arXiv subjects

Stefania Ebli

Publications and source records attributed to Stefania Ebli.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Combinatorial Conditions for Directed Collapsing

The purpose of this article is to study directed collapsibility of directed Euclidean cubical complexes. One application of this is in the nontrivial task of verifying the execution of concurrent programs. The classical definition of collapsibility involves certain conditions on a pair of cubes of the complex. The direction of the space can be taken into account by requiring that the past links of vertices remain homotopy equivalent after collapsing. We call this type of collapse a link-preserving directed collapse. In this paper, we give combinatorially equivalent conditions for preserving the topology of the links, allowing for the implementation of an algorithm for collapsing a directed Euclidean cubical complex. Furthermore, we give conditions for when link-preserving directed collapses preserve the contractability and connectedness of directed path spaces, as well as examples when link-preserving directed collapses do not preserve the number of connected components of the path space between the minimum and a given vertex.

math.AT↗

arXiv2022

Morse Theoretic Signal Compression and Reconstruction on Chain Complexes

At the intersection of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and machine learning, the field of cellular signal processing has advanced rapidly in recent years. In this context, each signal on the cells of a complex is processed using the combinatorial Laplacian, and the resultant Hodge decomposition. Meanwhile, discrete Morse theory has been widely used to speed up computations by reducing the size of complexes while preserving their global topological properties. In this paper, we provide an approach to signal compression and reconstruction on chain complexes that leverages the tools of algebraic discrete Morse theory. The main goal is to reduce and reconstruct a based chain complex together with a set of signals on its cells via deformation retracts, preserving as much as possible the global topological structure of both the complex and the signals. We first prove that any deformation retract of real degree-wise finite-dimensional based chain complexes is equivalent to a Morse matching. We will then study how the signal changes under particular types of Morse matching, showing its reconstruction error is trivial on specific components of the Hodge decomposition. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm to compute Morse matchings with minimal reconstruction error.

math.AT↗

arXiv2021

Nerve theorems for fixed points of neural networks

Nonlinear network dynamics are notoriously difficult to understand. Here we study a class of recurrent neural networks called combinatorial threshold-linear networks (CTLNs) whose dynamics are determined by the structure of a directed graph. They are a special case of TLNs, a popular framework for modeling neural activity in computational neuroscience. In prior work, CTLNs were found to be surprisingly tractable mathematically. For small networks, the fixed points of the network dynamics can often be completely determined via a series of graph rules that can be applied directly to the underlying graph. For larger networks, it remains a challenge to understand how the global structure of the network interacts with local properties. In this work, we propose a method of covering graphs of CTLNs with a set of smaller directional graphs that reflect the local flow of activity. While directional graphs may or may not have a feedforward architecture, their fixed point structure is indicative of feedforward dynamics. The combinatorial structure of the graph cover is captured by the nerve of the cover. The nerve is a smaller, simpler graph that is more amenable to graphical analysis. We present three nerve theorems that provide strong constraints on the fixed points of the underlying network from the structure of the nerve. We then illustrate the power of these theorems with some examples. Remarkably, we find that the nerve not only constrains the fixed points of CTLNs, but also gives insight into the transient and asymptotic dynamics. This is because the flow of activity in the network tends to follow the edges of the nerve.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2020

Simplicial Neural Networks

We present simplicial neural networks (SNNs), a generalization of graph neural networks to data that live on a class of topological spaces called simplicial complexes. These are natural multi-dimensional extensions of graphs that encode not only pairwise relationships but also higher-order interactions between vertices - allowing us to consider richer data, including vector fields and $n$-fold collaboration networks. We define an appropriate notion of convolution that we leverage to construct the desired convolutional neural networks. We test the SNNs on the task of imputing missing data on coauthorship complexes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

A Notion of Harmonic Clustering in Simplicial Complexes

We outline a novel clustering scheme for simplicial complexes that produces clusters of simplices in a way that is sensitive to the homology of the complex. The method is inspired by, and can be seen as a higher-dimensional version of, graph spectral clustering. The algorithm involves only sparse eigenproblems, and is therefore computationally efficient. We believe that it has broad application as a way to extract features from simplicial complexes that often arise in topological data analysis.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Towards Directed Collapsibility

In the directed setting, the spaces of directed paths between fixed initial and terminal points are the defining feature for distinguishing different directed spaces. The simplest case is when the space of directed paths is homotopy equivalent to that of a single path; we call this the trivial space of directed paths. Directed spaces that are topologically trivial may have non-trivial spaces of directed paths, which means that information is lost when the direction of these topological spaces is ignored. We define a notion of directed collapsibility in the setting of a directed Euclidean cubical complex using the spaces of directed paths of the underlying directed topological space relative to an initial or a final vertex. In addition, we give sufficient conditions for a directed Euclidean cubical complex to have a contractible or a connected space of directed paths from a fixed initial vertex. We also give sufficient conditions for the path space between two vertices in a Euclidean cubical complex to be disconnected. Our results have applications to speeding up the verification process of concurrent programming and to understanding partial executions in concurrent programs.

math.AT↗