mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Online Active Learning with Surrogate Loss Functions
Authors: Claudio Gentile, Tobias Sommer Thune Giulia DeSalvo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We derive a novel active learning algorithm in the streaming setting for binary classification tasks. The algorithm leverages weak labels to minimize the number of label requests, and trains a model to optimize a surrogate loss on a resulting set of labeled and weak-labeled points. Our algorithm jointly admits two crucial properties: theoretical guarantees in the general agnostic setting and a strong empirical performance. Our theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm attains favorable generalization and label complexity bounds, while our empirical study on 18 real-world datasets demonstrate that the algorithm outperforms standard baselines, including the Margin Algorithm, or  Uncertainty Sampling, a high-performing active learning algorithm favored by practitioners.
Does Preprocessing Help Training Over-parameterized Neural Networks?
Authors: Shuo Yang, Ruizhe Zhang Zhao Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance in many areas. Designing a fast and provable method for training neural networks is a fundamental question in machine learning. The classical training method requires paying $\Omega(mnd)$ cost for both forward computation and backward computation, where $m$ is the width of the neural network, and we are given $n$ training points in $d$-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose two novel preprocessing ideas to bypass this $\Omega(mnd)$ barrier:* First, by preprocessing the initial weights of the neural networks, we can train the neural network in $\widetilde{O}(m^{1-\Theta(1/d)} n d)$ cost per iteration.* Second, by preprocessing the input data points, we can train neural network in $\widetilde{O} (m^{4/5} nd )$ cost per iteration.From the technical perspective, our result is a sophisticated combination of tools in different fields, greedy-type convergence analysis in optimization, sparsity observation in practical work, high-dimensional geometric search in data structure, concentration and anti-concentration in probability. Our results also provide theoretical insights for a large number of previously established fast training methods.In addition, our classical algorithm can be generalized to the Quantum computation model. Interestingly, we can get a similar sublinear cost per iteration but avoid preprocessing initial weights or input data points.
Causal Influence Detection for Improving Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Bernhard Schölkopf, Georg Martius Maximilian Seitzer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments consist of independent entities that interact sparsely. In such environments, RL agents have only limited influence over other entities in any particular situation. Our idea in this work is that learning can be efficiently guided by knowing when and what the agent can influence with its actions. To achieve this, we introduce a measure of situation-dependent causal influence based on conditional mutual information and show that it can reliably detect states of influence. We then propose several ways to integrate this measure into RL algorithms to improve exploration and off-policy learning. All modified algorithms show strong increases in data efficiency on robotic manipulation tasks.
LADA: Look-Ahead Data Acquisition via Augmentation for Deep Active Learning
Authors: Kyungwoo Song, JoonHo Jang, Il-chul Moon Yoon-Yeong Kim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Active learning effectively collects data instances for training deep learning models when the labeled dataset is limited and the annotation cost is high. Data augmentation is another effective technique to enlarge the limited amount of labeled instances. The scarcity of labeled dataset leads us to consider the integration of data augmentation and active learning. One possible approach is a pipelined combination, which selects informative instances via the acquisition function and generates virtual instances from the selected instances via augmentation. However, this pipelined approach would not guarantee the informativeness of the virtual instances. This paper proposes Look-Ahead Data Acquisition via augmentation, or LADA framework, that looks ahead the effect of data augmentation in the process of acquisition. LADA jointly considers both 1) unlabeled data instance to be selected and 2) virtual data instance to be generated by data augmentation, to construct the acquisition function. Moreover, to generate maximally informative virtual instances, LADA optimizes the data augmentation policy to maximize the predictive acquisition score, resulting in the proposal of InfoSTN and InfoMixup. The experimental results of LADA show a significant improvement over the recent augmentation and acquisition baselines that were independently applied.
Policy Optimization in Adversarial MDPs: Improved Exploration via Dilated Bonuses
Authors: Chen-Yu Wei, Chung-Wei Lee Haipeng Luo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Policy optimization is a widely-used method in reinforcement learning. Due to its local-search nature, however, theoretical guarantees on global optimality often rely on extra assumptions on the Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that bypass the challenge of global exploration. To eliminate the need of such assumptions, in this work, we develop a general solution that adds dilated bonuses to the policy update to facilitate global exploration. To showcase the power and generality of this technique, we apply it to several episodic MDP settings with adversarial losses and bandit feedback, improving and generalizing the state-of-the-art. Specifically, in the tabular case, we obtain $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret where $T$ is the number of episodes, improving the $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{\frac{2}{3}})$ regret bound by Shani et al. [2020]. When the number of states is infinite, under the assumption that the state-action values are linear in some low-dimensional features, we obtain $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{\frac{2}{3}})$ regret with the help of a simulator, matching the result of Neu and Olkhovskaya [2020] while importantly removing the need of an exploratory policy that their algorithm requires. To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm with sublinear regret for linear function approximation with adversarial losses, bandit feedback, and no exploratory assumptions. Finally, we also discuss how to further improve the regret or remove the need of a simulator using dilated bonuses, when an exploratory policy is available.
Multiclass versus Binary Differentially Private PAC Learning
Authors: Mark Bun, Marco Gaboardi Satchit Sivakumar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We show a generic reduction from multiclass differentially private PAC learning to binary private PAC learning. We apply this transformation to a recently proposed binary private PAC learner to obtain a private multiclass learner with sample complexity that has a polynomial dependence on the multiclass Littlestone dimension and a poly-logarithmic dependence on the number of classes. This yields a doubly exponential improvement in the dependence on both parameters over learners from previous work. Our proof extends the notion of $\Psi$-dimension defined in work of Ben-David et al. [JCSS, 1995] to the online setting and explores its general properties.
Adversarially Robust Change Point Detection
Authors: Yi Yu Mengchu Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Change point detection is becoming increasingly popular in many application areas. On one hand, most of the theoretically-justified methods are investigated in an ideal setting without model violations, or merely robust against identical heavy-tailed noise distribution across time and/or against isolate outliers; on the other hand, we are aware that there have been exponentially growing attacks from adversaries, who may pose systematic contamination on data to purposely create spurious change points or disguise true change points. In light of the timely need for a change point detection method that is robust against adversaries, we start with, arguably, the simplest univariate mean change point detection problem. The adversarial attacks are formulated through the Huber $\varepsilon$-contamination framework, which in particular allows the contamination distributions to be different at each time point. In this paper, we demonstrate a phase transition phenomenon in change point detection. This detection boundary is a function of the contamination proportion~$\varepsilon$ and is the first time shown in the literature. In addition, we derive the minimax-rate optimal localisation error rate, quantifying the cost of accuracy in terms of the contamination proportion. We propose a computationally feasible method, matching the minimax lower bound under certain conditions, saving for logarithmic factors. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted with comparisons to robust change point detection methods in the existing literature.
Cycle Self-Training for Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng Long Hong Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Mainstream approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) learn domain-invariant representations to narrow the domain shift, which are empirically effective but theoretically challenged by the hardness or impossibility theorems. Recently, self-training has been gaining momentum in UDA, which exploits unlabeled target data by training with target pseudo-labels. However, as corroborated in this work, under distributional shift, the pseudo-labels can be unreliable in terms of their large discrepancy from target ground truth. In this paper, we propose Cycle Self-Training (CST), a principled self-training algorithm that explicitly enforces pseudo-labels to generalize across domains. CST cycles between a forward step and a reverse step until convergence. In the forward step, CST generates target pseudo-labels with a source-trained classifier. In the reverse step, CST trains a target classifier using target pseudo-labels, and then updates the shared representations to make the target classifier perform well on the source data. We introduce the Tsallis entropy as a confidence-friendly regularization to improve the quality of target pseudo-labels. We analyze CST theoretically under realistic assumptions, and provide hard cases where CST recovers target ground truth, while both invariant feature learning and vanilla self-training fail. Empirical results indicate that CST significantly improves over the state-of-the-arts on visual recognition and sentiment analysis benchmarks.
Novel Visual Category Discovery with Dual Ranking Statistics and Mutual Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Kai Han Bingchen Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of novel visual category discovery, i.e., grouping unlabelled images from new classes into different semantic partitions by leveraging a labelled dataset that contains images from other different but relevant categories.  This is a more realistic and challenging setting than conventional semi-supervised learning. We propose a two-branch learning framework for this problem, with one branch focusing on local part-level information and the other branch focusing on overall characteristics. To transfer knowledge from the labelled data to the unlabelled, we propose using dual ranking statistics on both branches to generate pseudo labels for training on the unlabelled data. We further introduce a mutual knowledge distillation method to allow information exchange and encourage agreement between the two branches for discovering new categories, allowing our model to enjoy the benefits of global and local features. We comprehensively evaluate our method on public benchmarks for generic object classification, as well as the more challenging datasets for fine-grained visual recognition, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Stochastic Anderson Mixing for Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Chenglong Bao, Yang Liu Fuchao Wei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Anderson mixing (AM) is an acceleration method for fixed-point iterations. Despite its success and wide usage in scientific computing, the convergence theory of AM remains unclear, and its applications to machine learning problems are not well explored. In this paper, by introducing damped projection and adaptive regularization to the classical AM, we propose a Stochastic Anderson Mixing (SAM) scheme to solve nonconvex stochastic optimization problems. Under mild assumptions, we establish the convergence theory of SAM, including the almost sure convergence to stationary points and the worst-case iteration complexity. Moreover, the complexity bound can be improved when randomly choosing an iterate as the output. To further accelerate the convergence, we incorporate a variance reduction technique into the proposed SAM. We also propose a preconditioned mixing strategy for SAM which can empirically achieve faster convergence or better generalization ability. Finally, we apply the SAM method to train various neural networks including the vanilla CNN, ResNets, WideResNet, ResNeXt, DenseNet and LSTM. Experimental results on image classification and language model demonstrate the advantages of our method.
Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Linearly-Parameterized MDPs with a Generative Model
Authors: Yuling Yan, Jianqing Fan Bingyan Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a near optimal policy with sampling access to a generative model, the minimax optimal sample complexity scales linearly with $|\mathcal{S}|\times|\mathcal{A}|$, which can be prohibitively large when $\mathcal{S}$ or $\mathcal{A}$ is large. This paper considers a Markov decision process (MDP) that admits a set of state-action features, which can linearly express (or approximate) its probability transition kernel. We show that a model-based approach (resp.$~$Q-learning) provably learns an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy (resp.$~$Q-function) with high probability as soon as the sample size exceeds the order of $\frac{K}{(1-\gamma)^{3}\varepsilon^{2}}$ (resp.$~$$\frac{K}{(1-\gamma)^{4}\varepsilon^{2}}$), up to some logarithmic factor. Here $K$ is the feature dimension and $\gamma\in(0,1)$ is the discount factor of the MDP. Both sample complexity bounds are provably tight, and our result for the model-based approach matches the minimax lower bound. Our results show that for arbitrarily large-scale MDP, both the model-based approach and Q-learning are sample-efficient when $K$ is relatively small, and hence the title of this paper.
NN-Baker: A Neural-network Infused Algorithmic Framework for Optimization Problems on Geometric Intersection Graphs
Authors: Qi Zhao, Anastasios Sidiropoulos, Yusu Wang Evan McCarty
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a surge of approaches to use neural networks to help tackle combinatorial optimization problems, including graph optimization problems. However, theoretical understanding of such approaches remains limited. In this paper, we consider the geometric setting, where graphs are induced by points in a fixed dimensional Euclidean space. We show that several graph optimization problems can be approximated by an algorithm that is polynomial in graph size n via a framework we propose, call the Baker-paradigm. More importantly, a key advantage of the Baker-paradigm is that it decomposes the input problem into (at most linear number of) small sub-problems of fixed sizes (independent of the size of the input). For the family of such fixed-size sub-problems, we can now design neural networks with universal approximation guarantees to solve them. This leads to a mixed algorithmic-ML framework, which we call NN-Baker that has the capacity to approximately solve a family of graph optimization problems (e.g, maximum independent set and minimum vertex cover) in time linear to input graph size, and only polynomial to approximation parameter. We instantiate our NN-Baker by a CNN version and GNN version, and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach via a range of experiments.
A Note on Sparse Generalized Eigenvalue Problem
Authors: Guanhua Fang, Ping Li Yunfeng Cai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The sparse generalized eigenvalue problem (SGEP) aims to find the leading eigenvector with sparsity structure. SGEP plays an important role in statistical learning and has wide applications including, but not limited to, sparse principal component analysis, sparse canonical correlation analysis  and sparse Fisher discriminant analysis, etc. Due to the sparsity constraint, the solution of SGEP entails interesting properties from both numerical and statistical perspectives. In this paper, we provide a detailed sensitivity analysis for SGEP and establish the rate-optimal perturbation bound under the sparse setting. Specifically, we show that the bound is related to the perturbation/noise level and the recovery of the true support of the leading eigenvector as well. We also investigate the estimator of SGEP via imposing a non-convex regularization. Such estimator can achieve the optimal error rate and can recover the sparsity structure as well. Extensive numerical experiments corroborate our theoretical findings via using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based computational method.
RMIX: Learning Risk-Sensitive Policies for Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Agents
Authors: Xinrun Wang, Runsheng Yu, Rundong Wang, Xu He, Bo An, Svetlana Obraztsova, Zinovi Rabinovich Wei Qiu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current value-based multi-agent reinforcement learning methods optimize individual Q values to guide individuals' behaviours via centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE). However, such expected, i.e., risk-neutral, Q value is not sufficient even with CTDE due to the randomness of rewards and the uncertainty in environments, which causes the failure of these methods to train coordinating agents in complex environments. To address these issues, we propose RMIX, a novel cooperative MARL method with the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) measure over the learned distributions of individuals' Q values. Specifically, we first learn the return distributions of individuals to analytically calculate CVaR for decentralized execution. Then, to handle the temporal nature of the stochastic outcomes during executions, we propose a dynamic risk level predictor for risk level tuning. Finally, we optimize the CVaR policies with CVaR values used to estimate the target in TD error during centralized training and the CVaR values are used as auxiliary local rewards to update the local distribution via Quantile Regression loss. Empirically, we show that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on various multi-agent risk-sensitive navigation scenarios and challenging StarCraft II cooperative tasks, demonstrating enhanced coordination and revealing improved sample efficiency.
Optimal Policies Tend To Seek Power
Authors: Logan Smith, Rohin Shah, Andrew Critch, Prasad Tadepalli Alex Turner
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of the objectives we specify for them. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like power-seeking instincts. To clarify this discussion, we develop the first formal theory of the statistical tendencies of optimal policies. In the context of Markov decision processes, we prove that certain environmental symmetries are sufficient for optimal policies to tend to seek power over the environment. These symmetries exist in many environments in which the agent can be shut down or destroyed. We prove that in these environments, most reward functions make it optimal to seek power by keeping a range of options available and, when maximizing average reward, by navigating towards larger sets of potential terminal states.
Catalytic Role Of Noise And Necessity Of Inductive Biases In The Emergence Of Compositional Communication
Authors: Tomasz Korbak, Paweł Kołodziej, Piotr Miłoś Łukasz Kuciński
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a compositional communication.  Moreover, we prove that compositionality spontaneously arises in the signaling games, where agents communicate over a noisy channel.  We experimentally confirm that a range of noise levels, which depends on the model and the data, indeed promotes compositionality. Finally, we provide a comprehensive study of this dependence and report results in terms of recently studied compositionality metrics: topographical similarity, conflict count, and context independence.
PLUR: A Unifying, Graph-Based View of Program Learning, Understanding, and Repair
Authors: Vincent J Hellendoorn, Pascal Lamblin, Petros Maniatis, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol, Daniel Tarlow, Subhodeep Moitra Zimin Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Machine learning for understanding and editing source code has recently attracted significant interest, with many developments in new models, new code representations, and new tasks.This proliferation can appear disparate and disconnected, making each approach seemingly unique and incompatible, thus obscuring the core machine learning challenges and contributions.In this work, we demonstrate that the landscape can be significantly simplified by taking a general approach of mapping a graph to a sequence of tokens and pointers.Our main result is to show that 16 recently published tasks of different shapes can be cast in this form, based on which a single model architecture achieves near or above state-of-the-art results on nearly all tasks, outperforming custom models like code2seq and alternative generic models like Transformers.This unification further enables multi-task learning and a series of cross-cutting experiments about the importance of different modeling choices for code understanding and repair tasks.The full framework, called PLUR, is easily extensible to more tasks, and will be open-sourced (https://github.com/google-research/plur).
COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining
Authors: Chenyan Xiong, Payal Bajaj, saurabh tiwary, Paul Bennett, Jiawei Han, XIA SONG Yu Meng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a self-supervised learning framework, COCO-LM, that pretrains Language Models by COrrecting and COntrasting corrupted text sequences. Following ELECTRA-style pretraining, COCO-LM employs an auxiliary language model to corrupt text sequences, upon which it constructs two new tasks for pretraining the main model. The first token-level task, Corrective Language Modeling, is to detect and correct tokens replaced by the auxiliary model, in order to better capture token-level semantics. The second sequence-level task, Sequence Contrastive Learning, is to align text sequences originated from the same source input while ensuring uniformity in the representation space. Experiments on GLUE and SQuAD demonstrate that COCO-LM not only outperforms recent state-of-the-art pretrained models in accuracy, but also improves pretraining efficiency. It achieves the MNLI accuracy of ELECTRA with 50% of its pretraining GPU hours. With the same pretraining steps of standard base/large-sized models, COCO-LM outperforms the previous best models by 1+ GLUE average points.
Minibatch and Momentum Model-based Methods for Stochastic Weakly Convex Optimization
Authors: Wenzhi Gao Qi Deng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Stochastic model-based methods have received increasing attention lately due to their appealing robustness to the stepsize selection and provable efficiency guarantee. We make two important extensions for improving model-based methods on stochastic weakly convex optimization. First, we propose new minibatch model- based methods by involving a set of samples to approximate the model function in each iteration. For the first time, we show that stochastic algorithms achieve linear speedup over the batch size even for non-smooth and non-convex (particularly, weakly convex) problems. To this end, we develop a novel sensitivity analysis of the proximal mapping involved in each algorithm iteration. Our analysis appears to be of independent interests in more general settings. Second, motivated by the success of momentum stochastic gradient descent, we propose a new stochastic extrapolated model-based method, greatly extending the classic Polyak momentum technique to a wider class of stochastic algorithms for weakly convex optimization. The rate of convergence to some natural stationarity condition is established over a fairly flexible range of extrapolation terms.While mainly focusing on weakly convex optimization, we also extend our work to convex optimization. We apply the minibatch and extrapolated model-based methods to stochastic convex optimization, for which we provide a new complexity bound and promising linear speedup in batch size. Moreover, an accelerated model-based method based on Nesterov’s momentum is presented, for which we establish an optimal complexity bound for reaching optimality.
XDO: A Double Oracle Algorithm for Extensive-Form Games
Authors: JB Lanier, Kevin A Wang, Pierre Baldi, Roy Fox Stephen McAleer
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that has been empirically shown to find approximate Nash equilibria in large games. Although PSRO is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium and can handle continuous actions, it may take an exponential number of iterations as the number of information states (infostates) grows. We propose Extensive-Form Double Oracle (XDO), an extensive-form double oracle algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium linearly in the number of infostates. Unlike PSRO, which mixes best responses at the root of the game, XDO mixes best responses at every infostate. We also introduce Neural XDO (NXDO), where the best response is learned through deep RL. In tabular experiments on Leduc poker, we find that XDO achieves an approximate Nash equilibrium in a number of iterations an order of magnitude smaller than PSRO. Experiments on a modified Leduc poker game and Oshi-Zumo show that tabular XDO achieves a lower exploitability than CFR with the same amount of computation. We also find that NXDO outperforms PSRO and NFSP on a sequential multidimensional continuous-action game. NXDO is the first deep RL method that can find an approximate Nash equilibrium in high-dimensional continuous-action sequential games.
Active Assessment of Prediction Services as Accuracy Surface Over Attribute Combinations
Authors: Soumen Chakrabarti, Sunita Sarawagi Vihari Piratla
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Our goal is to evaluate the accuracy of a black-box classification model, not as a single aggregate on a given test data distribution, but as a surface over a large number of combinations of attributes characterizing multiple test data distributions.  Such attributed accuracy measures become important as machine learning models get deployed as a service, where the training data distribution is hidden from clients, and different clients may be interested in diverse regions of the data distribution. We present Attributed Accuracy Assay (AAA) --- a Gaussian Process (GP)-based probabilistic estimator for such an accuracy surface. Each attribute combination, called an 'arm' is associated with a Beta density from which the service's accuracy is sampled.  We expect the GP to smooth the parameters of the Beta density over related arms to mitigate sparsity. We show that obvious application of GPs cannot address the challenge of heteroscedastic uncertainty over a huge attribute space that is sparsely and unevenly populated. In response, we present two enhancements: pooling sparse observations, and regularizing the scale parameter of the Beta densities. After introducing these innovations, we establish the effectiveness of AAA both in terms of its estimation accuracy and exploration efficiency, through extensive experiments and analysis.
A mechanistic multi-area recurrent network model of decision-making
Authors: Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Jonathan Kao Michael Kleinman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on neuroscience-based tasks have been widely used as models for cortical areas performing analogous tasks. However, very few tasks involve a single cortical area, and instead require the coordination of multiple brain areas. Despite the importance of multi-area computation, there is a limited understanding of the principles underlying such computation. We propose to use multi-area RNNs with neuroscience-inspired architecture constraints to derive key features of multi-area computation. In particular, we show that incorporating multiple areas and Dale's Law is critical for biasing the networks to learn biologically plausible solutions. Additionally, we leverage the full observability of the RNNs to show that output-relevant information is preferentially propagated between areas. These results suggest that cortex uses modular computation to generate minimal sufficient representations of task information. More broadly, our results suggest that constrained multi-area RNNs can produce experimentally testable hypotheses for computations that occur within and across multiple brain areas, enabling new insights into distributed computation in neural systems.
Learning to Compose Visual Relations
Authors: Shuang Li, Yilun Du, Josh Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba Nan Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The visual world around us can be described as a structured set of objects and their associated relations. An image of a room may be conjured given only the description of the underlying objects and their associated relations. While there has been significant work on designing deep neural networks which may compose individual objects together, less work has been done on composing the individual relations between objects. A principal difficulty is that while the placement of objects is mutually independent, their relations are entangled and dependent on each other. To circumvent this issue, existing works primarily compose relations by utilizing a holistic encoder, in the form of text or graphs. In this work, we instead propose to represent each relation as an unnormalized density (an energy-based model), enabling us to compose separate relations in a factorized manner. We show that such a factorized decomposition allows the model to both generate and edit scenes that have multiple sets of relations more faithfully. We further show that decomposition enables our model to effectively understand the underlying relational scene structure.
Identity testing for Mallows model
Authors: Dimitris Fotakis, Balazs Szorenyi, Emmanouil Zampetakis Róbert Busa-Fekete
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we devise identity tests for ranking data that is generated from Mallows model both in the \emph{asymptotic} and \emph{non-asymptotic} settings. First we consider the case when the central ranking is known, and devise two algorithms for testing the spread parameter of the Mallows model. The first one is obtained by constructing a Uniformly Most Powerful Unbiased (UMPU) test in the asymptotic setting and then converting it into a sample-optimal non-asymptotic identity test. The resulting test is, however, impractical even for medium sized data, because it requires computing the distribution of the sufficient statistic. The second non-asymptotic test is derived from an optimal learning algorithm for the Mallows model. This test is both easy to compute and is sample-optimal for a wide range of parameters. Next, we consider testing Mallows models for the unknown central ranking case. This case can be tackled in the asymptotic setting by introducing a bias that exponentially decays with the sample size. We support all our findings with extensive numerical experiments and show that the proposed tests scale gracefully with the number of items to be ranked.
Bandits with Knapsacks beyond the Worst Case
Authors: Aleksandrs Slivkins Karthik Abinav Sankararaman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Bandits with Knapsacks (BwK) is a general model for multi-armed bandits under supply/budget constraints. While worst-case regret bounds for BwK are well-understood, we present three results that go beyond the worst-case perspective. First, we provide upper and lower bounds which amount to a full characterization for logarithmic, instance-dependent regret rates.Second, we consider "simple regret" in BwK, which tracks algorithm's performance in a given round, and prove that it is small in all but a few rounds. Third, we provide a "generalreduction" from BwK to bandits which takes advantage of some known helpful structure, and apply this reduction to combinatorial semi-bandits, linear contextual bandits, and multinomial-logit bandits. Our results build on the BwK algorithm from prior work, providing new analyses thereof.
Closing the loop in medical decision support by understanding clinical decision-making: A case study on organ transplantation
Authors: Fergus Imrie, Alihan Hüyük, Daniel Jarrett, alexander gimson, Mihaela van der Schaar Yuchao Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Significant effort has been placed on developing decision support tools to improve patient care. However, drivers of real-world clinical decisions in complex medical scenarios are not yet well-understood, resulting in substantial gaps between these tools and practical applications. In light of this, we highlight that more attention on understanding clinical decision-making is required both to elucidate current clinical practices and to enable effective human-machine interactions. This is imperative in high-stakes scenarios with scarce available resources. Using organ transplantation as a case study, we formalize the desiderata of methods for understanding clinical decision-making. We show that most existing machine learning methods are insufficient to meet these requirements and propose iTransplant, a novel data-driven framework to learn the factors affecting decisions on organ offers in an instance-wise fashion directly from clinical data, as a possible solution. Through experiments on real-world liver transplantation data from OPTN, we demonstrate the use of iTransplant to: (1) discover which criteria are most important to clinicians for organ offer acceptance; (2) identify patient-specific organ preferences of clinicians allowing automatic patient stratification;  and (3) explore variations in transplantation practices between different transplant centers. Finally, we emphasize that the insights gained by iTransplant can be used to inform the development of future decision support tools.
Change Point Detection via Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis
Authors: Abdullah Alomar, Devavrat Shah Arwa Alanqary
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The objective of change point detection (CPD) is to detect significant and abrupt changes in the dynamics of the underlying system of interest through multivariate time series observations. In this work, we develop and analyze an algorithm for CPD that is inspired by a variant of the classical singular spectrum analysis (SSA) approach for time series by combining it with the classical cumulative sum (CUSUM) statistic from sequential hypothesis testing. In particular, we model the underlying dynamics of multivariate time series observations through the spatio-temporal model introduced recently in the multivariate SSA (mSSA) literature. The change point in such a setting corresponds to a change in the underlying spatio-temporal model. As the primary contributions of this work, we develop an algorithm based on CUSUM-statistic to detect such change points in an online fashion. We extend the analysis of CUSUM statistics, traditionally done for the setting of independent observations, to the dependent setting of (multivariate) time series under the spatio-temporal model. Specifically, for a given parameter $h > 0$, our method achieves the following desirable trade-off: when a change happens, it detects it within $O(h)$ time delay on average, while in the absence of change, it does not declare false detection for at least $\exp(\Omega(h))$ time length on average. We conduct empirical experiments using benchmark and synthetic datasets. We find that the proposed method performs competitively or outperforms the state-of-the-art change point detection methods across datasets.
Meta-learning to Improve Pre-training
Authors: Jonathan Lorraine, Simon Kornblith, Matthew McDermott, David K. Duvenaud Aniruddh Raghu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Pre-training (PT) followed by fine-tuning (FT) is an effective method for training neural networks, and has led to significant performance improvements in many domains.  PT can incorporate various design choices such as task and data reweighting strategies, augmentation policies, and noise models, all of which can significantly impact the quality of representations learned. The hyperparameters introduced by these strategies therefore must be tuned appropriately. However, setting the values of these hyperparameters is challenging. Most existing methods either struggle to scale to high dimensions, are too slow and memory-intensive, or cannot be directly applied to the two-stage PT and FT learning process. In this work, we propose an efficient, gradient-based algorithm to meta-learn PT hyperparameters. We formalize the PT hyperparameter optimization problem and propose a novel method to obtain PT hyperparameter gradients by combining implicit differentiation and backpropagation through unrolled optimization. We demonstrate that our method improves predictive performance on two real-world domains. First, we optimize high-dimensional task weighting hyperparameters for multitask pre-training on protein-protein interaction graphs and improve AUROC by up to 3.9%. Second, we optimize a data augmentation neural network for self-supervised PT with SimCLR on electrocardiography data and improve AUROC by up to 1.9%.
Fair Sparse Regression with Clustering: An Invex Relaxation for a Combinatorial Problem
Authors: Jean Honorio Adarsh Barik
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of fair sparse regression on a biased dataset where bias depends upon a hidden binary attribute. The presence of a hidden attribute adds an extra layer of complexity to the problem by combining sparse regression and clustering with unknown binary labels. The corresponding optimization problem is combinatorial, but we propose a novel relaxation of it as an invex optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first invex relaxation for a combinatorial problem. We show that the inclusion of the debiasing/fairness constraint in our model has no adverse effect on the performance. Rather, it enables the recovery of the hidden attribute. The support of our recovered regression parameter vector matches exactly with the true parameter vector. Moreover, we simultaneously solve the clustering problem by recovering the exact value of the hidden attribute for each sample. Our method uses carefully constructed primal dual witnesses to provide theoretical guarantees for the combinatorial problem. To that end, we show that the sample complexity of our method is logarithmic in terms of the dimension of the regression parameter vector.
Probabilistic Margins for Instance Reweighting in Adversarial Training
Authors: Feng Liu, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu, Chen Gong, Gang Niu, Mingyuan Zhou, Masashi Sugiyama qizhou wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reweighting adversarial data during training has been recently shown to improve adversarial robustness, where data closer to the current decision boundaries are regarded as more critical and given larger weights. However, existing methods measuring the closeness are not very reliable: they are discrete and can take only a few values, and they are path-dependent, i.e., they may change given the same start and end points with different attack paths. In this paper, we propose three types of probabilistic margin (PM), which are continuous and path-independent, for measuring the aforementioned closeness and reweighing adversarial data. Specifically, a PM is defined as the difference between two estimated class-posterior probabilities, e.g., such a probability of the true label minus the probability of the most confusing label given some natural data. Though different PMs capture different geometric properties, all three PMs share a negative correlation with the vulnerability of data: data with larger/smaller PMs are safer/riskier and should have smaller/larger weights. Experiments demonstrated that PMs are reliable and PM-based reweighting methods outperformed state-of-the-art counterparts.
Unbalanced Optimal Transport through Non-negative Penalized Linear Regression
Authors: Rémi Flamary, Haoran Wu, Cédric Févotte, Gilles Gasso Laetitia Chapel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) in which the marginal conditions are relaxed (using weighted penalties in lieu of equality) and no additional regularization is enforced on the OT plan. In this context, we show that the corresponding optimization problem can be reformulated as a non-negative penalized linear regression problem. This reformulation allows us to propose novel algorithms inspired from inverse problems and nonnegative matrix factorization. In particular, we consider majorization-minimization which leads in our setting to efficient multiplicative updates for a variety of penalties. Furthermore, we derive for the first time an efficient algorithm to compute the regularization path of UOT with quadratic penalties. The proposed algorithm provides a continuity of piece-wise linear OT plans converging to the solution of balanced OT (corresponding to infinite penalty weights). We perform several numerical experiments on simulated and real data illustrating the new algorithms, and provide a detailed discussion about more sophisticated optimization tools that can further be used to solve OT problems thanks to our reformulation.
The Difficulty of Passive Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Pablo Samuel Castro, Will Dabney Georg Ostrovski
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning to act from observational data without active environmental interaction is a well-known challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent approaches involve constraints on the learned policy or conservative updates, preventing strong deviations from the state-action distribution of the dataset. Although these methods are evaluated using non-linear function approximation, theoretical justifications are mostly limited to the tabular or linear cases. Given the impressive results of deep reinforcement learning, we argue for a need to more clearly understand the challenges in this setting.In the vein of Held & Hein's classic 1963 experiment, we propose the "tandem learning" experimental paradigm which facilitates our empirical analysis of the difficulties in offline reinforcement learning. We identify function approximation in conjunction with fixed data distributions as the strongest factors, thereby extending but also challenging hypotheses stated in past work. Our results provide relevant insights for offline deep reinforcement learning, while also shedding new light on phenomena observed in the online case of learning control.