<i>Peakons</i> are special weak solutions of a class of nonlinear partial differential equations modelling non-linear phenomena such as the breakdown of regularity and the onset of shocks. We show that the natural concept of weak solutions in the case of the modified CamassaHolm equation studied in this paper is dictated by the distributional compatibility of its Lax pair and, as a result, it differs from the one proposed and used in the literature based on the concept of weak solutions used for equations of the Burgers type. Subsequently, we give a complete construction of peakon solutions satisfying the modified CamassaHolm equation in the sense of distributions; our approach is based on solving certain inverse boundary value problem, the solution of which hinges on a combination of classical techniques of analysis involving Stieltjes continued fractions and multi-point Pad approximations. We propose

In computational complexity, a complexity class is given by a set of problems or functions, and a basic challenge is to show separations of complexity classes A!= B especially when A is known to be a subset of B. In this paper we introduce a homological theory of functions that can be used to establish complexity separations, while also providing other interesting consequences. We propose to associate a topological space S_A to each class of functions A, such that, to separate complexity classes A from a superclass B', it suffices to observe a change in" the number of holes", ie homology, in S_A as a subclass B of B'is added to A. In other words, if the homologies of S_A and S_ {A union B} are different, then A!= B'. We develop the underlying theory of functions based on homological commutative algebra and Stanley-Reisner theory, and prove a" maximal principle" for polynomial threshold functions that is used to recover Aspnes, Beigel, Furst, and Rudich's characterization of the polynomial threshold degree of symmetric functions. A surprising coincidence is demonstrated, where, roughly speaking, the maximal dimension of" holes" in S_A upper bounds the VC dimension of A, with equality for common computational cases such as the class of polynomial threshold functions or the class of linear functionals over the finite field of 2 elements, or common algebraic cases such as when the Stanley-Reisner ring of S_A is Cohen-Macaulay. As another interesting application of our theory, we prove a result that a priori has nothing to do with complexity separation: it characterizes when a vector subspace intersects the positive cone, in terms of homological

In computational complexity, a complexity class is given by a set of problems or functions, and a basic challenge is to show separations of complexity classes Aot= B especially when Aot= B is known to be a subset of Aot= B . In this paper we introduce a homological theory of functions that can be used to establish complexity separations, while also providing other interesting consequences. We propose to associate a topological space Aot= B to each class of functions Aot= B , such that, to separate complexity classes Aot= B , it suffices to observe a change in" the number of holes", ie homology, in Aot= B as a subclass Aot= B of Aot= B is added to Aot= B . In other words, if the homologies of Aot= B and Aot= B are different, then Aot= B . We develop the underlying theory of functions based on combinatorial and homological commutative algebra and Stanley-Reisner theory, and recover Minsky and Papert's 1969 result that parity cannot be computed by nonmaximal degree polynomial threshold functions. In the process, we derive a" maximal principle" for polynomial threshold functions that is used to extend this result further to arbitrary symmetric functions. A surprising coincidence is demonstrated, where the maximal dimension of" holes" in Aot= B upper bounds the VC dimension of Aot= B , with equality for common computational cases such as the class of polynomial threshold functions or the class of linear functionals in Aot= B , or common algebraic cases such as when the Stanley-Reisner ring of Aot= B is Cohen-Macaulay. As another interesting application of our theory, we prove a result that a priori has nothing to do with complexity separation: it characterizes when a vector subspace intersects the positive

A recent line of work has studied the statistical properties of neural networks to great success from a {\it mean field theory} perspective, making and verifying very precise predictions of neural network behavior and test time performance. In this paper, we build upon these works to explore two methods for taming the behaviors of random residual networks (with only fully connected layers and no batchnorm). The first method is {\it width variation (WV)}, ie varying the widths of layers as a function of depth. We show that width decay reduces gradient explosion without affecting the mean forward dynamics of the random network. The second method is {\it variance variation (VV)}, ie changing the initialization variances of weights and biases over depth. We show VV, used appropriately, can reduce gradient explosion of tanh and ReLU resnets from \exp (\Theta (\sqrt L)) and \exp (\Theta (\sqrt L)) respectively to constant \exp (\Theta (\sqrt L)) . A complete phase-diagram is derived for how variance decay affects different dynamics, such as those of gradient and activation norms. In particular, we show the existence of many phase transitions where these dynamics switch between exponential, polynomial, logarithmic, and even constant behaviors. Using the obtained mean field theory, we are able to track surprisingly well how VV at initialization time affects training and test time performance on MNIST after a set number of epochs: the level sets of test/train set accuracies coincide with the level sets of the expectations of certain gradient norms or of metric expressivity (as defined in\cite {yang_meanfield_2017}), a measure of expansion in a random neural network. Based on insights from past works in

Following the recent trend in explicit neural memory structures, we present a new design of an external memory, wherein memories are stored in an Euclidean key space \mathbb R^ n . An LSTM controller performs read and write via specialized read and write heads. It can move a head by either providing a new address in the key space (aka random access) or moving from its previous position via a Lie group action (aka Lie access). In this way, the" L" and" R" instructions of a traditional Turing Machine are generalized to arbitrary elements of a fixed Lie group action. For this reason, we name this new model the Lie Access Neural Turing Machine, or LANTM.