pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PREDILECT: Preferences Delineated with Zero-Shot Language-based Reasoning in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Simon Holk, Daniel Marta, Iolanda Leite
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Social Navigation

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a new field in robot learning, where humans play a pivotal role in shaping robot behavior by expressing preferences on different sequences of state-action pairs. However, formulating realistic policies for robots demands responses from humans to an extensive array of queries. In this work, we approach the sample-efficiency challenge by expanding the information collected per query to contain both preferences and optional text prompting. To accomplish this, we leverage the zero-shot capabilities of a large language model (LLM) to reason from the text provided by humans. To accommodate the additional query information, we reformulate the reward learning objectives to contain flexible highlights -- state-action pairs that contain relatively high information and are related to the features processed in a zero-shot fashion from a pretrained LLM. In both a simulated scenario and a user study, we reveal the effectiveness of our work by analyzing the feedback and its implications. Additionally, the collective feedback collected serves to train a robot on socially compliant trajectories in a simulated social navigation landscape. We provide video examples of the trained policies at https://sites.google.com/view/rl-predilect
The Impact of LoRA on the Emergence of Clusters in Transformers
Authors: Hugo Koubbi, Matthieu Boussard, Louis Hernandez
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

In this paper, we employ the mathematical framework on Transformers developed by \citet{sander2022sinkformers,geshkovski2023emergence,geshkovski2023mathematical} to explore how variations in attention parameters and initial token values impact the structural dynamics of token clusters. Our analysis demonstrates that while the clusters within a modified attention matrix dynamics can exhibit significant divergence from the original over extended periods, they maintain close similarities over shorter intervals, depending on the parameter differences. This work contributes to the fine-tuning field through practical applications to the LoRA algorithm \cite{hu2021lora,peft}, enhancing our understanding of the behavior of LoRA-enhanced Transformer models.
G-RepsNet: A Fast and General Construction of Equivariant Networks for Arbitrary Matrix Groups
Authors: Sourya Basu, Suhas Lohit, Matthew Brand
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias

Group equivariance is a strong inductive bias useful in a wide range of deep learning tasks. However, constructing efficient equivariant networks for general groups and domains is difficult. Recent work by Finzi et al. (2021) directly solves the equivariance constraint for arbitrary matrix groups to obtain equivariant MLPs (EMLPs). But this method does not scale well and scaling is crucial in deep learning. Here, we introduce Group Representation Networks (G-RepsNets), a lightweight equivariant network for arbitrary matrix groups with features represented using tensor polynomials. The key intuition for our design is that using tensor representations in the hidden layers of a neural network along with simple inexpensive tensor operations can lead to expressive universal equivariant networks. We find G-RepsNet to be competitive to EMLP on several tasks with group symmetries such as O(5), O(1, 3), and O(3) with scalars, vectors, and second-order tensors as data types. On image classification tasks, we find that G-RepsNet using second-order representations is competitive and often even outperforms sophisticated state-of-the-art equivariant models such as GCNNs (Cohen & Welling, 2016a) and E(2)-CNNs (Weiler & Cesa, 2019). To further illustrate the generality of our approach, we show that G-RepsNet is competitive to G-FNO (Helwig et al., 2023) and EGNN (Satorras et al., 2021) on N-body predictions and solving PDEs, respectively, while being efficient.
Optimistic Information Directed Sampling
Authors: Gergely Neu, Matteo Papini, Ludovic Schwartz
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

We study the problem of online learning in contextual bandit problems where the loss function is assumed to belong to a known parametric function class. We propose a new analytic framework for this setting that bridges the Bayesian theory of information-directed sampling due to Russo and Van Roy (2018) and the worst-case theory of Foster, Kakade, Qian, and Rakhlin (2021) based on the decision-estimation coefficient. Drawing from both lines of work, we propose a algorithmic template called Optimistic Information-Directed Sampling and show that it can achieve instance-dependent regret guarantees similar to the ones achievable by the classic Bayesian IDS method, but with the major advantage of not requiring any Bayesian assumptions. The key technical innovation of our analysis is introducing an optimistic surrogate model for the regret and using it to define a frequentist version of the Information Ratio of Russo and Van Roy (2018), and a less conservative version of the Decision Estimation Coefficient of Foster et al. (2021). Keywords: Contextual bandits, information-directed sampling, decision estimation coefficient, first-order regret bounds.
Lasso with Latents: Efficient Estimation, Covariate Rescaling, and Computational-Statistical Gaps
Authors: Jonathan Kelner, Frederic Koehler, Raghu Meka, Dhruv Rohatgi
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

It is well-known that the statistical performance of Lasso can suffer significantly when the covariates of interest have strong correlations. In particular, the prediction error of Lasso becomes much worse than computationally inefficient alternatives like Best Subset Selection. Due to a large conjectured computational-statistical tradeoff in the problem of sparse linear regression, it may be impossible to close this gap in general. In this work, we propose a natural sparse linear regression setting where strong correlations between covariates arise from unobserved latent variables. In this setting, we analyze the problem caused by strong correlations and design a surprisingly simple fix. While Lasso with standard normalization of covariates fails, there exists a heterogeneous scaling of the covariates with which Lasso will suddenly obtain strong provable guarantees for estimation. Moreover, we design a simple, efficient procedure for computing such a "smart scaling." The sample complexity of the resulting "rescaled Lasso" algorithm incurs (in the worst case) quadratic dependence on the sparsity of the underlying signal. While this dependence is not information-theoretically necessary, we give evidence that it is optimal among the class of polynomial-time algorithms, via the method of low-degree polynomials. This argument reveals a new connection between sparse linear regression and a special version of sparse PCA with a near-critical negative spike. The latter problem can be thought of as a real-valued analogue of learning a sparse parity. Using it, we also establish the first computational-statistical gap for the closely related problem of learning a Gaussian Graphical Model.
Conformalized-DeepONet: A Distribution-Free Framework for Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Operator Networks
Authors: Christian Moya, Amirhossein Mollaali, Zecheng Zhang, Lu Lu, Guang Lin
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, regression, Uncertainty Quantification

In this paper, we adopt conformal prediction, a distribution-free uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework, to obtain confidence prediction intervals with coverage guarantees for Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) regression. Initially, we enhance the uncertainty quantification frameworks (B-DeepONet and Prob-DeepONet) previously proposed by the authors by using split conformal prediction. By combining conformal prediction with our Prob- and B-DeepONets, we effectively quantify uncertainty by generating rigorous confidence intervals for DeepONet prediction. Additionally, we design a novel Quantile-DeepONet that allows for a more natural use of split conformal prediction. We refer to this distribution-free effective uncertainty quantification framework as split conformal Quantile-DeepONet regression. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods using various ordinary, partial differential equation numerical examples, and multi-fidelity learning.
United We Pretrain, Divided We Fail! Representation Learning for Time Series by Pretraining on 75 Datasets at Once
Authors: Maurice Kraus, Felix Divo, David Steinmann, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Time Series

In natural language processing and vision, pretraining is utilized to learn effective representations. Unfortunately, the success of pretraining does not easily carry over to time series due to potential mismatch between sources and target. Actually, common belief is that multi-dataset pretraining does not work for time series! Au contraire, we introduce a new self-supervised contrastive pretraining approach to learn one encoding from many unlabeled and diverse time series datasets, so that the single learned representation can then be reused in several target domains for, say, classification. Specifically, we propose the XD-MixUp interpolation method and the Soft Interpolation Contextual Contrasting (SICC) loss. Empirically, this outperforms both supervised training and other self-supervised pretraining methods when finetuning on low-data regimes. This disproves the common belief: We can actually learn from multiple time series datasets, even from 75 at once.
Grasp, See, and Place: Efficient Unknown Object Rearrangement with Policy Structure Prior
Authors: Kechun Xu, Zhongxiang Zhou, Jun Wu, Haojian Lu, Rong Xiong, Yue Wang
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Rearrangement

We focus on the task of unknown object rearrangement, where a robot is supposed to re-configure the objects into a desired goal configuration specified by an RGB-D image. Recent works explore unknown object rearrangement systems by incorporating learning-based perception modules. However, they are sensitive to perception error, and pay less attention to task-level performance. In this paper, we aim to develop an effective system for unknown object rearrangement amidst perception noise. We theoretically reveal that the noisy perception impacts grasp and place in a decoupled way, and show such a decoupled structure is valuable to improve task optimality. We propose GSP, a dual-loop system with the decoupled structure as prior. For the inner loop, we learn a see policy for self-confident in-hand object matching. For the outer loop, we learn a grasp policy aware of object matching and grasp capability guided by task-level rewards. We leverage the foundation model CLIP for object matching, policy learning and self-termination. A series of experiments indicate that GSP can conduct unknown object rearrangement with higher completion rates and fewer steps.
Distributionally Robust Off-Dynamics Reinforcement Learning: Provable Efficiency with Linear Function Approximation
Authors: Zhishuai Liu, Pan Xu
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs), where the learning algorithm actively interacts with the source domain while seeking the optimal performance under the worst possible dynamics that is within an uncertainty set of the source domain's transition kernel. We provide the first study on online DRMDPs with function approximation for off-dynamics RL. We find that DRMDPs' dual formulation can induce nonlinearity, even when the nominal transition kernel is linear, leading to error propagation. By designing a $d$-rectangular uncertainty set using the total variation distance, we remove this additional nonlinearity and bypass the error propagation. We then introduce DR-LSVI-UCB, the first provably efficient online DRMDP algorithm for off-dynamics RL with function approximation, and establish a polynomial suboptimality bound that is independent of the state and action space sizes. Our work makes the first step towards a deeper understanding of the provable efficiency of online DRMDPs with linear function approximation. Finally, we substantiate the performance and robustness of DR-LSVI-UCB through different numerical experiments.
Offline Inverse RL: New Solution Concepts and Provably Efficient Algorithms
Authors: Filippo Lazzati, Mirco Mutti, Alberto Maria Metelli
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the demonstrations. For this reason, IRL has been recently reframed in terms of estimating the feasible reward set (Metelli et al., 2021), thus, postponing the selection of a single reward. However, so far, the available formulations and algorithmic solutions have been proposed and analyzed mainly for the online setting, where the learner can interact with the environment and query the expert at will. This is clearly unrealistic in most practical applications, where the availability of an offline dataset is a much more common scenario. In this paper, we introduce a novel notion of feasible reward set capturing the opportunities and limitations of the offline setting and we analyze the complexity of its estimation. This requires the introduction an original learning framework that copes with the intrinsic difficulty of the setting, for which the data coverage is not under control. Then, we propose two computationally and statistically efficient algorithms, IRLO and PIRLO, for addressing the problem. In particular, the latter adopts a specific form of pessimism to enforce the novel desirable property of inclusion monotonicity of the delivered feasible set. With this work, we aim to provide a panorama of the challenges of the offline IRL problem and how they can be fruitfully addressed.
Efficient semi-supervised inference for logistic regression under case-control studies
Authors: Zhuojun Quan, Yuanyuan Lin, Kani Chen, Wen Yu
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Semi-supervised learning has received increasingly attention in statistics and machine learning. In semi-supervised learning settings, a labeled data set with both outcomes and covariates and an unlabeled data set with covariates only are collected. We consider an inference problem in semi-supervised settings where the outcome in the labeled data is binary and the labeled data is collected by case-control sampling. Case-control sampling is an effective sampling scheme for alleviating imbalance structure in binary data. Under the logistic model assumption, case-control data can still provide consistent estimator for the slope parameter of the regression model. However, the intercept parameter is not identifiable. Consequently, the marginal case proportion cannot be estimated from case-control data. We find out that with the availability of the unlabeled data, the intercept parameter can be identified in semi-supervised learning setting. We construct the likelihood function of the observed labeled and unlabeled data and obtain the maximum likelihood estimator via an iterative algorithm. The proposed estimator is shown to be consistent, asymptotically normal, and semiparametrically efficient. Extensive simulation studies are conducted to show the finite sample performance of the proposed method. The results imply that the unlabeled data not only helps to identify the intercept but also improves the estimation efficiency of the slope parameter. Meanwhile, the marginal case proportion can be estimated accurately by the proposed method.
All Thresholds Barred: Direct Estimation of Call Density in Bioacoustic Data
Authors: Amanda K. Navine, Tom Denton, Matthew J. Weldy, Patrick J. Hart
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) studies generate thousands of hours of audio, which may be used to monitor specific animal populations, conduct broad biodiversity surveys, detect threats such as poachers, and more. Machine learning classifiers for species identification are increasingly being used to process the vast amount of audio generated by bioacoustic surveys, expediting analysis and increasing the utility of PAM as a management tool. In common practice, a threshold is applied to classifier output scores, and scores above the threshold are aggregated into a detection count. The choice of threshold produces biased counts of vocalizations, which are subject to false positive/negative rates that may vary across subsets of the dataset. In this work, we advocate for directly estimating call density: The proportion of detection windows containing the target vocalization, regardless of classifier score. Our approach targets a desirable ecological estimator and provides a more rigorous grounding for identifying the core problems caused by distribution shifts -- when the defining characteristics of the data distribution change -- and designing strategies to mitigate them. We propose a validation scheme for estimating call density in a body of data and obtain, through Bayesian reasoning, probability distributions of confidence scores for both the positive and negative classes. We use these distributions to predict site-level densities, which may be subject to distribution shifts. We test our proposed methods on a real-world study of Hawaiian birds and provide simulation results leveraging existing fully annotated datasets, demonstrating robustness to variations in call density and classifier model quality.
Streaming Gaussian Dirichlet Random Fields for Spatial Predictions of High Dimensional Categorical Observations
Authors: J. E. San Soucie, H. M. Sosik, Y. Girdhar
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

We present the Streaming Gaussian Dirichlet Random Field (S-GDRF) model, a novel approach for modeling a stream of spatiotemporally distributed, sparse, high-dimensional categorical observations. The proposed approach efficiently learns global and local patterns in spatiotemporal data, allowing for fast inference and querying with a bounded time complexity. Using a high-resolution data series of plankton images classified with a neural network, we demonstrate the ability of the approach to make more accurate predictions compared to a Variational Gaussian Process (VGP), and to learn a predictive distribution of observations from streaming categorical data. S-GDRFs open the door to enabling efficient informative path planning over high-dimensional categorical observations, which until now has not been feasible.
Fourier Basis Density Model
Authors: Alfredo De la Fuente, Saurabh Singh, Johannes Ballé
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: model

We introduce a lightweight, flexible and end-to-end trainable probability density model parameterized by a constrained Fourier basis. We assess its performance at approximating a range of multi-modal 1D densities, which are generally difficult to fit. In comparison to the deep factorized model introduced in [1], our model achieves a lower cross entropy at a similar computational budget. In addition, we also evaluate our method on a toy compression task, demonstrating its utility in learned compression.
Iteration and Stochastic First-order Oracle Complexities of Stochastic Gradient Descent using Constant and Decaying Learning Rates
Authors: Kento Imaizumi, Hideaki Iiduka
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which is the simplest first-order optimizer for training deep neural networks, depends on not only the learning rate but also the batch size. They both affect the number of iterations and the stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexity needed for training. In particular, the previous numerical results indicated that, for SGD using a constant learning rate, the number of iterations needed for training decreases when the batch size increases, and the SFO complexity needed for training is minimized at a critical batch size and that it increases once the batch size exceeds that size. Here, we study the relationship between batch size and the iteration and SFO complexities needed for nonconvex optimization in deep learning with SGD using constant or decaying learning rates and show that SGD using the critical batch size minimizes the SFO complexity. We also provide numerical comparisons of SGD with the existing first-order optimizers and show the usefulness of SGD using a critical batch size. Moreover, we show that measured critical batch sizes are close to the sizes estimated from our theoretical results.
Ranking Entities along Conceptual Space Dimensions with LLMs: An Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies
Authors: Nitesh Kumar, Usashi Chatterjee, Steven Schockaert
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

Conceptual spaces represent entities in terms of their primitive semantic features. Such representations are highly valuable but they are notoriously difficult to learn, especially when it comes to modelling perceptual and subjective features. Distilling conceptual spaces from Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently emerged as a promising strategy, but existing work has been limited to probing pre-trained LLMs using relatively simple zero-shot strategies. We focus in particular on the task of ranking entities according to a given conceptual space dimension. Unfortunately, we cannot directly fine-tune LLMs on this task, because ground truth rankings for conceptual space dimensions are rare. We therefore use more readily available features as training data and analyse whether the ranking capabilities of the resulting models transfer to perceptual and subjective features. We find that this is indeed the case, to some extent, but having at least some perceptual and subjective features in the training data seems essential for achieving the best results.
Towards Principled Task Grouping for Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Chenguang Wang, Xuanhao Pan, Tianshu Yu
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Multi-Task Learning, Time Series

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage shared information among tasks to improve learning efficiency and accuracy. However, MTL often struggles to effectively manage positive and negative transfer between tasks, which can hinder performance improvements. Task grouping addresses this challenge by organizing tasks into meaningful clusters, maximizing beneficial transfer while minimizing detrimental interactions. This paper introduces a principled approach to task grouping in MTL, advancing beyond existing methods by addressing key theoretical and practical limitations. Unlike prior studies, our method offers a theoretically grounded approach that does not depend on restrictive assumptions for constructing transfer gains. We also present a flexible mathematical programming formulation that accommodates a wide range of resource constraints, thereby enhancing its versatility. Experimental results across diverse domains, including computer vision datasets, combinatorial optimization benchmarks, and time series tasks, demonstrate the superiority of our method over extensive baselines, thereby validating its effectiveness and general applicability in MTL without sacrificing efficiency.