`accumarray` makes anomalous calls to its function argument

Question

Short version:

The function passed as the fourth argument to accumarray sometimes gets called with arguments that are not consistent with specifications encoded the first argument to accumarray.

As a result, functions used as arguments to accumarray must test for what are, in effect, anomalous conditions.

The question is: how can an a 1-expression anonymous function test for such anomalous conditions? And more generally: how can write anonymous functions that are robust to accumarray's undocumented behavior?

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Full version:

The code below is a drastically distilled version of a problem that ate up most of my workday today.

First some definitions:

idxs = [1:3 1:3 1:3]';

vals0 = [1   4 6   3 5 7   6 Inf 2]';
vals1 = [1 Inf 6   3 5 7   6   4 2]';

anon = @(x) max(x(~isinf(x)));

Note vals1 is obtained from vals0 by swapping elements 2 and 8. The "anonymous" function anon computes the maximum among the non-infinite elements of its input.

Given these definitions, the two calls below

accumarray(idxs, vals0, [], anon)
accumarray(idxs, vals1, [], anon)

which differ only in their second argument (vals0 vs vals1), should produce identical results, since the difference between vals0 and vals1 affects only the ordering of the values in the argument to one of the calls to anon, and the result of this function is insensitive to the ordering of elements in its argument.

As it turns out the first of these two expressions evaluates normally and produces the right result¹:

>> accumarray(idxs, vals0, [], anon)
ans =
     6
     5
     7

The second one, however, fails with:

>> accumarray(idxs, vals1, [], anon)
Error using accumarray
The function '@(x)max(x(~isinf(x)))' returned a non-scalar value.

To troubleshoot this problem, all I could come up with² was to write a separate function (in its own file, of course, "the MATLAB way")

function out = kluge(x)
    global ncalls;
    ncalls = ncalls + 1;
    y = ~isinf(x);
    if any(y)
        out = max(x(y));
    else
        {ncalls x}
        out = NaN;
    end
end

...and ran the following:

>> global ncalls;
>> ncalls = int8(0); accumarray(idxs, vals0, [], @kluge)
ans =
     6
     5
     7
>> ncalls = int8(0); accumarray(idxs, vals1, [], @kluge)
ans = 
    [2]    [Inf]

ans =
     6
     5
     7

As one can see from the output of the last call to accumarray above, the argument to the second call to the kluge callback was the array [Int]. This tells me beyond any doubt that accumarray is not behaving as documented³ (since idxs specifies no arrays of length 1 to be passed to accumarray's function argument).

In fact, from this and other tests I determined that, contrary to what I expected, the function passed to accumarray is called more than max(idxs) (= 3) times; in the expressions involving kluge above it's called 5 times.

The problem here is that if one cannot rely on how accumarray's function argument will actually be called, then the only way to make this function argument robust is to include in it a lot of extra code to perform the necessary checks. This almost certainly will require that the function have multiple statements, which rules out anonymous functions. (E.g. the function kluge above is robust more robust than anon, but I don't know how to fit into an anonymous function.) Not being able to use anonymous functions with accumarray greatly reduces its utility.

So my question is:

how to specify anonymous functions that can be robust arguments to accumarray?

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_{¹ I have removed blank lines from MATLAB's typical over-padding in all the MATLAB output shown in this post.
² I welcome comments with any other troubleshooting suggestions you may have; troubleshooting this problem was a lot harder than it should be.
³ In particular, see items number 1 through 5 right after the line "The function processes the input as follows:".}

Answer 1

Short answer

The fourth input argument of accumarray, anon in this case, must return a scalar for any input.

Long answer (and discussion about index sorting)

Consider the output when the indexes are sorted:

>> [idxsSorted,sortInds] = sort(idxs)
>> accumarray(idxsSorted, vals0(sortInds), [], anon)
ans =
     6
     5
     7
>> accumarray(idxsSorted, vals1(sortInds), [], anon)
ans =
     6
     5
     7

Now, all the documentation has to say about this is the following:

If the subscripts in subs are not sorted, fun should not depend on the order of the values in its input data.

How does this relate the trouble with anon? It is a clue, as this forces anon to be called for the complete set of values for a given idx rather than a subset/subarray, as Luis Mendo suggested.

---

Consider how accumarray would work for a non-sorted list of indexes and values:

>> [idxs vals0 vals1]
ans =
     1     1     1
     2     4   Inf
     3     6     6
     1     3     3
     2     5     5
     3     7     7
     1     6     6
     2   Inf     4
     3     2     2

For both vals0 and vals1, the Inf belongs to the set where idxs equals 2. Since idxs is not sorted, it does not process all values for idxs=2 in one shot, at first. The actual algorithm (implementation) is opaque, but it seems to start by assuming that idxs is sorted, processing each single-valued block of the first argument. This is verifiable by putting a breakpoint in fun, the function reference by fourth input argument. When it encounters a 1 in idxs for the second time, it seems to start over, but with subsequent calls to fun containing all the values for a given index. Presumably accumarray calls some implementation of unique to fully-segment idxs (incidentally, order is not preserved). As kjo suggests, this is the point where accumarray actually processes the inputs as described in the documentation, following steps 1-5 here ("Find out how many unique indices there are..."). As a result, it crashes for vals1, when anon(Inf) is called, but not for vals0, which instead calls anon(4) on the first try.

However, even if it followed those steps exactly on the first go, it would not necessarily be robust if a complete subarray of values contained just Infs (consider that anon([Inf Inf Inf]) returns an empty matrix too). It is a requirement, although an understated one, that fun must return a scalar. What is not clear from the documentation is that it must return a scalar, for any inputs, not just what is expected based on the high-level description of the algorithm.

---

Workaround:

anon = @(x) max([x(~isinf(x));-Inf]);

Answer 2

The documentation does not say that anon is called only with the whole set¹ of vals corresponding to each value of idx as its input. As seen in your example, it does get called with subsets thereof.

So the way to make anon robust seems to be: make sure it gives a scalar output when its input is any subset of vals (or maybe just any subset of each set with same-idx value). In your case, anon(inf) does not return a scalar.

_{¹ It's actually an array, of course, but I think it's easier to describe this in terms of sets (and subsets).}