Session
Poster Session 14
BoXHED: Boosted eXact Hazard Estimator with Dynamic covariates
Xiaochen Wang · Arash Pakbin · Bobak Mortazavi · Hongyu Zhao · Donald Lee
The proliferation of medical monitoring devices makes it possible to track health vitals at high frequency, enabling the development of dynamic health risk scores that change with the underlying readings. Survival analysis, in particular hazard estimation, is well-suited to analyzing this stream of data to predict disease onset as a function of the time-varying vitals. This paper introduces the software package BoXHED (pronounced `box-head') for nonparametrically estimating hazard functions via gradient boosting. BoXHED 1.0 is a novel tree-based implementation of the generic estimator proposed in Lee et al. (2017), which was designed for handling time-dependent covariates in a fully nonparametric manner. BoXHED is also the first publicly available software implementation for Lee et al. (2017). Applying BoXHED to cardiovascular disease onset data from the Framingham Heart Study reveals novel interaction effects among known risk factors, potentially resolving an open question in clinical literature.
Closed Loop Neural-Symbolic Learning via Integrating Neural Perception, Grammar Parsing, and Symbolic Reasoning
Qing Li · Siyuan Huang · Yining Hong · Yixin Chen · Ying Nian Wu · Song-Chun Zhu
The goal of neural-symbolic computation is to integrate the connectionist and symbolist paradigms. Prior methods learn the neural-symbolic models using reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which ignore the error propagation in the symbolic reasoning module and thus converge slowly with sparse rewards. In this paper, we address these issues and close the loop of neural-symbolic learning by (1) introducing the grammar model as a symbolic prior to bridge neural perception and symbolic reasoning, and (2) proposing a novel back-search algorithm which mimics the top-down human-like learning procedure to propagate the error through the symbolic reasoning module efficiently. We further interpret the proposed learning framework as maximum likelihood estimation using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and the back-search algorithm as a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The experiments are conducted on two weakly-supervised neural-symbolic tasks: (1) handwritten formula recognition on the newly introduced HWF dataset; (2) visual question answering on the CLEVR dataset. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms the RL methods in terms of performance, converging speed, and data efficiency. Our code and data are released at https://liqing-ustc.github.io/NGS.
Disentangling Trainability and Generalization in Deep Neural Networks
Lechao Xiao · Jeffrey Pennington · Samuel Schoenholz
A longstanding goal in the theory of deep learning is to characterize the conditions under which a given neural network architecture will be trainable, and if so, how well it might generalize to unseen data. In this work, we provide such a characterization in the limit of very wide and very deep networks, for which the analysis simplifies considerably. For wide networks, the trajectory under gradient descent is governed by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), and for deep networks the NTK itself maintains only weak data dependence. By analyzing the spectrum of the NTK, we formulate necessary conditions for trainability and generalization across a range of architectures, including Fully Connected Networks (FCNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We identify large regions of hyperparameter space for which networks can memorize the training set but completely fail to generalize. We find that CNNs without global average pooling behave almost identically to FCNs, but that CNNs with pooling have markedly different and often better generalization performance. These theoretical results are corroborated experimentally on CIFAR10 for a variety of network architectures.
We include a \href{https://colab.research.google.com/github/google/neural-tangents/blob/master/notebooks/disentanglingtrainabilityand_generalization.ipynb}{colab} notebook that reproduces the essential results of the paper.
Learning Algebraic Multigrid Using Graph Neural Networks
Ilay Luz · Meirav Galun · Haggai Maron · Ronen Basri · Irad Yavneh
Efficient numerical solvers for sparse linear systems are crucial in science and engineering. One of the fastest methods for solving large-scale sparse linear systems is algebraic multigrid (AMG). The main challenge in the construction of AMG algorithms is the selection of the prolongation operator---a problem-dependent sparse matrix which governs the multiscale hierarchy of the solver and is critical to its efficiency. Over many years, numerous methods have been developed for this task, and yet there is no known single right answer except in very special cases. Here we propose a framework for learning AMG prolongation operators for linear systems with sparse symmetric positive (semi-) definite matrices. We train a single graph neural network to learn a mapping from an entire class of such matrices to prolongation operators, using an efficient unsupervised loss function. Experiments on a broad class of problems demonstrate improved convergence rates compared to classical AMG, demonstrating the potential utility of neural networks for developing sparse system solvers.
Low-loss connection of weight vectors: distribution-based approaches
Ivan Anokhin · Dmitry Yarotsky
Recent research shows that sublevel sets of the loss surfaces of overparameterized networks are connected, exactly or approximately. We describe and compare experimentally a panel of methods used to connect two low-loss points by a low-loss curve on this surface. Our methods vary in accuracy and complexity. Most of our methods are based on ''macroscopic'' distributional assumptions and are insensitive to the detailed properties of the points to be connected. Some methods require a prior training of a ''global connection model'' which can then be applied to any pair of points. The accuracy of the method generally correlates with its complexity and sensitivity to the endpoint detail.
Neural Contextual Bandits with UCB-based Exploration
Dongruo Zhou · Lihong Li · Quanquan Gu
We study the stochastic contextual bandit problem, where the reward is generated from an unknown function with additive noise. No assumption is made about the reward function other than boundedness. We propose a new algorithm, NeuralUCB, which leverages the representation power of deep neural networks and uses a neural network-based random feature mapping to construct an upper confidence bound (UCB) of reward for efficient exploration. We prove that, under standard assumptions, NeuralUCB achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $T$ is the number of rounds. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first neural network-based contextual bandit algorithm with a near-optimal regret guarantee. We also show the algorithm is empirically competitive against representative baselines in a number of benchmarks.
Recovery of Sparse Signals from a Mixture of Linear Samples
Soumyabrata Pal · Arya Mazumdar
Mixture of linear regressions is a popular learning theoretic model that is used widely to represent heterogeneous data. In the simplest form, this model assumes that the labels are generated from either of two different linear models and mixed together. Recent works of Yin et al. and Krishnamurthy et al., 2019, focus on an experimental design setting of model recovery for this problem. It is assumed that the features can be designed and queried with to obtain their label. When queried, an oracle randomly selects one of the two different sparse linear models and generates a label accordingly. How many such oracle queries are needed to recover both of the models simultaneously? This question can also be thought of as a generalization of the well-known compressed sensing problem (Cand`es and Tao, 2005, Donoho, 2006). In this work we address this query complexity problem and provide efficient algorithms that improves on the previously best known results.
Streaming Coresets for Symmetric Tensor Factorization
Supratim Shit · Rachit Chhaya · Jayesh Choudhari · Anirban Dasgupta
Factorizing tensors has recently become an important optimization module in a number of machine learning pipelines, especially in latent variable models. We show how to do this efficiently in the streaming setting. Given a set of $n$ vectors, each in $\~R^d$, we present algorithms to select a sublinear number of these vectors as coreset, while guaranteeing that the CP decomposition of the $p$-moment tensor of the coreset approximates the corresponding decomposition of the $p$-moment tensor computed from the full data. We introduce two novel algorithmic techniques: online filtering and kernelization. Using these two, we present four algorithms that achieve different tradeoffs of coreset size, update time and working space, beating or matching various state of the art algorithms. In the case of matrices (2-ordered tensor), our online row sampling algorithm guarantees $(1 \pm \epsilon)$ relative error spectral approximation. We show applications of our algorithms in learning single topic modeling.
Tightening Exploration in Upper Confidence Reinforcement Learning
Hippolyte Bourel · Odalric-Ambrym Maillard · Mohammad Sadegh Talebi
The upper confidence reinforcement learning (\UCRL) strategy introduced in \citep{jaksch2010near} is a popular method to perform regret minimization in unknown discrete Markov Decision Processes under the average-reward criterion. Despite its nice and generic theoretical regret guarantees, this strategy and its variants have remained until now mostly theoretical as numerical experiments on simple environments exhibit long burn-in phases before the learning takes place. In pursuit of practical efficiency, we present \UCRLnew, following the lines of \UCRL, but with two key modifications: First, it uses state-of-the-art time-uniform concentration inequalities, to compute confidence sets on the reward and (component-wise) transition distributions for each state-action pair. Further, to tighten exploration, it uses an adaptive computation of the support of each transition distributions, which in turn enables us to revisit the extended value iteration procedure to optimize over distributions with reduced support by disregarding low probability transitions, while still ensuring near-optimism. We demonstrate, through numerical experiments on standard environments, that reducing exploration this way yields a substantial numerical improvement compared to \UCRL\ and its variants. On the theoretical side, these key modifications enable us to derive a regret bound for \UCRLnew\ improving on \UCRL, that for the first time makes appear notions of local diameter and effective support, thanks to variance-aware concentration bounds.
Being Bayesian about Categorical Probability
Taejong Joo · Uijung Chung · Min-Gwan Seo
Neural networks utilize the softmax as a building block in classification tasks, which contains an overconfidence problem and lacks an uncertainty representation ability. As a Bayesian alternative to the softmax, we consider a random variable of a categorical probability over class labels. In this framework, the prior distribution explicitly models the presumed noise inherent in the observed label, which provides consistent gains in generalization performance in multiple challenging tasks. The proposed method inherits advantages of Bayesian approaches that achieve better uncertainty estimation and model calibration. Our method can be implemented as a plug-and-play loss function with negligible computational overhead compared to the softmax with the cross-entropy loss function.
How Good is the Bayes Posterior in Deep Neural Networks Really?
Florian Wenzel · Kevin Roth · Bastiaan Veeling · Jakub Swiatkowski · Linh Tran · Stephan Mandt · Jasper Snoek · Tim Salimans · Rodolphe Jenatton · Sebastian Nowozin
During the past five years the Bayesian deep learning community has developed increasingly accurate and efficient approximate inference procedures that allow for Bayesian inference in deep neural networks. However, despite this algorithmic progress and the promise of improved uncertainty quantification and sample efficiency there are---as of early 2020---no publicized deployments of Bayesian neural networks in industrial practice. In this work we cast doubt on the current understanding of Bayes posteriors in popular deep neural networks: we demonstrate through careful MCMC sampling that the posterior predictive induced by the Bayes posterior yields systematically worse predictions when compared to simpler methods including point estimates obtained from SGD. Furthermore, we demonstrate that predictive performance is improved significantly through the use of a ``cold posterior'' that overcounts evidence. Such cold posteriors sharply deviate from the Bayesian paradigm but are commonly used as heuristic in Bayesian deep learning papers. We put forward several hypotheses that could explain cold posteriors and evaluate the hypotheses through experiments. Our work questions the goal of accurate posterior approximations in Bayesian deep learning: If the true Bayes posterior is poor, what is the use of more accurate approximations? Instead, we argue that it is timely to focus on understanding the origin of cold posteriors.
LazyIter: A Fast Algorithm for Counting Markov Equivalent DAGs and Designing Experiments
Ali Teshnizi · Saber Salehkaleybar · Negar Kiyavash
The causal relationships among a set of random variables are commonly represented by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where there is a directed edge from variable $X$ to variable $Y$ if $X$ is a direct cause of $Y$. From the purely observational data, the true causal graph can be identified up to a Markov Equivalence Class (MEC), which is a set of DAGs with the same conditional independencies between the variables. The size of an MEC is a measure of complexity for recovering the true causal graph by performing interventions. We propose a method for efficient iteration over possible MECs given intervention results. We utilize the proposed method for computing MEC sizes and experiment design in active and passive learning settings. Compared to previous work for computing the size of MEC, our proposed algorithm reduces the time complexity by a factor of $O(n)$ for sparse graphs where $n$ is the number of variables in the system. Additionally, integrating our approach with dynamic programming, we design an optimal algorithm for passive experiment design. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms for both computing the size of MEC and experiment design outperform the state of the art.
Non-Autoregressive Neural Text-to-Speech
Kainan Peng · Wei Ping · Zhao Song · Kexin Zhao
In this work, we propose ParaNet, a non-autoregressive seq2seq model that converts text to spectrogram. It is fully convolutional and brings 46.7 times speed-up over the lightweight Deep Voice 3 at synthesis, while obtaining reasonably good speech quality. ParaNet also produces stable alignment between text and speech on the challenging test sentences by iteratively improving the attention in a layer-by-layer manner. Furthermore, we build the parallel text-to-speech system by applying various parallel neural vocoders, which can synthesize speech from text through a single feed-forward pass. We also explore a novel VAE-based approach to train the inverse autoregressive flow~(IAF) based parallel vocoder from scratch, which avoids the need for distillation from a separately trained WaveNet as previous work.
Robustness to Spurious Correlations via Human Annotations
Megha Srivastava · Tatsunori Hashimoto · Percy Liang
The reliability of machine learning systems critically assumes that the associations between features and labels remain similar between training and test distributions. However, unmeasured variables, such as confounders, break this assumption---useful correlations between features and labels at training time can become useless or even harmful at test time. For example, high obesity is generally predictive for heart disease, but this relation may not hold for smokers who generally have lower rates of obesity and higher rates of heart disease. We present a framework for making models robust to spurious correlations by leveraging humans' common sense knowledge of causality. Specifically, we use human annotation to augment each training example with a potential unmeasured variable (i.e. an underweight patient with heart disease may be a smoker), reducing the problem to a covariate shift problem. We then introduce a new distributionally robust optimization objective over unmeasured variables (UV-DRO) to control the worst-case loss over possible test- time shifts. Empirically, we show improvements of 5--10% on a digit recognition task confounded by rotation, and 1.5--5% on the task of analyzing NYPD Police Stops confounded by location.
The Many Shapley Values for Model Explanation
Mukund Sundararajan · Amir Najmi
The Shapley value has become the basis for several methods that attribute the prediction of a machine-learning model on an input to its base features. The use of the Shapley value is justified by citing the uniqueness result from~\cite{Shapley53}, which shows that it is the only method that satisfies certain good properties (\emph{axioms}). There are, however, a multiplicity of ways in which the Shapley value is operationalized for model explanation. These differ in how they reference the model, the training data, and the explanation context. Hence they differ in output, rendering the uniqueness result inapplicable. Furthermore, the techniques that rely on they training data produce non-intuitive attributions, for instance unused features can still receive attribution.
In this paper, we use the axiomatic approach to study the differences between some of the many operationalizations of the Shapley value for attribution. We discuss a technique called Baseline Shapley (BShap), provide a proper uniqueness result for it, and contrast it with two other techniques from prior literature, Integrated Gradients~\cite{STY17} and Conditional Expectation Shapley~\cite{Lundberg2017AUA}.
Influence Diagram Bandits: Variational Thompson Sampling for Structured Bandit Problems
Tong Yu · Branislav Kveton · Zheng Wen · Ruiyi Zhang · Ole J. Mengshoel
We propose a novel framework for structured bandits, which we call an influence diagram bandit. Our framework captures complex statistical dependencies between actions, latent variables, and observations; and thus unifies and extends many existing models, such as combinatorial semi-bandits, cascading bandits, and low-rank bandits. We develop novel online learning algorithms that learn to act efficiently in our models. The key idea is to track a structured posterior distribution of model parameters, either exactly or approximately. To act, we sample model parameters from their posterior and then use the structure of the influence diagram to find the most optimistic action under the sampled parameters. We empirically evaluate our algorithms in three structured bandit problems, and show that they perform as well as or better than problem-specific state-of-the-art baselines.
Policy Teaching via Environment Poisoning: Training-time Adversarial Attacks against Reinforcement Learning
Amin Rakhsha · Goran Radanovic · Rati Devidze · Jerry Zhu · Adish Singla
We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find a policy that maximizes average reward in undiscounted infinite-horizon problem settings. The attacker can manipulate the rewards or the transition dynamics in the learning environment at training-time and is interested in doing so in a stealthy manner. We propose an optimization framework for finding an \emph{optimal stealthy attack} for different measures of attack cost. We provide sufficient technical conditions under which the attack is feasible and provide lower/upper bounds on the attack cost. We instantiate our attacks in two settings: (i) an \emph{offline} setting where the agent is doing planning in the poisoned environment, and (ii) an \emph{online} setting where the agent is learning a policy using a regret-minimization framework with poisoned feedback. Our results show that the attacker can easily succeed in teaching any target policy to the victim under mild conditions and highlight a significant security threat to reinforcement learning agents in practice.
SoftSort: A Continuous Relaxation for the argsort Operator
Sebastian Prillo · Julian M Eisenschlos
While sorting is an important procedure in computer science, the argsort operator - which takes as input a vector and returns its sorting permutation - has a discrete image and thus zero gradients almost everywhere. This prohibits end-to-end, gradient-based learning of models that rely on the argsort operator. A natural way to overcome this problem is to replace the argsort operator with a continuous relaxation. Recent work has shown a number of ways to do this, but the relaxations proposed so far are computationally complex. In this work we propose a simple continuous relaxation for the argsort operator which has the following qualities: it can be implemented in three lines of code, achieves state-of-the-art performance, is easy to reason about mathematically - substantially simplifying proofs - and is faster than competing approaches. We open source the code to reproduce all of the experiments and results.
Topological Autoencoders
Michael Moor · Max Horn · Bastian Rieck · Karsten Borgwardt
We propose a novel approach for preserving topological structures of the input space in latent representations of autoencoders. Using persistent homology, a technique from topological data analysis, we calculate topological signatures of both the input and latent space to derive a topological loss term. Under weak theoretical assumptions, we construct this loss in a differentiable manner, such that the encoding learns to retain multi-scale connectivity information. We show that our approach is theoretically well-founded and that it exhibits favourable latent representations on a synthetic manifold as well as on real-world image data sets, while preserving low reconstruction errors.
Maximum Likelihood with Bias-Corrected Calibration is Hard-To-Beat at Label Shift Adaptation
Amr Mohamed Alexandari · Anshul Kundaje · Avanti Shrikumar
Label shift refers to the phenomenon where the prior class probability p(y) changes between the training and test distributions, while the conditional probability p(x|y) stays fixed. Label shift arises in settings like medical diagnosis, where a classifier trained to predict disease given symptoms must be adapted to scenarios where the baseline prevalence of the disease is different. Given estimates of p(y|x) from a predictive model, Saerens et al. proposed an efficient maximum likelihood algorithm to correct for label shift that does not require model retraining, but a limiting assumption of this algorithm is that p(y|x) is calibrated, which is not true of modern neural networks. Recently, Black Box Shift Learning (BBSL) and Regularized Learning under Label Shifts (RLLS) have emerged as state-of-the-art techniques to cope with label shift when a classifier does not output calibrated probabilities, but both methods require model retraining with importance weights and neither has been benchmarked against maximum likelihood. Here we (1) show that combining maximum likelihood with a type of calibration we call bias-corrected calibration outperforms both BBSL and RLLS across diverse datasets and distribution shifts, (2) prove that the maximum likelihood objective is concave, and (3) introduce a principled strategy for estimating source-domain priors that improves robustness to poor calibration. This work demonstrates that the maximum likelihood with appropriate calibration is a formidable and efficient baseline for label shift adaptation; notebooks reproducing experiments available at https://github.com/kundajelab/labelshiftexperiments
Optimization and Analysis of the pAp@k Metric for Recommender Systems
Gaurush Hiranandani · Warut Vijitbenjaronk · Sanmi Koyejo · Prateek Jain
Modern recommendation and notification systems must be robust to data imbalance, limitations on the number of recommendations/notifications, and heterogeneous engagement profiles across users. The pAp@k metric, which combines the partial-AUC and the precision@k metrics, was recently proposed to evaluate such recommendation systems and has been used in real-world deployments. Conceptually, pAp@k measures the probability of correctly ranking a top-ranked positive instance over top-ranked negative instances. Due to the combinatorial aspect surfaced by top-ranked points, little is known about the characteristics and optimization methods of pAp@k. In this paper, we analyze the learning-theoretic properties of pAp@k, particularly its benefits in evaluating modern recommender systems, and propose novel surrogates that are consistent under certain data regularity conditions. We then provide gradient descent based algorithms to optimize the surrogates directly. Our analysis and experimental evaluation suggest that pAp@k indeed exhibits a certain dual behavior with respect to partial-AUC and precision@k. Moreover, the proposed methods outperform all the baselines in various applications. Taken together, our results motivate the use of pAp@k for large-scale recommender systems with heterogeneous user-engagement.
Rethinking Bias-Variance Trade-off for Generalization of Neural Networks
Zitong Yang · Yaodong Yu · Chong You · Jacob Steinhardt · Yi Ma
The classical bias-variance trade-off predicts that bias decreases and variance increase with model complexity, leading to a U-shaped risk curve. Recent work calls this into question for neural networks and other over-parameterized models, for which it is often observed that larger models generalize better. We provide a simple explanation of this by measuring the bias and variance of neural networks: while the bias is {\em monotonically decreasing} as in the classical theory, the variance is {\em unimodal} or bell-shaped: it increases then decreases with the width of the network. We vary the network architecture, loss function, and choice of dataset and confirm that variance unimodality occurs robustly for all models we considered. The risk curve is the sum of the bias and variance curves and displays different qualitative shapes depending on the relative scale of bias and variance, with the double descent in the recent literature as a special case. We corroborate these empirical results with a theoretical analysis of two-layer linear networks with random first layer. Finally, evaluation on out-of-distribution data shows that most of the drop in accuracy comes from increased bias while variance increases by a relatively small amount. Moreover, we find that deeper models decrease bias and increase variance for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data.
Understanding and Mitigating the Tradeoff between Robustness and Accuracy
Aditi Raghunathan · Sang Michael Xie · Fanny Yang · John Duchi · Percy Liang
Adversarial training augments the training set with perturbations to improve the robust error (over worst-case perturbations), but it often leads to an increase in the standard error (on unperturbed test inputs). Previous explanations for this tradeoff rely on the assumption that no predictor in the hypothesis class has low standard and robust error. In this work, we precisely characterize the effect of augmentation on the standard error in linear regression when the optimal linear predictor has zero standard and robust error. In particular, we show that the standard error could increase even when the augmented perturbations have noiseless observations from the optimal linear predictor. We then prove that the recently proposed robust self-training (RST) estimator improves robust error without sacrificing standard error for noiseless linear regression. Empirically, for neural networks, we find that RST with different adversarial training methods improves both standard and robust error for random and adversarial rotations and adversarial l_infty perturbations in CIFAR-10.
Bandits with Adversarial Scaling
Thodoris Lykouris · Vahab Mirrokni · Renato Leme
We study "adversarial scaling", a multi-armed bandit model where rewards have a stochastic and an adversarial component. Our model captures display advertising where the "click-through-rate" can be decomposed to a (fixed across time) arm-quality component and a non-stochastic user-relevance component (fixed across arms). Despite the relative stochasticity of our model, we demonstrate two settings where most bandit algorithms suffer. On the positive side, we show that two algorithms, one from the action elimination and one from the mirror descent family are adaptive enough to be robust to adversarial scaling. Our results shed light on the robustness of adaptive parameter selection in stochastic bandits, which may be of independent interest.
Consistent Structured Prediction with Max-Min Margin Markov Networks
Alex Nowak · Francis Bach · Alessandro Rudi
Max-margin methods for binary classification such as the support vector machine (SVM) have been extended to the structured prediction setting under the name of max-margin Markov networks ($M^3N$), or more generally structural SVMs. Unfortunately, these methods are statistically inconsistent when the relationship between inputs and labels is far from deterministic. We overcome such limitations by defining the learning problem in terms of a ``max-min'' margin formulation, naming the resulting method max-min margin Markov networks ($M^4N$). We prove consistency and finite sample generalization bounds for $M^4N$ and provide an explicit algorithm to compute the estimator. The algorithm achieves a generalization error of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ for a total cost of $O(n)$ projection-oracle calls (which have at most the same cost as the max-oracle from $M^3N$). Experiments on multi-class classification, ordinal regression, sequence prediction and matching demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Domain Adaptive Imitation Learning
Kuno Kim · Yihong Gu · Jiaming Song · Shengjia Zhao · Stefano Ermon
We study the question of how to imitate tasks across domains with discrepancies such as embodiment, viewpoint, and dynamics mismatch. Many prior works require paired, aligned demonstrations and an additional RL step that requires environment interactions. However, paired, aligned demonstrations are seldom obtainable and RL procedures are expensive. In this work, we formalize the Domain Adaptive Imitation Learning (DAIL) problem - a unified framework for imitation learning in the presence of viewpoint, embodiment, and/or dynamics mismatch. Informally, DAIL is the process of learning how to perform a task optimally, given demonstrations of the task in a distinct domain. We propose a two step approach to DAIL: alignment followed by adaptation. In the alignment step we execute a novel unsupervised MDP alignment algorithm, Generative Adversarial MDP Alignment (GAMA), to learn state and action correspondences from \emph{unpaired, unaligned} demonstrations. In the adaptation step we leverage the correspondences to zero-shot imitate tasks across domains. To describe when DAIL is feasible via alignment and adaptation, we introduce a theory of MDP alignability. We experimentally evaluate GAMA against baselines in embodiment, viewpoint, and dynamics mismatch scenarios where aligned demonstrations don't exist and show the effectiveness of our approach
Kernel Methods for Cooperative Multi-Agent Contextual Bandits
Abhimanyu Dubey · Alex `Sandy' Pentland
Cooperative multi-agent decision making involves a group of agents cooperatively solving learning problems while communicating over a network with delays. In this paper, we consider the kernelised contextual bandit problem, where the reward obtained by an agent is an arbitrary linear function of the contexts' images in the related reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and a group of agents must cooperate to collectively solve their unique decision problems. For this problem, we propose Coop-KernelUCB, an algorithm that provides near-optimal bounds on the per-agent regret, and is both computationally and communicatively efficient. For special cases of the cooperative problem, we also provide variants of Coop-KernelUCB that provides optimal per-agent regret. In addition, our algorithm generalizes several existing results in the multi-agent bandit setting. Finally, on a series of both synthetic and real-world multi-agent network benchmarks, we demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms existing benchmarks.
Peer Loss Functions: Learning from Noisy Labels without Knowing Noise Rates
Yang Liu · Hongyi Guo
Learning with noisy labels is a common challenge in supervised learning. Existing approaches often require practitioners to specify noise rates, i.e., a set of parameters controlling the severity of label noises in the problem, and the specifications are either assumed to be given or estimated using additional steps. In this work, we introduce a new family of loss functions that we name as peer loss functions, which enables learning from noisy labels and does not require a priori specification of the noise rates. Peer loss functions work within the standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) framework. We show that, under mild conditions, performing ERM with peer loss functions on the noisy data leads to the optimal or a near-optimal classifier as if performing ERM over the clean training data, which we do not have access to. We pair our results with an extensive set of experiments. Peer loss provides a way to simplify model development when facing potentially noisy training labels, and can be promoted as a robust candidate loss function in such situations.
Quantum Expectation-Maximization for Gaussian mixture models
Alessandro Luongo · Iordanis Kerenidis · Anupam Prakash
We define a quantum version of Expectation-Maximization (QEM), a fundamental tool in unsupervised machine learning, often used to solve Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation problems. We use QEM to fit a Gaussian Mixture Model, and show how to generalize it to fit mixture models with base distributions in the exponential family. Given quantum access to a dataset, our algorithm has convergence and precision guarantees similar to the classical algorithm, while the runtime is polylogarithmic in the number of elements in the training set and polynomial in other parameters, such as the dimension of the feature space and the number of components in the mixture. We discuss the performance of the algorithm on a dataset that is expected to be classified successfully by classical EM and provide guarantees for its runtime.
Stochastically Dominant Distributional Reinforcement Learning
John Martin · Michal Lyskawinski · Xiaohu Li · Brendan Englot
We describe a new approach for managing aleatoric uncertainty in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Instead of selecting actions according to a single statistic, we propose a distributional method based on the second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) relation. This compares the inherent dispersion of random returns induced by actions, producing a comprehensive evaluation of the environment’s uncertainty. The necessary conditions for SSD require estimators to predict accurate second moments. To accommodate this, we map the distributional RL problem to a Wasserstein gradient flow, treating the distributional Bellman residual as a potential energy functional. We propose a particle-based algorithm for which we prove optimality and convergence. Our experiments characterize the algorithm’s performance and demonstrate how uncertainty and performance are better balanced using an SSD policy than with other risk measures.
Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?
Trevor Standley · Amir Zamir · Dawn Chen · Leonidas Guibas · Jitendra Malik · Silvio Savarese
Many computer vision applications require solving multiple tasks in real-time. A neural network can be trained to solve multiple tasks simultaneously using multi-task learning. This can save computation at inference time as only a single network needs to be evaluated. Unfortunately, this often leads to inferior overall performance as task objectives can compete, which consequently poses the question: which tasks should and should not be learned together in one network when employing multi-task learning? We study task cooperation and competition in several different learning settings and propose a framework for assigning tasks to a few neural networks such that cooperating tasks are computed by the same neural network, while competing tasks are computed by different networks. Our framework offers a time-accuracy trade-off and can produce better accuracy using less inference time than not only a single large multi-task neural network but also many single-task networks.