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Topological Attention for Time Series Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

The problem of (point) forecasting univariate time series is considered. Most approaches, ranging from traditional statistical methods to recent learning-based techniques with neural networks, directly operate on raw time series observations. As an extension, we study whether local topological properties, as captured via persistent homology, can serve as a reliable signal that provides complementary information for learning to forecast. To this end, we propose topological attention, which allows attending to local topological features within a time horizon of historical data. Our approach easily integrates into existing end-to-end trainable forecasting models, such as N-BEATS, and, in combination with the latter, exhibits state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale M4 benchmark dataset of 100,000 diverse time series from different domains. Ablation experiments, as well as a comparison to a broad range of forecasting methods in a setting where only a single time series is available for training, corroborate the beneficial nature of including local topological information through an attention mechanism.


Heterogeneous Multi-player Multi-armed Bandits: Closing the Gap and Generalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite the significant interests and many progresses in decentralized multi-player multi-armed bandits (MP-MAB) problems in recent years, the regret gap to the natural centralized lower bound in the heterogeneous MP-MAB setting remains open. In this paper, we propose BEACON - Batched Exploration with Adaptive COmmunicatioN - that closes this gap. BEACON accomplishes this goal with novel contributions in implicit communication and efficient exploration. For the former, we propose a novel adaptive differential communication (ADC) design that significantly improves the implicit communication efficiency. For the latter, a carefully crafted batched exploration scheme is developed to enable incorporation of the combinatorial upper confidence bound (CUCB) principle. We then generalize the existing linear-reward MP-MAB problems, where the system reward is always the sum of individually collected rewards, to a new MP-MAB problem where the system reward is a general (nonlinear) function of individual rewards. We extend BEACON to solve this problem and prove a logarithmic regret. BEACON bridges the algorithm design and regret analysis of combinatorial MAB (CMAB) and MP-MAB, two largely disjointed areas in MAB, and the results in this paper suggest that this previously ignored connection is worth further investigation.


Improved Coresets and Sublinear Algorithms for Power Means in Euclidean Spaces Vincent Cohen-Addad David Saulpic Chris Schwiegelshohn

Neural Information Processing Systems

Special cases of problem include the well-known Fermat-Weber problem - or geometric median problem - where z = 1, the mean or centroid where z = 2, and the Minimum Enclosing Ball problem, where z = . We consider these problem in the big data regime. Here, we are interested in sampling as few points as possible such that we can accurately estimate m. More specifically, we consider sublinear algorithms as well as coresets for these problems. Sublinear algorithms have a random query access to the set A and the goal is to minimize the number of queries.


C2FAR: Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Networks for Precise Probabilistic Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

C2FAR generates a hierarchical, coarse-to-fine discretization of a variable autoregressively; progressively finer intervals of support are generated from a sequence of binned distributions, where each distribution is conditioned on previously-generated coarser intervals. Unlike prior (flat) binned distributions, C2FAR can represent values with exponentially higher precision, for only a linear increase in complexity. We use C2FAR for probabilistic forecasting via a recurrent neural network, thus modeling time series autoregressively in both space and time. C2FAR is the first method to simultaneously handle discrete and continuous series of arbitrary scale and distribution shape. This flexibility enables a variety of time series use cases, including anomaly detection, interpolation, and compression. C2FAR achieves improvements over the state-of-the-art on several benchmark forecasting datasets.


A Tight Lower Bound and Efficient Reduction for Swap Regret

Neural Information Processing Systems

Swap regret, a generic performance measure of online decision-making algorithms, plays an important role in the theory of repeated games, along with a close connection to correlated equilibria in strategic games. This paper shows an (p TN log N)-lower bound for swap regret, where T and N denote the numbers of time steps and available actions, respectively. Our lower bound is tight up to a constant, and resolves an open problem mentioned, e.g., in the book by Nisan et al. [28]. Besides, we present a computationally efficient reduction method that converts no-external-regret algorithms to no-swap-regret algorithms. This method can be applied not only to the full-information setting but also to the bandit setting and provides a better regret bound than previous results.


Efficient Streaming Algorithms for Graphlet Sampling Marco Bressan Cispa Helmholtz Center for Information Security Department of Computer Science Saarland University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Given a graph G and a positive integer k, the Graphlet Sampling problem asks to sample a connected induced k-vertex subgraph of G uniformly at random. Graphlet sampling enhances machine learning applications by transforming graph structures into feature vectors for tasks such as graph classification and subgraph identification, boosting neural network performance, and supporting clustered federated learning by capturing local structures and relationships.


Feature-fortified Unrestricted Graph Alignment

Neural Information Processing Systems

The necessity to align two graphs, minimizing a structural distance metric, is prevalent in biology, chemistry, recommender systems, and social network analysis. Due to the problem's NP-hardness, prevailing graph alignment methods follow a modular and mediated approach, solving the problem restricted to the domain of intermediary graph representations or products like embeddings, spectra, and graph signals. Restricting the problem to this intermediate space may distort the original problem and are hence predisposed to miss high-quality solutions.


AR-Pro: Counterfactual Explanations for Anomaly Repair with Formal Properties

Neural Information Processing Systems

Anomaly detection is widely used for identifying critical errors and suspicious behaviors, but current methods lack interpretability. We leverage common properties of existing methods and recent advances in generative models to introduce counterfactual explanations for anomaly detection. Given an input, we generate its counterfactual as a diffusion-based repair that shows what a non-anomalous version should have looked like. A key advantage of this approach is that it enables a domain-independent formal specification of explainability desiderata, offering a unified framework for generating and evaluating explanations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our anomaly explainability framework, AR-Pro, on vision (MVTec, VisA) and time-series (SWaT, WADI, HAI) anomaly datasets. The code used for the experiments is accessible at: https://github.com/xjiae/arpro.


Mixture of Link Predictors on Graphs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Link prediction, which aims to forecast unseen connections in graphs, is a fundamental task in graph machine learning. Heuristic methods, leveraging a range of different pairwise measures such as common neighbors and shortest paths, often rival the performance of vanilla Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Therefore, recent advancements in GNNs for link prediction (GNN4LP) have primarily focused on integrating one or a few types of pairwise information. In this work, we reveal that different node pairs within the same dataset necessitate varied pairwise information for accurate prediction and models that only apply the same pairwise information uniformly could achieve suboptimal performance. As a result, we propose a simple mixture of experts model Link-MoE for link prediction. Link-MoE utilizes various GNNs as experts and strategically selects the appropriate expert for each node pair based on various types of pairwise information. Experimental results across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate substantial performance improvement from Link-MoE. Notably, Link-MoE achieves a relative improvement of 18.71% on the MRR metric for the Pubmed dataset and 9.59% on the Hits@100 metric for the ogbl-ppa dataset, compared to the best baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ml-ml/Link-MoE/.