Influence maximization (IM) is a crucial optimization task related to analyzing complex networks in the real world, such as social networks, disease propagation networks, and marketing networks. Publications to date about the IM problem focus mainly on graphs, which fail to capture high-order interaction relationships from the real world. Therefore, the use of hypergraphs for addressing the IM problem has been receiving increasing attention. However, identifying the most influential nodes in hypergraphs remains challenging, mainly because nodes and hyperedges are often strongly coupled and correlated. In this paper, to effectively identify the most influential nodes, we first propose a novel hypergraph-independent cascade model that integrates the influences of both node and hyperedge failures. Afterward, we introduce genetic algorithms (GA) to identify the most influential nodes that leverage hypergraph collective influences. In the GA-based method, the hypergraph collective influence is effectively used to initialize the population, thereby enhancing the quality of initial candidate solutions. The designed fitness function considers the joint influences of both nodes and hyperedges. This ensures the optimal set of nodes with the best influence on both nodes and hyperedges to be evaluated accurately. Moreover, a new mutation operator is designed by introducing factors, i.e., the collective influence and overlapping effects of nodes in hypergraphs, to breed high-quality offspring. In the experiments, several simulations on both synthetic and real hypergraphs have been conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the compared methods.
Neural networks often operate in the overparameterized regime, in which there are far more parameters than training samples, allowing the training data to be fit perfectly. That is, training the network effectively learns an interpolating function, and properties of the interpolant affect predictions the network will make on new samples. This manuscript explores how properties of such functions learned by neural networks of depth greater than two layers. Our framework considers a family of networks of varying depths that all have the same capacity but different representation costs. The representation cost of a function induced by a neural network architecture is the minimum sum of squared weights needed for the network to represent the function; it reflects the function space bias associated with the architecture. Our results show that adding additional linear layers to the input side of a shallow ReLU network yields a representation cost favoring functions with low mixed variation - that is, it has limited variation in directions orthogonal to a low-dimensional subspace and can be well approximated by a single- or multi-index model. Such functions may be represented by the composition of a function with low two-layer representation cost and a low-rank linear operator. Our experiments confirm this behavior in standard network training regimes. They additionally show that linear layers can improve generalization and the learned network is well-aligned with the true latent low-dimensional linear subspace when data is generated using a multi-index model.
Interest in spiking neural networks (SNNs) has been growing steadily, promising an energy-efficient alternative to formal neural networks (FNNs), commonly known as artificial neural networks (ANNs). Despite increasing interest, especially for Edge applications, these event-driven neural networks suffered from their difficulty to be trained compared to FNNs. To alleviate this problem, a number of innovative methods have been developed to provide performance more or less equivalent to that of FNNs. However, the spiking activity of a network during inference is usually not considered. While SNNs may usually have performance comparable to that of FNNs, it is often at the cost of an increase of the network's activity, thus limiting the benefit of using them as a more energy-efficient solution. In this paper, we propose to leverage Knowledge Distillation (KD) for SNNs training with surrogate gradient descent in order to optimize the trade-off between performance and spiking activity. Then, after understanding why KD led to an increase in sparsity, we also explored Activations regularization and proposed a novel method with Logits Regularization. These approaches, validated on several datasets, clearly show a reduction in network spiking activity (-26.73% on GSC and -14.32% on CIFAR-10) while preserving accuracy.
Leveraging the computing and sensing capabilities of vehicles, vehicular federated learning (VFL) has been applied to edge training for connected vehicles. The dynamic and interconnected nature of vehicular networks presents unique opportunities to harness direct vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, enhancing VFL training efficiency. In this paper, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the VFL training performance, considering the energy constraints and mobility of vehicles, and propose a V2V-enhanced dynamic scheduling (VEDS) algorithm to solve it. The model aggregation requirements of VFL and the limited transmission time due to mobility result in a stepwise objective function, which presents challenges in solving the problem. We thus propose a derivative-based drift-plus-penalty method to convert the long-term stochastic optimization problem to an online mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and provide a theoretical analysis to bound the performance gap between the online solution and the offline optimal solution. Further analysis of the scheduling priority reduces the original problem into a set of convex optimization problems, which are efficiently solved using the interior-point method. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art benchmarks, the proposed algorithm enhances the image classification accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset by 3.18% and reduces the average displacement errors on the Argoverse trajectory prediction dataset by 10.21%.
Robust estimation of the essential matrix, which encodes the relative position and orientation of two cameras, is a fundamental step in structure from motion pipelines. Recent deep-based methods achieved accurate estimation by using complex network architectures that involve graphs, attention layers, and hard pruning steps. Here, we propose a simpler network architecture based on Deep Sets. Given a collection of point matches extracted from two images, our method identifies outlier point matches and models the displacement noise in inlier matches. A weighted DLT module uses these predictions to regress the essential matrix. Our network achieves accurate recovery that is superior to existing networks with significantly more complex architectures.
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a crucial area of research that involves understanding human movements using computer and machine vision technology. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for this task, with models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers being employed to capture various aspects of human motion. One of the key contributions of this work is the demonstration of the effectiveness of feature fusion in improving HAR accuracy by capturing spatial and temporal features, which has important implications for the development of more accurate and robust activity recognition systems. The study uses sensory data from HuGaDB, PKU-MMD, LARa, and TUG datasets. Two model, the PO-MS-GCN and a Transformer were trained and evaluated, with PO-MS-GCN outperforming state-of-the-art models. HuGaDB and TUG achieved high accuracies and f1-scores, while LARa and PKU-MMD had lower scores. Feature fusion improved results across datasets.
Accurate estimation of queuing delays is crucial for designing and optimizing communication networks, particularly in the context of Deterministic Networking (DetNet) scenarios. This study investigates the approximation of Internet queuing delays using an M/M/1 envelope model, which provides a simple methodology to find tight upper bounds of real delay percentiles. Real traffic statistics collected at large Internet Exchange Points (like Amsterdam and San Francisco) have been used to fit polynomial regression models for transforming packet queuing delays into the M/M/1 envelope models. We finally propose a methodology for providing delay percentiles in DetNet scenarios where tight latency guarantees need to be assured.
One of the most natural approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation is value iteration, which inductively generates approximations to the optimal value function by solving a sequence of regression problems. To ensure the success of value iteration, it is typically assumed that Bellman completeness holds, which ensures that these regression problems are well-specified. We study the problem of learning an optimal policy under Bellman completeness in the online model of RL with linear function approximation. In the linear setting, while statistically efficient algorithms are known under Bellman completeness (e.g., Jiang et al. (2017); Zanette et al. (2020)), these algorithms all rely on the principle of global optimism which requires solving a nonconvex optimization problem. In particular, it has remained open as to whether computationally efficient algorithms exist. In this paper we give the first polynomial-time algorithm for RL under linear Bellman completeness when the number of actions is any constant.
The ultimate goal of next generation multiple access (NGMA) is to support massive terminals and facilitate multiple functionalities over the limited radio resources of wireless networks in the most efficient manner possible. However, the random and uncontrollable wireless radio environment is a major obstacle to realizing this NGMA vision. Given the prominent feature of achieving 360{\deg} smart radio environment, simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surfaces (STARS) are emerging as one key enabling technology among the family of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for NGMA. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent research progress of STARS, focusing on fundamentals, performance analysis, and full-space beamforming design, as well as promising employments of STARS in NGMA. In particular, we first introduce the basics of STARS by elaborating on the foundational principles and operating protocols as well as discussing different STARS categories and prototypes. Moreover, we systematically survey the existing performance analysis and beamforming design for STARS-aided wireless communications in terms of diverse objectives and different mathematical approaches. Given the superiority of STARS, we further discuss advanced STARS applications as well as the attractive interplay between STARS and other emerging techniques to motivate future works for realizing efficient NGMA.
Signed networks, characterized by edges labeled as either positive or negative, offer nuanced insights into interaction dynamics beyond the capabilities of unsigned graphs. Central to this is the task of identifying the maximum balanced subgraph, crucial for applications like polarized community detection in social networks and portfolio analysis in finance. Traditional models, however, are limited by an assumption of perfect partitioning, which fails to mirror the complexities of real-world data. Addressing this gap, we introduce an innovative generalized balanced subgraph model that incorporates tolerance for irregularities. Our proposed region-based heuristic algorithm, tailored for this NP-hard problem, strikes a balance between low time complexity and high-quality outcomes. Comparative experiments validate its superior performance against leading solutions, delivering enhanced effectiveness (notably larger subgraph sizes) and efficiency (achieving up to 100x speedup) in both traditional and generalized contexts.
Interest in bilevel optimization has grown in recent years, partially due to its applications to tackle challenging machine-learning problems. Several exciting recent works have been centered around developing efficient gradient-based algorithms that can solve bilevel optimization problems with provable guarantees. However, the existing literature mainly focuses on bilevel problems either without constraints, or featuring only simple constraints that do not couple variables across the upper and lower levels, excluding a range of complex applications. Our paper studies this challenging but less explored scenario and develops a (fully) first-order algorithm, which we term BLOCC, to tackle BiLevel Optimization problems with Coupled Constraints. We establish rigorous convergence theory for the proposed algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on two well-known real-world applications - hyperparameter selection in support vector machine (SVM) and infrastructure planning in transportation networks using the real data from the city of Seville.