multivariate normal distribution
A CLT for Polynomial GNNs on Community-Based Graphs
We consider the empirical distribution of the embeddings of a $k$-layer polynomial GNN on a semi-supervised node classification task and prove a central limit theorem for them. Assuming a community based model for the underlying graph, with growing average degree $\nu_n\to\infty$, we show that the empirical distribution of the centered features, when scaled by $\nu_{n}^{k-1/2}$ converge in 1-Wasserstein distance to a centered stable mixture of multivariate normal distributions. In addition, the joint empirical distribution of uncentered features and labels when normalized by $\nu_n^k$ approach that of mixture of multivariate normal distributions, with stable means and covariance matrices vanishing as $\nu_n^{-1}$. We explicitly identify the asymptotic means and covariances, showing that the mixture collapses towards a 1-D version as $k$ is increased. Our results provides a precise and nuanced lens on how oversmoothing presents itself in the large graph limit, in the sparse regime. In particular, we show that training with cross-entropy on these embeddings is asymptotically equivalent to training on these nearly collapsed Gaussian mixtures.
Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits with Control Variates
This paper studies a new variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandits problem where auxiliary information about the arm rewards is available in the form of control variates. In many applications like queuing and wireless networks, the arm rewards are functions of some exogenous variables. The mean values of these variables are known a priori from historical data and can be used as control variates. Leveraging the theory of control variates, we obtain mean estimates with smaller variance and tighter confidence bounds. We develop an upper confidence bound based algorithm named UCB-CV and characterize the regret bounds in terms of the correlation between rewards and control variates when they follow a multivariate normal distribution. We also extend UCB-CV to other distributions using resampling methods like Jackknifing and Splitting. Experiments on synthetic problem instances validate performance guarantees of the proposed algorithms.
We thank the reviewers for their thorough reading of our work
We thank the reviewers for their thorough reading of our work. Mean Discrepancy (MMD) when the dimensionality goes to infinity. MMD provided that the summation of discrepancies between marginal univariate distributions is large enough. Our work is complementary and differs on several aspects. We will try to add a mention of this weakness in the manuscript.
High-Order Langevin Monte Carlo Algorithms
Dang, Thanh, Gurbuzbalaban, Mert, Islam, Mohammad Rafiqul, Yao, Nian, Zhu, Lingjiong
Langevin algorithms are popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for large-scale sampling problems that often arise in data science. We propose Monte Carlo algorithms based on the discretizations of $P$-th order Langevin dynamics for any $P\geq 3$. Our design of $P$-th order Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithms is by combining splitting and accurate integration methods. We obtain Wasserstein convergence guarantees for sampling from distributions with log-concave and smooth densities. Specifically, the mixing time of the $P$-th order LMC algorithm scales as $O\left(d^{\frac{1}{R}}/ε^{\frac{1}{2R}}\right)$ for $R=4\cdot 1_{\{ P=3\}}+ (2P-1)\cdot 1_{\{ P\geq 4\}}$, which has a better dependence on the dimension $d$ and the accuracy level $ε$ as $P$ grows. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms.