods in the literature, including Q-learning, soft-Q-learning, and maximum entropy policy gradient, and is closely related to optimism and count based exploration methods. K-learning is simple to implement, as it only requires adding a bonus to the reward at each state-action and then solving a Bellman equation. We conclude with a numerical example demonstrating that K-learning is competitive with other state-of-the-art algorithms in practice.