arXiv research

Estimate relaxation times in nonextensive systems using gradient flow for Tsallis entropy maximization.

In this work we study convex relaxations of quadratic optimisation problems over permutation matrices. While existing semidefinite programming approaches can achieve remarkably tight relaxations, they have the strong disadvantage that they lift the original $n {\times} n$-dimensional variable to an $n^2 {\times} n^2$-d…

New method improves neural network verification by considering multivariate input space of ReLU neurons.

Many high dimensional sparse learning problems are formulated as nonconvex optimization. A popular approach to solve these nonconvex optimization problems is through convex relaxations such as linear and semidefinite programming. In this paper, we study the statistical limits of convex relaxations. Particularly, we con…

The Gromov-Hausdorff distance provides a metric on the set of isometry classes of compact metric spaces. Unfortunately, computing this metric directly is believed to be computationally intractable. Motivated by applications in shape matching and point-cloud comparison, we study a semidefinite programming relaxation of …

We show that the spectral norm of a random $n_1\times n_2\times \cdots \times n_K$ tensor (or higher-order array) scales as $O\left(\sqrt{(\sum_{k=1}^{K}n_k)\log(K)}\right)$ under some sub-Gaussian assumption on the entries. The proof is based on a covering number argument. Since the spectral norm is dual to the tensor…

Statistical image reconstruction (SIR) methods are studied extensively for X-ray computed tomography (CT) due to the potential of acquiring CT scans with reduced X-ray dose while maintaining image quality. However, the longer reconstruction time of SIR methods hinders their use in X-ray CT in practice. To accelerate st…

A new method relaxes molecules without needing non-equilibrium data.

New bounds for MCMC on discrete spaces without dimension dependence.

Study uses DRL with Lagrangian relaxation to solve temporal control tasks with STL constraints.

We propose an SDP relaxation for the Gromov-Wasserstein distance, providing globally optimal solutions.

Proposes new convex relaxations for certifying spatial robustness of neural networks.

A novel method relaxes binary constraints to non-negative spheres for multi-matching and clustering.

We study the problem of controlling linear time-invariant systems with known noisy dynamics and adversarially chosen quadratic losses. We present the first efficient online learning algorithms in this setting that guarantee $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret under mild assumptions, where $T$ is the time horizon. Our algorithms rely …

We study singular stochastic control of a two dimensional stochastic differential equation, where the first component is linear with random and unbounded coefficients. We derive existence of an optimal relaxed control and necessary conditions for optimality in the form of a mixed relaxed-singular maximum principle in a…

This article provides the first procedure for computing a fully data-dependent interval that traps the mixing time $t_{\text{mix}}$ of a finite reversible ergodic Markov chain at a prescribed confidence level. The interval is computed from a single finite-length sample path from the Markov chain, and does not require t…

Verification of neural networks enables us to gauge their robustness against adversarial attacks. Verification algorithms fall into two categories: exact verifiers that run in exponential time and relaxed verifiers that are efficient but incomplete. In this paper, we unify all existing LP-relaxed verifiers, to the best…

This work optimizes RL algorithms using entropy regularisation for continuous-time LQ problems.

New algorithm solves large cardinality-constrained clustering problems.

The paper develops sum-of-squares relaxations for computing $f$-divergences.

Bounds on chemical reaction network relaxation rates using convex analysis.

GDM models time series with smoother transitions and interpretable states.

We study the relaxation dynamics of a financial market just after the occurrence of a crash by investigating the number of times the absolute value of an index return is exceeding a given threshold value. We show that the empirical observation of a power law evolution of the number of events exceeding the selected thre…

Discrete random variables are natural components of probabilistic clustering models. A number of VAE variants with discrete latent variables have been developed. Training such methods requires marginalizing over the discrete latent variables, causing training time complexity to be linear in the number clusters. By appl…

Study improves denoising score matching under relaxed manifold assumptions.

We study Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) for sampling from a strongly logconcave density proportional to $e^{-f}$ where $f:\mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ is $μ$-strongly convex and $L$-smooth (the condition number is $κ= L/μ$). We show that the relaxation time (inverse of the spectral gap) of ideal HMC is $O(κ)$, improving…

Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) involves nonconvex optimization for which the global solution is hard to obtain. To address this issue, one popular approach is convex relaxation. However, such an approach may produce suboptimal estimators due to the relaxation effect. To optimally estimate sparse principal su…

Matching correlated VAR time series databases by recovering matching permutations.

New method closes certification gap for adversarially trained models.

Near isometric orthogonal embeddings to lower dimensions are a fundamental tool in data science and machine learning. In this paper, we present the construction of such embeddings that minimizes the maximum distortion for a given set of points. We formulate the problem as a non convex constrained optimization problem. …

Algorithm learns graph ARMA processes for missing signal estimation.

We investigate relaxation and correlations in a class of mean-reverting models for stochastic variances. We derive closed-form expressions for the correlation functions and leverage for a general form of the stochastic term. We also discuss correlation functions and leverage for three specific models -- multiplicative,…

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are commonly applied to clinical time-series data with the goal of learning patient risk stratification models. Their effectiveness is due, in part, to their use of parameter sharing over time (i.e., cells are repeated hence the name recurrent). We hypothesize, however, that this trait …

New regularizers tighten convex relaxation bounds for neural networks.

Improved neural network robustness certification through tighter convex relaxations.

We propose a new topic modeling procedure that takes advantage of the fact that the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) log likelihood function is asymptotically equivalent to the logarithm of the volume of the topic simplex. This allows topic modeling to be reformulated as finding the probability simplex that minimizes …

Polynomial-time private algorithm for robust estimation of mean and covariance in the presence of outliers.

A step by step procedure to derive analytically the exact dynamical evolution equations of the probability density functions (PDF) of well known kinetic wealth exchange economic models is shown. This technique gives a dynamical insight into the evolution of the PDF, e.g., allowing the calculation of its relaxation time…

In this note we compare two recently proposed semidefinite relaxations for the sparse linear regression problem by Pilanci, Wainwright and El Ghaoui (Sparse learning via boolean relaxations, 2015) and Dong, Chen and Linderoth (Relaxation vs. Regularization A conic optimization perspective of statistical variable select…

Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, neural networks fail catastrophically in the presence of adversarial inputs---imperceptibly but adversarially perturbed versions of natural inputs. We have witnessed an arms race between defenders who attempt to train robust networks and attackers who try to constr…

This paper establishes a statistical versus computational trade-off for solving a basic high-dimensional machine learning problem via a basic convex relaxation method. Specifically, we consider the {\em Sparse Principal Component Analysis} (Sparse PCA) problem, and the family of {\em Sum-of-Squares} (SoS, aka Lasserre/…

We use high-frequency data of 1364 Chinese A-share stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange to investigate the intraday patterns in the bid-ask spreads. The daily periodicity in the spread time series is confirmed by Lomb analysis and the intraday bid-ask spreads are found to exhibit $L$…

We propose convex relaxations for convolutional neural nets with one hidden layer where the output weights are fixed. For convex activation functions such as rectified linear units, the relaxations are convex second order cone programs which can be solved very efficiently. We prove that the relaxation recovers the glob…

New method controls linear systems with adversarial disturbances.

Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference over discrete Markov random fields is a fundamental task spanning a wide spectrum of real-world applications, which is known to be NP-hard for general graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel semidefinite relaxation formulation (referred to as SDR) to estimate the MAP assignment. A…

Study bounds financial path expectations using martingale distributions.

Enhances neural architecture search efficiency and prevents performance collapse.

We analyse the dynamics of the Warsaw Stock Exchange index WIG at a daily time horizon before and after its well defined local maxima of the cusp-like shape decorated with oscillations. The rising and falling paths of the index peaks can be described by the Mittag-Leffler function superposed with various types of oscil…