Graph representation learning (also called graph embeddings) is a popular technique for incorporating network structure into machine learning models. Unsupervised graph embedding methods aim to capture graph structure by learning a low-dimensional vector representation (the embedding) for each node. Despite the widespread use of these embeddings for a variety of downstream transductive machine learning tasks, there is little principled analysis of the effectiveness of this approach for common tasks. In this work, we provide an empirical and theoretical analysis for the performance of a class of embeddings on the common task of pairwise community labeling. This is a binary variant of the classic community detection problem, which seeks to build a classifier to determine whether a pair of vertices participate in a community. In line with our goal of foundational understanding, we focus on a popular class of unsupervised embedding techniques that learn low rank factorizations of a vertex proximity matrix (this class includes methods like GraRep, Deep-Walk, node2vec, NetMF). We perform detailed empirical analysis for community labeling over a variety of real and synthetic graphs with ground truth. In all cases we studied, the models trained from embedding features perform poorly on community labeling. In constrast, a simple logistic model with classic graph structural features handily outperforms the embedding models. For a more principled understanding, we provide a theoretical analysis for the (in)effectiveness of these embeddings in capturing the community structure. We formally prove that popular low-dimensional factorization methods either cannot produce community structure, or can only produce “unstable” communities. These communities are inherently unstable under small perturbations. This theoretical result suggests that even though “good” factorizations exist, they are unlikely to be found by computational methods.

We introduce the zip tree , 1 a form of randomized binary search tree that integrates previous ideas into one practical, performant, and pleasant-to-implement package. A zip tree is a binary search tree in which each node has a numeric rank and the tree is (max)-heap-ordered with respect to ranks, with rank ties broken in favor of smaller keys. Zip trees are essentially treaps [8], except that ranks are drawn from a geometric distribution instead of a uniform distribution, and we allow rank ties. These changes enable us to use fewer random bits per node. We perform insertions and deletions by unmerging and merging paths ( unzipping and zipping ) rather than by doing rotations, which avoids some pointer changes and improves efficiency. The methods of zipping and unzipping take inspiration from previous top-down approaches to insertion and deletion by Stephenson [10], Martínez and Roura [5], and Sprugnoli [9]. From a theoretical standpoint, this work provides two main results. First, zip trees require only O (log log n ) bits (with high probability) to represent the largest rank in an n -node binary search tree; previous data structures require O (log n ) bits for the largest rank. Second, zip trees are naturally isomorphic to skip lists [7], and simplify Dean and Jones’ mapping between skip lists

Consider the task of performing a sequence of searches in a binary search tree. After each search, an algorithm is allowed to arbitrarily restructure the tree, at a cost proportional to the amount of restructuring performed. The cost of an execution is the sum of the time spent searching and the time spent optimizing those searches with restructuring operations. This notion was introduced by Sleator and Tarjan in 1985 [27], along with an algorithm and a conjecture. The algorithm, Splay, is an elegant procedure for performing adjustments while moving searched items to the top of the tree. The conjecture, called dynamic optimality, is that the cost of splaying is always within a constant factor of the optimal algorithm for performing searches. The conjecture stands to this day. We offer the first systematic proposal for settling the dynamic optimality conjecture. At the heart of our methods is what we term a simulation embedding: a mapping from executions to lists of keys that induces a target algorithm to simulate the execution. We build a simulation embedding for Splay by inducing it to perform arbitrary subtree transformations, and use this to show that if the cost of splaying a sequence of items is an upper bound on the cost of splaying every subsequence thereof, then Splay is dynamically optimal. We call this the subsequence property. Building on this machinery, we show that if Splay is dynamically optimal, then with respect to optimal costs, its additive overhead is at most linear in the sum of initial tree size and number of requests. As a corollary, the subsequence property is also a necessary condition for dynamic optimality. The subsequence property also implies both the traversal [27] and deque [30] conjectures. The notions of simulation embeddings and bounding additive overheads should be of general interest in competitive analysis. For readers especially interested in dynamic optimality, we provide an outline of a proof that a lower bound on search costs by Wilber [32] has the subsequence property, and extensive suggestions for adapting this proof to Splay.

We present a method of extracting figures and images from the pages of scanned documents, especially from technical research articles. Our approach is novel in two key ways. First, we treat this as a computer vision problem, and train convolutional neural networks to recognize figures in scanned pages. Second, we generate our training data from 'born-digital' structured documents, allowing us to automatically produce labels for our training set using PDF figure extractors. This avoids the otherwise tedious task of hand-labelling thousands of document pages. Our convolutional neural networks achieve precision and recall of close to 85% in identifying figures from a test set consisting of modern journal papers and conference proceedings, and obtain precision and recall above 80% on an application data set comprised of historical technical documents scanned from the Bell Labs Records. Our results show that models trained on digital documents transfer very well to historical scans. Finally, it is easy to extend our models to identify other document elements such as tables and captions.