3,207 research outputs found
Tree Contractions and Evolutionary Trees
An evolutionary tree is a rooted tree where each internal vertex has at least
two children and where the leaves are labeled with distinct symbols
representing species. Evolutionary trees are useful for modeling the
evolutionary history of species. An agreement subtree of two evolutionary trees
is an evolutionary tree which is also a topological subtree of the two given
trees. We give an algorithm to determine the largest possible number of leaves
in any agreement subtree of two trees T_1 and T_2 with n leaves each. If the
maximum degree d of these trees is bounded by a constant, the time complexity
is O(n log^2(n)) and is within a log(n) factor of optimal. For general d, this
algorithm runs in O(n d^2 log(d) log^2(n)) time or alternatively in O(n d
sqrt(d) log^3(n)) time
Beyond the One Step Greedy Approach in Reinforcement Learning
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement
and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants
of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, -step and trace-based returns, have
been analyzed in previous works. However, the case of multiple-step lookahead
policy improvement, despite the recent increase in empirical evidence of its
strength, has to our knowledge not been carefully analyzed yet. In this work,
we introduce the first such analysis. Namely, we formulate variants of
multiple-step policy improvement, derive new algorithms using these definitions
and prove their convergence. Moreover, we show that recent prominent
Reinforcement Learning algorithms are, in fact, instances of our framework. We
thus shed light on their empirical success and give a recipe for deriving new
algorithms for future study.Comment: ICML 201
Cryptography from tensor problems
We describe a new proposal for a trap-door one-way function. The new proposal belongs to the "multivariate quadratic" family but the trap-door is different from existing methods, and is simpler
Many-Sources Large Deviations for Max-Weight Scheduling
In this paper, a many-sources large deviations principle (LDP) for the
transient workload of a multi-queue single-server system is established where
the service rates are chosen from a compact, convex and coordinate-convex rate
region and where the service discipline is the max-weight policy. Under the
assumption that the arrival processes satisfy a many-sources LDP, this is
accomplished by employing Garcia's extended contraction principle that is
applicable to quasi-continuous mappings.
For the simplex rate-region, an LDP for the stationary workload is also
established under the additional requirements that the scheduling policy be
work-conserving and that the arrival processes satisfy certain mixing
conditions.
The LDP results can be used to calculate asymptotic buffer overflow
probabilities accounting for the multiplexing gain, when the arrival process is
an average of \emph{i.i.d.} processes. The rate function for the stationary
workload is expressed in term of the rate functions of the finite-horizon
workloads when the arrival processes have \emph{i.i.d.} increments.Comment: 44 page
Decentralized Convergence to Nash Equilibria in Constrained Deterministic Mean Field Control
This paper considers decentralized control and optimization methodologies for
large populations of systems, consisting of several agents with different
individual behaviors, constraints and interests, and affected by the aggregate
behavior of the overall population. For such large-scale systems, the theory of
aggregative and mean field games has been established and successfully applied
in various scientific disciplines. While the existing literature addresses the
case of unconstrained agents, we formulate deterministic mean field control
problems in the presence of heterogeneous convex constraints for the individual
agents, for instance arising from agents with linear dynamics subject to convex
state and control constraints. We propose several model-free feedback
iterations to compute in a decentralized fashion a mean field Nash equilibrium
in the limit of infinite population size. We apply our methods to the
constrained linear quadratic deterministic mean field control problem and to
the constrained mean field charging control problem for large populations of
plug-in electric vehicles.Comment: IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control (cond. accepted
The role of asymptotic functions in network optimization and feasibility studies
Solutions to network optimization problems have greatly benefited from
developments in nonlinear analysis, and, in particular, from developments in
convex optimization. A key concept that has made convex and nonconvex analysis
an important tool in science and engineering is the notion of asymptotic
function, which is often hidden in many influential studies on nonlinear
analysis and related fields. Therefore, we can also expect that asymptotic
functions are deeply connected to many results in the wireless domain, even
though they are rarely mentioned in the wireless literature. In this study, we
show connections of this type. By doing so, we explain many properties of
centralized and distributed solutions to wireless resource allocation problems
within a unified framework, and we also generalize and unify existing
approaches to feasibility analysis of network designs. In particular, we show
sufficient and necessary conditions for mappings widely used in wireless
communication problems (more precisely, the class of standard interference
mappings) to have a fixed point. Furthermore, we derive fundamental bounds on
the utility and the energy efficiency that can be achieved by solving a large
family of max-min utility optimization problems in wireless networks.Comment: GlobalSIP 2017 (to appear
Computing periodic orbits using the anti-integrable limit
Chaotic dynamics can be effectively studied by continuation from an
anti-integrable limit. Using the Henon map as an example, we obtain a simple
analytical bound on the domain of existence of the horseshoe that is equivalent
to the well-known bound of Devaney and Nitecki. We also reformulate the popular
method for finding periodic orbits introduced by Biham and Wenzel. Near an
anti-integrable limit, we show that this method is guaranteed to converge. This
formulation puts the choice of symbolic dynamics, required for the algorithm,
on a firm foundation.Comment: 11 Pages Latex2e + 1 Figure (eps). Accepted for publication in
Physics Lettes
Combinatorial persistency criteria for multicut and max-cut
In combinatorial optimization, partial variable assignments are called
persistent if they agree with some optimal solution. We propose persistency
criteria for the multicut and max-cut problem as well as fast combinatorial
routines to verify them. The criteria that we derive are based on mappings that
improve feasible multicuts, respectively cuts. Our elementary criteria can be
checked enumeratively. The more advanced ones rely on fast algorithms for upper
and lower bounds for the respective cut problems and max-flow techniques for
auxiliary min-cut problems. Our methods can be used as a preprocessing
technique for reducing problem sizes or for computing partial optimality
guarantees for solutions output by heuristic solvers. We show the efficacy of
our methods on instances of both problems from computer vision, biomedical
image analysis and statistical physics
Harmonic mappings valued in the Wasserstein space
We propose a definition of the Dirichlet energy (which is roughly speaking
the integral of the square of the gradient) for mappings mu : Omega -> (P(D),
W\_2) defined over a subset Omega of R^p and valued in the space P(D) of
probability measures on a compact convex subset D of R^q endowed with the
quadratic Wasserstein distance. Our definition relies on a straightforward
generalization of the Benamou-Brenier formula (already introduced by Brenier)
but is also equivalent to the definition of Koorevaar, Schoen and Jost as limit
of approximate Dirichlet energies, and to the definition of Reshetnyak of
Sobolev spaces valued in metric spaces. We study harmonic mappings, i.e.
minimizers of the Dirichlet energy provided that the values on the boundary d
Omega are fixed. The notion of constant-speed geodesics in the Wasserstein
space is recovered by taking for Omega a segment of R. As the Wasserstein space
(P(D), W\_2) is positively curved in the sense of Alexandrov we cannot apply
the theory of Koorevaar, Schoen and Jost and we use instead arguments based on
optimal transport. We manage to get existence of harmonic mappings provided
that the boundary values are Lipschitz on d Omega, uniqueness is an open
question. If Omega is a segment of R, it is known that a curve valued in the
Wasserstein space P(D) can be seen as a superposition of curves valued in D. We
show that it is no longer the case in higher dimensions: a generic mapping
Omega -> P(D) cannot be represented as the superposition of mappings Omega ->
D. We are able to show the validity of a maximum principle: the composition
F(mu) of a function F : P(D) -> R convex along generalized geodesics and a
harmonic mapping mu : Omega -> P(D) is a subharmonic real-valued function. We
also study the special case where we restrict ourselves to a given family of
elliptically contoured distributions (a finite-dimensional and geodesically
convex submanifold of (P(D), W\_2) which generalizes the case of Gaussian
measures) and show that it boils down to harmonic mappings valued in the
Riemannian manifold of symmetric matrices endowed with the distance coming from
optimal transport
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