GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
A Rigorous Information-Theoretic Definition of Redundancy and Relevancy in Feature Selection Based on (Partial) Information Decomposition
Authors: Patricia Wollstadt; Sebastian Schmitt; Michael Wibral
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Selecting a minimal feature set that is maximally informative about a target variable is a central task in machine learning and statistics. Information theory provides a powerful framework for formulating feature selection algorithmsâyet, a rigorous, information-theoretic definition of feature relevancy, which accounts for feature interactions such as redundant and synergistic contributions, is still missing. We argue that this lack is inherent to classical information theory which does not provide measures to decompose the information a set of variables provides about a target into unique, redundant, and synergistic contributions. Such a decomposition has been introduced only recently by the partial information decomposition (PID) framework. Using PID, we clarify why feature selection is a conceptually difficult problem when approached using information theory and provide a novel definition of feature relevancy and redundancy in PID terms. From this definition, we show that the conditional mutual information (CMI) maximizes relevancy while minimizing redundancy and propose an iterative, CMI-based algorithm for practical feature selection. We demonstrate the power of our CMI-based algorithm in comparison to the unconditional mutual information on benchmark examples and provide corresponding PID estimates to highlight how PID allows to quantify information contribution of features and their interactions in feature-selection problems.
Generalized Linear Models in Non-interactive Local Differential Privacy with Public Data
Authors: Di Wang; Lijie Hu; Huanyu Zhang; Marco Gaboardi; Jinhui Xu
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of estimating smooth Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) in the Non-interactive Local Differential Privacy (NLDP) model.  Unlike its classical setting, our model allows the server to access additional public but unlabeled data. In the first part of the paper, we focus on GLMs. Specifically, we first consider the case where each data record is i.i.d. sampled from a zero-mean multivariate Gaussian distribution. Motivated by the Stein's lemma, we present an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-NLDP algorithm for   GLMs. Moreover, the sample complexity of public and private data for the algorithm to achieve an $\ell_2$-norm estimation error of  $\alpha$ (with high probability) is ${O}(p \alpha^{-2})$ and $\tilde{O}(p^3\alpha^{-2}\epsilon^{-2})$ respectively, where $p$ is the dimension of the feature vector. This is a significant improvement over the previously known exponential or quasi-polynomial in $\alpha^{-1}$, or exponential in $p$ sample complexities of  GLMs with no public data. Then we consider a more general setting where each data record is i.i.d. sampled from some sub-Gaussian distribution with bounded $\ell_1$-norm. Based on a variant of Stein's lemma, we propose an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-NLDP algorithm for GLMs whose sample complexity of  public and private data to achieve an $\ell_\infty$-norm estimation error of $\alpha$ is ${O}(p^2\alpha^{-2})$ and $\tilde{O}(p^2\alpha^{-2}\epsilon^{-2})$  respectively, under some mild assumptions and if  $\alpha$ is not too small  i.e., $\alpha\geq \Omega(\frac{1}{\sqrt{p}})$). In the second part of the paper, we extend our idea to the problem of estimating non-linear regressions and show similar results as in GLMs for both multivariate Gaussian and sub-Gaussian cases. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.  To our best knowledge, this is the first paper showing the existence of efficient and effective  algorithms for GLMs and non-linear regressions in the NLDP model with unlabeled public data.
Exploiting Discovered Regression Discontinuities to Debias Conditioned-on-observable Estimators
Authors: Benjamin Jakubowski; Sriram Somanchi; Edward McFowland III; Daniel B. Neill
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in the absence of a randomized experiment. However, standard approaches to RD analysis face two significant limitations. First, they require a priori knowledge of discontinuities in treatment. Second, they yield doubly-local treatment effect estimates, and fail to provide more general causal effect estimates away from the discontinuity. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel method for automatically detecting RDs at scale, integrating information from multiple discovered discontinuities with an observational estimator, and extrapolating away from discovered, local RDs. We demonstrate the performance of our method on two synthetic datasets, showing improved performance compared to direct use of an observational estimator, direct extrapolation of RD estimates, and existing methods for combining multiple causal effect estimates. Finally, we apply our novel method to estimate spatially heterogeneous treatment effects in the context of a recent economic development problem.
MARS: A Second-Order Reduction Algorithm for High-Dimensional Sparse Precision Matrices Estimation
Authors: Qian Li; Binyan Jiang; Defeng Sun
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Estimation of the precision matrix (or inverse covariance matrix) is of great importance in statistical data analysis and machine learning. However, as the number of parameters scales quadratically with the dimension $p$, the computation becomes very challenging when $p$ is large. In this paper, we propose an adaptive sieving reduction algorithm to generate a solution path for the estimation of precision matrices under the $\ell_1$ penalized D-trace loss, with each subproblem being solved by a second-order algorithm. In each iteration of our algorithm, we are able to greatly reduce the number of variables in the problem based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and the sparse structure of the estimated precision matrix in the previous iteration. As a result, our algorithm is capable of handling data sets with very high dimensions that may go beyond  the capacity of the existing methods. Moreover, for the sub-problem in each iteration, other than solving the primal problem directly, we develop a semismooth Newton augmented Lagrangian algorithm with global linear convergence rate on the dual problem to improve the efficiency. Theoretical properties of our proposed algorithm have been established. In particular, we show that the convergence rate of our algorithm is asymptotically superlinear. The high efficiency and promising performance of our algorithm are illustrated via extensive simulation studies and real data applications, with comparison to several state-of-the-art solvers.
Sparse GCA and Thresholded Gradient Descent
Authors: Sheng Gao; Zongming Ma
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Generalized correlation analysis (GCA) is concerned with uncovering linear relationships across multiple data sets. It generalizes canonical correlation analysis that is designed for two data sets. We study sparse GCA when there are potentially multiple leading generalized correlation tuples in data that are of interest and the loading matrix has a small number of nonzero rows. It includes sparse CCA and sparse PCA of correlation matrices as special cases. We first formulate sparse GCA as a generalized eigenvalue problem at both population and sample levels via a careful choice of normalization constraints. Based on a Lagrangian form of the sample optimization problem, we propose a thresholded gradient descent algorithm for estimating GCA loading vectors and matrices in high dimensions. We derive tight estimation error bounds for estimators generated by the algorithm with proper initialization. We also demonstrate the prowess of the algorithm on a number of synthetic data sets.
Dimension Reduction in Contextual Online Learning via Nonparametric Variable Selection
Authors: Wenhao Li; Ningyuan Chen; L. Jeff Hong
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: We consider a contextual online learning (multi-armed bandit) problem with high-dimensional covariate $x$ and decision $y$. The reward function to learn, $f(x,y)$, does not have a particular parametric form. The literature has shown that the optimal regret is $\tilde{O}(T^{(d_x\!+\!d_y\!+\!1)/(d_x\!+\!d_y\!+\!2)})$, where $d_x$ and $d_y$ are the dimensions of $x$ and $y$, and thus it suffers from the curse of dimensionality. In many applications, only a small subset of variables in the covariate affect the value of $f$, which is referred to as sparsity in statistics. To take advantage of the sparsity structure of the covariate, we propose a variable selection algorithm called BV-LASSO, which incorporates novel ideas such as binning and voting to apply LASSO to nonparametric settings. Using it as a subroutine, we can achieve the regret $\tilde{O}(T^{(d_x^*\!+\!d_y\!+\!1)/(d_x^*\!+\!d_y\!+\!2)})$, where $d_x^*$ is the effective covariate dimension. The regret matches the optimal regret when the covariate is $d^*_x$-dimensional and thus cannot be improved. Our algorithm may serve as a general recipe to achieve dimension reduction via variable selection in nonparametric settings.
Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent for Mean Squared Error Regression with Two-Layer Wide Neural Networks
Authors: Hui Jin; Guido Montufar
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: We investigate gradient descent training of wide neural networks and the corresponding implicit bias in function space. For univariate regression, we show that the solution of training a width-$n$ shallow ReLU network is within $n^{- 1/2}$ of the function which fits the training data and whose difference from the initial function has the smallest 2-norm of the second derivative weighted by a curvature penalty that depends on the probability distribution that is used to initialize the network parameters. We compute the curvature penalty function explicitly for various common initialization procedures. For instance, asymmetric initialization with a uniform distribution yields a constant curvature penalty, and thence the solution function is the natural cubic spline interpolation of the training data. For stochastic gradient descent we obtain the same implicit bias result. We obtain a similar result for different activation functions. For multivariate regression we show an analogous result, whereby the second derivative is replaced by the Radon transform of a fractional Laplacian. For initialization schemes that yield a constant penalty function, the solutions are polyharmonic splines. Moreover, we show that the training trajectories are captured by trajectories of smoothing splines with decreasing regularization strength.
Asymptotics of Network Embeddings Learned via Subsampling
Authors: Andrew Davison; Morgane Austern
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Network data are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, with tasks of interest including node classification, node clustering and link prediction. A frequent approach begins by learning an Euclidean embedding of the network, to which algorithms developed for vector-valued data are applied. For large networks, embeddings are learned using stochastic gradient methods where the sub-sampling scheme can be freely chosen. Despite the strong empirical performance of such methods, they are not well understood theoretically. Our work encapsulates representation methods using a subsampling approach, such as node2vec, into a single unifying framework. We prove, under the assumption that the graph is exchangeable, that the distribution of the learned embedding vectors asymptotically decouples. Moreover, we characterize the asymptotic distribution and provided rates of convergence, in terms of the latent parameters, which includes the choice of loss function and the embedding dimension. This provides a theoretical foundation to understand what the embedding vectors represent and how well these methods perform on downstream tasks. Notably, we observe that typically used loss functions may lead to shortcomings, such as a lack of Fisher consistency.
Policy Gradient Methods Find the Nash Equilibrium in N-player General-sum Linear-quadratic Games
Authors: Ben Hambly; Renyuan Xu; Huining Yang
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: We consider a general-sum N-player linear-quadratic game with stochastic dynamics over a finite horizon and prove the global convergence of the natural policy gradient method to the Nash equilibrium. In order to prove convergence of the method we require a certain amount of noise in the system. We give a condition, essentially a lower bound on the covariance of the noise in terms of the model parameters, in order to guarantee convergence. We illustrate our results with numerical experiments to show that even in situations where the policy gradient method may not converge in the deterministic setting, the addition of noise leads to convergence.
Jump Interval-Learning for Individualized Decision Making with Continuous Treatments
Authors: Hengrui Cai; Chengchun Shi; Rui Song; Wenbin Lu
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: An individualized decision rule (IDR) is a decision function that assigns each individual a given treatment based on his/her observed characteristics. Most of the existing works in the literature consider settings with binary or finitely many treatment options. In this paper, we focus on the continuous treatment setting and propose a jump interval-learning to develop an individualized interval-valued decision rule (I2DR) that maximizes the expected outcome. Unlike IDRs that recommend a single treatment, the proposed I2DR yields an interval of treatment options for each individual, making it more flexible to implement in practice. To derive an optimal I2DR, our jump interval-learning method estimates the conditional mean of the outcome given the treatment and the covariates via jump penalized regression, and derives the corresponding optimal I2DR based on the estimated outcome regression function. The regressor is allowed to be either linear for clear interpretation or deep neural network to model complex treatment-covariates interactions. To implement jump interval-learning, we develop a searching algorithm based on dynamic programming that efficiently computes the outcome regression function. Statistical properties of the resulting I2DR are established when the outcome regression function is either a piecewise or continuous function over the treatment space. We further develop a procedure to infer the mean outcome under the (estimated) optimal policy. Extensive simulations and a real data application to a Warfarin study are conducted to demonstrate the empirical validity of the proposed I2DR.
Optimal Convergence Rates for Distributed Nystroem Approximation
Authors: Jian Li; Yong Liu; Weiping Wang
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: The distributed kernel ridge regression (DKRR) has shown great potential in processing complicated tasks. However, DKRR only made use of the local samples that failed to capture the global characteristics. Besides, the existing optimal learning guarantees were provided in expectation and only pertain to the attainable case that the target regression lies exactly in the kernel space. In this paper, we propose distributed learning with globally-shared Nystroem centers (DNystroem), which utilizes global information across the local clients. We also study the statistical properties of DNystroem in expectation and in probability, respectively, and obtain several state-of-the-art results with the minimax optimal learning rates. Note that, the optimal convergence rates for DNystroem pertain to the non-attainable case, while the statistical results allow more partitions and require fewer Nystroem centers. Finally, we conduct experiments on several real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the empirical results coincide with our theoretical findings.
On Tilted Losses in Machine Learning: Theory and Applications
Authors: Tian Li; Ahmad Beirami; Maziar Sanjabi; Virginia Smith
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Exponential tilting is a technique commonly used in fields such as statistics, probability, information theory, and optimization to create parametric distribution shifts. Despite its prevalence in related fields, tilting has not seen widespread use in machine learning. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by exploring the use of tilting in risk minimization. We study a simple extension to ERM---tilted empirical risk minimization (TERM)---which uses exponential tilting to flexibly tune the impact of individual losses. The resulting framework has several useful properties: We show that TERM can increase or decrease the influence of outliers, respectively, to enable fairness or robustness; has variance-reduction properties that can benefit generalization; and can be viewed as a smooth approximation to the tail probability of losses. Our work makes connections between TERM and related objectives, such as Value-at-Risk, Conditional Value-at-Risk, and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). We develop batch and stochastic first-order optimization methods for solving TERM, provide convergence guarantees for the solvers, and show that the framework can be efficiently solved relative to common alternatives. Finally, we demonstrate that TERM can be used for a multitude of applications in machine learning, such as enforcing fairness between subgroups, mitigating the effect of outliers, and handling class imbalance. Despite the straightforward modification TERM makes to traditional ERM objectives, we find that the framework can consistently outperform ERM and deliver competitive performance with state-of-the-art, problem-specific approaches.
Large sample spectral analysis of graph-based multi-manifold clustering
Authors: Nicolas Garcia Trillos; Pengfei He; Chenghui Li
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this work we study statistical properties of graph-based algorithms for multi-manifold clustering (MMC). In MMC the goal is to retrieve the multi-manifold structure underlying a given Euclidean data set when this one is assumed to be obtained by sampling a distribution on a union of manifolds $\M = \M_1 \cup\dots  \cup \M_N$ that may intersect with each other and that may have different dimensions. We investigate sufficient conditions that similarity graphs on data sets must satisfy in order for their corresponding graph Laplacians to capture the right geometric information to solve the MMC problem. Precisely, we provide high probability error bounds for the spectral approximation of a tensorized Laplacian on $\M$ with a suitable graph Laplacian built from the observations; the recovered tensorized Laplacian contains all geometric information of all the individual underlying manifolds. We provide an example of a family of similarity graphs, which we call annular proximity graphs with angle constraints, satisfying these sufficient conditions. We contrast our family of graphs with other constructions in the literature based on the alignment of tangent planes. Extensive numerical experiments expand the insights that our theory provides on the MMC problem.
Escaping The Curse of Dimensionality in Bayesian Model-Based Clustering
Authors: Noirrit Kiran Chandra; Antonio Canale; David B. Dunson
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: Bayesian mixture models are widely used for clustering of high-dimensional data with appropriate uncertainty quantification. However, as the dimension of the observations increases, posterior inference often tends to favor too many or too few clusters. This article explains this behavior by studying the random partition posterior in a non-standard setting with a fixed sample size and increasing data dimensionality. We provide conditions under which the finite sample posterior tends to either assign every observation to a different cluster or all observations to the same cluster as the dimension grows. Interestingly, the conditions do not depend on the choice of clustering prior, as long as all possible partitions of observations into clusters have positive prior probabilities, and hold irrespective of the true data-generating model. We then propose a class of latent mixtures for Bayesian clustering (Lamb) on a set of low-dimensional latent variables inducing a partition on the observed data. The model is amenable to scalable posterior inference and we show that it can avoid the pitfalls of high-dimensionality under mild assumptions. The proposed approach is shown to have good performance in simulation studies and an application to inferring cell types based on scRNAseq.
Memory-Based Optimization Methods for Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning and Personalized Federated Learning
Authors: Bokun Wang; Zhuoning Yuan; Yiming Ying; Tianbao Yang
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: In recent years, model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has become a popular research area. However, the stochastic optimization of MAML is still underdeveloped. Existing MAML algorithms rely on the âepisodeâ idea by sampling a few tasks and data points to update the meta-model at each iteration. Nonetheless, these algorithms either fail to guarantee convergence with a constant mini-batch size or require processing a large number of tasks at every iteration, which is unsuitable for continual learning or cross-device federated learning where only a small number of tasks are available per iteration or per round. To address these issues, this paper proposes memory-based stochastic algorithms for MAML that converge with vanishing error. The proposed algorithms require sampling a constant number of tasks and data samples per iteration, making them suitable for the continual learning scenario. Moreover, we introduce a communication-efficient memory-based MAML algorithm for personalized federated learning in cross-device (with client sampling) and cross-silo (without client sampling) settings. Our theoretical analysis improves the optimization theory for MAML, and our empirical results corroborate our theoretical findings.
Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Emphatic Weightings
Authors: Eric Graves; Ehsan Imani; Raksha Kumaraswamy; Martha White
Venue: JMLR 2023 (main)

Abstract: A variety of theoretically-sound policy gradient algorithms exist for the on-policy setting due to the policy gradient theorem, which provides a simplified form for the gradient. The off-policy setting, however, has been less clear due to the existence of multiple objectives and the lack of an explicit off-policy policy gradient theorem. In this work, we unify these objectives into one off-policy objective, and provide a policy gradient theorem for this unified objective. The derivation involves emphatic weightings and interest functions. We show multiple strategies to approximate the gradients, in an algorithm called Actor Critic with Emphatic weightings (ACE). We prove in a counterexample that previous (semi-gradient) off-policy actor-critic methodsâparticularly Off-Policy Actor-Critic (OffPAC) and Deterministic Policy Gradient (DPG)âconverge to the wrong solution whereas ACE finds the optimal solution. We also highlight why these semi-gradient approaches can still perform well in practice, suggesting strategies for variance reduction in ACE. We empirically study several variants of ACE on two classic control environments and an image-based environment designed to illustrate the tradeoffs made by each gradient approximation. We find that by approximating the emphatic weightings directly, ACE performs as well as or better than OffPAC in all settings tested.