Neural oscillators, originating from the second-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs), have demonstrated competitive performance in stably learning causal mappings between long-term sequences or continuous temporal functions. However, theoretically quantifying the capacities of their neural network architectures remains a significant challenge. In this study, the neural oscillator consisting of a second-order ODE followed by a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is considered. Its upper approximation bound for approximating causal and uniformly continuous operators between continuous temporal function spaces and that for approximating uniformly asymptotically incrementally stable second-order dynamical systems are derived. The established proof method of the approximation bound for approximating the causal continuous operators can also be directly applied to state-space models consisting of a linear time-continuous complex recurrent neural network followed by an MLP. Theoretical results reveal that the approximation error of the neural oscillator for approximating the second-order dynamical systems scales polynomially with the reciprocals of the widths of two utilized MLPs, thus mitigating the curse of parametric complexity. The decay rates of two established approximation error bounds are validated through two numerical cases. These results provide a robust theoretical foundation for the effective application of the neural oscillator in science and engineering.

We obtain a new universal approximation theorem for continuous operators on arbitrary Banach spaces using the Leray-Schauder mapping. Moreover, we introduce and study a method for operator learning in Banach spaces $L^p$ of functions with multiple variables, based on orthogonal projections on polynomial bases. We derive a universal approximation result for operators where we learn a linear projection and a finite dimensional mapping under some additional assumptions. For the case of $p=2$, we give some sufficient conditions for the approximation results to hold. This article serves as the theoretical framework for a deep learning methodology whose implementation will be provided in subsequent work.

Rank aggregation with pairwise comparisons has shown promising results in elections, sports competitions, recommendations, and information retrieval. However, little attention has been paid to the security issue of such algorithms, in contrast to numerous research work on the computational and statistical characteristics. Driven by huge profits, the potential adversary has strong motivation and incentives to manipulate the ranking list. Meanwhile, the intrinsic vulnerability of the rank aggregation methods is not well studied in the literature. To fully understand the possible risks, we focus on the purposeful adversary who desires to designate the aggregated results by modifying the pairwise data in this paper. From the perspective of the dynamical system, the attack behavior with a target ranking list is a fixed point belonging to the composition of the adversary and the victim. To perform the targeted attack, we formulate the interaction between the adversary and the victim as a game-theoretic framework consisting of two continuous operators while Nash equilibrium is established. Then two procedures against HodgeRank and RankCentrality are constructed to produce the modification of the original data. Furthermore, we prove that the victims will produce the target ranking list once the adversary masters the complete information. It is noteworthy that the proposed methods allow the adversary only to hold incomplete information or imperfect feedback and perform the purposeful attack. The effectiveness of the suggested target attack strategies is demonstrated by a series of toy simulations and several real-world data experiments. These experimental results show that the proposed methods could achieve the attacker's goal in the sense that the leading candidate of the perturbed ranking list is the designated one by the adversary.

The need for high-level task planning in robotics is well understood. However, interfacing discrete planning with continuous actions often requires extensive engineering of the solution. For instance, picking up an object may require removing many others that obstruct it. Identifying the exact obstructions requires geometric reasoning which is prohibitively expensive to precompute, with results that are difficult to represent efficiently at the level of a discrete planner. We propose a new approach that utilizes representation techniques from first-order logic and provides a method for synchronizing between continuous and discrete planning layers. We evaluate the approach and illustrate its robustness through a number of experiments using a state-of-the-art robotics simulator, accomplishing a variety of challenging tasks like picking objects from cluttered environments, where the planner needs to figure out which other objects need to be moved first to be able to reach the target object, and laying out a table for dinner, where the planner figures out effective tray-loading, navigation and unloading strategies.