The representativeness of synthetic pre-crash scenarios is crucial for assessing the safety impact of Driving Automation Systems through virtual simulations. However, a gap remains in the robust evaluation of synthetic pre-crash scenarios' practical equivalence to their real-world counterparts; that is, whether they are similar enough for the intended assessment purpose. Conventional significance testing is inadequate, as it focuses on detecting differences rather than establishing practical equivalence. This study addresses the research gap by extending our previous work on a Bayesian Region of Practical Equivalence (ROPE)-based equivalence testing framework by introducing a binning-based approach to define appropriate statistics and equivalence criteria. Two binning-based statistics are proposed to measure practically meaningful distributional differences between datasets in the context of safety impact assessment. The framework's applicability is demonstrated through a case study, which tests the practical equivalence of two synthetic rear-end pre-crash datasets with a previously developed reference dataset in the context of the safety impact assessment of an Automatic Emergency
Efficient global optimization (EGO) is one of the most widely used noise-free Bayesian optimization algorithms.It comprises the Gaussian process (GP) surrogate model and expected improvement (EI) acquisition function. In practice, when EGO is applied, a scalar matrix of a small positive value (also called a nugget or jitter) is usually added to the covariance matrix of the deterministic GP to improve numerical stability. We refer to this EGO with a positive nugget as the practical EGO. Despite its wide adoption and empirical success, to date, cumulative regret bounds for practical EGO have yet to be established. In this paper, we present for the first time the cumulative regret upper bound of practical EGO. In particular, we show that practical EGO has sublinear cumulative regret bounds and thus is a no-regret algorithm for commonly used kernels including the squared exponential (SE) and Matérn kernels ($ν>\frac{1}{2}$). Moreover, we analyze the effect of the nugget on the regret bound and discuss the theoretical implication on its choice. Numerical experiments are conducted to support and validate our findings.
We demonstrate a practical countermeasure against a well-known class of attacks on quantum key distribution (QKD) systems that exploit detection efficiency mismatch, where the receiver's detectors do not exhibit identical responses to incoming photons across all degrees of freedom. This class of quantum hacking strategies is broad and significantly includes the time-shift attack, which targets an arrival-time-dependent side channel at the receiver. The four-state countermeasure, previously only proven to be secure in theory, is implemented here on a GHz-clocked prototype QKD system and evaluated for its security and performance. We show that its presence enables almost complete recovery of the system's ideal secret key rate. Our results provide strong justification for adopting this countermeasure as a standard component in future scalable and practical QKD systems.
There is an ongoing and dedicated effort to estimate bounds on the generalization error of deep learning models, coupled with an increasing interest with practical metrics that can be used to experimentally evaluate a model's ability to generalize. This interest is not only driven by practical considerations but is also vital for theoretical research, as theoretical estimations require practical validation. However, there is currently a lack of research on benchmarking the generalization capacity of various deep networks and verifying these theoretical estimations. This paper aims to introduce a practical generalization metric for benchmarking different deep networks and proposes a novel testbed for the verification of theoretical estimations. Our findings indicate that a deep network's generalization capacity in classification tasks is contingent upon both classification accuracy and the diversity of unseen data. The proposed metric system is capable of quantifying the accuracy of deep learning models and the diversity of data, providing an intuitive and quantitative evaluation method, a trade-off point. Furthermore, we compare our practical metric with existing generalization the
We develop a practical framework for livelock analysis in self-disabling unidirectional ring protocols. Klinkhamer and Ebnenasir established that livelock detection for parameterized rings is $Σ^0_1$-complete and livelock-freedom verification is $Π^0_1$-complete, via reduction from the periodic domino problem. We observe that lifting the analysis from the transition space to an \emph{equivariant product space} -- the space of transition-witness pairs -- reveals structure that supports effective verification. We construct a \emph{product transition graph} (at most $|T|^2$ nodes) that captures all livelocks: every livelock maps into this graph as a witness-closed subgraph. The maximal such subgraph $G^*(T)$ is computable in polynomial time ($O(|T|^8)$ worst case) via monotone fixed-point iteration. When $G^*(T) = \emptyset$, the protocol is \emph{provably livelock-free} for all ring sizes -- a sound and complete livelock-freedom verifier. When $G^*(T) eq \emptyset$, we apply a backtracking search that backward-propagates each simple cycle through $G^*$ until the chain either closes into a torus (confirming a livelock) or dies (no livelock from that cycle). This two-phase algorithm -
Realizing practical quantum advantage with meaningful economic impact is the holy grail of the quantum information field. Recent quantum technology advances have driven exponential growth in quantum information research, with resultant publications achieving significantly elevated impact. Within academia, citation counts serve as a key metric for evaluating research impact, often directly influencing career advancement and compensation structures. Motivated by these observations, we propose a potential protocol for practical quantum advantage in boosting citations.
As computational analysis becomes increasingly more complex in health research, transparent sharing of analytical code is vital for reproducibility and trust. This practical guide, aligned to open science practices, outlines actionable recommendations for code sharing in healthcare research. Emphasising the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, the authors address common barriers and provide clear guidance to help make code more robust, reusable, and scrutinised as part of the scientific record. This supports better science and more reliable evidence for computationally-driven practice and helps to adhere to new standards and guidelines of codesharing mandated by publishers and funding bodies.
Identifiability of a mathematical model plays a crucial role in parameterization of the model. In this study, we establish the structural identifiability of a Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) model given different combinations of input data and investigate practical identifiability with respect to different observable data, data frequency, and noise distributions. The practical identifiability is explored by both Monte Carlo simulations and a Correlation Matrix approach. Our results show that practical identifiability benefits from higher data frequency and data from the peak of an outbreak. The incidence data gives the best practical identifiability results compared to prevalence and cumulative data. In addition, we compare and distinguish the practical identifiability by Monte Carlo simulations and a Correlation Matrix approach, providing insights for when to use which method for other applications.
Practical numbers are positive integers $n$ such that every positive integer less than or equal to $n$ can be written as a sum of distinct positive divisors of $n$. In this paper, we show that all positive integers can be written as a sum of a practical number and a triangular number, resolving a conjecture by Sun. We also show that all sufficiently large natural numbers can be written as a sum of a practical number and two $s$-gonal numbers.
A positive integer $n$ is said to be a practical number if every integer in $[1,n]$ can be represented as the sum of distinct divisors of $n$. In this article, we consider practical numbers of a given polynomial form. We give a necessary and sufficient condition on coefficients $a$ and $b$ for there to be infinitely many practical numbers of the form $an+b$. We also give a necessary and sufficient for a quadratic polynomial to contain infinitely many practical numbers, using which we solve first part of a conjecture mentioned in [9]. In the final section, we prove that every number of $8k+1$ form can be expressed as a sum of a practical number and a square, and for every $j\in \{0,\ldots,7\}\setminus \{1\}$ there are infinitely many natural numbers of $8k+j$ form which cannot be written as sum of a square and a practical number.
Fair representation learning (FRL) is a popular class of methods aiming to produce fair classifiers via data preprocessing. Recent regulatory directives stress the need for FRL methods that provide practical certificates, i.e., provable upper bounds on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on preprocessed data, which directly provides assurance in a practical scenario. Creating such FRL methods is an important challenge that remains unsolved. In this work, we address that challenge and introduce FARE (Fairness with Restricted Encoders), the first FRL method with practical fairness certificates. FARE is based on our key insight that restricting the representation space of the encoder enables the derivation of practical guarantees, while still permitting favorable accuracy-fairness tradeoffs for suitable instantiations, such as one we propose based on fair trees. To produce a practical certificate, we develop and apply a statistical procedure that computes a finite sample high-confidence upper bound on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on FARE embeddings. In our comprehensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that FARE produces practical certific
Let $A$ be a set of positive integers. We define a positive integer $n$ as an $A$-practical number if every positive integer from the set $\left\{1,\ldots ,\sum_{d\in A, d\mid n}d\right\}$ can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of $n$ that belong to $A$. Denote the set of $A$-practical numbers as $\text{Pr}(A)$. The aim of the paper is to explore the properties of the sets $\text{Pr}(A)$ (the form of the elements, cardinality) as $A$ varies over the power set of $\mathbb{N}$. We are also interested in the set-theoretic and dynamic properties of the mapping $\mathcal{PR}:\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N}) i A\mapsto\text{Pr}(A)\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N})$.
There is a general agreement that it is important to consider the practical relevance of an effect in addition to its statistical significance, yet a formal definition of practical relevance is still pending and shall be provided within this paper. It appears that an underlying decision problem, characterized by actions and a loss function, is required to define the notion of practical relevance, rendering it a decision theoretic concept. In the context of hypothesis-based analyses, the notion of practical relevance relates to specifying the hypotheses reasonably, such that the null hypothesis does not contain only a single parameter null value, but also all parameter values that are equivalent to the null value on a practical level. In that regard, the definition of practical relevance is also extended into the context of hypotheses. The formal elaborations on the notion of practical relevance within this paper indicate that, typically, a specific decision problem is implicitly assumed when dealing with the practical relevance of an effect or some results. As a consequence, involving decision theoretic considerations into a statistical analysis suggests itself by the mere nature o
Different prediction models might perform equally well (Rashomon set) in the same task, but offer conflicting interpretations and conclusions about the data. The Rashomon effect in the context of Explainable AI (XAI) has been recognized as a critical factor. Although the Rashomon set has been introduced and studied in various contexts, its practical application is at its infancy stage and lacks adequate guidance and evaluation. We study the problem of the Rashomon set sampling from a practical viewpoint and identify two fundamental axioms - generalizability and implementation sparsity that exploring methods ought to satisfy in practical usage. These two axioms are not satisfied by most known attribution methods, which we consider to be a fundamental weakness. We use the norms to guide the design of an $ε$-subgradient-based sampling method. We apply this method to a fundamental mathematical problem as a proof of concept and to a set of practical datasets to demonstrate its ability compared with existing sampling methods.
Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into multiple categories: human-based, optimization-based, generation-based, and the recent indirect and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delays to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM as a defense instance (in detection state) to concurrently protect the target LLM instance (in normal answering state) in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs can identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using mainstream GPT-3.5/4 models against major jailbreak attacks. To fur
Passive human speed estimation plays a critical role in acoustic sensing. Despite extensive study, existing systems, however, suffer from various limitations: First, the channel measurement rate proves inadequate to estimate high moving speeds. Second, previous acoustic speed estimation exploits Doppler Frequency Shifts (DFS) created by moving targets and relies on microphone arrays, making them only capable of sensing the radial speed within a constrained distance. To overcome these issues, we present ASE, an accurate and robust Acoustic Speed Estimation system on a single commodity microphone. We propose a novel Orthogonal Time-Delayed Multiplexing (OTDM) scheme for acoustic channel estimation at a high rate that was previously infeasible, making it possible to estimate high speeds. We then model the sound propagation from a unique perspective of the acoustic diffusion field, and infer the speed from the acoustic spatial distribution, a completely different way of thinking about speed estimation beyond prior DFS-based approaches. We further develop novel techniques for motion detection and signal enhancement to deliver a robust and practical system. We implement and evaluate ASE
A positive integer $n$ is practical if every $m \leq n$ can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of $n$. One can generalize the concept of practical numbers by applying an arithmetic function $f$ to each of the divisors of $n$ and asking whether all integers in a given interval can be expressed as sums of $f(d)$'s, where the $d$'s are distinct divisors of $n$. We will refer to such $n$ as `$f$-practical.' In this paper, we introduce the $f$-practical numbers for the first time. We give criteria for when all $f$-practical numbers can be constructed via a simple necessary-and-sufficient condition, demonstrate that it is possible to construct $f$-practical sets with any asymptotic density, and prove a series of results related to the distribution of $f$-practical numbers for many well-known arithmetic functions $f$.
Following Srinivasan, an integer n\geq 1 is called practical if every natural number in [1,n] can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of n. This motivates us to define f(n) as the largest integer with the property that all of 1, 2, 3,..., f(n) can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of n. (Thus, n is practical precisely when f(n)\geq n.) We think of f(n) as measuring the "practicality" of n; large values of f correspond to numbers n which we term practical pretenders. Our first theorem describes the distribution of these impostors: Uniformly for 4 \leq y \leq x, #{n\leq x: f(n)\geq y} \asymp \frac{x}{\log{y}}. This generalizes Saias's result that the count of practical numbers in [1,x] is \asymp \frac{x}{\log{x}}. Next, we investigate the maximal order of f when restricted to non-practical inputs. Strengthening a theorem of Hausman and Shapiro, we show that every n > 3 for which f(n) \geq \sqrt{e^γ n\log\log{n}} is a practical number. Finally, we study the range of f. Call a number m belonging to the range of f an additive endpoint. We show that for each fixed A >0 and ε> 0, the number of additive endpoints in [1,x] is eventually smaller than x/(\log{x})^A but la
We introduce a type of safe extremum seeking (ES) controller, which minimizes an unknown objective function while also maintaining practical positivity of an unknown barrier function. We show semi-global practical asymptotic stability of our algorithm and present an analogous notion of practical safety. The dynamics of the controller are inspired by the quadratic program (QP) based safety filter designs which, in the literature, are more commonly used in cases where the barrier function is known. Conditions on the barrier and objective function are explored showing that non convex problems can be solved. A Lyapunov argument is proposed to achieve the main results of the paper. Finally, an example is given of the algorithm which solves the constrained optimization problem.
Algorithms for continuous optimization problems have a rich history of design and innovation over the past several decades, in which mathematical analysis of their convergence and complexity properties plays a central role. Besides their theoretical properties, optimization algorithms are interesting also for their practical usefulness as computational tools for solving real-world problems. There are often gaps between the practical performance of an algorithm and what can be proved about it. These two facets of the field -- the theoretical and the practical -- interact in fascinating ways, each driving innovation in the other. This work focuses on the development of algorithms in two areas -- linear programming and unconstrained minimization of smooth functions -- outlining major algorithm classes in each area along with their theoretical properties and practical performance, and highlighting how advances in theory and practice have influenced each other in these areas. In discussing theory, we focus mainly on non-asymptotic complexity, which are upper bounds on the amount of computation required by a given algorithm to find an approximate solution of problems in a given class.