mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning disentangled representations via product manifold projection
Authors: Marco Fumero, Luca Cosmo, Simone Melzi, Emanuele Rodola
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to disentangle the generative factors of variation underlying a given set of observations. Our method builds upon the idea that the (unknown) low-dimensional manifold underlying the data space can be explicitly modeled as a product of submanifolds. This definition of disentanglement gives rise to a novel weakly-supervised algorithm for recovering the unknown explanatory factors behind the data. At training time, our algorithm only requires pairs of non i.i.d. data samples whose elements share at least one, possibly multidimensional, generative factor of variation. We require no knowledge on the nature of these transformations, and do not make any limiting assumption on the properties of each subspace. Our approach is easy to implement, and can be successfully applied to different kinds of data (from images to 3D surfaces) undergoing arbitrary transformations. In addition to standard synthetic benchmarks, we showcase our method in challenging real-world applications, where we compare favorably with the state of the art.
Policy Information Capacity: Information-Theoretic Measure for Task Complexity in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hiroki Furuta, Tatsuya Matsushima, Tadashi Kozuno, Yutaka Matsuo, Sergey Levine, Ofir Nachum, Shixiang Shane Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) research is largely enabled by benchmark task environments. However, analyzing the nature of those environments is often overlooked. In particular, we still do not have agreeable ways to measure the difficulty or solvability of a task, given that each has fundamentally different actions, observations, dynamics, rewards, and can be tackled with diverse RL algorithms. In this work, we propose policy information capacity (PIC) – the mutual information between policy parameters and episodic return – and policy-optimal information capacity (POIC) – between policy parameters and episodic optimality – as two environment-agnostic, algorithm-agnostic quantitative metrics for task difficulty. Evaluating our metrics across toy environments as well as continuous control benchmark tasks from OpenAI Gym and DeepMind Control Suite, we empirically demonstrate that these information-theoretic metrics have higher correlations with normalized task solvability scores than a variety of alternatives. Lastly, we show that these metrics can also be used for fast and compute-efficient optimizations of key design parameters such as reward shaping, policy architectures, and MDP properties for better solvability by RL algorithms without ever running full RL experiments.
An Information-Geometric Distance on the Space of Tasks
Authors: Yansong Gao, Pratik Chaudhari
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper prescribes a distance between learning tasks modeled as joint distributions on data and labels. Using tools in information geometry, the distance is defined to be the length of the shortest weight trajectory on a Riemannian manifold as a classifier is fitted on an interpolated task. The interpolated task evolves from the source to the target task using an optimal transport formulation. This distance, which we call the "coupled transfer distance" can be compared across different classifier architectures. We develop an algorithm to compute the distance which iteratively transports the marginal on the data of the source task to that of the target task while updating the weights of the classifier to track this evolving data distribution. We develop theory to show that our distance captures the intuitive idea that a good transfer trajectory is the one that keeps the generalization gap small during transfer, in particular at the end on the target task. We perform thorough empirical validation and analysis across diverse image classification datasets to show that the coupled transfer distance correlates strongly with the difficulty of fine-tuning.
Maximum Mean Discrepancy Test is Aware of Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Ruize Gao, Feng Liu, Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) test could in principle detect any distributional discrepancy between two datasets. However, it has been shown that the MMD test is unaware of adversarial attacks–the MMD test failed to detect the discrepancy between natural data and adversarial data. Given this phenomenon, we raise a question: are natural and adversarial data really from different distributions? The answer is affirmative–the previous use of the MMD test on the purpose missed three key factors, and accordingly, we propose three components. Firstly, the Gaussian kernel has limited representation power, and we replace it with an effective deep kernel. Secondly, the test power of the MMD test was neglected, and we maximize it following asymptotic statistics. Finally, adversarial data may be non-independent, and we overcome this issue with the help of wild bootstrap. By taking care of the three factors, we verify that the MMD test is aware of adversarial attacks, which lights up a novel road for adversarial data detection based on two-sample tests.
Unsupervised Co-part Segmentation through Assembly
Authors: Qingzhe Gao, Bin Wang, Libin Liu, Baoquan Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Co-part segmentation is an important problem in computer vision for its rich applications. We propose an unsupervised learning approach for co-part segmentation from images. For the training stage, we leverage motion information embedded in videos and explicitly extract latent representations to segment meaningful object parts. More importantly, we introduce a dual procedure of part-assembly to form a closed loop with part-segmentation, enabling an effective self-supervision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a host of extensive experiments, ranging from human bodies, hands, quadruped, and robot arms. We show that our approach can achieve meaningful and compact part segmentation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on diverse benchmarks.
Discriminative Complementary-Label Learning with Weighted Loss
Authors: Yi Gao, Min-Ling Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Complementary-label learning (CLL) deals with the weak supervision scenario where each training instance is associated with one \emphcomplementary label, which specifies the class label that the instance does \emphnot belong to. Given the training instance $\bm x$, existing CLL approaches aim at modeling the \emphgenerative relationship between the complementary label $\bar y$, i.e. $P(\bar y∣ \bm x)$, and the ground-truth label $y$, i.e. $P(y∣ \bm x)$. Nonetheless, as the ground-truth label is not directly accessible for complementarily labeled training instance, strong generative assumptions may not hold for real-world CLL tasks. In this paper, we derive a simple and theoretically-sound \emphdiscriminative model towards $P(\bar y∣ \bm x)$, which naturally leads to a risk estimator with estimation error bound at $\mathcalO(1/\sqrtn)$ convergence rate. Accordingly, a practical CLL approach is proposed by further introducing weighted loss to the empirical risk to maximize the predictive gap between potential ground-truth label and complementary label. Extensive experiments clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed discriminative complementary-label learning approach.
RATT: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Guarantee Generalization
Authors: Saurabh Garg, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Zico Kolter, Zachary Lipton
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: To assess generalization, machine learning scientists typically either (i) bound the generalization gap and then (after training) plug in the empirical risk to obtain a bound on the true risk; or (ii) validate empirically on holdout data. However, (i) typically yields vacuous guarantees for overparameterized models; and (ii) shrinks the training set and its guarantee erodes with each re-use of the holdout set. In this paper, we leverage unlabeled data to produce generalization bounds. After augmenting our (labeled) training set with randomly labeled data, we train in the standard fashion. Whenever classifiers achieve low error on the clean data but high error on the random data, our bound ensures that the true risk is low. We prove that our bound is valid for 0-1 empirical risk minimization and with linear classifiers trained by gradient descent. Our approach is especially useful in conjunction with deep learning due to the early learning phenomenon whereby networks fit true labels before noisy labels but requires one intuitive assumption. Empirically, on canonical computer vision and NLP tasks, our bound provides non-vacuous generalization guarantees that track actual performance closely. This work enables practitioners to certify generalization even when (labeled) holdout data is unavailable and provides insights into the relationship between random label noise and generalization.
On Proximal Policy Optimization’s Heavy-tailed Gradients
Authors: Saurabh Garg, Joshua Zhanson, Emilio Parisotto, Adarsh Prasad, Zico Kolter, Zachary Lipton, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Pradeep Ravikumar
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Modern policy gradient algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) rely on an arsenal of heuristics, including loss clipping and gradient clipping, to ensure successful learning. These heuristics are reminiscent of techniques from robust statistics, commonly used for estimation in outlier-rich ("heavy-tailed") regimes. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study to characterize the heavy-tailed nature of the gradients of the PPO surrogate reward function. We demonstrate that the gradients, especially for the actor network, exhibit pronounced heavy-tailedness and that it increases as the agent’s policy diverges from the behavioral policy (i.e., as the agent goes further off policy). Further examination implicates the likelihood ratios and advantages in the surrogate reward as the main sources of the observed heavy-tailedness. We then highlight issues arising due to the heavy-tailed nature of the gradients. In this light, we study the effects of the standard PPO clipping heuristics, demonstrating that these tricks primarily serve to offset heavy-tailedness in gradients. Thus motivated, we propose incorporating GMOM, a high-dimensional robust estimator, into PPO as a substitute for three clipping tricks. Despite requiring less hyperparameter tuning, our method matches the performance of PPO (with all heuristics enabled) on a battery of MuJoCo continuous control tasks.
What does LIME really see in images?
Authors: Damien Garreau, Dina Mardaoui
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The performance of modern algorithms on certain computer vision tasks such as object recognition is now close to that of humans. This success was achieved at the price of complicated architectures depending on millions of parameters and it has become quite challenging to understand how particular predictions are made. Interpretability methods propose to give us this understanding. In this paper, we study LIME, perhaps one of the most popular. On the theoretical side, we show that when the number of generated examples is large, LIME explanations are concentrated around a limit explanation for which we give an explicit expression. We further this study for elementary shape detectors and linear models. As a consequence of this analysis, we uncover a connection between LIME and integrated gradients, another explanation method. More precisely, the LIME explanations are similar to the sum of integrated gradients over the superpixels used in the preprocessing step of LIME.
Parametric Graph for Unimodal Ranking Bandit
Authors: Camille-Sovanneary Gauthier, Romaric Gaudel, Elisa Fromont, Boammani Aser Lompo
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle the online ranking problem of assigning $L$ items to $K$ positions on a web page in order to maximize the number of user clicks. We propose an original algorithm, easy to implement and with strong theoretical guarantees to tackle this problem in the Position-Based Model (PBM) setting, well suited for applications where items are displayed on a grid. Besides learning to rank, our algorithm, GRAB (for parametric Graph for unimodal RAnking Bandit), also learns the parameter of a compact graph over permutations of $K$ items among $L$. The logarithmic regret bound of this algorithm is a direct consequence of the unimodality property of the bandit setting with respect to the learned graph. Experiments against state-of-the-art learning algorithms which also tackle the PBM setting, show that our method is more efficient while giving regret performance on par with the best known algorithms on simulated and real life datasets.
Let’s Agree to Degree: Comparing Graph Convolutional Networks in the Message-Passing Framework
Authors: Floris Geerts, Filip Mazowiecki, Guillermo Perez
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper we cast neural networks defined on graphs as message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) to study the distinguishing power of different classes of such models. We are interested in when certain architectures are able to tell vertices apart based on the feature labels given as input with the graph. We consider two variants of MPNNS: anonymous MPNNs whose message functions depend only on the labels of vertices involved; and degree-aware MPNNs whose message functions can additionally use information regarding the degree of vertices. The former class covers popular graph neural network (GNN) formalisms for which the distinguished power is known. The latter covers graph convolutional networks (GCNs), introduced by Kipf and Welling, for which the distinguishing power was unknown. We obtain lower and upper bounds on the distinguishing power of (anonymous and degree-aware) MPNNs in terms of the distinguishing power of the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) algorithm. Our main results imply that (i) the distinguishing power of GCNs is bounded by the WL algorithm, but they may be one step ahead; (ii) the WL algorithm cannot be simulated by “plain vanilla” GCNs but the addition of a trade-off parameter between features of the vertex and those of its neighbours (as proposed by Kipf and Welling) resolves this problem.
On the difficulty of unbiased alpha divergence minimization
Authors: Tomas Geffner, Justin Domke
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Several approximate inference algorithms have been proposed to minimize an alpha-divergence between an approximating distribution and a target distribution. Many of these algorithms introduce bias, the magnitude of which becomes problematic in high dimensions. Other algorithms are unbiased. These often seem to suffer from high variance, but little is rigorously known. In this work we study unbiased methods for alpha-divergence minimization through the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the gradient estimator. We study several representative scenarios where strong analytical results are possible, such as fully-factorized or Gaussian distributions. We find that when alpha is not zero, the SNR worsens exponentially in the dimensionality of the problem. This casts doubt on the practicality of these methods. We empirically confirm these theoretical results.
How and Why to Use Experimental Data to Evaluate Methods for Observational Causal Inference
Authors: Amanda M Gentzel, Purva Pruthi, David Jensen
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Methods that infer causal dependence from observational data are central to many areas of science, including medicine, economics, and the social sciences. A variety of theoretical properties of these methods have been proven, but empirical evaluation remains a challenge, largely due to the lack of observational data sets for which treatment effect is known. We describe and analyze observational sampling from randomized controlled trials (OSRCT), a method for evaluating causal inference methods using data from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). This method can be used to create constructed observational data sets with corresponding unbiased estimates of treatment effect, substantially increasing the number of data sets available for evaluating causal inference methods. We show that, in expectation, OSRCT creates data sets that are equivalent to those produced by randomly sampling from empirical data sets in which all potential outcomes are available. We then perform a large-scale evaluation of seven causal inference methods over 37 data sets, drawn from RCTs, as well as simulators, real-world computational systems, and observational data sets augmented with a synthetic response variable. We find notable performance differences when comparing across data from different sources, demonstrating the importance of using data from a variety of sources when evaluating any causal inference method.
Strategic Classification in the Dark
Authors: Ganesh Ghalme, Vineet Nair, Itay Eilat, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Nir Rosenfeld
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Strategic classification studies the interaction between a classification rule and the strategic agents it governs. Agents respond by manipulating their features, under the assumption that the classifier is known. However, in many real-life scenarios of high-stake classification (e.g., credit scoring), the classifier is not revealed to the agents, which leads agents to attempt to learn the classifier and game it too. In this paper we generalize the strategic classification model to such scenarios and analyze the effect of an unknown classifier. We define the ”price of opacity” as the difference between the prediction error under the opaque and transparent policies, characterize it, and give a sufficient condition for it to be strictly positive, in which case transparency is the recommended policy. Our experiments show how Hardt et al.’s robust classifier is affected by keeping agents in the dark.
EMaQ: Expected-Max Q-Learning Operator for Simple Yet Effective Offline and Online RL
Authors: Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour, Dale Schuurmans, Shixiang Shane Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of sample-efficient learning of decision-making policies by leveraging past experience. However, in the offline RL setting – where a fixed collection of interactions are provided and no further interactions are allowed – it has been shown that standard off-policy RL methods can significantly underperform. In this work, we closely investigate an important simplification of BCQ (Fujimoto et al., 2018) – a prior approach for offline RL – removing a heuristic design choice. Importantly, in contrast to their original theoretical considerations, we derive this simplified algorithm through the introduction of a novel backup operator, Expected-Max Q-Learning (EMaQ), which is more closely related to the resulting practical algorithm. Specifically, in addition to the distribution support, EMaQ explicitly considers the number of samples and the proposal distribution, allowing us to derive new sub-optimality bounds. In the offline RL setting – the main focus of this work – EMaQ matches and outperforms prior state-of-the-art in the D4RL benchmarks (Fu et al., 2020). In the online RL setting, we demonstrate that EMaQ is competitive with Soft Actor Critic (SAC). The key contributions of our empirical findings are demonstrating the importance of careful generative model design for estimating behavior policies, and an intuitive notion of complexity for offline RL problems. With its simple interpretation and fewer moving parts, such as no explicit function approximator representing the policy, EMaQ serves as a strong yet easy to implement baseline for future work.
Differentially Private Aggregation in the Shuffle Model: Almost Central Accuracy in Almost a Single Message
Authors: Badih Ghazi, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Rasmus Pagh, Amer Sinha
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The shuffle model of differential privacy has attracted attention in the literature due to it being a middle ground between the well-studied central and local models. In this work, we study the problem of summing (aggregating) real numbers or integers, a basic primitive in numerous machine learning tasks, in the shuffle model. We give a protocol achieving error arbitrarily close to that of the (Discrete) Laplace mechanism in central differential privacy, while each user only sends 1 + o(1) short messages in expectation.
The Power of Adaptivity for Stochastic Submodular Cover
Authors: Rohan Ghuge, Anupam Gupta, Viswanath Nagarajan
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In the stochastic submodular cover problem, the goal is to select a subset of stochastic items of minimum expected cost to cover a submodular function. Solutions in this setting correspond to a sequential decision process that selects items one by one “adaptively” (depending on prior observations). While such adaptive solutions achieve the best objective, the inherently sequential nature makes them undesirable in many applications. We ask: \emphhow well can solutions with only a few adaptive rounds approximate fully-adaptive solutions? We consider both cases where the stochastic items are independent, and where they are correlated. For both situations, we obtain nearly tight answers, establishing smooth tradeoffs between the number of adaptive rounds and the solution quality, relative to fully adaptive solutions. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets validate the practical performance of our algorithms, showing qualitative improvements in the solutions as we allow more rounds of adaptivity; in practice, solutions using just a few rounds of adaptivity are nearly as good as fully adaptive solutions.
Differentially Private Quantiles
Authors: Jennifer Gillenwater, Matthew Joseph, Alex Kulesza
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Quantiles are often used for summarizing and understanding data. If that data is sensitive, it may be necessary to compute quantiles in a way that is differentially private, providing theoretical guarantees that the result does not reveal private information. However, when multiple quantiles are needed, existing differentially private algorithms fare poorly: they either compute quantiles individually, splitting the privacy budget, or summarize the entire distribution, wasting effort. In either case the result is reduced accuracy. In this work we propose an instance of the exponential mechanism that simultaneously estimates exactly $m$ quantiles from $n$ data points while guaranteeing differential privacy. The utility function is carefully structured to allow for an efficient implementation that returns estimates of all $m$ quantiles in time $O(mnłog(n) + m^2n)$. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the current state of the art on both real and synthetic data while remaining efficient enough to be practical.
Query Complexity of Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Grzegorz Gluch, Rüdiger Urbanke
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: There are two main attack models considered in the adversarial robustness literature: black-box and white-box. We consider these threat models as two ends of a fine-grained spectrum, indexed by the number of queries the adversary can ask. Using this point of view we investigate how many queries the adversary needs to make to design an attack that is comparable to the best possible attack in the white-box model. We give a lower bound on that number of queries in terms of entropy of decision boundaries of the classifier. Using this result we analyze two classical learning algorithms on two synthetic tasks for which we prove meaningful security guarantees. The obtained bounds suggest that some learning algorithms are inherently more robust against query-bounded adversaries than others.
Spectral Normalisation for Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Optimisation Perspective
Authors: Florin Gogianu, Tudor Berariu, Mihaela C Rosca, Claudia Clopath, Lucian Busoniu, Razvan Pascanu
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most of the recent deep reinforcement learning advances take an RL-centric perspective and focus on refinements of the training objective. We diverge from this view and show we can recover the performance of these developments not by changing the objective, but by regularising the value-function estimator. Constraining the Lipschitz constant of a single layer using spectral normalisation is sufficient to elevate the performance of a Categorical-DQN agent to that of a more elaborated agent on the challenging Atari domain. We conduct ablation studies to disentangle the various effects normalisation has on the learning dynamics and show that is sufficient to modulate the parameter updates to recover most of the performance of spectral normalisation. These findings hint towards the need to also focus on the neural component and its learning dynamics to tackle the peculiarities of Deep Reinforcement Learning.
12-Lead ECG Reconstruction via Koopman Operators
Authors: Tomer Golany, Kira Radinsky, Daniel Freedman, Saar Minha
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: 32% of all global deaths in the world are caused by cardiovascular diseases. Early detection, especially for patients with ischemia or cardiac arrhythmia, is crucial. To reduce the time between symptoms onset and treatment, wearable ECG sensors were developed to allow for the recording of the full 12-lead ECG signal at home. However, if even a single lead is not correctly positioned on the body that lead becomes corrupted, making automatic diagnosis on the basis of the full signal impossible. In this work, we present a methodology to reconstruct missing or noisy leads using the theory of Koopman Operators. Given a dataset consisting of full 12-lead ECGs, we learn a dynamical system describing the evolution of the 12 individual signals together in time. The Koopman theory indicates that there exists a high-dimensional embedding space in which the operator which propagates from one time instant to the next is linear. We therefore learn both the mapping to this embedding space, as well as the corresponding linear operator. Armed with this representation, we are able to impute missing leads by solving a least squares system in the embedding space, which can be achieved efficiently due to the sparse structure of the system. We perform an empirical evaluation using 12-lead ECG signals from thousands of patients, and show that we are able to reconstruct the signals in such way that enables accurate clinical diagnosis.
Function Contrastive Learning of Transferable Meta-Representations
Authors: Muhammad Waleed Gondal, Shruti Joshi, Nasim Rahaman, Stefan Bauer, Manuel Wuthrich, Bernhard Schölkopf
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Meta-learning algorithms adapt quickly to new tasks that are drawn from the same task distribution as the training tasks. The mechanism leading to fast adaptation is the conditioning of a downstream predictive model on the inferred representation of the task’s underlying data generative process, or \emphfunction. This \emphmeta-representation, which is computed from a few observed examples of the underlying function, is learned jointly with the predictive model. In this work, we study the implications of this joint training on the transferability of the meta-representations. Our goal is to learn meta-representations that are robust to noise in the data and facilitate solving a wide range of downstream tasks that share the same underlying functions. To this end, we propose a decoupled encoder-decoder approach to supervised meta-learning, where the encoder is trained with a contrastive objective to find a good representation of the underlying function. In particular, our training scheme is driven by the self-supervision signal indicating whether two sets of examples stem from the same function. Our experiments on a number of synthetic and real-world datasets show that the representations we obtain outperform strong baselines in terms of downstream performance and noise robustness, even when these baselines are trained in an end-to-end manner.
Active Slices for Sliced Stein Discrepancy
Authors: Wenbo Gong, Kaibo Zhang, Yingzhen Li, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Sliced Stein discrepancy (SSD) and its kernelized variants have demonstrated promising successes in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning in high dimensions. Despite the theoretical elegance, their empirical performance depends crucially on the search of the optimal slicing directions to discriminate between two distributions. Unfortunately, previous gradient-based optimisation approach returns sub-optimal results for the slicing directions: it is computationally expensive, sensitive to initialization, and it lacks theoretical guarantee for convergence. We address these issues in two steps. First, we show in theory that the requirement of using optimal slicing directions in the kernelized version of SSD can be relaxed, validating the resulting discrepancy with finite random slicing directions. Second, given that good slicing directions are crucial for practical performance, we propose a fast algorithm for finding good slicing directions based on ideas of active sub-space construction and spectral decomposition. Experiments in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning show that our approach achieves both the best performance and the fastest convergence. Especially, we demonstrate 14-80x speed-up in goodness-of-fit tests when compared with the gradient-based approach.
On the Problem of Underranking in Group-Fair Ranking
Authors: Sruthi Gorantla, Amit Deshpande, Anand Louis
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Bias in ranking systems, especially among the top ranks, can worsen social and economic inequalities, polarize opinions, and reinforce stereotypes. On the other hand, a bias correction for minority groups can cause more harm if perceived as favoring group-fair outcomes over meritocracy. Most group-fair ranking algorithms post-process a given ranking and output a group-fair ranking. In this paper, we formulate the problem of underranking in group-fair rankings based on how close the group-fair rank of each item is to its original rank, and prove a lower bound on the trade-off achievable for simultaneous underranking and group fairness in ranking. We give a fair ranking algorithm that takes any given ranking and outputs another ranking with simultaneous underranking and group fairness guarantees comparable to the lower bound we prove. Our experimental results confirm the theoretical trade-off between underranking and group fairness, and also show that our algorithm achieves the best of both when compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
MARINA: Faster Non-Convex Distributed Learning with Compression
Authors: Eduard Gorbunov, Konstantin P. Burlachenko, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We develop and analyze MARINA: a new communication efficient method for non-convex distributed learning over heterogeneous datasets. MARINA employs a novel communication compression strategy based on the compression of gradient differences that is reminiscent of but different from the strategy employed in the DIANA method of Mishchenko et al. (2019). Unlike virtually all competing distributed first-order methods, including DIANA, ours is based on a carefully designed biased gradient estimator, which is the key to its superior theoretical and practical performance. The communication complexity bounds we prove for MARINA are evidently better than those of all previous first-order methods. Further, we develop and analyze two variants of MARINA: VR-MARINA and PP-MARINA. The first method is designed for the case when the local loss functions owned by clients are either of a finite sum or of an expectation form, and the second method allows for a partial participation of clients – a feature important in federated learning. All our methods are superior to previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of oracle/communication complexity. Finally, we provide a convergence analysis of all methods for problems satisfying the Polyak-Łojasiewicz condition.
Systematic Analysis of Cluster Similarity Indices: How to Validate Validation Measures
Authors: Martijn M Gösgens, Alexey Tikhonov, Liudmila Prokhorenkova
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many cluster similarity indices are used to evaluate clustering algorithms, and choosing the best one for a particular task remains an open problem. We demonstrate that this problem is crucial: there are many disagreements among the indices, these disagreements do affect which algorithms are preferred in applications, and this can lead to degraded performance in real-world systems. We propose a theoretical framework to tackle this problem: we develop a list of desirable properties and conduct an extensive theoretical analysis to verify which indices satisfy them. This allows for making an informed choice: given a particular application, one can first select properties that are desirable for the task and then identify indices satisfying these. Our work unifies and considerably extends existing attempts at analyzing cluster similarity indices: we introduce new properties, formalize existing ones, and mathematically prove or disprove each property for an extensive list of validation indices. This broader and more rigorous approach leads to recommendations that considerably differ from how validation indices are currently being chosen by practitioners. Some of the most popular indices are even shown to be dominated by previously overlooked ones.
Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline
Authors: Ankit Goyal, Hei Law, Bowei Liu, Alejandro Newell, Jia Deng
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Processing point cloud data is an important component of many real-world systems. As such, a wide variety of point-based approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time. We study the key ingredients of this progress and uncover two critical results. First, we find that auxiliary factors like different evaluation schemes, data augmentation strategies, and loss functions, which are independent of the model architecture, make a large difference in performance. The differences are large enough that they obscure the effect of architecture. When these factors are controlled for, PointNet++, a relatively older network, performs competitively with recent methods. Second, a very simple projection-based method, which we refer to as SimpleView, performs surprisingly well. It achieves on par or better results than sophisticated state-of-the-art methods on ModelNet40 while being half the size of PointNet++. It also outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ScanObjectNN, a real-world point cloud benchmark, and demonstrates better cross-dataset generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SimpleView.
Dissecting Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Florian Graf, Christoph Hofer, Marc Niethammer, Roland Kwitt
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Minimizing cross-entropy over the softmax scores of a linear map composed with a high-capacity encoder is arguably the most popular choice for training neural networks on supervised learning tasks. However, recent works show that one can directly optimize the encoder instead, to obtain equally (or even more) discriminative representations via a supervised variant of a contrastive objective. In this work, we address the question whether there are fundamental differences in the sought-for representation geometry in the output space of the encoder at minimal loss. Specifically, we prove, under mild assumptions, that both losses attain their minimum once the representations of each class collapse to the vertices of a regular simplex, inscribed in a hypersphere. We provide empirical evidence that this configuration is attained in practice and that reaching a close-to-optimal state typically indicates good generalization performance. Yet, the two losses show remarkably different optimization behavior. The number of iterations required to perfectly fit to data scales superlinearly with the amount of randomly flipped labels for the supervised contrastive loss. This is in contrast to the approximately linear scaling previously reported for networks trained with cross-entropy.
Oops I Took A Gradient: Scalable Sampling for Discrete Distributions
Authors: Will Grathwohl, Kevin Swersky, Milad Hashemi, David Duvenaud, Chris Maddison
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We show empirically that this approach outperforms generic samplers in a number of difficult settings including Ising models, Potts models, restricted Boltzmann machines, and factorial hidden Markov models. We also demonstrate our improved sampler for training deep energy-based models on high dimensional discrete image data. This approach outperforms variational auto-encoders and existing energy-based models. Finally, we give bounds showing that our approach is near-optimal in the class of samplers which propose local updates.
Detecting Rewards Deterioration in Episodic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ido Greenberg, Shie Mannor
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In many RL applications, once training ends, it is vital to detect any deterioration in the agent performance as soon as possible. Furthermore, it often has to be done without modifying the policy and under minimal assumptions regarding the environment. In this paper, we address this problem by focusing directly on the rewards and testing for degradation. We consider an episodic framework, where the rewards within each episode are not independent, nor identically-distributed, nor Markov. We present this problem as a multivariate mean-shift detection problem with possibly partial observations. We define the mean-shift in a way corresponding to deterioration of a temporal signal (such as the rewards), and derive a test for this problem with optimal statistical power. Empirically, on deteriorated rewards in control problems (generated using various environment modifications), the test is demonstrated to be more powerful than standard tests - often by orders of magnitude. We also suggest a novel Bootstrap mechanism for False Alarm Rate control (BFAR), applicable to episodic (non-i.i.d) signal and allowing our test to run sequentially in an online manner. Our method does not rely on a learned model of the environment, is entirely external to the agent, and in fact can be applied to detect changes or drifts in any episodic signal.
Crystallization Learning with the Delaunay Triangulation
Authors: Jiaqi Gu, Guosheng Yin
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Based on the Delaunay triangulation, we propose the crystallization learning to estimate the conditional expectation function in the framework of nonparametric regression. By conducting the crystallization search for the Delaunay simplices closest to the target point in a hierarchical way, the crystallization learning estimates the conditional expectation of the response by fitting a local linear model to the data points of the constructed Delaunay simplices. Instead of conducting the Delaunay triangulation for the entire feature space which would encounter enormous computational difficulty, our approach focuses only on the neighborhood of the target point and thus greatly expedites the estimation for high-dimensional cases. Because the volumes of Delaunay simplices are adaptive to the density of feature data points, our method selects neighbor data points uniformly in all directions and thus is more robust to the local geometric structure of the data than existing nonparametric regression methods. We develop the asymptotic properties of the crystallization learning and conduct numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data to demonstrate the advantages of our method in estimation of the conditional expectation function and prediction of the response.
AutoAttend: Automated Attention Representation Search
Authors: Chaoyu Guan, Xin Wang, Wenwu Zhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-attention mechanisms have been widely adopted in many machine learning areas, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Graph Representation Learning (GRL), etc. However, existing works heavily rely on hand-crafted design to obtain customized attention mechanisms. In this paper, we automate Key, Query and Value representation design, which is one of the most important steps to obtain effective self-attentions. We propose an automated self-attention representation model, AutoAttend, which can automatically search powerful attention representations for downstream tasks leveraging Neural Architecture Search (NAS). In particular, we design a tailored search space for attention representation automation, which is flexible to produce effective attention representation designs. Based on the design prior obtained from attention representations in previous works, we further regularize our search space to reduce the space complexity without the loss of expressivity. Moreover, we propose a novel context-aware parameter sharing mechanism considering special characteristics of each sub-architecture to provide more accurate architecture estimations when conducting parameter sharing in our tailored search space. Experiments show the superiority of our proposed AutoAttend model over previous state-of-the-arts on eight text classification tasks in NLP and four node classification tasks in GRL.
Operationalizing Complex Causes: A Pragmatic View of Mediation
Authors: Limor Gultchin, David Watson, Matt Kusner, Ricardo Silva
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We examine the problem of causal response estimation for complex objects (e.g., text, images, genomics). In this setting, classical \emphatomic interventions are often not available (e.g., changes to characters, pixels, DNA base-pairs). Instead, we only have access to indirect or \emphcrude interventions (e.g., enrolling in a writing program, modifying a scene, applying a gene therapy). In this work, we formalize this problem and provide an initial solution. Given a collection of candidate mediators, we propose (a) a two-step method for predicting the causal responses of crude interventions; and (b) a testing procedure to identify mediators of crude interventions. We demonstrate, on a range of simulated and real-world-inspired examples, that our approach allows us to efficiently estimate the effect of crude interventions with limited data from new treatment regimes.
On a Combination of Alternating Minimization and Nesterov’s Momentum
Authors: Sergey Guminov, Pavel Dvurechensky, Nazarii Tupitsa, Alexander Gasnikov
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Alternating minimization (AM) procedures are practically efficient in many applications for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems. On the other hand, Nesterov’s accelerated gradient is theoretically optimal first-order method for convex optimization. In this paper we combine AM and Nesterov’s acceleration to propose an accelerated alternating minimization algorithm. We prove $1/k^2$ convergence rate in terms of the objective for convex problems and $1/k$ in terms of the squared gradient norm for non-convex problems, where $k$ is the iteration counter. Our method does not require any knowledge of neither convexity of the problem nor function parameters such as Lipschitz constant of the gradient, i.e. it is adaptive to convexity and smoothness and is uniformly optimal for smooth convex and non-convex problems. Further, we develop its primal-dual modification for strongly convex problems with linear constraints and prove the same $1/k^2$ for the primal objective residual and constraints feasibility.
Decentralized Single-Timescale Actor-Critic on Zero-Sum Two-Player Stochastic Games
Authors: Hongyi Guo, Zuyue Fu, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the global convergence and global optimality of the actor-critic algorithm applied for the zero-sum two-player stochastic games in a decentralized manner. We focus on the single-timescale setting where the critic is updated by applying the Bellman operator only once and the actor is updated by policy gradient with the information from the critic. Our algorithm is in a decentralized manner, as we assume that each player has no access to the actions of the other one, which, in a way, protects the privacy of both players. Moreover, we consider linear function approximations for both actor and critic, and we prove that the sequence of joint policy generated by our decentralized linear algorithm converges to the minimax equilibrium at a sublinear rate \(O̧(\sqrtK)\), where \(K\)is the number of iterations. To the best of our knowledge, we establish the global optimality and convergence of decentralized actor-critic algorithm on zero-sum two-player stochastic games with linear function approximations for the first time.