Title: Nonparametric Teaching for Multiple Learners
Venue: NeurIPS 2023
Accepted: yes
Keywords: Nonparametric machine teaching

Multiple learners
Abstract: We study the problem of teaching multiple learners simultaneously in the nonparametric iterative teaching setting, where the teacher iteratively provides examples to the learner for accelerating the acquisition of a target concept. This problem is motivated by the gap between current single-learner teaching setting and the real-world scenario of human instruction where a teacher typically imparts knowledge to multiple students. Under the new problem formulation, we introduce a novel framework -- Multi-learner Nonparametric Teaching (MINT). In MINT, the teacher aims to instruct multiple learners, with each learner focusing on learning a scalar-valued target model. To achieve this, we frame the problem as teaching a vector-valued target model and extend the target model space from a scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space used in single-learner scenarios to a vector-valued space. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MINT offers significant teaching speed-up over repeated single-learner teaching, particularly when the multiple learners can communicate with each other. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the practicality and efficiency of MINT.

Nonparametric Teaching for Multiple Learners

Abstract

We study the problem of teaching multiple learners simultaneously in the nonparametric iterative teaching setting, where the teacher iteratively provides examples to the learner for accelerating the acquisition of a target concept. This problem is motivated by the gap between current single-learner teaching setting and the real-world scenario of human instruction where a teacher typically imparts knowledge to multiple students. Under the new problem formulation, we introduce a novel framework - Multi-learner Nonparametric Teaching (MINT). In MINT, the teacher aims to instruct multiple learners, with each learner focusing on learning a scalar-valued target model. To achieve this, we frame the problem as teaching a vector-valued target model and extend the target model space from a scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space used in single-learner scenarios to a vector-valued space. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MINT offers significant teaching speedup over repeated single-learner teaching, particularly when the multiple learners can communicate with each other. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the practicality and efficiency of MINT.

1 Introduction

Machine teaching [81, 83] considers the problem of how to design the most effective teaching set, typically with the smallest amount of (teaching) examples possible, to facilitate rapid learning of the target models by learners based on these examples. It can be thought of as an inverse problem of machine learning, in the sense that the student aims to learn a target model on a given dataset, while the teacher constructs such a (minimal) dataset. Machine teaching has many applications in computer vision [67, 68], crowd sourcing [59, 60, 78, 79] and cyber security [2, 3, 39, 53].

Roughly speaking, machine teaching can be carried out in a batch [80, 81, 33] or iterative [36, 37, 38, 52] fashion, depending on how teachers and learners interact with each other. Batch teaching focuses on single-round interaction, that is, the most representative and effective teaching dataset are designed to be fed to the learner in one shot. After that, the leaner solely and assiduously learns a target model from this dataset without further interaction. With practical considerations, iterative teaching extends such a single-round mode to a multi-round one. It studies the case where the teacher feeds examples based on learners' status (current learnt models) round by round, such that the learner can converge to a target model within fewer rounds. The minimal count of such rounds (or iterations) is referred to as iterative teaching dimension [36, 37].

Considering that previous works on iterative machine teaching usually limit target models in a parameterized family, that is, assuming the target model can be represented by some parameters, nonparametric iterative machine teaching [73] extends such single family to a general nonparametric one. This allows multiple possibility of the target model family. Specifically, by formulating nonparametric teaching in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), [73] introduce various families of target models associated with kernels, e.g. , Gaussian and Laplacian kernels in RKHS.

However, existing nonparametric teaching only focuses on the singlelearner setting ( i.e. , teaching a scalar-valued target model or function to a single learner), and it is computationally inefficient to carry out this same single-learner teaching repeatedly for the multi-learner scenario, where the teacher needs to teach numerous scalar-valued target functions to multiple learners and a single learner can only learn one. For example, when taking a colored picture with three (RGB) channels as a multi-learner target function 1 ( e.g. , [62, 20]), the iteration number of repeatedly performing singlelearner teaching for each channel is intuitively triple that of carrying out them simultaneously. Another example is the scenario where the single-learner target model having a large input space. Such a model can be divided into multiple smaller ones with an input space of appropriate size, and these smaller models can be formulated together into a multi-learner target model

The target is a

monochrome

G

B

R

(a)  Single-learner nonparametric teaching

(b1)  Multi-learner nonparametric teaching

The

target

is

a

colored

one with

RGB channels

(b2)  Multi-learner nonparametric teaching

The

target

is

a colored one

in pieces

[7, 64, 66, 61, 74]. Concretely, one can divide a single high-revolution picture into multiple subregions, and the original single-learner target function will become a multi-learner one. These examples motivate us to study a generalized framework, called multi-learner nonparametric teaching (MINT), where a vector-valued target model (instead of a scalar-valued model) is being taught. A comparison between single-learner teaching and MINT is illustrated in Figure 1.

It is therefore of great significance to generalize the recent single-learner nonparametric teaching [73] to MINT [11, 14, 77]. MINT is guided by the insight that repeatedly (or sequentially) teaching multiple scalar-valued target functions can be viewed as teaching a vector-valued target function. The theoretical motivation comes from the well-developed results of kernels for vector-valued functions [56, 44, 21], an important approach to deal with multiple data sources. This inspires us to formulate MINT as a teaching problem of a vector-valued target function, where sequentially teaching multiple scalar-valued functions (for single-learner teaching) becomes a special case of teaching a vectorvalued function [43, 21, 14]. We emphasize that, compared to the case where a single learner is learning a vector-valued target function, the multi-learner setting offers a general framework that can be generalized to more complicated scenarios, e.g. , learners operate within different feature spaces, and learners are able to communicate with each other. We summarize our major contributions below:

By analyzing general vector-valued RKHS [10, 45, 4], we study the multi-learner nonparametric teaching (MINT), where the teacher selects examples based on a vector-valued target function (each component of the vector-valued function is a scalar-valued function for a single learner) 2 , such that multiple learners can learn their own target models simultaneously.

By enabling the communication among multiple learners, learners can update themselves with a linear combination of current learnt functions of all learners [23, 12].We study a communicated MINT where the teacher not only selects examples but also injects the guidance of communication.

Under mild assumptions, we characterize the efficiency of our multi-learner generalization of nonparametric teaching. More importantly, we also empirically demonstrate its efficiency.

2 Related Works

Machine teaching . Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the field of machine teaching, see [81, 83, 36, 37, 67] and references therein. Batch machine teaching has examined the behaviors of various types of learners, including linear learners [33], forgetful learners [27, 37], version space learners [13, 65], hypothesis learner [40] and reinforcement learners [29, 76]. Further, by extending the single-round teaching mode to a multi-round one, iterative teaching has attracted growing attention in recent studies [36, 37, 40, 50, 32, 38, 69, 52, 73]. Specifically, [38] focuses on label synthesis teaching, while [52] proposes generative teaching. Additionally, [73] relaxes the parametric assumption on target models and generalizes the previous iterative teaching to a nonparametric iterative one [30, 51]. In contrast to previous works that mainly concentrate on the single-learner teaching, this work aims to address a more practical task - teaching multi-learner (vector-valued) target models. In this regard, the realistic practical scenario, classroom teaching [82, 71], is highly relevant, where it examines multiple learners by partitioning them into groups in batch and iterative setting, respectively. However, their works are also limited to the parametric setting, and their methods therefore are not immediately generalizable to nonparametric situations. In contrast, our work investigates multi-learner teaching in the nonparametric setting.

Multi-task functional optimization . Functional optimization [58, 6, 58, 22, 84, 63, 75] is a fundamental and significant task in various fields, such as variational inference [35, 34], barycenter problem [57, 70], and Residual Networks [48, 49, 26]. It involves mapping from input to output without having pre-defined parameters, optimized over a more general function space such as the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), Sobolev space [1, 46], and Fréchet space [47]. Notably, the functional gradient descent algorithm has been studied extensively for functional optimization in RKHS due to its regular properties [41, 42, 16, 35, 46, 5, 57]. Meanwhile, modeling in RKHS of vector-valued functions [56, 21, 44, 10, 9, 14, 19, 45] is an important approach to handle multi-task problem. Specifically, [21, 9, 4] focus on the analysis of the kernel and [28, 12] study multi-task versions of online mirror descent, which displays the similarity to multi-learner teaching in the sense of simultaneous execution. These theoretical and empirical works motivate us to extend single-learner teaching to a multi-learner one by analyzing functional gradient in vector-valued RKHS.

3 Background

Notation . Let X ⊆ R n be a n dimensional input ( i.e. , feature) space and Y ⊆ R be a output ( i.e. , label) space. By X d = X 1 × · · · × X d ⊆ R n × d we denote a d -learner input space, and let Y d = Y 1 ×··· × Y d ⊆ R d be a d -learner output space. Let a d -dimensional column vector with a i , entries indexed by i ∈ N d ( N k := { 1 , · · · , k } ), be [ a i ] d = ( a 1 , · · · , a d ) T (we may denote it by a for simplicity), and a 1-vector of size d be [1] d = (1 , · · · , 1) T ∈ R d . By M ( i, · ) we denote i -th row vector of a matrix M , and let M ( · ,i ) be its i -th column vector. A d -learner teaching sequence in size d × k is a collection of examples, notated as D = { ( x i,j , y i,j ) ∈ X × Y} 3 with the learner index i ∈ N d and the example index j ∈ N k . We notate the collection of such teaching sequence candidates by D d ∋ D , which is referred to as the knowledge domain of the teacher [36].

Let K ( x, x ′ ) : X × X ↦→ R be a scalar-valued positive definite kernel function, which can be equivalently notated by K ( x, x ′ ) = K x ( x ′ ) = K x ′ ( x ) , and one can abbreviate K x ( · ) by K x . The scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) H defined by K ( x, x ′ ) is the closure of linear span { f : f ( · ) = ∑ r i =1 α i K ( x i , · ) , α i ∈ R , r ∈ N , x i ∈ X} equipped with inner product ⟨ f, g ⟩ H = ∑ ij α i β j K ( x i , x j ) when g = ∑ j β j K x j . We assume that given the scalarvalued target model f ∗ ∈ H , one can uniquely identify a teaching example by its x † for brevity, ( x † , y † ) = ( x † , f ∗ ( x † )) . Let H d = H i ×··· × H d be a RKHS of vector-valued functions f = [ f i ] d with f i ∈ H 4 , equipped with inner product ⟨ f , g ⟩ H d = ∑ d i =1 ⟨ f i , g i ⟩ H . For simplicity, we use the vector-input K ( x , x ′ ) = [ K ( x i , x ′ i )] d to denote kernels in vector-valued RKHS H d . For a functional F : H d ↦→ R , its Fréchet derivative [16, 34, 57] is defined as following:

Definition 1. (Fréchet derivative in vector-valued RKHS) For a vector-valued functional F : H d ↦→ R , its Fréchet derivative ∇ f F [ f ] at f ∈ H d is defined implicitly as F [ f + ϵ g ] = F [ f ] + ϵ ⟨∇ f F [ f ] , g ⟩ H d + O ( ϵ 2 ) for any g ∈ H d and ϵ ∈ R , which is a function in H d .

Using the Riesz-Fréchet representation theorem [31, 55], the evaluation functional of vector-valued functions is defined in the following:

Definition 2. For a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space H d with a positive definite kernel K x ∈ H d , where x = [ x i,j i ] d ∈ X d and the example index j i ∈ N k , we define evaluation functional E x [ · ] : H d ↦→ R as

Single-learner nonparametric teaching . [73] formulates the single-learner nonparametric teaching as a functional minimization over single-learner D in scalar-valued RKHS:

where M is a disagreement between ˆ f ∗ and f ∗ ( e.g. , L 2 distance defined in RKHS M ( ˆ f ∗ , f ∗ ) = ∥ ˆ f ∗ -f ∗ ∥ H ), len ( · ) is the length of the teaching sequence D ( i.e. , the ITD defined in [36]) controlled by a regularized constant λ , and A denotes the learning algorithm of learners. Usually, A ( D ) is taken as empirical risk minimization:

with single-learner convex loss function L . As introduced in Section 1, iterative teaching [36, 37] focuses on some specific optimization algorithm that the learner adopts [38]. In the nonparametric setting, we consider the functional gradient descent:

where t = 0 , 1 , . . . , T serves as an iteration index, η t > 0 ( i.e. , a small constant) denotes the learning rate for the t -th iteration, and G represents the gradient functional evaluated at D t .

Specifically, [73] investigates the teaching algorithms within a practical teaching protocol and graybox setting. This involves a teacher that has no knowledge about the learner, including the learning rate and specific loss function, but still is able to keep track of the learnt model during each iteration. Two functional teaching algorithms are proposed: Random Functional Teaching (RFT) and Greedy FT (GFT). The former essentially adopts random sampling, and it serves as a simple baseline, which can also be viewed as a functional analogue of stochastic gradient descent [54, 25]. In contrast, GFT picks examples by maximizing the corresponding disagreement between the target and current models [5, 18], and has been shown to be more effective than RFT both theoretically and experimentally.

4 MINT: Multi-learner nonparametric teaching

In this section, we begin by defining multi-learner nonparametric teaching as a functional minimization in a vector-valued RKHS. Next, we analyze a vanilla MINT where multiple learners independently and simultaneously learns corresponding components of a vector-valued target function. Lastly, we investigate a communicated MINT where the teacher does not only provide examples but also guide multiple learners in the process of linearly combining present learnt functions.

4.1 Teaching settings

To define MINT, we expand scalar-valued target models in single-learner teaching to vector-valued ones and modify other notations to suit the multi-learner setting. More specifically, we redefine functional minimization of Eq. 2 as follows:

where f ∗ ∈ H d refers to a vector-valued target model, and other notations bear the same meaning as in Eq. 2. The learning algorithm A arrives at the following solution:

where ( x , y ) ∈ X d × Y d and ( x , y ) ∼ [ Q i ( x i , y i )] d . Evaluated at an example vector ( x , y ) = [( x i,j i , y i,j i )] d with the example index j i ∈ N k , the multi-learner convex loss L therein is

where L i is the convex loss for i -th learner. We can also express it as ⟨ [1] d , [ L i ( f i ( x i,j i ) , y i,j i )] d ⟩ H d , where the vector [1] d can be replaced by a weight vector [ w i ] d ∈ R d to adjust the significance of each learner relative to others. Under iterative setting [36, 37] which explores teaching algorithms from the viewpoint of optimization and approximation, we present vector-valued functional gradient descent:

where ⊙ denotes the element-wise multiplication, η t = [ η i ] d = ( η t 1 , · · · , η t d ) T is a vector of learning rates that corresponds to d learners and the communication matrix A t = arg min A ∈ R d × d ∥ A f t -f ∗ ∥ H d signifies a matrix with row sums that are equal to one in order to maintain the output's scale. Equivalently, by denoting that A t ( i, · ) = arg min M t ( i, · ) ∈ R 1 × d ∥ M t ( i, · ) · f t -f ∗ i ∥ H , it can also be expressed in a learner-specific ( i.e. , component-wise) fashion as f t +1 i ← A t ( i, · ) · f t i -η t i G i ( L ; A t ( i, · ) · f t ; D t ) , where i ∈ N d is the learner index.

We investigate MINT in the gray-box setting, which is equivalent to the one considered in [73]. To facilitate the theoretical analysis, we adopt some moderate assumptions regarding L i and kernels, which align with those made in [73].

Assumption 3. Each loss L i ( f i ) , i ∈ N d is L L i -Lipschitz smooth, i.e. , ∀ f i , f ′ i ∈ H , x i ∈ X and i ∈ N d where L L i ≥ 0 is a constant. To simplify the notation, we assume that L L i = L L for all i ∈ N d . Assumption 4. Each kernel K ( x, x ′ ) ∈ H is bounded, i.e. , ∀ x, x ′ ∈ X , K ( x, x ′ ) ≤ M K , where M K ≥ 0 is a constant.

With regards to diverse knowledge domains, we narrow the scope of investigation in this study to the synthesis-based teacher setting [36]. Furthermore, it's worth noting that by limiting the knowledge domain to a specific pool, it can result in multiple learners converging to a suboptimal f ∗′ , such findings of pool-based teachers are comparable and can be deduced accordingly, as discussed in Remark 7 of [73].

4.2 Vanilla multi-learner teaching

In tackling MINT, we begin by examining a basic scenario in which multiple learners concurrently learns corresponding components of a vector-valued target function without communication between them [28, 12], that is, A t in Eq. 8 is assigned the identity matrix I d . This simplifies Eq. 8 to

In this vanilla setting, multiple learners do not linearly combine learned functions of all learners; rather, it updates its functions by Eq. 9 alone.

In light of the definition of Fréchet derivative in vector-valued RKHS (as presented in Defi.1), we present Chain Rule for vector-valued functional gradients [24] as a Lemma.

Lemma 5. (Chain rule for vector-valued functional gradients) For differentiable functions G : R ↦→ R that are functions of functionals F , G ( F [ f ]) , the expression

is usually referred to as the chain rule.

To obtain the derivative of the evaluation functional [16], we introduce Lemma 6, with the proof of this lemma deferred to Appendix B.

Lemma 6. For an evaluation functional in vector-valued RKHS E x [ f ] = ∑ d i =1 f i ( x i,j i ) : H d ↦→ R where x = [ x i,j i ] d ∈ X d , its gradient is a d -dimensional vector ∇ f E x [ f ] = K x = [ K x i,j i ] d ∈ H d .

Using Lemma 5 and Lemma 6, we offer an expansion viewpoint on the vector-valued functional gradients of L [41, 16]: Suppose we have a specific example vector ( x , y ) = [( x i,j i , y i,j i )] d ∈ X d ×Y d , the gradient G of the multi-learner loss function L w.r.t. the vector-valued model f can be expressed by

We also broaden the applicability of RFT and GFT from their single-learner versions [73] to a multi-learner one. Under this context, RFT involves randomly picking examples for each learner, while GFT selects examples that satisfy

To avoid clutter in the notation, our examination is restricted to the selection of a single example for each learner during every iteration, and we provide the pseudo code in Appendix A.

In the upcoming discussion, we shall present our theoretical examination of the convergence performance of multi-learner RFT and GFT. Our approach differs from [73] as we focus on RFT's average performance by introducing the expectation operation over random sampling. This helps us gain valuable insights by averaging out the impact of randomness. Recall the teaching settings (Eq. 6, 9), we then proceed with our analysis of RFT's per-iteration reduction concerning L .

Lemma 7. (Sufficient Descent for multi-learner RFT) Suppose there are d learners, and the example mean for each learner is µ i = E x i ∼ P i ( x i ) ( x i ) < ∞ , and the variance σ 2 i = E x i ∼ P i ( x i ) ( x i -µ i ) 2 < ∞ , i ∈ N d . Under the assumptions outlined in both 3 and 4, if η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K for all i ∈ N d , then RFT teachers can, on average, reduce the multi-learner loss L ( f ) by:

where ˜ η t = min i ∈ N d η t i and m i,t ( ˙ x ) := E ˙ x [( ∇ f L i ( f ) | f = f t i ) 2 ] .

Intuitively, m i,t ( µ i ) serves as a measure of the gradient's magnitude (loss L i w.r.t. f t i ) for the i -th learner at the example mean µ i in the t -th iteration, and as f t i approaches f ∗ i , m i,t ( µ i ) becomes increasingly small. According to Lemma 7, as proven in Appendix B, the average reduction of multi-learner loss L per iteration is constrained by a negative upper bound. To be more precise, this upper bound is determined by a range of elements, such as the learning rate, the count of learners, the example variance σ 2 i and the gradient of L i at the example mean µ i ( i ∈ N d ), and these elements are independent of each another. When the gradient at each µ i is large, RFT on average can reduce L by a significant amount. Meanwhile, the variance also has an impact on the reduction and this is governed by a diminutive constant of m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) / 2 .

The least helpful teaching scenario in the t -th iteration across the d learners is represented by min i ∈ N d ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) σ 2 i / 2 ) , which has the smallest gradient at the example mean. It is observed from Lemma 7 that the reduction of L per iteration is, at a minimum, d times greater than that of the worst-case scenario -˜ η t / 2 · min i ∈ N d ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) σ 2 i / 2 ) . In other words, when multi-learner RFT achieves a stationary point in the worst-case scenario, the multi-learner loss L reaches convergence as well. This indicates that the convergence rate of multi-learner RFT is at least as fast as in the single-learner worst-case scenario (also faster than repeatedly teaching).

Introducing the expectation operation enables us to eliminate the randomness that arises from random sampling. In contrast to [73], which determines the decrease based on the discrepancy at specific but randomly chosen example x t (involving randomness), we establish that the decrease on average is determined by the mean and variance. This valuable insight is important to understand the fundamentals of RFT, which is not considered in [73].

Theorem 8. (Convergence for multi-learner RFT) Suppose the vector-valued model for multiple learners is initialized with f 0 ∈ H d and returns f t ∈ H d after t iterations, we have the upper bound of min i ∈ N d ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) σ 2 i / 2 ) w.r.t. t :

where 0 < ˙ η = min l ∈{ 0 } ⋃ N t -1 ˜ η l ≤ 1 / (2 L L · M K ) , and given a small constant ϵ > 0 it would take approximately O (2 E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f 0 ) ] / ( d ˙ ηϵ ) ) iterations to reach a stationary point.

The proof for Theorem 8 can be found in Appendix B. Theorem 8 tells that the minimum of the nonnegative term within the upper bound in Theorem 7, which is min i ∈ N d ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) σ 2 i / 2 ) , is also upper bounded, and the iterative teaching dimension is 2 E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f 0 ) ] / ( d ˙ ηϵ ) .

In comparison to RFT, GFT achieves a larger reduction in multi-learner loss L per iteration, suggesting a faster convergence rate and a lesser number of iterations required to achieve convergence.

Lemma 9. (Sufficient Descent for multi-learner GFT) Under Assumption 3 and 4, if η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K for all i ∈ N d , the GFT teachers can achieve a greater reduction in the multi-learner loss L :

where ˜ η t and m i,t ( · ) retain their previous meaning.

The proof of the Lemma 9 is presented in Appendix B. GFT selects examples with the steepest gradient, which leads to m i,t ( x t i ∗ ) ≥ ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) σ 2 i / 2 ) for each learner. Consequently, it can be observed that per-iteration L reduction of GFT has a tighter bound compared to RFT. This is due to the fact that GFT uses a greedy approach to select examples that maximizes the norm of difference between the current and target models. This allows the learners to take a larger step forward f ∗ in per iteration. The tighter bound provides theoretical evidence supporting the effectiveness of GFT, which is consistent with the findings in the single-learner teaching [73].

Theorem 10. (Convergence for multi-learner GFT) Suppose the vector-valued model for multiple learners is initialized with f 0 ∈ H d and returns f t ∈ H d after t iterations, we have the upper bound of min i ∈ N d m i,t ( x t i ∗ ) w.r.t. t :

where ˙ η has the same definition as before.

It follows from Lemma 7 and 9 that when x t i ∗ is close to µ i for i ∈ N d , then GFT and RFT perform similarly. In Theorem 10 (The proof is given in Appendix B), we theoretically show this relation by introducing the distance between x t i ∗ and µ i , which provides a deep insight of the difference between RFT and GFT that is not considered in [73]. Specifically, the per-iteration loss reduction under both RFT and GFT has negative upper bounds, and the difference between these two upper bounds can be seen by comparing Theorem 8 and Theorem 10. From a qualitative perspective, GFT can achieve better convergence speed-up because its negative upper bound can take smaller values than that of

1

d

i

=1

x

l

i

∗

µ

2

which is the cumulative distance

RFT. This gap is characterized by 1 dt ∑ t -l =0 ∑ ( ∥ -∥ ) between select x t i ∗ and mean µ i for all learners and averaged over iterations. We emphasize that the purpose of our results is to show the difference between RFT and GFT, rather than proving that GFT always achieves better convergence than RFT (which is not always true). By comparing Theorem 8 and Theorem 10, we can learn that it is possible for GFT to have larger per-iteration loss reduction than RFT. However, we also recognize the intrinsic difficulty to show the exact conditions such that GFT can always be better than RFT. In contrast to our results, the parametric case ( e.g. , [36]) also has not obtained the necessary and sufficient conditions for greedy teaching to be better than random teaching. More generally, [38] also considers some alternative teaching strategies other than the greedy teaching, such as the parameterized teaching with a multi-iteration reward function. Despite not being able to fully characterize the difference of convergence rate between GFT and RFT, our existing theoretical analysis still poses an important open problem: when and how can GFT provably achieve faster convergence than RFT?

i

t=0

t=10000

t=30000

t=60000

t=70000

t=100000

(a) Single-learner teaching

t=0

t=5000

t=10000

t=30000

t=50000

t=100000

(b) Vanilla MINT

t=0

t=5000

t=10000

t=30000

t=50000

t=80000

(c) Single-learner teaching

t=0

t=5000

t=10000

t=30000

t=50000

t=80000

(d) Vanilla MINT

0

200

400

600

800

1000

Iteration t

×

10 2

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Loss

×

10

3

Singel­learner teaching, GFT

Vanilla MINT, GFT

(a) Tiger & cheetah.

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

Iteration t

×

10

2

1

.

25

1

.

30

1

.

35

1

.

40

1

.

45

1

.

50

1

.

55

1

.

60

Loss

×

10

-

3

Singel-learner teaching, GFT

(b) Gray lion.

0

500

1000

1500

2000

Iteration t

×

10 2

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

Loss

×

10

3

Single­learner teaching, GFT

Single­learner teaching, RFT

Vanilla MINT, GFT

Vanilla MINT, RFT

Communicated MINT, GFT

Communicated MINT, RFT

(c) RGB lion.

4.3 Communicated multi-learner teaching

An infant would often compose previously learnt knowledge in order to grasp a new target concept, such as understanding what a zebra is by combining the learnt ideas of horses and black-and-white stripes. Such an efficient learning motivates us to explore the idea of communicated MINT, which enables the communication between learners. In other words, multiple learners can execute linear combination on the currently learnt functions of all learners [21, 23, 77, 12], that is, A t is no longer constrained to be an identity matrix.

In practice, to direct this communication, the teacher can utilize a two-layer perceptron (MLP) to derive the matrix A t in Eq. 8 by searching a matrix A that minimizes ∥ A f t -f ∗ ∥ H d as much as possible, which is an addition step beyond example selection in each iteration.

Proposition 11. If the proximity between f t and f ∗ is sufficiently close, meaning that ∥ f t -f ∗ ∥ H d ≤ ϵ where ϵ is a tiny positive constant, then A t equals the identity matrix I d .

The proof of Prop.11 is given in Appendix B. This suggests that there is no need for MLP to be used in solving matrix A t in every iteration, but only at the beginning, because as the iterations progress, f t will approach near to f ∗ .

Lemma 12. Under Assumption 3, the communication across learners will result in a reduction of the multi-learner convex loss L by 0 ≤ L ( f t ) -L ( A t f t ) ≤ 2 L L ∥ f t -f ∗ ∥ H d .

Proof of Lemma 12 is given in Appendix B. The difference in L between the case where the communication exists and that where it doesn't is lower bounded by zero and upper bounded by the distance between f t and f ∗ . This suggests that if f t is far from f ∗ , then matrix A t can potentially decrease L significantly at the best case while not causing any increase at the worst case.

Theorem 13. Suppose the communication in the t -th iteration of multiple learners is denoted by the matrix A t and returns f t +1 A t ∈ H d , for both RFT and GFT we have:

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(a) Single-learner teaching.

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(b) Vanilla MINT.

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(c) Communicated MINT.

Proof of Theorem 13 is in Appendix B. This shows that the addition of communication has led to an improvement in model updates, which is evident from the larger loss discrepancy between f t +1 A t and f t compared to the difference observed between f t +1 A t and A t f t .

5 Experiments and Results

Testing the teaching of a multi-learner (vector-valued) target model, MINT presents more satisfactory performance than repeatedly carrying out the single-learner teaching, which is consistent with our theoretical findings. Detailed configurations and supplementary experiments are given in the Appendix C.

MINT in gray scale. A grayscale figure can be viewed as a 3D surface where the z axis corresponds to the level of gray, while the x, y axes depict the placement of pixels [73]. We consider two scenarios: one involves the simultaneous teaching of a tiger and a cheetah figure, while the other focuses on the teaching of a lion. After comparing (a) and (b) in Figure 2, we see that when teaching two target functions by GFT simultaneously, the vanilla MINT requires almost half the number of cost iterations compared to single-learner teaching, which is also evident from the loss plot shown in Figure 3 (a). By comparing (c) and (d) in Figure 2, we can observe that dividing a single-learner target figure into smaller pieces and recasting them into MINT can significantly improve the efficiency, which is also demonstrated by the loss plot in Figure 3 (b).

MINT in three (RGB) channels. To further demonstrate the benefits of communication, we examine with a lion image with three channels in RGB format. The loss plot in Figure 3 (c) reveals that the most efficient teaching is the communicated MINT for both RFT and GFT. The vanilla MINT and single-learner teaching follow in order of decreasing efficiency. Furthermore, as anticipated, the multi-learner GFT proves to be more efficient compared to RFT. One intriguing observation is that the communicated MINT leads to a significant reduction in multi-learner loss at the outset, which aligns with our theoretical findings in Lemma 12 and confirms the validity of Prop.11 that A t could eventually become an identity matrix after numerous iterations. Figure 4 compares the specific learnt f t for three versions of GFT during each iteration, wherein we observe that MINT consistently outperforms the single-learner one, and the learnt image under the communicated MINT is more clear compared to that of the vanilla one. To be more persuasive, we also offer detailed and additional

experiments in Appendix, including channel-wise visualization of specific f t (Figure 7), RFT-taught f t (Figure 8-9) and teaching multiple learners with a particular initialization of f 0 (Figure 11-10), which includes an extreme case that only one-time communication is sufficient to help multiple learners learn f ∗ (Figure 15).

6 Concluding Remarks and Future Work

In this paper, we seek to address a practical limitation of current nonparametric iterative machine teaching by enabling the teaching of multi-learner (vector-valued) target models. This generalization of teaching ability involves generalizing the model space from space of scalar-valued functions to that of vector-valued functions. In order to address multi-learner nonparametric teaching, we start by analyzing a vanilla MINT where the teacher picks examples based on a vector-valued target function such that multiple learners can learn its components simultaneously. Additionally, we consider the communicated MINT ( i.e. , multiple learners are allowed to carry out linear combination on current learnt functions) for further exploration. Through both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, we demonstrate that the communicated MINT is more efficient than the vanilla MINT.

Moving forward, it could be interesting to explore other practical aspects related to nonparametric teaching. This will involve a deeper theoretical understanding and the development of more efficient teaching algorithms. Besides, it would be intriguing to establish connections between MINT and multi-output neural networks, which can further enhance its practical applications such as knowledge distillation. Moreover, generating teaching examples with a surrogate objective that does not need a target model ( e.g. , black-box teaching) is also an important direction ( e.g. , [17, 72]). More generally, (iterative) machine teaching is intrinsically connected to the recent popular data-centric AI. Understanding data-centric learning ( e.g. , text prompting, data augmentation, data distillation) may require a deeper understanding towards (iterative) machine teaching.

References

Robert A Adams and John JF Fournier. Sobolev spaces . Elsevier, 2003. 3

Scott Alfeld, Xiaojin Zhu, and Paul Barford. Data poisoning attacks against autoregressive models. In AAAI , 2016. 1

Scott Alfeld, Xiaojin Zhu, and Paul Barford. Explicit defense actions against test-set attacks. In AAAI , 2017. 1

Mauricio A Alvarez, Lorenzo Rosasco, Neil D Lawrence, et al. Kernels for vector-valued functions: A review. Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning , 4(3):195-266, 2012. 2, 3

Michael Arbel, Anna Korba, Adil Salim, and Arthur Gretton. Maximum mean discrepancy gradient flow. In NeurIPS , 2019. 3, 4

Axel D Becke. Density-functional exchange-energy approximation with correct asymptotic behavior. Physical review A , 38(6):3098, 1988. 3

Jon Louis Bentley. Multidimensional divide-and-conquer. Communications of the ACM , 23(4):214-229, 1980. 2

Dimitri P Bertsekas and John N Tsitsiklis. Introduction to probability vol. 1. 2002. 26

Andrea Caponnetto, Charles A Micchelli, Massimiliano Pontil, and Yiming Ying. Universal multi-task kernels. The Journal of Machine Learning Research , 9:1615-1646, 2008. 3

Claudio Carmeli, Ernesto De Vito, and Alessandro Toigo. Vector valued reproducing kernel hilbert spaces of integrable functions and mercer theorem. Analysis and Applications , 4(04):377-408, 2006. 2, 3

Rich Caruana. Multitask learning. Machine learning , 28:41-75, 1997. 2

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Pierre Laforgue, Andrea Paudice, et al. Multitask online mirror descent. Transactions of Machine Learning Research . 2, 3, 5, 8

Yuxin Chen, Adish Singla, Oisin Mac Aodha, Pietro Perona, and Yisong Yue. Understanding the role of adaptivity in machine teaching: The case of version space learners. In NeurIPS , 2018. 3

Carlo Ciliberto, Youssef Mroueh, Tomaso Poggio, and Lorenzo Rosasco. Convex learning of multiple tasks and their structure. In ICML , 2015. 2, 3

Sebastian Claici, Edward Chien, and Justin Solomon. Stochastic wasserstein barycenters. In ICML , 2018. 23

Rodney Coleman. Calculus on normed vector spaces . Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. 3, 6, 16

Katherine M Collins, Umang Bhatt, Weiyang Liu, Vihari Piratla, Ilia Sucholutsky, Bradley Love, and Adrian Weller. Human-in-the-loop mixup. In UAI , 2023. 10

Thomas H Cormen, Charles E Leiserson, Ronald L Rivest, and Clifford Stein. Introduction to algorithms . MIT press, 2022. 4

Francesco Dinuzzo, Cheng S Ong, Gianluigi Pillonetto, and Peter V Gehler. Learning output kernels with block coordinate descent. In ICML , 2011. 3

Emilien Dupont, Hyunjik Kim, SM Ali Eslami, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, and Dan Rosenbaum. From data to functa: Your data point is a function and you can treat it like one. In ICML , 2022. 2

Theodoros Evgeniou, Charles A Micchelli, Massimiliano Pontil, and John Shawe-Taylor. Learning multiple tasks with kernel methods. Journal of machine learning research , 6(4), 2005. 2, 3, 8

Jerome H Friedman. Greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine. Annals of statistics , pages 1189-1232, 2001. 3

Peter Gehler and Sebastian Nowozin. On feature combination for multiclass object classification. In ICCV , 2009. 2, 8

Izrail Moiseevitch Gelfand, Richard A Silverman, et al. Calculus of variations . Courier Corporation, 2000. 5, 16

Moritz Hardt, Ben Recht, and Yoram Singer. Train faster, generalize better: Stability of stochastic gradient descent. In ICML , 2016. 4

Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learning for image recognition. In CVPR , 2016. 3

Anette Hunziker, Yuxin Chen, Oisin Mac Aodha, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Andreas Krause, Pietro Perona, Yisong Yue, and Adish Singla. Teaching multiple concepts to a forgetful learner. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.08322 , 2018. 3

Sham M Kakade, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and Ambuj Tewari. Regularization techniques for learning with matrices. The Journal of Machine Learning Research , 13(1):1865-1890, 2012. 3, 5

Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Rati Devidze, Volkan Cevher, and Adish Singla. Interactive teaching algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11867 , 2019. 3

Akash Kumar, Hanqi Zhang, Adish Singla, and Yuxin Chen. The teaching dimension of kernel perceptron. In AISTATS , 2021. 3

Peter D Lax. Functional analysis , volume 55. John Wiley & Sons, 2002. 4

Laurent Lessard, Xuezhou Zhang, and Xiaojin Zhu. An optimal control approach to sequential machine teaching. In AISTATS , 2019. 3

Ji Liu, Xiaojin Zhu, and Hrag Ohannessian. The teaching dimension of linear learners. In ICML , 2016. 1, 3

Qiang Liu. Stein variational gradient descent as gradient flow. In NeurIPS , 2017. 3

Qiang Liu and Dilin Wang. Stein variational gradient descent: A general purpose bayesian inference algorithm. In NeurIPS , 2016. 3

Weiyang Liu, Bo Dai, Ahmad Humayun, Charlene Tay, Chen Yu, Linda B Smith, James M Rehg, and Le Song. Iterative machine teaching. In ICML , 2017. 1, 3, 4, 5, 7

Weiyang Liu, Bo Dai, Xingguo Li, Zhen Liu, James Rehg, and Le Song. Towards black-box iterative machine teaching. In ICML , 2018. 1, 3, 4, 5

Weiyang Liu, Zhen Liu, Hanchen Wang, Liam Paull, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Adrian Weller. Iterative teaching by label synthesis. In NeurIPS , 2021. 1, 3, 4, 7

Yuzhe Ma, Xuezhou Zhang, Wen Sun, and Jerry Zhu. Policy poisoning in batch reinforcement learning and control. In NeurIPS , 2019. 1

Farnam Mansouri, Yuxin Chen, Ara Vartanian, Jerry Zhu, and Adish Singla. Preference-based batch and sequential teaching: Towards a unified view of models. In NeurIPS , 2019. 3

Llew Mason, Jonathan Baxter, Peter Bartlett, and Marcus Frean. Boosting algorithms as gradient descent. In NeurIPS , 1999. 3, 6

Llew Mason, Jonathan Baxter, Peter L Bartlett, Marcus Frean, et al. Functional gradient techniques for combining hypotheses. In NeurIPS , 1999. 3

Charles Micchelli and Massimiliano Pontil. Kernels for multi-task learning. In NeurIPS , 2004. 2

Charles A Micchelli and Massimiliano Pontil. On learning vector-valued functions. Neural computation , 17(1):177-204, 2005. 2, 3

Ha Q Minh and Vikas Sindhwani. Vector-valued manifold regularization. In ICML , 2011. 2, 3

Youssef Mroueh, Tom Sercu, and Anant Raj. Sobolev descent. In AISTATS , 2019. 3

Lawrence Narici and Edward Beckenstein. Topological vector spaces . Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2010. 3

Atsushi Nitanda and Taiji Suzuki. Functional gradient boosting based on residual network perception. In ICML , 2018. 3

Atsushi Nitanda and Taiji Suzuki. Functional gradient boosting for learning residual-like networks with statistical guarantees. In AISTATS , 2020. 3

Tomi Peltola, Mustafa Mert Çelikok, Pedram Daee, and Samuel Kaski. Machine teaching of active sequential learners. In NeurIPS , 2019. 3

Hong Qian, Xu-Hui Liu, Chen-Xi Su, Aimin Zhou, and Yang Yu. The teaching dimension of regularized kernel learners. In ICML , 2022. 3

Zeju Qiu, Weiyang Liu, Tim Z Xiao, Zhen Liu, Umang Bhatt, Yucen Luo, Adrian Weller, and Bernhard Schölkopf. Iterative teaching by data hallucination. In AISTATS , 2023. 1, 3

Amin Rakhsha, Goran Radanovic, Rati Devidze, Xiaojin Zhu, and Adish Singla. Policy teaching via environment poisoning: Training-time adversarial attacks against reinforcement learning. In ICML , 2020. 1

Sebastian Ruder. An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.04747 , 2016. 4

Bernhard Schölkopf, Alexander J Smola, Francis Bach, et al. Learning with kernels: support vector machines, regularization, optimization, and beyond . MIT press, 2002. 4

Laurent Schwartz. Sous-espaces hilbertiens d'espaces vectoriels topologiques et noyaux associés (noyaux reproduisants). Journal d'analyse mathématique , 13:115-256, 1964. 2, 3

Zebang Shen, Zhenfu Wang, Alejandro Ribeiro, and Hamed Hassani. Sinkhorn barycenter via functional gradient descent. In NeurIPS , 2020. 3

Ivan Singer. The theory of best approximation and functional analysis . SIAM, 1974. 3

Adish Singla, Ilija Bogunovic, G Bartók, A Karbasi, and A Krause. On actively teaching the crowd to classify. In NIPS Workshop on Data Driven Education , 2013. 1

Adish Singla, Ilija Bogunovic, Gábor Bartók, Amin Karbasi, and Andreas Krause. Near-optimally teaching the crowd to classify. In ICML , 2014. 1

J Sirotkovi´ c, H Dujmi´ c, and V Papi´ c. Accelerating mean shift image segmentation with ifgt on massively parallel gpu. In International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics , 2013. 2

Vincent Sitzmann, Julien Martel, Alexander Bergman, David Lindell, and Gordon Wetzstein. Implicit neural representations with periodic activation functions. In NeurIPS , 2020. 2

Michael J Smanski, Swapnil Bhatia, Dehua Zhao, YongJin Park, Lauren BA Woodruff, Georgia Giannoukos, Dawn Ciulla, Michele Busby, Johnathan Calderon, Robert Nicol, et al. Functional optimization of gene clusters by combinatorial design and assembly. Nature biotechnology , 32(12):1241-1249, 2014. 3

Douglas R Smith. The design of divide and conquer algorithms. Science of Computer Programming , 5:37-58, 1985. 2

Behzad Tabibian, Utkarsh Upadhyay, Abir De, Ali Zarezade, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Manuel GomezRodriguez. Enhancing human learning via spaced repetition optimization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 116(10):3988-3993, 2019. 3

David Tarditi, Sidd Puri, and Jose Oglesby. Accelerator: using data parallelism to program gpus for general-purpose uses. ACM SIGPLAN Notices , 41(11):325-335, 2006. 2

Pei Wang, Kabir Nagrecha, and Nuno Vasconcelos. Gradient-based algorithms for machine teaching. In CVPR , 2021. 1, 3

Pei Wang and Nuno Vasconcelos. A machine teaching framework for scalable recognition. In ICCV , 2021. 1

Zhaozhuo Xu, Beidi Chen, Chaojian Li, Weiyang Liu, Le Song, Yingyan Lin, and Anshumali Shrivastava. Locality sensitive teaching. In NeurIPS , 2021. 3

Jianbo Ye, Panruo Wu, James Z Wang, and Jia Li. Fast discrete distribution clustering using wasserstein barycenter with sparse support. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing , 65(9):2317-2332, 2017. 3

Teresa Yeo, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Adish Singla, Arpit Merchant, Thibault Asselborn, Louis Faucon, Pierre Dillenbourg, and Volkan Cevher. Iterative classroom teaching. In AAAI , 2019. 3

Longhui Yu, Weisen Jiang, Han Shi, Jincheng Yu, Zhengying Liu, Yu Zhang, James T Kwok, Zhenguo Li, Adrian Weller, and Weiyang Liu. Metamath: Bootstrap your own mathematical questions for large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.12284 , 2023. 10

Chen Zhang, Xiaofeng Cao, Weiyang Liu, Ivor Tsang, and James Kwok. Nonparametric iterative machine teaching. In ICML , 2023. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 23

Chen Zhang, Guangyu Sun, Zhenman Fang, Peipei Zhou, Peichen Pan, and Jason Cong. Caffeine: Toward uniformed representation and acceleration for deep convolutional neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems , 38(11):2072-2085, 2018. 2

Dinghuai Zhang, Mao Ye, Chengyue Gong, Zhanxing Zhu, and Qiang Liu. Black-box certification with randomized smoothing: A functional optimization based framework. In NeurIPS , 2020. 3

Xuezhou Zhang, Shubham Kumar Bharti, Yuzhe Ma, Adish Singla, and Xiaojin Zhu. The sample complexity of teaching-by-reinforcement on q-learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.09324 , 2020. 3

Yu Zhang and Qiang Yang. A survey on multi-task learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering , 34(12):5586-5609, 2021. 2, 8

Yao Zhou, Arun Reddy Nelakurthi, and Jingrui He. Unlearn what you have learned: Adaptive crowd teaching with exponentially decayed memory learners. In SIGKDD , 2018. 1

Yao Zhou, Arun Reddy Nelakurthi, Ross Maciejewski, Wei Fan, and Jingrui He. Crowd teaching with imperfect labels. In The Web Conference , 2020. 1

Xiaojin Zhu. Machine teaching for bayesian learners in the exponential family. arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.4947 , 2013. 1

Xiaojin Zhu. Machine teaching: An inverse problem to machine learning and an approach toward optimal education. In AAAI , 2015. 1, 3

Xiaojin Zhu, Ji Liu, and Manuel Lopes. No learner left behind: On the complexity of teaching multiple learners simultaneously. In IJCAI , 2017. 3

Xiaojin Zhu, Adish Singla, Sandra Zilles, and Anna N Rafferty. An overview of machine teaching. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.05927 , 2018. 1, 3

R Zoppoli, M Sanguineti, and Thomas Parisini. Approximating networks and extended ritz method for the solution of functional optimization problems. Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications , 112(2):403-440, 2002. 3

A Additional Discussions

Broader Impact

This paper is to address a practical limitation of recently introduced Nonparametric Iterative Machine Teaching from the theoretical aspect, which is to enable multi-learner teaching. We also provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that multi-learner nonparametric teaching is effective in addressing such a limitation. Although we hope that the outcomes of this study will enlighten the theoretical community, we do not expect any immediate effects on society from this work.

Pseudo code for multi-learner RFT and GFT

The pseudo code for RFT and GFT in the vanilla and communicated MINT is given as following:

Algorithm 1 Greedy (Random) Functional Teaching for the Communicated (Vanilla) MINT

Input: Target f ∗ ∈ H d , initial f 0 ∈ H d , small constants ϵ, ϵ 0 > 0 and maximal iteration numbers T, T 0 .

The teacher is not only to construct the communication matrix but alos to select the teaching set for multiple learners:

// Construction of the communication matrix.

Initialize a two-layer perceptron with a linear layer, i.e. , initialize the communication matrix with an indentity one ( A = I d ), and set t 0 = 0 .

Train the linear weight ( A ) of this two-layer perceptron, such that ∥ A f t -f ∗ ∥ H d decreases. end

/* For the Vanilla MINT, omit the above procedure of solving for the communication matrix, just need to set A = I d . */

// Selection of the teaching set.

Initialize the teaching set D = ∅ ;

Pick x t i ∗ ∈ X i , i ∈ N d with the maximal difference between f t i and f ∗ i for multiple learners simultaneously:

/* For random functional teaching, Pick x t i ∗ ∈ X i , i ∈ N d randomly and concurrently. */

Add ( x t i ∗ , y t i ∗ = f ∗ i ( x t i ∗ )) into the teaching set D . Provide A and D to multiple learners.

The learners update f t based on received A t = A and D t = D :

Set

end

Further discussion about the idea behind MINT

In practical scenarios, it is a commonly accepted fact that a single object can possess multiple characteristics. For instance, when describing a fruit, we often take into account its various attributes such as shape, color, and texture. This highlights the notion that limiting oneself to scalar-vector functions in nonparametric iterative machine teaching would not be enough to capture the complexity of real-world data. We thus extend the current nonparametric teaching from the single-learner version to a multi-learner one (MINT) by considering vector-valued functions. Compared to parameterized

t

t

+1

.

Appendix

(b)  Communicated MINT

Update

Converge

Converge

teaching, MINT can be seen as a type of extension which involves replacing the vector unit from values to functions.

The idea of communicated MINT partially comes from linear algebra. If f 0 ∈ H d forms a basis of H d , and f ∗ can be linearly expressed by this basis, then it is noteworthy that learners can successfully learn f ∗ with only one-time communication.

Let us consider a scenario in which the components of f 0 are from different function families. Suppose we take f 0 = ( e x , sin x, x ) T and f ∗ = (2 e x -sin x -x, sin x +2 x, -e x +sin x + x ) T , it holds that which indicates that the teacher can teach f ∗ to multiple learners through providing the communication matrix A within one iteration. To draw a practical analogy, we can view e kx as denoting shape, sin kx as indicating color, and x 1 /k as representing texture.

Another scenario is when the components of f 0 belong to the same function family. Consider the scenario where two learners are familiar with the shapes of a circle and a square, respectively, and they need to learn two different shapes as shown in Figure 5. In this case, we can model it by assuming that f 0 j , j ∈ N 2 belong to the cosine family, i.e. , f 0 = ( √ 2 cos(2 πx ) , √ 2 cos(4 πx )) T . Here, f 0 are not linearly related, which is a property of basis. The target function is denoted as

By referring to the illustration in Figure 5, we can compare the performance of vanilla MINT and communicated MINT. It can be observed that the communicated MINT is capable of helping to learn f ∗ within just one iteration, whereas the vanilla MINT requires numerous iterations to achieve the same.

B Detailed Proofs

Our suggestion for further reading on functional calculus would be to consult the literature [24, 16] and the references therein.

Proof of Lemma 6 We firstly define a function q by adding a small disturbance ϵ g ( ϵ ∈ R , g ∈ H d ) to f ∈ H d , that is, q = f + ϵ g . We see that q ∈ H d since vector-valued RKHS is closed under addition and scalar multiplication. For a evaluation functional E x [ f ] = ∑ d i =1 f i ( x i,j i ) : H d ↦→ R where x = [ x i,j i ] d ∈ X d , we thus can evaluate q at x as

Recall the definition of the Fréchet derivative in a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which is defined implicitly and can be found in Definition 1, E x [ f + ϵ g ] = E x [ f ] + ϵ ⟨∇ f E x [ f ] , g ⟩ H d + O ( ϵ 2 ) , it follows from Eq. 20 that the gradient of a evaluation functional in vector-valued RKHS H d is ∇ f E x [ f ] = K x = [ K x i,j i ] d .

■

Proof of Lemma 7 Note that one example ( x, y ) ∼ Q i ( x, y ) can be uniquely identified by its x , we take expectation on x ∼ P ( x ) only for the sake of simplicity. It follows from the convexity of L i and the definition of Fréchet derivative in Definition 1 that we have

Under L L -Lipschitz smooth Assumption 3 and bounded kernel function Assumption 4, we can show that

For succinctness, we define and

Then, we can apply Taylor expansion for m i,t ( x t i ) on µ i = E x i ∼ P i ( x i ) ( x t i ) and derives

where the remainder R 2 ( x t i ) usually is omitted, and we assume m i,t ( x t i ) is 2 -times differentiable. We see that evaluated at mean µ i , m i,t ( µ i ) is monotonically decreasing w.r.t. iteration t . Combining Eq. 21, 22 and 25, we have

Hence, if ∀ i ∈ N d , η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K , we have

where ˜ η t = min i ∈ N d η t i .

■

Proof of Theorem 8 Recall Lemma 7, ∀ i ∈ N d , η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K , we have

where ˜ η t = min i ∈ N d η t i . Rearranging above, we have:

Equivalently, replace index t by l , 2 E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f l ) -L ( f l +1 ) ] d ˜ η l ≥ min i ∈ N d ( m i,l ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,l ( µ i ) 2 σ 2 i ) . Consequently, plugging l = 0 , 1 . . . , t -1 in it and summing them up, we hence have

where ˙ η = min l ∈{ 0 } ⋃ N t -1 ˜ η l > 0 . Expanding the r.h.s. term in Eq. 31 yields

In terms of the l.h.s. term in Eq. 31, we must have

Combining expression 32 and 33, we thus have

Since m i,t ( µ i ) is monotonically decreasing w.r.t. iteration t , we have

Therefore, we can derive

when the returned vector-valued model for multiple learners is f t and index t -1 denotes the last iteration.

On the other hand, it follows from Eq. 32 and the fact that m i,t ( µ i ) is monotonically decreasing w.r.t. iteration t that we have

After rearranging, we obtain

Let r.h.s. of Eq. 37 be controlled by a small constant ϵ > 0 , we have

which means given a small constant ϵ > 0 it would take approximately

iterations to reach a stationary point.

Additionally, this suggests that multiple learners could achieve the stationary state as: In each iteration, check if m i,t -1 ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t -1 ( µ i ) 2 σ 2 i is small enough. Assuming this condition is satisfied, the learners will have already reduced the multi-learner loss to an acceptably low level, allowing them to send a signal indicating termination back to the teachers. If the condition is not fulfilled, the teachers will continue with the process. The termination occurs within 2 d ˙ ηϵ · E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f 0 ) ] iterations. ■

Proof of Lemma 9 Recall practical Greedy Functional Teaching in Eq. 12

Obviously, it is trivial to see that ∀ x t ∈ X ,

Analogous to the Proof of Lemma 7 in B, we can derive

where ∗ = holds because selected x t i ∗ by GFT is determined. Therefore,

Hence, if ∀ i ∈ N d , η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K , we have

where ˜ η t = min i ∈ N d η t i . Note that GFT is to select examples such that the gradient is the steepest, thus min i ∈ N d m i,t ( x t i ∗ ) ≥ min i ∈ N d ( m i,t ( µ i ) + m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) 2 σ 2 i )

■

Proof of Theorem 10 Recall the result of Lemma 7, when ∀ i ∈ N d , η t i ≤ 1 2 L L · M K

where ˜ η t = min i ∈ N d η t i .

We see that ∑ d i =1 ( m i,t ( µ i )+ m ′′ i,t ( µ i ) 2 σ 2 i ) ∑ d i =1 m i,t ( x t i ∗ ) ≤ 1 measures the difference between two algorithms at t iteration. And this is deterministic in each iteration, that is, this can be estimated before sampling, so we can see the superiority of GFT.

where we assume m i,t ( ˙ x ) is Lipschitz continuous w.r.t. input ˙ x to tract the relation between this quantity and the distance between µ i and x t i ∗ . Now, we have

We see that when selected x t i ∗ by GFT is close to µ i then RFT and GFT on average share the same performance. (show that if maximal model disagreement occurs at the mean of x distribution, then such a greedy teacher may share similar performance with a random teacher on average.) This is important to gain an insight on when a greedy teacher is better than a random teacher. Then, we have

Therefore,

Equivalently, replace index t by l , 2 E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f l ) -L ( f l +1 ) ] d ˜ η l + 1 d ∑ d i =1 ( ∥ x l i ∗ -µ i ∥ 2 ) ≥ min i ∈ N d m i,l ( x l i ∗ ) . Consequently, plugging l = 0 , 1 . . . , t -1 in it and summing them up, we hence have

where ˙ η = min l ∈{ 0 } ⋃ N t -1 ˜ η l > 0 . Expanding the r.h.s. term in Eq. 51 yields

In terms of the l.h.s. term in Eq. 51, we must have

Combining expression 51, 52 and 53, we thus have

Since m i,t ( x t i ∗ ) is monotonically non-increasing w.r.t. iteration t , we can derive

when the returned vector-valued model for multiple learners is f t .

To compare with RFT, we can plug the r.h.s. of Eq. 38 and see that the loss reduction is more than E x ∼ [ P i ( x i )] d [ L ( f 0 ) ] , which indicates GFT needs less iterations to converge and the efficiency of GFT. Compared with Eq. 35 and 55, we see that the inferiority of RFT compared to GFT comes from the cumulative distance between the example mean and the example selected by GFT.

■

Proof of Proportion 11 When the proximity between f t and f ∗ is sufficiently close, we have ϵ < ϵ 0 where ϵ 0 is the pre-defined approximation error of employed two-layer perceptron. Take A = I d , then we have ∥ A · f t -f ∗ ∥ H d = ∥ I d · f t -f ∗ ∥ H d = ∥ f t -f ∗ ∥ H d ≤ ϵ ≤ ϵ 0 , which means that this perceptron have searched the matrix A = I d that satisfies ∥ A · f t -f ∗ ∥ H d ≤ ϵ 0 .

■

Proof of Lemma 12 Since the multi-learner convex loss L ( f ) will decrease as input f close to f ∗ and matrix A t comes from A t = arg min A ∈ R d × d ∥ A f t -f ∗ ∥ H d , searching a matrix A to minimize the disagreement between A f t and f ∗ , it is trivial to see that

Based on Assumption 3, we can derive that

and

Therefore, we have

which concludes the proof.

■

Proof of Theorem 13 Following the style of the previous proof, e.g. , the proof of Lemma 7, we begin by investigating the reduction in the loss for a single learner.

where it follows from Lemma 12 that ∗ ≤ holds. Therefore, we have which completes the proof.

■

t=0

t=10000

t=20000

t=30000

t=50000

t=69999

t=70000

t=80000

t=90000

t=100000

t=120000

t=139999

t=140000

t=150000

t=160000

t=170000

t=190000

t=209999

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(a) Vanilla MINT.

(b) Communicated MINT.

C Detailed Experiments and Extensions

Since computers operate in a discrete manner, we employ dense pairwise points { ( x i , f ( x i )) } i ∈ N n to represent a scalar-valued function f and points { ([ x i ] d j , [ f i ( x i )] d j ) } j ∈ N m to represent a vector-valued function f = [ f i ] d ∈ H d . To facilitate visualization, our experiments have utilized 2D (1D Gaussian data), 3D (a grayscale image) and 4D (a colored image) examples to demonstrate the insights obtained from our theoretical analysis. Generally, the domain of the functions being learned in 3D cases is determined by the x and y values, which represent the pixel locations, while the range is represented by the z values, indicating the color levels. This is comparable for 2D and 4D cases. Besides, for high-dimensional vision datasets that can be formulated as vector-valued functions, the methodology developed in this work can be applied as well. For all experiments, we align with [73] to set RBF

K ( x, x ′ ) = exp ( -∥ ∥ ∥ x -x ′ 2 ∥ ∥ ∥ 2 2 ) as the kernel and to take empirical (average) L 2 norm defined in vector-valued Hilbert space to measure the difference between f ∈ H d and f ∗ ∈ H d ,

Our implementation relies on the Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H processor and utilizes NVIDIA graphics cards, specifically the GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q Design and RTX6000.

MINT in gray scale. For impartation of a tiger 5 and a cheetah [15], we assume the loss functions for both learners are square loss L i = ( y -f i ( x )) 2 , i ∈ N 2 . For the monochrome lion divided into 4 × 4

pieces, each piece is learnt by a single learner whose loss function is set to be square loss, and all loss functions are the same, L i = ( y -f i ( x )) 2 , i ∈ N 16 . This enables the teaching of a single-learner target model having large input spaces.

MINT in three (RGB) channels. Three learners, each with their own randomly-initialized f 0 , are tasked with learning the three (RGB) channel lion image 6 . Each learner is equipped with a square loss function to learn their respective channels. In the case of single-learner teaching, the teacher must repeatedly teach all three channels. In Vanilla MINT, the teacher can teach all three channels concurrently. In communicated MINT, the teacher uses a two-layer perceptron to solve for the communication matrix A t , with the linear layer initialized by an identity matrix. This allows the teacher to teach all three channels simultaneously.

We present a comprehensive visualization of f t for Figure 4 (a) in Figure 6, while the channel-specific visualization of certain f t corresponding to Figure 4 (b)-(c) is exhibited in Figure 7. In order to evaluate the quality of the learned f t (as images), we utilize the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and the results corresponding to Figure 4 are presented in Table 1. Meanwhile, Figure 8 displays the specific learned f t for RFT, and its corresponding PSNR is listed in Table 2. Additionally, Figures 9 (a) and (b) respectively exhibit the channel-specific visualizations of vanilla (Figure 8 (b)) and communicated (Figure 8 (c)) MINT for RFT.

In addition, we also investigate the performance of single-learner teaching, as well as vanilla and communicated MINT under a specific initialization of f 0 , which is obtained through a linear combination of f ∗ using the inverse of matrix

Figure 10 displays the plot of the loss. Figure 11 showcases the specific learned f t for three versions of GFT throughout each iteration. From Figure 11, we can observe that MINT consistently outperforms the single-learner teaching, and additionally, communicated MINT exhibits better performance compared to vanilla MINT. Figure 12 presents the channel-specific visualization of certain f t that correspond to Figure 11 (b)-(c), while Table 3 lists the PSNR for all comparable f t in Figure 11. Additionally, Figure 13 displays the specific learned f t for RFT, while the channel-specific visualization of certain f t for MINT is exhibited in Figure 14. The corresponding PSNR values are

t=0

t=10000

t=20000

t=30000

t=50000

t=69999

t=70000

t=80000

t=90000

t=100000

t=120000

t=139999

t=140000

t=150000

t=160000

t=170000

t=190000

t=209999

(a) Single-learner teaching.

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(b) Vanilla MINT.

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(c) Communicated MINT.

listed in Table 4. An interesting finding is that with this specific initialization, the teacher can assist the learners in directly learning f ∗ by providing the communication matrix

which is solved by a two-layer perceptron. In order to elaborate this observation, we offer an illustration in Figure 15.

Synthetic 1D Gaussian data. We use a synthetic 1D Gaussian data set for teaching a single learner to demonstrate that the greater the distance between the example mean and the example selected by GFT, the more significant the difference between RFT and GFT. We set f 0 = 0 and f ∗ = N ( x ; 0 , 5 2 ) , where N ( x ; µ, σ 2 ) represents the probability density function of a Gaussian distribution with mean µ and standard deviation σ . It is trivial to see that GFT will select examples primarily around x = 0 . Looking at the loss depicted in Figure 16 (a), we observe that GFT reduces the loss more rapidly than

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

t=0

t=10000

t=50000

t=100000

t=150000

t=210000

(a) Vanilla MINT.

(b) Communicated MINT.

0

200

400

600

800

Iteration t

×

10 2

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

Loss

×

10

3

Single­learner teaching, GFT

Single­learner teaching, RFT

Vanilla MINT, GFT

Vanilla MINT, RFT

Communicated MINT, GFT

Communicated MINT, RFT

RFT in the settings of µ = 0 , µ = -4 , µ = -7 (in an order of decreasing speed). This is consistent with the observation in Theorem 10. Additionally, we present the specific learned function f t in Figure 16 (b).

Synthetic bivariate mixture Gaussian data. To further showcase the effectiveness of MINT, we utilize synthetic bivariate mixture Gaussian data. It is well-established that a bivariate Gaussian distribution f X 1 ,X 2 ( x 1 , x 2 ) can be factored as the product of two independent univariate Gaussian distributions f X 1 ,X 2 ( x 1 , x 2 ) = f X 1 ( x 1 ) f X 2 ( x 2 ) 7 [8], regardless of whether X 1 and X 2 are correlated. For simplicity, our primary focus is on the scenario where there is no correlation ( ρ = 0 ), and on GFT. We set and

Figure 17 depicts the visualization of f ∗ X 1 ,X 2 ( x 1 , x 2 ) . One can also formulate such a single-learner target function into a multi-learner (vector-valued) one f , with the first component being f X 1 ( x 1 ) and the second component being f X 2 ( x 2 ) . Thus, we can represent f as f = ( f X 1 , f X 2 ) T . To simplify the notation, we can represent it as f = ( f 1 , f 2 ) T . In Figure 18, we can observe the specific learned f t of single-learner teaching, vanilla and communicated MINT. Based on the observations from Figure 18, it can be concluded that MINT method is much more effective in terms of efficiency when compared to single-learner teaching. Furthermore, for communicated MINT, the teacher can provide the communicated matrix to let f being learnt within a single iteration. Besides, Figure 19 shows the loss plot which tracks convergence performance.

Synthetic 1D data. We use synthetic one-dimensional data to evaluate when the communication matrix A t is advantageous. Specifically, our main focus is on t = 1 , which refers to the first iteration

t=0

t=2000

t=5000

t=10000

t=20000

t=29999

t=30000

t=32000

t=35000

t=40000

t=50000

t=59999

t=60000

t=62000

t=65000

t=70000

t=80000

t=89999

(a) Single-learner teaching.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(b) Vanilla MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(c) Communicated MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(a) Vanilla MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(b) Communicated MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=5000

t=10000

t=20000

t=29999

t=30000

t=32000

t=35000

t=40000

t=50000

t=59999

t=60000

t=62000

t=65000

t=70000

t=80000

t=89999

(a) Single-learner teaching.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(b) Vanilla MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(c) Communicated MINT.

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

t=0

t=2000

t=10000

t=20000

t=50000

t=90000

(a) Vanilla MINT.

(b) Communicated MINT.

f

0

R

G

B

f

0

RGB

MLP Solved A:





1

.

27

2

.

22

3

.

60

2

.

47

-

0

.

53

2

.

36

2

.

40

1

.

68

0

.

40



-→

Ground Truth A:





1

.

26

2

.

22

3

.

60

2

.

47

-

0

.

53

2

.

36

2

.

40

1

.

68

0

.

40



f

1

RGB

f

1

3

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

Iteration t

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

Loss

×

10

GFT

=0

=

4

=

7

(a) Convergence performance

10

0

10

0.00

0.05

0.10

0.15

x

=-0.0

0th Iteration

Target

GFT

=0

=

4

=

7

10

0

10

x

=0.1

500th Iteration

10

0

10

x

=7.0

1000th Iteration

10

0

10

x

=3.9

2000th Iteration

10

0

10

x

=-7.1

3000th Iteration

10

0

10

5000th Iteration

(b) Visualization of

f

t

and

f

∗

(the results of t > 1 can be derived similarly), where there are two learners attempting to learn separate target functions. We set f 0 = ( f 1 , f 2 ) T = ( x, x 2 ) T and f ∗ γ = ( γx/ 2 + γx 2 / 2 + (1 -γ ) cos x, γx/ 3 + 2 γx 2 / 3 + (1 -γ ) sin x ) T , γ ∈ [0 , 1] , and we generate γ by arange(-1,1,0.01) . In Figure 20, we present the corresponding ∥ A γ f 0 -f ∗ γ ∥ H 2 against γ . The observed trend is that as γ increases, the distance between A γ f 0 and f ∗ γ decreases. This indicates that A γ performs better when f ∗ can be linearly expressed by f 0 , but poorly when f ∗ cannot be linearly expressed by f 0 . Moreover, A is beneficial when f ∗ can be partially expressed in a linear manner by f 0 .

x

1

-

6

-

4

-

2

0

2

4

6

x

2

6

-

4

-

2

0

2

4

6

0

.

00

0

.

05

0

.

10

0

.

15

0

.

20

0

.

25

f

∗

1

(

x

1

)

f

∗

2

(

x

2

)

-

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

0

(

x

1

, x

2

)

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

500

(

x

1

, x

2

)

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

2000

(

x

1

, x

2

)

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

3000

(

x

1

, x

2

)

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

4

.

5

-

1

.

5

1

.

5

4

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

9000

(

x

1

, x

2

)

x

1

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

x

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

0

.

00

0

.

02

0

.

04

0

.

06

0

.

08

0

.

10

f

∗

(

x

1

, x

2

)

(a) Single-learner teaching.

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

x

=

2.0

0th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

0

1

x

=

-3.1

150th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

150

1

x

=

-3.2

450th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

450

1

x

=

1.5

1000th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

1000

1

x

=

2.6

2000th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

2000

1

3000th Iteration

f

∗

1

f

3000

1

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

x

=

2.0

f

∗

2

f

0

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

x

=

-3.1

f

∗

2

f

150

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

x

=

-3.2

f

∗

2

f

450

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

x

=

1.5

f

∗

2

f

1000

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

x

=

-2.1

f

∗

2

f

2000

2

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

f

∗

2

f

3000

2

(b) Vanilla MINT.

MLP Solved:

(

0

.

33

0

.

67

0

.

75

0

.

25

)

·

Ground Truth:

(

1

/

3

2

/

3

3

/

4

1

/

4

)

A

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

f

0

= (

f

0

1

, f

0

2

)

T

f

0

1

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

f

0

2

Converge

-→

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

f

∗

= (

f

∗

1

, f

∗

2

)

T

f

∗

1

-

7

.

5

-

5

.

0

-

2

.

5

0

.

0

2

.

5

5

.

0

7

.

5

0

.

0

0

.

1

0

.

2

0

.

3

0

.

4

f

∗

2

(c) Communicated MINT.

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

Iteration t

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

Loss

×

10

4

Singel­learner teaching, GFT

Vanilla MINT, GFT

Communicated MINT, GFT

0

2

0.0

0.5

1.0

×

10

4

0

.

0

0

.

2

0

.

4

0

.

6

0

.

8

1

.

0

γ

0

2

4

6

8

10

‖

Aγ

f

0

-

f

∗

γ

‖H

2

Peer reviews:
comments: SUMMARY:
This paper extends nonparametric teaching from the setting of teaching each learner independently to teaching multiple ones simultaneously. The method is about teaching a vector-valued model, which improves over existing methods when multiple learners can communicate with each other. There are both theoretical and experimental results validating the effectiveness of this method.

STRENGTHS:
The paper seems to have solid theoretical analysis; it's hard for me to judge as a non-expert.

WEAKNESSES:
Only one experiment on the RGB channels of images is shown in the paper. Another experiment in a different setting may help demonstrate the generalizability of the approach. As someone with no expertise in this area, I'll defer to others on the technical side of things.

QUESTIONS:
Can you elaborate on what other possible applications can benefit from the proposed approach?

LIMITATIONS:
N/A
TITLE: Official Review
SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS: 3
DATE: 2023-07-05

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThe paper extends non-parametric machine teaching to the case of multiple learners. In particular, each learner learns one component of a vector-valued function. The authors consider the case where learners have no communication with each other and the case where there is \"communication\" via a matrix transformation of the outputs of each individual learner.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\nOriginality: I am not an expert in machine teaching so I can't say how original the contribution is relative to prior work.\n\nQuality: The paper appears to be of good quality, though I did not check the proofs carefully.\n\nClarity: The paper was relatively clear, though with key exceptions referenced below\n\nSignificance: The paper appears to me to be an incremental step beyond the non-parametric single-learner setting.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\nI believe the paper needs more motivation and needs to contrast with the case where a single learner is learning a vector-valued function. Currently, the paper extends the scalar-valued single-learner setting to one where the teacher is teaching multiple learners---each outputting one component of a vector-valued output. In the introduction, the paper explains why teaching multiple learners at once would be better than teaching multiple learners separately. That seems quite clear, but then why not just teach one single learner that is learning a vector-valued function rather than multiple learners learning each component separately? The introduction seems to hint at computational issues but this should be made more explicit, and if computational issues are a critical motivation, then experiments showing the computational advantage should be included. \n\nEspecially because the paper also includes a section on \"communication\" between the learners and shows that they achieve better performance when communication is allowed. (By the way, the communication, in this case, is just a matrix that the teacher gives each learner.. the learners aren't learning to communicate with each other, so it seems clear from the outset that this would lead to improvement) So if communication leads to higher performance, then why not full \"communication\", i.e., one learner that outputs all components?\n\nQUESTIONS:\nI thought the experiments section could be made clearer (I also looked at the additional details in the appendix but was still confused). What is the domain and range of the functions being learned? What are the examples (x and y) that the teacher is giving for each settting? Are they pixels?\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nI ask that the authors replace the Lenna image with any other image. There is no reason that this paper needs to use, of all images, the Lenna image, a cropped photo of a nude women from a Playboy centerfold. The continued unnecessary use of this image perpetuates an uninclusive environment.\n\nhttps://womenlovetech.com/losing-lena-why-we-need-to-remove-one-image-and-end-techs-original-sin/\nhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold-does-not-belong-in-tj-classrooms/2015/04/24/76e87fa4-e47a-11e4-81ea-0649268f729e_story.html\n\nLena herself has said that she no longer wants her image used: “I retired from modelling a long time ago,” said Lena in a new documentary film called Losing Lena. “It’s time I retired from tech, too. We can make a simple change today that creates a lasting change for tomorrow. Let’s commit to losing me.”", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 4, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 3, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 3, "DATE": "2023-07-05"}

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThe paper studied nonparametric teaching in the presence of multiple learners. Following prior works on nonparametric teaching, the paper extended to a scenario where multiple learners simultaneously learn a separate component of the joint model. The paper first analyzed the performance of the Random Functional Teaching (RFT) and the Greedy FT (GFT) strategy and showed that both teachers can successfully guarantee reduction in the loss function when the learners are completely independently, and no communication happens. Secondly, the authors studied the effect of communication between learners and show that an affine transformation of the joint model does not increase the loss but can significantly enhance the loss reduction in the beginning of the training phase. Experiments validated the discoveries in this paper.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\n(1). The problem of teaching multiple learners itself is interesting and underexplored in the machine teaching community. This paper pushes the frontier of machine teaching in this aspect.\n\n(2). The paper theoretically analyzed the loss reduction of RFT and GFT teacher, and also the benefit of communication. The results show that non-parameter teaching with communication can indeed help with loss reduction.\n\n(3). The paper performed extensive empirical study of the teaching strategy, and the results are convincing.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\n(1). The assumption in the theoretical study is not clearly stated in the paper. For example, the theory seems to rely on the fact that the loss function must be convex, and this information should be made more prominent upfront. The authors may want to discuss the applicability of both the theory and the methodology developed in this paper. Does it apply with neural network model or only convex learners?\n\n(2). One thing missing from the discussion is that how does the teaching performance compare to vanilla learning. The non-parametric teacher only guarantees that the loss is always reduced. However, how does the loss reduction compare to standard learning process without teaching is an important topic to be discussed.\n\nQUESTIONS:\n(1). What is the applicability of the theoretical results and the methodology developed in this paper? Is convexity a required property?\n\n(2). How does non-parametric teaching compare to vanilla learning without teaching. Does it help accelerate the learning process?\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nYes", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 6, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 4, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 4, "DATE": "2023-07-06"}

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThis paper investigates the iterative machine teaching problem under the non-parametric learner setting with vector-valued target models, also known as multi-learner nonparametric teaching (MINT). The authors consider two teaching strategies: Random Functional Teaching (RFT) and Greedy FT (GFT). The authors first theoretically analyze the convergence behavior induced by the teaching strategies in the vanilla MINT setting, where there is no communication between the learners. Then, they study the teaching strategies in the communicated MINT setting. Finally, they empirically compare the effectiveness of different teaching strategies.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\nThe paper is overall well-written, and the related work is extensively discussed. \n\nThe theoretical results in this paper seem correct; I haven’t checked the details of the proofs.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\nThe availability of a powerful teacher with a vector-valued target model needs to be motivated with more realistic practical scenarios. \n\nThe novelty of the contributions of this work in comparison to “Nonparametric Iterative Machine Teaching (NIMT)”: the problem formulation/setup, RFT/GFT teaching strategies are extensions from the NIMT paper. Thus, it is important to clearly discuss how non-trivial these extensions are and how different the proof techniques are from those of the NIMT paper.\n\nQUESTIONS:\nThe theoretical results in the paper are based on a synthetic example generation setting. If the teacher is restricted to choosing examples from a pool, that would result in different examples than the ideal one. Then, what would be the impact on the results?\n\nGiven that the teacher can freely synthesize examples to guide the learner toward a target model, can the results discussed be extended to learners with non-convex loss functions?\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nThe paper is of an algorithmic/theoretical nature and does not have any direct potential negative societal impact.", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 6, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 3, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 3, "DATE": "2023-07-30"}