mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Long-Tailed Recognition by Mutual Information Maximization between Latent Features and Ground-Truth Labels
Authors: Min-Kook Suh, Seung-Woo Seo
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Although contrastive learning methods have shown prevailing performance on a variety of representation learning tasks, they encounter difficulty when the training dataset is long-tailed. Many researchers have combined contrastive learning and a logit adjustment technique to address this problem, but the combinations are done ad-hoc and a theoretical background has not yet been provided. The goal of this paper is to provide the background and further improve the performance. First, we show that the fundamental reason contrastive learning methods struggle with long-tailed tasks is that they try to maximize the mutual information between latent features and input data. As ground-truth labels are not considered in the maximization, they are not able to address imbalances between classes. Rather, we interpret the long-tailed recognition task as a mutual information maximization between latent features and ground-truth labels. This approach integrates contrastive learning and logit adjustment seamlessly to derive a loss function that shows state-of-the-art performance on long-tailed recognition benchmarks. It also demonstrates its efficacy in image segmentation tasks, verifying its versatility beyond image classification. Code is available at https://github.com/bluecdm/Long-tailed-recognition.
Adversarial Learning of Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yang Sui, Yukun Huang, Hongtu Zhu, Fan Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant advancements in artificial intelligence. However, its real-world applications are limited due to differences between simulated environments and the actual world. Consequently, it is crucial to systematically analyze how each component of the RL system can affect the final model performance. In this study, we propose an adversarial learning framework for distributional reinforcement learning, which adopts the concept of influence measure from the statistics community. This framework enables us to detect performance loss caused by either the internal policy structure or the external state observation. The proposed influence measure is based on information geometry and has desirable properties of invariance. We demonstrate that the influence measure is useful for three diagnostic tasks: identifying fragile states in trajectories, determining the instability of the policy architecture, and pinpointing anomalously sensitive policy parameters.
Distilling Internet-Scale Vision-Language Models into Embodied Agents
Authors: Theodore Sumers, Kenneth Marino, Arun Ahuja, Rob Fergus, Ishita Dasgupta
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Instruction-following agents must ground language into their observation and action spaces. Learning to ground language is challenging, typically requiring domain-specific engineering or large quantities of human interaction data. To address this challenge, we propose using pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to supervise embodied agents. We combine ideas from model distillation and hindsight experience replay (HER), using a VLM to retroactively generate language describing the agent’s behavior. Simple prompting allows us to control the supervision signal, teaching an agent to interact with novel objects based on their names (e.g., planes) or their features (e.g., colors) in a 3D rendered environment. Fewshot prompting lets us teach abstract category membership, including pre-existing categories (food vs toys) and ad-hoc ones (arbitrary preferences over objects). Our work outlines a new and effective way to use internet-scale VLMs, repurposing the generic language grounding acquired by such models to teach task-relevant groundings to embodied agents.
Vector-Valued Control Variates
Authors: Zhuo Sun, Alessandro Barp, Francois-Xavier Briol
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Control variates are variance reduction tools for Monte Carlo estimators. They can provide significant variance reduction, but usually require a large number of samples, which can be prohibitive when sampling or evaluating the integrand is computationally expensive. Furthermore, there are many scenarios where we need to compute multiple related integrals simultaneously or sequentially, which can further exacerbate computational costs. In this paper, we propose vector-valued control variates, an extension of control variates which can be used to reduce the variance of multiple Monte Carlo estimators jointly. This allows for the transfer of information across integration tasks, and hence reduces the need for a large number of samples. We focus on control variates based on kernel interpolants and our novel construction is obtained through a generalised Stein identity and the development of novel matrix-valued Stein reproducing kernels. We demonstrate our methodology on a range of problems including multifidelity modelling, Bayesian inference for dynamical systems, and model evidence computation through thermodynamic integration.
MetaModulation: Learning Variational Feature Hierarchies for Few-Shot Learning with Fewer Tasks
Authors: Wenfang Sun, Yingjun Du, Xiantong Zhen, Fan Wang, Ling Wang, Cees G. M. Snoek
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Meta-learning algorithms are able to learn a new task using previously learned knowledge, but they often require a large number of meta-training tasks which may not be readily available. To address this issue, we propose a method for few-shot learning with fewer tasks, which we call MetaModulation. The key idea is to use a neural network to increase the density of the meta-training tasks by modulating batch normalization parameters during meta-training. Additionally, we modify parameters at various neural network levels, rather than just a single layer, to increase task diversity. To account for the uncertainty caused by the reduced number of training tasks, we propose a variational MetaModulation where the modulation parameters are treated as latent variables. We also introduce learning variational feature hierarchies by the variational MetaModulation, which modulates features at all layers and can take into account task uncertainty and generate more diverse tasks. The ablation studies illustrate the advantages of utilizing a learnable task modulation at different levels and demonstrate the benefit of incorporating probabilistic variants in few-task meta-learning. Our MetaModulation and its variational variants consistently outperform state-of-the-art alternatives on four few-task meta-learning benchmarks.
Revisiting Sampling for Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Haoran Sun, Katayoon Goshvadi, Azade Nova, Dale Schuurmans, Hanjun Dai
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Sampling approaches like Markov chain Monte Carlo were once popular for combinatorial optimization, but the inefficiency of classical methods and the need for problem-specific designs curtailed ongoing development. Recent work has favored data-driven approaches that mitigate the need for hand-craft heuristics, but these are often not usable as out-of-the-box solvers due to dependence on in-distribution training and limited scalability to large instances. In this paper, we revisit the idea of using sampling for combinatorial optimization, motivated by the significant recent advances of gradient-based discrete MCMC and new techniques for parallel neighborhood exploration on accelerators. Remarkably, we find that modern sampling strategies can leverage landscape information to provide general-purpose solvers that require no training and yet are competitive with state of the art combinatorial solvers. In particular, experiments on cover vertex selection, graph partition and routing demonstrate better speed-quality trade-offs over current learning based approaches, and sometimes even superior performance to commercial solvers and specialized algorithms.
What Makes Entities Similar? A Similarity Flooding Perspective for Multi-sourced Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Zequn Sun, Jiacheng Huang, Xiaozhou Xu, Qijin Chen, Weijun Ren, Wei Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Joint representation learning over multi-sourced knowledge graphs (KGs) yields transferable and expressive embeddings that improve downstream tasks. Entity alignment (EA) is a critical step in this process. Despite recent considerable research progress in embedding-based EA, how it works remains to be explored. In this paper, we provide a similarity flooding perspective to explain existing translation-based and aggregation-based EA models. We prove that the embedding learning process of these models actually seeks a fixpoint of pairwise similarities between entities. We also provide experimental evidence to support our theoretical analysis. We propose two simple but effective methods inspired by the fixpoint computation in similarity flooding, and demonstrate their effectiveness on benchmark datasets. Our work bridges the gap between recent embedding-based models and the conventional similarity flooding algorithm. It would improve our understanding of and increase our faith in embedding-based EA.
Maximum Optimality Margin: A Unified Approach for Contextual Linear Programming and Inverse Linear Programming
Authors: Chunlin Sun, Shang Liu, Xiaocheng Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we study the predict-then-optimize problem where the output of a machine learning prediction task is used as the input of some downstream optimization problem, say, the objective coefficient vector of a linear program. The problem is also known as predictive analytics or contextual linear programming. The existing approaches largely suffer from either (i) optimization intractability (a non-convex objective function)/statistical inefficiency (a suboptimal generalization bound) or (ii) requiring strong condition(s) such as no constraint or loss calibration. We develop a new approach to the problem called maximum optimality margin which designs the machine learning loss function by the optimality condition of the downstream optimization. The max-margin formulation enjoys both computational efficiency and good theoretical properties for the learning procedure. More importantly, our new approach only needs the observations of the optimal solution in the training data rather than the objective function, which makes it a new and natural approach to the inverse linear programming problem under both contextual and context-free settings; we also analyze the proposed method under both offline and online settings, and demonstrate its performance using numerical experiments.
Tensor Gaussian Process with Contraction for Multi-Channel Imaging Analysis
Authors: Hu Sun, Ward Manchester, Meng Jin, Yang Liu, Yang Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-channel imaging data is a prevalent data format in scientific fields such as astronomy and biology. The structured information and the high dimensionality of these 3-D tensor data makes the analysis an intriguing but challenging topic for statisticians and practitioners. The low-rank scalar-on-tensor regression model, in particular, has received widespread attention and has been re-formulated as a tensor Gaussian Process (Tensor-GP) model with multi-linear kernel in Yu et al. (2018). In this paper, we extend the Tensor-GP model by introducing an integrative dimensionality reduction technique, called tensor contraction, with a Tensor-GP for a scalar-on-tensor regression task with multi-channel imaging data. This is motivated by the solar flare forecasting problem with high dimensional multi-channel imaging data. We first estimate a latent, reduced-size tensor for each data tensor and then apply a multi-linear Tensor-GP on the latent tensor data for prediction. We introduce an anisotropic total-variation regularization when conducting the tensor contraction to obtain a sparse and smooth latent tensor. We then propose an alternating proximal gradient descent algorithm for estimation. We validate our approach via extensive simulation studies and applying it to the solar flare forecasting problem.
MABe22: A Multi-Species Multi-Task Benchmark for Learned Representations of Behavior
Authors: Jennifer J. Sun, Markus Marks, Andrew Wesley Ulmer, Dipam Chakraborty, Brian Geuther, Edward Hayes, Heng Jia, Vivek Kumar, Sebastian Oleszko, Zachary Partridge, Milan Peelman, Alice Robie, Catherine E Schretter, Keith Sheppard, Chao Sun, Param Uttarwar, Julian Morgan Wagner, Erik Werner, Joseph Parker, Pietro Perona, Yisong Yue, Kristin Branson, Ann Kennedy
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce MABe22, a large-scale, multi-agent video and trajectory benchmark to assess the quality of learned behavior representations. This dataset is collected from a variety of biology experiments, and includes triplets of interacting mice (4.7 million frames video+pose tracking data, 10 million frames pose only), symbiotic beetle-ant interactions (10 million frames video data), and groups of interacting flies (4.4 million frames of pose tracking data). Accompanying these data, we introduce a panel of real-life downstream analysis tasks to assess the quality of learned representations by evaluating how well they preserve information about the experimental conditions (e.g. strain, time of day, optogenetic stimulation) and animal behavior. We test multiple state-of-the-art self-supervised video and trajectory representation learning methods to demonstrate the use of our benchmark, revealing that methods developed using human action datasets do not fully translate to animal datasets. We hope that our benchmark and dataset encourage a broader exploration of behavior representation learning methods across species and settings.
Dynamic Regularized Sharpness Aware Minimization in Federated Learning: Approaching Global Consistency and Smooth Landscape
Authors: Yan Sun, Li Shen, Shixiang Chen, Liang Ding, Dacheng Tao
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In federated learning (FL), a cluster of local clients are chaired under the coordination of the global server and cooperatively train one model with privacy protection. Due to the multiple local updates and the isolated non-iid dataset, clients are prone to overfit into their own optima, which extremely deviates from the global objective and significantly undermines the performance. Most previous works only focus on enhancing the consistency between the local and global objectives to alleviate this prejudicial client drifts from the perspective of the optimization view, whose performance would be prominently deteriorated on the high heterogeneity. In this work, we propose a novel and general algorithm FedSMOO by jointly considering the optimization and generalization targets to efficiently improve the performance in FL. Concretely, FedSMOO adopts a dynamic regularizer to guarantee the local optima towards the global objective, which is meanwhile revised by the global Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer to search for the consistent flat minima. Our theoretical analysis indicates that FedSMOO achieves fast $\mathcalO(1/T)$ convergence rate with low generalization bound. Extensive numerical studies are conducted on the real-world dataset to verify its peerless efficiency and excellent generality.
When and How Does Known Class Help Discover Unknown Ones? Provable Understanding Through Spectral Analysis
Authors: Yiyou Sun, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang, Yixuan Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Novel Class Discovery (NCD) aims at inferring novel classes in an unlabeled set by leveraging prior knowledge from a labeled set with known classes. Despite its importance, there is a lack of theoretical foundations for NCD. This paper bridges the gap by providing an analytical framework to formalize and investigate when and how known classes can help discover novel classes. Tailored to the NCD problem, we introduce a graph-theoretic representation that can be learned by a novel NCD Spectral Contrastive Loss (NSCL). Minimizing this objective is equivalent to factorizing the graph’s adjacency matrix, which allows us to derive a provable error bound and provide the sufficient and necessary condition for NCD. Empirically, NSCL can match or outperform several strong baselines on common benchmark datasets, which is appealing for practical usage while enjoying theoretical guarantees.
Learning Prescriptive ReLU Networks
Authors: Wei Sun, Asterios Tsiourvas
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the problem of learning optimal policy from a set of discrete treatment options using observational data. We propose a piecewise linear neural network model that can balance strong prescriptive performance and interpretability, which we refer to as the prescriptive ReLU network, or P-ReLU. We show analytically that this model (i) partitions the input space into disjoint polyhedra, where all instances that belong to the same partition receive the same treatment, and (ii) can be converted into an equivalent prescriptive tree with hyperplane splits for interpretability. We demonstrate the flexibility of the P-ReLU network as constraints can be easily incorporated with minor modifications to the architecture. Through experiments, we validate the superior prescriptive accuracy of P-ReLU against competing benchmarks. Lastly, we present examples of prescriptive trees extracted from trained P-ReLUs using a real-world dataset, for both the unconstrained and constrained scenarios.
All in a Row: Compressed Convolution Networks for Graphs
Authors: Junshu Sun, Shuhui Wang, Xinzhe Han, Zhe Xue, Qingming Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Compared to Euclidean convolution, existing graph convolution methods generally fail to learn diverse convolution operators under limited parameter scales and depend on additional treatments of multi-scale feature extraction. The challenges of generalizing Euclidean convolution to graphs arise from the irregular structure of graphs. To bridge the gap between Euclidean space and graph space, we propose a differentiable method for regularization on graphs that applies permutations to the input graphs. The permutations constrain all nodes in a row regardless of their input order and therefore enable the flexible generalization of Euclidean convolution. Based on the regularization of graphs, we propose Compressed Convolution Network (CoCN) for hierarchical graph representation learning. CoCN follows the local feature learning and global parameter sharing mechanisms of Convolution Neural Networks. The whole model can be trained end-to-end and is able to learn both individual node features and the corresponding structure features. We validate CoCN on several node classification and graph classification benchmarks. CoCN achieves superior performance over competitive convolutional GNNs and graph pooling models. Codes are available at https://github.com/sunjss/CoCN.
Momentum Ensures Convergence of SIGNSGD under Weaker Assumptions
Authors: Tao Sun, Qingsong Wang, Dongsheng Li, Bao Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Sign Stochastic Gradient Descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient stochastic algorithm that only uses the sign information of the stochastic gradient to update the model’s weights. However, the existing convergence theory of signSGD either requires increasing batch sizes during training or assumes the gradient noise is symmetric and unimodal. Error feedback has been used to guarantee the convergence of signSGD under weaker assumptions at the cost of communication overhead. This paper revisits the convergence of signSGD and proves that momentum can remedy signSGD under weaker assumptions than previous techniques; in particular, our convergence theory does not require the assumption of bounded stochastic gradient or increased batch size. Our results resonate with echoes of previous empirical results where, unlike signSGD, signSGD with momentum maintains good performance even with small batch sizes. Another new result is that signSGD with momentum can achieve an improved convergence rate when the objective function is second-order smooth. We further extend our theory to signSGD with major vote and federated learning.
A Critical Revisit of Adversarial Robustness in 3D Point Cloud Recognition with Diffusion-Driven Purification
Authors: Jiachen Sun, Jiongxiao Wang, Weili Nie, Zhiding Yu, Zhuoqing Mao, Chaowei Xiao
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: 3D point clouds serve as a crucial data representation in numerous real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and medical imaging. While the advancements in deep learning have spurred the utilization of 3D point clouds, deep models are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Various defense solutions have been proposed to build robust models against adversarial attacks. In this work, we pinpoint a major limitation of the leading empirical defense, adversarial training, when applied to 3D point cloud models: gradient obfuscation, which significantly hampers robustness against potent attacks. To bridge the gap, we propose PointDP, a purification strategy that leverages diffusion models to defend against 3D adversarial attacks. Since PointDP does not rely on predefined adversarial examples for training, it can defend against a variety of threats. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of PointDP across six representative 3D point cloud architectures, employing sixteen strong and adaptive attacks to manifest its foundational robustness. Our evaluation shows that PointDP achieves significantly better (i.e., 12.6%-40.3%) adversarial robustness than state-of-the-art methods under strong attacks bounded by different $\ell_p$ norms.
SDDM: Score-Decomposed Diffusion Models on Manifolds for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Shikun Sun, Longhui Wei, Junliang Xing, Jia Jia, Qi Tian
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent score-based diffusion models (SBDMs) show promising results in unpaired image-to-image translation (I2I). However, existing methods, either energy-based or statistically-based, provide no explicit form of the interfered intermediate generative distributions. This work presents a new score-decomposed diffusion model (SDDM) on manifolds to explicitly optimize the tangled distributions during image generation. SDDM derives manifolds to make the distributions of adjacent time steps separable and decompose the score function or energy guidance into an image "denoising" part and a content "refinement" part. To refine the image in the same noise level, we equalize the refinement parts of the score function and energy guidance, which permits multi-objective optimization on the manifold. We also leverage the block adaptive instance normalization module to construct manifolds with lower dimensions but still concentrated with the perturbed reference image. SDDM outperforms existing SBDM-based methods with much fewer diffusion steps on several I2I benchmarks.
A Neural PDE Solver with Temporal Stencil Modeling
Authors: Zhiqing Sun, Yiming Yang, Shinjae Yoo
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Numerical simulation of non-linear partial differential equations plays a crucial role in modeling physical science and engineering phenomena, such as weather, climate, and aerodynamics. Recent Machine Learning (ML) models trained on low-resolution spatio-temporal signals have shown new promises in capturing important dynamics in high-resolution signals, under the condition that the models can effectively recover the missing details. However, this study shows that significant information is often lost in the low-resolution down-sampled features. To address such issues, we propose a new approach, namely Temporal Stencil Modeling (TSM), which combines the strengths of advanced time-series sequence modeling (with the HiPPO features) and state-of-the-art neural PDE solvers (with learnable stencil modeling). TSM aims to recover the lost information from the PDE trajectories and can be regarded as a temporal generalization of classic finite volume methods such as WENO. Our experimental results show that TSM achieves the new state-of-the-art simulation accuracy for 2-D incompressible Navier-Stokes turbulent flows: it significantly outperforms the previously reported best results by 19.9% in terms of the highly-correlated duration time, and reduces the inference latency into 80%. We also show a strong generalization ability of the proposed method to various out-of-distribution turbulent flow settings, as well as lower resolution or 1-D / 3-D settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Edward-Sun/TSM-PDE .
Feature Expansion for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Jiaqi Sun, Lin Zhang, Guangyi Chen, Peng Xu, Kun Zhang, Yujiu Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph neural networks aim to learn representations for graph-structured data and show impressive performance in node classification. Recently, many methods have studied the representations of GNNs from the perspective of optimization goals and spectral graph theory. However, the feature space that dominates representation learning has not been systematically studied in graph neural networks. In this paper, we propose to fill this gap by analyzing the feature space of both spatial and spectral models. We decompose graph neural networks into determined feature spaces and trainable weights, providing the convenience of studying the feature space explicitly using matrix space analysis. In particular, we find theoretically that the feature space tends to be linearly correlated due to repeated aggregations. In this case, the feature space is bounded by the poor representation of shared weights or the limited dimensionality of node attributes in existing models, leading to poor performance. Motivated by these findings, we propose 1) feature subspaces flattening and 2) structural principal components to expand the feature space. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed more comprehensive feature space, with comparable inference time to the baseline, and demonstrate its efficient convergence capability.
Model-Bellman Inconsistency for Model-based Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yihao Sun, Jiaji Zhang, Chengxing Jia, Haoxin Lin, Junyin Ye, Yang Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: For offline reinforcement learning (RL), model-based methods are expected to be data-efficient as they incorporate dynamics models to generate more data. However, due to inevitable model errors, straightforwardly learning a policy in the model typically fails in the offline setting. Previous studies have incorporated conservatism to prevent out-of-distribution exploration. For example, MOPO penalizes rewards through uncertainty measures from predicting the next states, which we have discovered are loose bounds of the ideal uncertainty, i.e., the Bellman error. In this work, we propose MOdel-Bellman Inconsistency penalized offLinE Policy Optimization (MOBILE), a novel uncertainty-driven offline RL algorithm. MOBILE conducts uncertainty quantification through the inconsistency of Bellman estimations under an ensemble of learned dynamics models, which can be a better approximator to the true Bellman error, and penalizes the Bellman estimation based on this uncertainty. Empirically we have verified that our proposed uncertainty quantification can be significantly closer to the true Bellman error than the compared methods. Consequently, MOBILE outperforms prior offline RL approaches on most tasks of D4RL and NeoRL benchmarks.
Inflow, Outflow, and Reciprocity in Machine Learning
Authors: Mukund Sundararajan, Walid Krichene
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Data is pooled across entities (individuals or enterprises) to create machine learning models, and sometimes, the entities that contribute the data also benefit from the models. Consider for instance a recommender system (e.g. Spotify, Instagram or YouTube), a health care app that predicts the risk for some disease, or a service built by pooling data across enterprises. In this work we propose a framework to study this value exchange, i.e., we model and measure contributions (outflows), benefits (inflows) and the balance between contributions and benefits (the degree of reciprocity). We show theoretically, and via experiments that under certain distributional assumptions, some classes of models are approximately reciprocal. These results only scratch the surface; we conclude with several open directions.
When Personalization Harms Performance: Reconsidering the Use of Group Attributes in Prediction
Authors: Vinith Menon Suriyakumar, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Berk Ustun
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Machine learning models are often personalized with categorical attributes that define groups. In this work, we show that personalization with <em>group attributes</em> can inadvertently reduce performance at a <em>group level</em> – i.e., groups may receive unnecessarily inaccurate predictions by sharing their personal characteristics. We present formal conditions to ensure the <em>fair use</em> of group attributes in a prediction task, and describe how they can be checked by training one additional model. We characterize how fair use conditions be violated due to standard practices in model development, and study the prevalence of fair use violations in clinical prediction tasks. Our results show that personalization often fails to produce a tailored performance gain for every group who reports personal data, and underscore the need to evaluate fair use when personalizing models with characteristics that are protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire.
Tuning Computer Vision Models With Task Rewards
Authors: André Susano Pinto, Alexander Kolesnikov, Yuge Shi, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Misalignment between model predictions and intended usage can be detrimental for the deployment of computer vision models. The issue is exacerbated when the task involves complex structured outputs, as it becomes harder to design procedures which address this misalignment. In natural language processing, this is often addressed using reinforcement learning techniques that align models with a task reward. We adopt this approach and show its surprising effectiveness to improve generic models pretrained to imitate example outputs across multiple computer vision tasks, such as object detection, panoptic segmentation, colorization and image captioning. We believe this approach has the potential to be widely useful for better aligning models with a diverse range of computer vision tasks.
Beyond Exponentially Fast Mixing in Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Level Monte Carlo Actor-Critic
Authors: Wesley A Suttle, Amrit Bedi, Bhrij Patel, Brian M. Sadler, Alec Koppel, Dinesh Manocha
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in the step-size selection. Unfortunately, this assumption is violated for large state spaces or settings with sparse rewards, and the mixing time is unknown, making the step size inoperable. In this work, we propose an RL methodology attuned to the mixing time by employing a multi-level Monte Carlo estimator for the critic, the actor, and the average reward embedded within an actor-critic (AC) algorithm. This method, which we call <b>M</b>ulti-level <b>A</b>ctor-<b>C</b>ritic (MAC), is developed specifically for infinite-horizon average-reward settings and neither relies on oracle knowledge of the mixing time in its parameter selection nor assumes its exponential decay; it is therefore readily applicable to applications with slower mixing times. Nonetheless, it achieves a convergence rate comparable to SOTA actor-critic algorithms. We experimentally show that these alleviated restrictions on the technical conditions required for stability translate to superior performance in practice for RL problems with sparse rewards.
Tight and fast generalization error bound of graph embedding in metric space
Authors: Atsushi Suzuki, Atsushi Nitanda, Taiji Suzuki, Jing Wang, Feng Tian, Kenji Yamanishi
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent studies have experimentally shown that we can achieve in non-Euclidean metric space effective and efficient graph embedding, which aims to obtain the vertices’ representations reflecting the graph’s structure in the metric space. Specifically, graph embedding in hyperbolic space has experimentally succeeded in embedding graphs with hierarchical-tree structure, e.g., data in natural languages, social networks, and knowledge bases. However, recent theoretical analyses have shown a much higher upper bound on non-Euclidean graph embedding’s generalization error than Euclidean one’s, where a high generalization error indicates that the incompleteness and noise in the data can significantly damage learning performance. It implies that the existing bound cannot guarantee the success of graph embedding in non-Euclidean metric space in a practical training data size, which can prevent non-Euclidean graph embedding’s application in real problems. This paper provides a novel upper bound of graph embedding’s generalization error by evaluating the local Rademacher complexity of the model as a function set of the distances of representation couples. Our bound clarifies that the performance of graph embedding in non-Euclidean metric space, including hyperbolic space, is better than the existing upper bounds suggest. Specifically, our new upper bound is polynomial in the metric space’s geometric radius $R$ and can be $O(\frac1S)$ at the fastest, where $S$ is the training data size. Our bound is significantly tighter and faster than the existing one, which can be exponential to $R$ and $O(\frac1\sqrtS)$ at the fastest. Specific calculations on example cases show that graph embedding in non-Euclidean metric space can outperform that in Euclidean space with much smaller training data than the existing bound has suggested.
Proximal Causal Learning of Conditional Average Treatment Effects
Authors: Erik Sverdrup, Yifan Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Efficiently and flexibly estimating treatment effect heterogeneity is an important task in a wide variety of settings ranging from medicine to marketing, and there are a considerable number of promising conditional average treatment effect estimators currently available. These, however, typically rely on the assumption that the measured covariates are enough to justify conditional exchangeability. We propose the P-learner, motivated by the R- and DR-learner, a tailored two-stage loss function for learning heterogeneous treatment effects in settings where exchangeability given observed covariates is an implausible assumption, and we wish to rely on proxy variables for causal inference. Our proposed estimator can be implemented by off-the-shelf loss-minimizing machine learning methods, which in the case of kernel regression satisfies an oracle bound on the estimated error as long as the nuisance components are estimated reasonably well.
Inverse Reinforcement Learning without Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Gokul Swamy, David Wu, Sanjiban Choudhury, Drew Bagnell, Steven Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful set of techniques for imitation learning that aims to learn a reward function that rationalizes expert demonstrations. Unfortunately, traditional IRL methods suffer from a computational weakness: they require repeatedly solving a hard reinforcement learning (RL) problem as a subroutine. This is counter-intuitive from the viewpoint of reductions: we have reduced the <em>easier</em> problem of imitation learning to repeatedly solving the <em>harder</em> problem of RL. Another thread of work has proved that access to the side-information of the distribution of states where a strong policy spends time can dramatically reduce the sample and computational complexities of solving an RL problem. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time a more informed imitation learning reduction where we utilize the state distribution of the expert to alleviate the global exploration component of the RL subroutine, providing an <em>exponential</em> speedup in theory. In practice, we find that we are able to significantly speed up the prior art on continuous control tasks.
Von Mises Mixture Distributions for Molecular Conformation Generation
Authors: Kirk Swanson, Jake Lawrence Williams, Eric M Jonas
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Molecules are frequently represented as graphs, but the underlying 3D molecular geometry (the locations of the atoms) ultimately determines most molecular properties. However, most molecules are not static and at room temperature adopt a wide variety of geometries or $\textitconformations$. The resulting distribution on geometries $p(x)$ is known as the Boltzmann distribution, and many molecular properties are expectations computed under this distribution. Generating accurate samples from the Boltzmann distribution is therefore essential for computing these expectations accurately. Traditional sampling-based methods are computationally expensive, and most recent machine learning-based methods have focused on identifying $\textitmodes$ in this distribution rather than generating true $\textitsamples$. Generating such samples requires capturing conformational variability, and it has been widely recognized that the majority of conformational variability in molecules arises from rotatable bonds. In this work, we present VonMisesNet, a new graph neural network that captures conformational variability via a variational approximation of rotatable bond torsion angles as a mixture of von Mises distributions. We demonstrate that VonMisesNet can generate conformations for arbitrary molecules in a way that is both physically accurate with respect to the Boltzmann distribution and orders of magnitude faster than existing sampling methods.
Optimal randomized multilevel Monte Carlo for repeatedly nested expectations
Authors: Yasa Syed, Guanyang Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The estimation of repeatedly nested expectations is a challenging task that arises in many real-world systems. However, existing methods generally suffer from high computational costs when the number of nestings becomes large. Fix any non-negative integer $D$ for the total number of nestings. Standard Monte Carlo methods typically cost at least $\mathcalO(ɛ^-(2+D))$ and sometimes $\mathcal O(ɛ^-2(1+D))$ to obtain an estimator up to $ɛ$-error. More advanced methods, such as multilevel Monte Carlo, currently only exist for $D = 1$. In this paper, we propose a novel Monte Carlo estimator called $\mathsfREAD$, which stands for “Recursive Estimator for Arbitrary Depth.” Our estimator has an optimal computational cost of $\mathcalO(ɛ^-2)$ for every fixed $D$ under suitable assumptions, and a nearly optimal computational cost of $\mathcalO(ɛ^-2(1 + δ))$ for any $0 < δ < \frac12$ under much more general assumptions. Our estimator is also unbiased, which makes it easy to parallelize. The key ingredients in our construction are an observation of the problem’s recursive structure and the recursive use of the randomized multilevel Monte Carlo method.
Adaptive Coordination in Social Embodied Rearrangement
Authors: Andrew Szot, Unnat Jain, Dhruv Batra, Zsolt Kira, Ruta Desai, Akshara Rai
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We present the task of "Social Rearrangement", consisting of cooperative everyday tasks like setting up the dinner table, tidying a house or unpacking groceries in a simulated multi-agent environment. In Social Rearrangement, two robots coordinate to complete a long-horizon task, using onboard sensing and egocentric observations, and no privileged information about the environment. We study zero-shot coordination (ZSC) in this task, where an agent collaborates with a new partner, emulating a scenario where a robot collaborates with a new human partner. Prior ZSC approaches struggle to generalize in our complex and visually rich setting, and on further analysis, we find that they fail to generate diverse coordination behaviors at training time. To counter this, we propose Behavior Diversity Play (BDP), a novel ZSC approach that encourages diversity through a discriminability objective. Our results demonstrate that BDP learns adaptive agents that can tackle visual coordination, and zero-shot generalize to new partners in unseen environments, achieving 35% higher success and 32% higher efficiency compared to baselines.
MG-GNN: Multigrid Graph Neural Networks for Learning Multilevel Domain Decomposition Methods
Authors: Ali Taghibakhshi, Nicolas Nytko, Tareq Uz Zaman, Scott Maclachlan, Luke Olson, Matthew West
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Domain decomposition methods (DDMs) are popular solvers for discretized systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), with one-level and multilevel variants. These solvers rely on several algorithmic and mathematical parameters, prescribing overlap, subdomain boundary conditions, and other properties of the DDM. While some work has been done on optimizing these parameters, it has mostly focused on the one-level setting or special cases such as structured-grid discretizations with regular subdomain construction. In this paper, we propose multigrid graph neural networks (MG-GNN), a novel GNN architecture for learning optimized parameters in two-level DDMs. We train MG-GNN using a new unsupervised loss function, enabling effective training on small problems that yields robust performance on unstructured grids that are orders of magnitude larger than those in the training set. We show that MG-GNN outperforms popular hierarchical graph network architectures for this optimization and that our proposed loss function is critical to achieving this improved performance.
Learning Mixtures of Gaussians with Censored Data
Authors: Wai Ming Tai, Bryon Aragam
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study the problem of learning mixtures of Gaussians with censored data. Statistical learning with censored data is a classical problem, with numerous practical applications, however, finite-sample guarantees for even simple latent variable models such as Gaussian mixtures are missing. Formally, we are given censored data from a mixture of univariate Gaussians $ ∑_i=1^k w_i \mathcalN(μ_i,σ^2), $ i.e. the sample is observed only if it lies inside a set $S$. The goal is to learn the weights $w_i$ and the means $μ_i$. We propose an algorithm that takes only $\frac1ɛ^O(k)$ samples to estimate the weights $w_i$ and the means $μ_i$ within $ɛ$ error.
Approximation and Estimation Ability of Transformers for Sequence-to-Sequence Functions with Infinite Dimensional Input
Authors: Shokichi Takakura, Taiji Suzuki
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite the great success of Transformer networks in various applications such as natural language processing and computer vision, their theoretical aspects are not well understood. In this paper, we study the approximation and estimation ability of Transformers as sequence-to-sequence functions with infinite dimensional inputs. Although inputs and outputs are both infinite dimensional, we show that when the target function has anisotropic smoothness, Transformers can avoid the curse of dimensionality due to their feature extraction ability and parameter sharing property. In addition, we show that even if the smoothness changes depending on each input, Transformers can estimate the importance of features for each input and extract important features dynamically. Then, we proved that Transformers achieve similar convergence rate as in the case of the fixed smoothness. Our theoretical results support the practical success of Transformers for high dimensional data.
Learning Neural PDE Solvers with Parameter-Guided Channel Attention
Authors: Makoto Takamoto, Francesco Alesiani, Mathias Niepert
Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) is concerned with the development of learned emulators of physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDE). In application domains such as weather forecasting, molecular dynamics, and inverse design, ML-based surrogate models are increasingly used to augment or replace inefficient and often non-differentiable numerical simulation algorithms. While a number of ML-based methods for approximating the solutions of PDEs have been proposed in recent years, they typically do not adapt to the parameters of the PDEs, making it difficult to generalize to PDE parameters not seen during training. We propose a Channel Attention guided by PDE Parameter Embeddings (CAPE) component for neural surrogate models and a simple yet effective curriculum learning strategy. The CAPE module can be combined with any neural PDE solvers allowing them to adapt to unseen PDE parameters. The curriculum learning strategy provides a seamless transition between teacher-forcing and fully auto-regressive training. We compare CAPE in conjunction with the curriculum learning strategy using a PDE benchmark and obtain consistent and significant improvements over the baseline models. The experiments also show several advantages of CAPE, such as its increased ability to generalize to unseen PDE parameters without large increases inference time and parameter count. An implementation of the method and experiments are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAPE-ML4Sci-145B.