We revisit the problem of computing with noisy information considered in Feige et al. 1994, which includes computing the OR function from noisy queries, and computing the MAX, SEARCH and SORT functions from noisy pairwise comparisons. For $K$ given elements, the goal is to correctly recover the desired function with probability at least $1-\delta$ when the outcome of each query is flipped with probability $p$. We consider both the adaptive sampling setting where each query can be adaptively designed based on past outcomes, and the non-adaptive sampling setting where the query cannot depend on past outcomes. The prior work provides tight bounds on the worst-case query complexity in terms of the dependence on $K$. However, the upper and lower bounds do not match in terms of the dependence on $\delta$ and $p$. We improve the lower bounds for all the four functions under both adaptive and non-adaptive query models. Most of our lower bounds match the upper bounds up to constant factors when either $p$ or $\delta$ is bounded away from $0$, while the ratio between the best prior upper and lower bounds goes to infinity when $p\rightarrow 0$ or $p\rightarrow 1/2$. On the other hand, we also provide matching upper and lower bounds for the number of queries in expectation, improving both the upper and lower bounds for the variable-length query model.
We introduce a novel monotone discretization method for addressing obstacle problems involving the integral fractional Laplacian with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions over bounded Lipschitz domains. This problem is prevalent in mathematical finance, particle systems, and elastic theory. By leveraging insights from the successful monotone discretization of the fractional Laplacian, we establish uniform boundedness, solution existence, and uniqueness for the numerical solutions of the fractional obstacle problem. We employ a policy iteration approach for efficient solution of discrete nonlinear problems and prove its finite convergence. Our improved policy iteration, adapted to solution regularity, demonstrates superior performance by modifying discretization across different regions. Numerical examples underscore the method's efficacy.
Our modern world relies on a growing number of interconnected and interacting devices, leading to a plethora of logs establishing audit trails for all kinds of events. Simultaneously, logs become increasingly important for forensic investigations, and thus, an adversary will aim to alter logs to avoid culpability, e.g., by compromising devices that generate and store logs. Thus, it is essential to ensure that no one can tamper with any logs without going undetected. However, existing approaches to establish tamper evidence of logs do not scale and cannot protect the increasingly large number of devices found today, as they impose large storage or network overheads. Additionally, most schemes do not provide an efficient mechanism to prove that individual events have been logged to establish accountability when different devices interact. This paper introduces a novel scheme for practical large-scale tamper-evident logging with the help of a trusted third party. To achieve this, we present a new binary hash tree construction designed around timestamps to achieve constant storage overhead with a configured temporal resolution. Additionally, our design enables the efficient construction of shareable proofs, proving that an event was indeed logged. Our evaluation shows that - using practical parameters - our scheme can localize any tampering of logs with a sub-second resolution, with a constant overhead of ~8KB per hour per device.
Efficient and timely calculations of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are essential for emerging technologies like autonomous driving, the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing. One of the primary ML algorithms used in such systems is Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which demand high computational resources. This requirement has led to the use of ML accelerators like GPGPUs to meet design constraints. However, selecting the most suitable accelerator involves Design Space Exploration (DSE), a process that is usually time-consuming and requires significant manual effort. Our work presents approaches to expedite the DSE process by identifying the most appropriate GPGPU for CNN inferencing systems. We have developed a quick and precise technique for forecasting the power and performance of CNNs during inference, with a MAPE of 5.03% and 5.94%, respectively. Our approach empowers computer architects to estimate power and performance in the early stages of development, reducing the necessity for numerous prototypes. This saves time and money while also improving the time-to-market period.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of comparable size? Furthermore, from among all solutions that fit the training data, how does GD find one that generalizes well (when such a well-generalizing solution exists)? We argue that the answer to both questions lies in the interaction of the gradients of different examples during training. Intuitively, if the per-example gradients are well-aligned, that is, if they are coherent, then one may expect GD to be (algorithmically) stable, and hence generalize well. We formalize this argument with an easy to compute and interpretable metric for coherence, and show that the metric takes on very different values on real and random datasets for several common vision networks. The theory also explains a number of other phenomena in deep learning, such as why some examples are reliably learned earlier than others, why early stopping works, and why it is possible to learn from noisy labels. Moreover, since the theory provides a causal explanation of how GD finds a well-generalizing solution when one exists, it motivates a class of simple modifications to GD that attenuate memorization and improve generalization. Generalization in deep learning is an extremely broad phenomenon, and therefore, it requires an equally general explanation. We conclude with a survey of alternative lines of attack on this problem, and argue that the proposed approach is the most viable one on this basis.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
Knowledge graphs capture interlinked information between entities and they represent an attractive source of structured information that can be harnessed for recommender systems. However, existing recommender engines use knowledge graphs by manually designing features, do not allow for end-to-end training, or provide poor scalability. Here we propose Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks (KGCN), an end-to-end trainable framework that harnesses item relationships captured by the knowledge graph to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, KGCN computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relations for a given user and then transforming the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph. Then, KGCN applies a graph convolutional neural network that computes an embedding of an item node by propagating and aggregating knowledge graph neighborhood information. Moreover, to provide better inductive bias KGCN uses label smoothness (LS), which provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, We unify KGCN and LS regularization, and present a scalable minibatch implementation for KGCN-LS model. Experiments show that KGCN-LS outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. KGCN-LS also achieves great performance in sparse scenarios and is highly scalable with respect to the knowledge graph size.
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.