Angeliki Giannou, Emmanouil Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis, Panayotis Mertikopoulos

In this paper, we examine the Nash equilibrium convergence properties of no-regret learning in general N -player games. For concreteness, we focus on the archetypal “follow the regularized leader” (FTRL) family of algorithms, and we consider the full spectrum of uncertainty that the players may encounter – from noisy, oracle-based feedback, to bandit, payoff-based information. In this general context, we establish a comprehensive equivalence between the stability of a Nash equilibrium and its support: a Nash equilibrium is stable and attracting with arbitrarily high probability if and only if it is strict (i.e., each equilibrium strategy has a unique best response). This equivalence extends existing continuous-time versions of the “folk theorem” of evolutionary game theory to a bona fide algorithmic learning setting, and it provides a clear refinement criterion for the prediction of the day-to-day behavior of no-regret learning in games.

Chenghao Guo, Zhiyi Huang, Zhihao Gavin Tang, Xinzhi Zhang

This paper explores a theory of generalization for learning problems on product distributions, complementing the existing learning theories in the sense that it does not rely on any complexity measures of the hypothesis classes. The main contributions are two general sample complexity bounds: (1) $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{nk}{{ϵ}^2}\right)$ samples are sufficient and necessary for learning an $ϵ$-optimal hypothesis in \emph{any problem} on an $n$-dimensional product distribution, whose marginals have finite supports of sizes at most $k$; (2) $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{n}{{ϵ}^2}\right)$ samples are sufficient and necessary for any problem on $n$-dimensional product distributions if it satisfies a notion of strong monotonicity from the algorithmic game theory literature. As applications of these theories, we match the optimal sample complexity for single-parameter revenue maximization (Guo et al., STOC 2019), improve the state-of-the-art for multi-parameter revenue maximization (Gonczarowski and Weinberg, FOCS 2018) and prophet inequality (Correa et al., EC 2019; Rubinstein et al., ITCS 2020), and provide the first and tight sample complexity bound for Pandora’s problem.

Steve Hanneke, Roi Livni, Shay Moran

Which classes can be learned properly in the online model? — that is, by an algorithm that on each round uses a predictor from the concept class. While there are simple and natural cases where improper learning is useful and even necessary, it is natural to ask how complex must the improper predictors be in such cases. Can one always achieve nearly optimal mistake/regret bounds using "simple" predictors? In this work, we give a complete characterization of when this is possible, thus settling an open problem which has been studied since the pioneering works of Angluin (1987) and Littlestone (1988). More precisely, given any concept class C and any hypothesis class H, we provide nearly tight bounds (up to a log factor) on the optimal mistake bounds for online learning C using predictors from H. Our bound yields an exponential improvement over the previously best known bound by Chase and Freitag (2020). As applications, we give constructive proofs showing that (i) in the realizable setting, a near-optimal mistake bound (up to a constant factor) can be attained by a sparse majority-vote of proper predictors, and (ii) in the agnostic setting, a near-optimal regret bound (up to a log factor) can be attained by a randomized proper algorithm. The latter was proven non-constructively by Rakhlin, Sridharan, and Tewari (2015). It was also achieved by constructive but improper algorithms proposed by Ben-David, Pal, and Shalev-Shwartz (2009) and Rakhlin, Shamir, and Sridharan (2012). A technical ingredient of our proof which may be of independent interest is a generalization of the celebrated Minimax Theorem (von Neumann, 1928) for binary zero-sum games with arbitrary action-sets: a simple game which fails to satisfy Minimax is "Guess the Larger Number". In this game, each player picks a natural number and the player who picked the larger number wins. Equivalently, the payoff matrix of this game is infinite triangular. We show that this is the only obstruction: if the payoff matrix does not contain triangular submatrices of unbounded sizes then the Minimax theorem is satisfied. This generalizes von Neumann’s Minimax Theorem by removing requirements of finiteness (or compactness) of the action-sets, and moreover it captures precisely the types of games of interest in online learning: namely, Littlestone games.

Yu-Guan Hsieh, Kimon Antonakopoulos, Panayotis Mertikopoulos

In game-theoretic learning, several agents are simultaneously following their individual interests, so the environment is non-stationary from each player’s perspective. In this context, the performance of a learning algorithm is often measured by its regret. However, no-regret algorithms are not created equal in terms of game-theoretic guarantees: depending on how they are tuned, some of them may drive the system to an equilibrium, while others could produce cyclic, chaotic, or otherwise divergent trajectories. To account for this, we propose a range of no-regret policies based on optimistic mirror descent, with the following desirable properties: (\emph{i}) they do not require \emph{any} prior tuning or knowledge of the game; (\emph{ii}) they all achieve $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret against arbitrary, adversarial opponents; and (\emph{iii}) they converge to the best response against convergent opponents. Also, if employed by all players, then (\emph{iv}) they guarantee $\mathcal{O}(1)$ \emph{social} regret; while (\emph{v}) the induced sequence of play converges to Nash equilibirum with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ \emph{individual} regret in all variationally stable games (a class of games that includes all monotone and convex-concave zero-sum games).

Chicheng Zhang, Yinan Li

We give a computationally-efficient PAC active learning algorithm for $d$-dimensional homogeneous halfspaces that can tolerate Massart noise (Massart and Nedelec, 2006) and Tsybakov noise (Tsybakov, 2004). Specialized to the $\eta$-Massart noise setting, our algorithm achieves an information-theoretically near-optimal label complexity of $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{d}{(1-2\eta {)}^2}\mathrm{polylog}(\frac{1}{ϵ})\right)$ under a wide range of unlabeled data distributions (specifically, the family of ``structured distributions' defined in Diakonikolas et al. (2020)). Under the more challenging Tsybakov noise condition, we identify two subfamilies of noise conditions, under which our efficient algorithm provides label complexity guarantees strictly lower than passive learning algorithms.

Yichun Hu, Nathan Kallus, Masatoshi Uehara

We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration (FQI), suggest a $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ convergence for regret, empirical behavior exhibits much faster convergence. In this paper, we present a finer regret analysis that exactly characterized this phenomenon by providing fast rates for the regret convergence. First, we show that given any estimate for the optimal quality function $Q^{\ast }$, the regret of the policy it defines converges at a rate given by the exponentiation of the $Q^{\ast }$-estimate’s pointwise convergence rate, thus speeding it up. The level of exponentiation depends on the level of noise in the decision-making problem, rather than the estimation problem. We establish such noise levels for linear and tabular MDPs as examples. Second, we provide new analyses of FQI and Bellman residual minimization to establish the correct pointwise convergence guarantees. As specific cases, our results imply $O(1/n)$ regret rates in linear cases and $\exp (-\Omega (n))$ regret rates in tabular cases.

Tianyuan Jin, Pan Xu, Xiaokui Xiao, Quanquan Gu

We study the multi-armed bandit problem with subGaussian rewards. The explore-then-commit (ETC) strategy, which consists of an exploration phase followed by an exploitation phase, is one of the most widely used algorithms in a variety of online decision applications. Nevertheless, it has been shown in \cite{garivier2016explore} that ETC is suboptimal in the asymptotic sense as the horizon grows, and thus, is worse than fully sequential strategies such as Upper Confidence Bound (UCB). In this paper, we show that a variant of ETC algorithm can actually achieve the asymptotic optimality for multi-armed bandit problems as UCB-type algorithms do and extend it to the batched bandit setting. Specifically, we propose a double explore-then-commit (DETC) algorithm that has two exploration and exploitation phases and proves that DETC achieves the asymptotically optimal regret bound. To our knowledge, DETC is the first non-fully-sequential algorithm that achieves such asymptotic optimality. In addition, we extend DETC to batched bandit problems, where (i) the exploration process is split into a small number of batches and (ii) the round complexity is of central interest. We prove that a batched version of DETC can achieve the asymptotic optimality with only a constant round complexity. This is the first batched bandit algorithm that can attain the optimal asymptotic regret bound and optimal round complexity simultaneously.

Peter Kairouz, Monica Ribero Diaz, Keith Rush, Abhradeep Thakurta

We revisit the problem of empirical risk minimziation (ERM) with differential privacy. We show that noisy AdaGrad, given appropriate knowledge and conditions on the subspace from which gradients can be drawn, achieves a regret comparable to traditional AdaGrad plus a well-controlled term due to noise. We show a convergence rate of $O(\text{tr}(G_T)/T)$, where $G_T$ captures the geometry of the gradient subspace. Since $\text{tr}(G_T)=O(\sqrt{T})$ we can obtain faster rates for convex and Lipschitz functions, compared to the $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate achieved by known versions of noisy (stochastic) gradient descent with comparable noise variance. In particular, we show that if the gradients lie in a known constant rank subspace, and assuming algorithmic access to an envelope which bounds decaying sensitivity, one can achieve faster convergence to an excess empirical risk of $\tilde{O}(1/ϵn)$, where $ϵ$ is the privacy budget and $n$ the number of samples. Letting $p$ be the problem dimension, this result implies that, by running noisy Adagrad, we can bypass the DP-SGD bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{p}/ϵn)$ in $T=(ϵn{)}^{2/(1+2\alpha )}$ iterations, where $\alpha \ge 0$ is a parameter controlling gradient norm decay, instead of the rate achieved by SGD of $T={ϵ}^2{n}^2$. Our results operate with general convex functions in both constrained and unconstrained minimization. Along the way, we do a perturbation analysis of noisy AdaGrad, which is of independent interest. Our utility guarantee for the private ERM problem follows as a corollary to the regret guarantee of noisy AdaGrad.

Ben Chamberlain, James Rowbottom, Maria Gorinova, Michael Bronstein, Stefan Webb, Emanuele Rossi

We present Graph Neural Diffusion (GRAND) that approaches deep learning on graphs as a continuous diffusion process and treats Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as discretisations of an underlying PDE. In our model, the layer structure and topology correspond to the discretisation choices of temporal and spatial operators. Our approach allows a principled development of a broad new class of GNNs that are able to address the common plights of graph learning models such as depth, oversmoothing, and bottlenecks. Key to the success of our models are stability with respect to perturbations in the data and this is addressed for both implicit and explicit discretisation schemes. We develop linear and nonlinear versions of GRAND, which achieve competitive results on many standard graph benchmarks.

Christopher Jung, Changhwa Lee, Mallesh Pai, Aaron Roth, Rakesh Vohra

We show how to achieve the notion of "multicalibration" from Hebert-Johnson et al. (2018) not just for means, but also for variances and other higher moments. Informally, this means that we can find regression functions which, given a data point, can make point predictions not just for the expectation of its label, but for higher moments of its label distribution as well—and those predictions match the true distribution quantities when averaged not just over the population as a whole, but also when averaged over an enormous number of finely defined subgroups. It yields a principled way to estimate the uncertainty of predictions on many different subgroups—and to diagnose potential sources of unfairness in the predictive power of features across subgroups. As an application, we show that our moment estimates can be used to derive marginal prediction intervals that are simultaneously valid as averaged over all of the (sufficiently large) subgroups for which moment multicalibration has been obtained.

Dmitriy Kunisky

Analysis of low-degree polynomial algorithms is a powerful, newly-popular method for predicting computational thresholds in hypothesis testing problems. One limitation of current techniques for this analysis is their restriction to Bernoulli and Gaussian distributions. We expand this range of possibilities by performing the low-degree analysis of hypothesis testing for the Morris class of natural exponential families with quadratic variance function, giving a unified treatment of Gaussian, Poisson, gamma (including exponential and chi-squared), binomial (including Bernoulli), negative binomial (including geometric), and generalized hyperbolic secant distributions. We then give several algorithmic applications. 1. In models where a random signal is observed through coordinatewise-independent noise applied in an exponential family, the success or failure of low-degree polynomials is governed by the z-score overlap, the inner product of z-score vectors with respect to the null distribution of two independent copies of the signal. 2. In the same models, testing with low-degree polynomials exhibits channel monotonicity: the above distributions admit a total ordering by computational cost of hypothesis testing, according to a scalar parameter describing how the variance depends on the mean in an exponential family. 3. In a spiked matrix model with a particular non-Gaussian noise distribution, the low-degree prediction is incorrect unless polynomials with arbitrarily large degree in individual matrix entries are permitted. This shows that polynomials summing over self-avoiding walks and variants thereof, as proposed recently by Ding, Hopkins, and Steurer (2020) for spiked matrix models with heavy-tailed noise, are strictly suboptimal for this model. Thus low-degree polynomials appear to offer a tradeoff between robustness and strong performance fine-tuned to specific models. Inspired by this, we suggest that a class of problems requiring "exploration before inference," where an algorithm must first examine the input and then use some intermediate computation to choose a suitable inference subroutine, appears especially difficult for low-degree polynomials.

Yi Li, David Woodruff, Taisuke Yasuda

Despite many applications, dimensionality reduction in the ${\ell }_1$-norm is much less understood than in the Euclidean norm. We give two new oblivious dimensionality reduction techniques for the ${\ell }_1$-norm which improve exponentially over prior ones: - We design a distribution over random matrices $S\in {\mathbb{R}}^{r\times n}$, where $r=2^{\text{poly}(d/(\epsilon \delta ))}$, such that given any matrix $A\in {\mathbb{R}}^{n\times d}$, with probability at least $1-\delta$, simultaneously for all $x$, $\Vert SAx{\Vert }_1=(1\pm \epsilon )\Vert Ax{\Vert }_1$. Note that $S$ is linear, does not depend on $A$, and maps ${\ell }_1$ into ${\ell }_1$. Our distribution provides an exponential improvement on the previous best known map of Wang and Woodruff (SODA, 2019), which required $r=2^{2^{\Omega (d)}}$, even for constant $\epsilon$ and $\delta$. Our bound is optimal, up to a polynomial factor in the exponent, given a known $2^{\text{poly}(d)}$ lower bound for constant $\epsilon$ and $\delta$. - We design a distribution over matrices $S\in {\mathbb{R}}^{k\times n}$, where $k=2^{O(q^2)}({\epsilon }^{-1}q\log d{)}^{O(q)}$, such that given any $q$-mode tensor $A\in ({\mathbb{R}}^d{)}^{\otimes q}$, one can estimate the entrywise ${\ell }_1$-norm $\Vert A{\Vert }_1$ from $S(A)$. Moreover, $S=S^1\otimes S^2\otimes \cdots \otimes S^q$ and so given vectors $u_1,\dots ,u_q\in {\mathbb{R}}^d$, one can compute $S(u_1\otimes u_2\otimes \cdots \otimes u_q)$ in time $2^{O(q^2)}({\epsilon }^{-1}q\log d{)}^{O(q)}$, which is much faster than the $d^q$ time required to form $u_1\otimes u_2\otimes \cdots \otimes u_q$. Our linear map gives a streaming algorithm for independence testing using space $2^{O(q^2)}({\epsilon }^{-1}q\log d{)}^{O(q)}$, improving the previous doubly exponential $({\epsilon }^{-1}\log d{)}^{q^{O(q)}}$ space bound of Braverman and Ostrovsky (STOC, 2010). For subspace embeddings, we also study the setting when $A$ is itself drawn from distributions with independent entries, and obtain a polynomial embedding dimension. For independence testing, we also give algorithms for any distance measure with a polylogarithmic-sized sketch and satisfying an approximate triangle inequality.

Eran Malach, Gilad Yehudai, Shai Shalev-Schwartz, Ohad Shamir

Several recent works have shown separation results between deep neural networks, and hypothesis classes with inferior approximation capacity such as shallow networks or kernel classes. On the other hand, the fact that deep networks can efficiently express a target function does not mean that this target function can be learned efficiently by deep neural networks. In this work we study the intricate connection between learnability and approximation capacity. We show that learnability with deep networks of a target function depends on the ability of simpler classes to approximate the target. Specifically, we show that a necessary condition for a function to be learnable by gradient descent on deep neural networks is to be able to approximate the function, at least in a weak sense, with shallow neural networks. We also show that a class of functions can be learned by an efficient statistical query algorithm if and only if it can be approximated in a weak sense by some kernel class. We give several examples of functions which demonstrate depth separation, and conclude that they cannot be efficiently learned, even by a hypothesis class that can efficiently approximate them.

Maxwell M Aladago, Lorenzo Torresani

In contrast to traditional weight optimization in a continuous space, we demonstrate the existence of effective random networks whose weights are never updated. By selecting a weight among a fixed set of random values for each individual connection, our method uncovers combinations of random weights that match the performance of traditionally-trained networks of the same capacity. We refer to our networks as "slot machines" where each reel (connection) contains a fixed set of symbols (random values). Our backpropagation algorithm "spins" the reels to seek "winning" combinations, i.e., selections of random weight values that minimize the given loss. Quite surprisingly, we find that allocating just a few random values to each connection (e.g., 8 values per connection) yields highly competitive combinations despite being dramatically more constrained compared to traditionally learned weights. Moreover, finetuning these combinations often improves performance over the trained baselines. A randomly initialized VGG-19 with 8 values per connection contains a combination that achieves 91% test accuracy on CIFAR-10. Our method also achieves an impressive performance of 98.2% on MNIST for neural networks containing only random weights.

Saeed Masoudian, Yevgeny Seldin

We derive improved regret bounds for the Tsallis-INF algorithm of Zimmert and Seldin (2021). We show that in adversarial regimes with a $(\Delta ,C,T)$ self-bounding constraint the algorithm achieves $\mathcal{O}\left(\left({\sum }_{i\ne i^{\ast }}\frac{1}{{\Delta }_i}\right){\log }_{+}\left(\frac{(K-1)T}{{\left({\sum }_{i\ne i^{\ast }}\frac{1}{{\Delta }_i}\right)}^2}\right)+\sqrt{C\left({\sum }_{i\ne i^{\ast }}\frac{1}{{\Delta }_i}\right){\log }_{+}\left(\frac{(K-1)T}{C{\sum }_{i\ne i^{\ast }}\frac{1}{{\Delta }_i}}\right)}\right)$ regret bound, where $T$ is the time horizon, $K$ is the number of arms, ${\Delta }_i$ are the suboptimality gaps, $i^{\ast }$ is the best arm, $C$ is the corruption magnitude, and ${\log }_{+}(x)=\max \left(1,\log x\right)$. The regime includes stochastic bandits, stochastically constrained adversarial bandits, and stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions as special cases. Additionally, we provide a general analysis, which allows to achieve the same kind of improvement for generalizations of Tsallis-INF to other settings beyond multiarmed bandits.

Song Mei, Theodor Misiakiewicz, Andrea Montanari

A number of machine learning tasks entail a high degree of invariance: the data distribution does not change if we act on the data with a certain group of transformations. For instance, labels of images are invariant under translations of the images. Certain neural network architectures —for instance, convolutional networks—are believed to owe their success to the fact that they exploit such invariance properties. With the objective of quantifying the gain achieved by invariant architectures, we introduce two classes of models: invariant random features and invariant kernel methods. The latter includes, as a special case, the neural tangent kernel for convolutional networks with global average pooling. We consider uniform covariates distributions on the sphere and hypercube and a general invariant target function. We characterize the test error of invariant methods in a high-dimensional regime in which the sample size and number of hidden units scale as polynomials in the dimension, for a class of groups that we call ‘degeneracy $\alpha$’, with $\alpha \le 1$. We show that exploiting invariance in the architecture saves a $d^{\alpha }$ factor ($d$ stands for the dimension) in sample size and number of hidden units to achieve the same test error as for unstructured architectures. Finally, we show that output symmetrization of an unstructured kernel estimator does not give a significant statistical improvement; on the other hand, data augmentation with an unstructured kernel estimator is equivalent to an invariant kernel estimator and enjoys the same improvement in statistical efficiency.

Mikito Nanashima

Which concepts can we learn efficiently on average? In this paper, we investigate the capability of a natural average-case learning framework, heuristic PAC (heurPAC) learning to answer this and some other related questions. Roughly speaking, we say that a concept class is heurPAC learnable if there exists a learning algorithm that given $n,s\in \mathbb{N}$ and $ϵ,\delta ,\eta \in (0,1]$ as input, learns all but $\eta$ fraction of $n$-input target functions represented as $s$-bit strings in the class from passively collected examples and then outputs an $ϵ$-close hypothesis with failure probability at most $\delta$ in polynomial-time in $n$, $s$, ${ϵ}^{-1},{\delta }^{-1}$, and ${\eta }^{-1}$, where each example is generated according to some example distribution. First, we establish a positive learnability result. Specifically, we show that a simple Fourier-based algorithm heurPAC learns $\Omega (\log n)$-junta functions on the uniform distribution, which is a central open question in the original PAC learning model. Our technical contribution is to introduce the notion of elusive functions that captures hard-to-learn cases and to establish a polynomial relation between the running time and the fraction of such elusive functions. Second, we present clear relations between heurPAC learnability and cryptography. Particularly, we show that for any efficiently evaluated class $\mathcal{C}$, (1) if $\mathcal{C}$ is not heurPAC learnable, then an auxiliary-input one-way function (AIOWF) exists; (2) if $\mathcal{C}$ is not heurPAC learnable on the uniform distribution, then an infinitely-often one-way function (io-OWF) exists. As a corollary, we also present new characterizations for AIOWF and io-OWF based on heurPAC learnability, which is conceptually stronger than the previous ones that are based on average-case learnability for fixed parameters. These results show that our framework might yield heuristic learners with theoretical guarantees for broader classes than the usual PAC learning framework, and any efficiently evaluated class has a potential for such a heuristic learner or a secure cryptographic primitive. Through this paper, we suggest further research toward the win-win “learning vs. cryptography” paradigm.

Yizhen Wang, Somesh Jha, Kamalika Chaudhuri

Motivated by safety-critical applications, test-time attacks on classifiers via adversarial examples has recently received a great deal of attention. However, there is a general lack of understanding on why adversarial examples arise; whether they originate due to inherent properties of data or due to lack of training samples remains ill-understood. In this work, we introduce a theoretical framework analogous to bias-variance theory for understanding these effects. We use our framework to analyze the robustness of a canonical non-parametric classifier {–} the k-nearest neighbors. Our analysis shows that its robustness properties depend critically on the value of k {–} the classifier may be inherently non-robust for small k, but its robustness approaches that of the Bayes Optimal classifier for fast-growing k. We propose a novel modified 1-nearest neighbor classifier, and guarantee its robustness in the large sample limit. Our experiments suggest that this classifier may have good robustness properties even for reasonable data set sizes.

Sumeet Katariya, Lalit Jain, Nandana Sengupta, James Evans, Robert Nowak

We consider the problem of active coarse ranking, where the goal is to sort items according to their means into clusters of pre-specified sizes, by adaptively sampling from their reward distributions. This setting is useful in many social science applications involving human raters and the approximate rank of every item is desired. Approximate or coarse ranking can significantly reduce the number of ratings required in comparison to the number needed to find an exact ranking. We propose a computationally efficient PAC algorithm LUCBRank for coarse ranking, and derive an upper bound on its sample complexity. We also derive a nearly matching distribution-dependent lower bound. Experiments on synthetic as well as real-world data show that LUCBRank performs better than state-of-the-art baseline methods, even when these methods have the advantage of knowing the underlying parametric model.

Insu Han, Jennifer Gillenwater

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are a good fit for modeling diversity in many machine learning applications. For instance, in recommender systems, one might have a basic DPP defined by item features, and a customized version of this DPP for each user with features re-weighted according to user preferences. While such models perform well, they are typically applied only to relatively small datasets, because existing maximum a posteriori (MAP) approximation algorithms are expensive. In this work, we propose a new MAP algorithm: we show that, by performing a one-time preprocessing step on a basic DPP, it is possible to run an approximate version of the standard greedy MAP approximation algorithm on any customized version of the DPP in time sublinear in the number of items. Our key observation is that the core computation can be written as a maximum inner product search (MIPS), which allows us to accelerate inference via approximate MIPS structures, e.g., trees or hash tables. We provide a theoretical analysis of the algorithm’s approximation quality, as well as empirical results on real-world datasets demonstrating that it is often orders of magnitude faster while sacrificing little accuracy.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Jinjun Xiong, Chuang Gan, David Cox, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Prosody plays an important role in characterizing the style of a speaker or an emotion, but most non-parallel voice or emotion style transfer algorithms do not convert any prosody information. Two major components of prosody are pitch and rhythm. Disentangling the prosody information, particularly the rhythm component, from the speech is challenging because it involves breaking the synchrony between the input speech and the disentangled speech representation. As a result, most existing prosody style transfer algorithms would need to rely on some form of text transcriptions to identify the content information, which confines their application to high-resource languages only. Recently, SpeechSplit has made sizeable progress towards unsupervised prosody style transfer, but it is unable to extract high-level global prosody style in an unsupervised manner. In this paper, we propose AutoPST, which can disentangle global prosody style from speech without relying on any text transcriptions. AutoPST is an Autoencoder-based Prosody Style Transfer framework with a thorough rhythm removal module guided by the self-expressive representation learning. Experiments on different style transfer tasks show that AutoPST can effectively convert prosody that correctly reflects the styles of the target domains.

Yibo Lin, Zhao Song, Lin F. Yang

Parameter reduction has been a popular topic in deep learning due to the ever- increasing size of deep neural network models and the need to train and run deep neural nets on resource limited machines. Despite many efforts in this area, there were no rigorous theoretical guarantees on why existing neural net compression methods should work. In this paper, we provide provable guarantees on some hashing-based parameter reduction methods in neural nets. First, we introduce a neural net compression scheme based on random linear sketching (which is usually implemented efficiently via hashing), and show that the sketched (smaller) network is able to approximate the original network on all input data coming from any smooth well-conditioned low-dimensional manifold. The sketched network can also be trained directly via back-propagation. Next, we study the previously proposed HashedNets architecture and show that the optimization landscape of one-hidden-layer HashedNets has a local strong convexity property similar to a normal fully connected neural network. Together with the initialization algorithm developed in [51], this implies that the parameters in HashedNets can be provably recovered. We complement our theoretical results with some empirical verification.

Poompol Buathong, David Ginsbourger, Tipaluck Krityakierne

We focus on kernel methods for set-valued inputs and their application to Bayesian set optimization, notably combinatorial optimization. We investigate two classes of set kernels that both rely on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space embeddings, namely the "Double Sum" (DS) kernels recently considered in Bayesian set optimization, and a class introduced here called "Deep Embedding" (DE) kernels that essentially consists in applying a radial kernel on Hilbert space on top of the canonical distance induced by another kernel such as a DS kernel. We establish in particular that while DS kernels typically suffer from a lack of strict positive definiteness, vast subclasses of DE kernels built upon DS kernels do possess this property, enabling in turn combinatorial optimization without requiring to introduce a jitter parameter. Proofs of theoretical results about considered kernels are complemented by a few practicalities regarding hyperparameter fitting. We furthermore demonstrate the applicability of our approach in prediction and optimization tasks, relying both on toy examples and on two test cases from mechanical engineering and hydrogeology, respectively. Experimental results highlight the applicability and compared merits of the considered approaches while opening new perspectives in prediction and sequential design with set inputs.

Kai Han, Yunhe Wang, Yixing Xu, Chunjing Xu, Enhua Wu, Chang Xu

This paper formalizes the binarization operations over neural networks from a learning perspective. In contrast to classical hand crafted rules (\eg hard thresholding) to binarize full-precision neurons, we propose to learn a mapping from full-precision neurons to the target binary ones. Each individual weight entry will not be binarized independently. Instead, they are taken as a whole to accomplish the binarization, just as they work together in generating convolution features. To help the training of the binarization mapping, the full-precision neurons after taking sign operations is regarded as some auxiliary supervision signal, which is noisy but still has valuable guidance. An unbiased estimator is therefore introduced to mitigate the influence of the supervision noise. Experimental results on benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed binarization technique attains consistent improvements over baselines.

Maciej Skorski

The seminal result of Johnson and Lindenstrauss on random embeddings has been intensively studied in applied and theoretical computer science. Despite that vast body of literature, we still lack of complete understanding of statistical properties of random projections; a particularly intriguing question is: why are the theoretical bounds that far behind the empirically observed performance? Motivated by this question, this work develops Johnson-Lindenstrauss distributions with optimal, data-oblivious, statistical confidence bounds. These bounds are numerically best possible, for any given data dimension, embedding dimension, and distortion tolerance. They improve upon prior works in terms of statistical accuracy, as well as exactly determine the no-go regimes for data-oblivious approaches. Furthermore, the projection matrices are efficiently samplable. The construction relies on orthogonal matrices, and the proof uses certain elegant properties of the unit sphere. In particular, the following techniques introduced in this work are of independent interest: a) a compact expression for the projection distortion in terms of singular eigenvalues of the projection matrix, b) a parametrization linking the unit sphere and the Dirichlet distribution and c) anti-concentration bounds for the Dirichlet distribution. Besides the technical contribution, the paper presents applications and numerical evaluation along with working implementation in Python (shared as a GitHub repository).

Enayat Ullah, Tung Mai, Anup Rao, Ryan A. Rossi, Raman Arora

We study the problem of machine unlearning and identify a notion of algorithmic stability, Total Variation (TV) stability, which we argue, is suitable for the goal of exact unlearning. For convex risk minimization problems, we design TV-stable algorithms based on noisy Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). Our key contribution is the design of corresponding efficient unlearning algorithms, which are based on constructing a near-maximal coupling of Markov chains for the noisy SGD procedure. To understand the trade-offs between accuracy and unlearning efficiency, we give upper and lower bounds on excess empirical and populations risk of TV stable algorithms for convex risk minimization. Our techniques generalize to arbitrary non-convex functions, and our algorithms are differentially private as well.

Adrien Vacher, Boris Muzellec, Alessandro Rudi, Francis Bach, Francois-Xavier Vialard

It is well-known that plug-in statistical estimation of optimal transport suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Despite recent efforts to improve the rate of estimation with the smoothness of the problem, the computational complexity of these recently proposed methods still degrade exponentially with the dimension. In this paper, thanks to an infinite-dimensional sum-of-squares representation, we derive a statistical estimator of smooth optimal transport which achieves a precision $\epsilon$ from $\tilde{O}({\epsilon }^{-2})$ independent and identically distributed samples from the distributions, for a computational cost of $\tilde{O}({\epsilon }^{-4})$ when the smoothness increases, hence yielding dimension-free statistical \emph{and} computational rates, with potentially exponentially dimension-dependent constants.

Tim van Erven, Sarah Sachs, Wouter M Koolen, Wojciech Kotlowski

We consider online convex optimization when a number k of data points are outliers that may be corrupted. We model this by introducing the notion of robust regret, which measures the regret only on rounds that are not outliers. The aim for the learner is to achieve small robust regret, without knowing where the outliers are. If the outliers are chosen adversarially, we show that a simple filtering strategy on extreme gradients incurs O(k) overhead compared to the usual regret bounds, and that this is unimprovable, which means that k needs to be sublinear in the number of rounds. We further ask which additional assumptions would allow for a linear number of outliers. It turns out that the usual benign cases of independently, identically distributed (i.i.d.) observations or strongly convex losses are not sufficient. However, combining i.i.d. observations with the assumption that outliers are those observations that are in an extreme quantile of the distribution, does lead to sublinear robust regret, even though the expected number of outliers is linear.

Gal Vardi, Daniel Reichman, Toniann Pitassi, Ohad Shamir

When studying the expressive power of neural networks, a main challenge is to understand how the size and depth of the network affect its ability to approximate real functions. However, not all functions are interesting from a practical viewpoint: functions of interest usually have a polynomially-bounded Lipschitz constant, and can be computed efficiently. We call functions that satisfy these conditions “benign”, and explore the benefits of size and depth for approximation of benign functions with ReLU networks. As we show, this problem is more challenging than the corresponding problem for non-benign functions. We give complexity-theoretic barriers to showing depth-lower-bounds: Proving existence of a benign function that cannot be approximated by polynomial-sized networks of depth $4$ would settle longstanding open problems in computational complexity. It implies that beyond depth $4$ there is a barrier to showing depth-separation for benign functions, even between networks of constant depth and networks of nonconstant depth. We also study size-separation, namely, whether there are benign functions that can be approximated with networks of size $O(s(d))$, but not with networks of size $O(s’(d))$. We show a complexity-theoretic barrier to proving such results beyond size $O(d{\log }^2(d))$, but also show an explicit benign function, that can be approximated with networks of size $O(d)$ and not with networks of size $o(d/\log d)$. For approximation in the $L_{\infty }$ sense we achieve such separation already between size $O(d)$ and size $o(d)$. Moreover, we show superpolynomial size lower bounds and barriers to such lower bounds, depending on the assumptions on the function. Our size-separation results rely on an analysis of size lower bounds for Boolean functions, which is of independent interest: We show linear size lower bounds for computing explicit Boolean functions (such as set disjointness) with neural networks and threshold circuits.

Zihan Zhang, Xiangyang Ji, Simon Du

Episodic reinforcement learning and contextual bandits are two widely studied sequential decision-making problems. Episodic reinforcement learning generalizes contextual bandits and is often perceived to be more difficult due to long planning horizon and unknown state-dependent transitions. The current paper shows that the long planning horizon and the unknown state-dependent transitions (at most) pose little additional difficulty on sample complexity. We consider the episodic reinforcement learning with S states, A actions, planning horizon H, total reward bounded by 1, and the agent plays for K episodes. We propose a new algorithm, Monotonic Value Propagation (MVP), which relies on a new Bernstein-type bonus. The new bonus only requires tweaking the constants to ensure optimism and thus is significantly simpler than existing bonus constructions. We show MVP enjoys an $O\left(\left(\sqrt{SAK}+S^{2}A\right)\text{poly}\log \left(SAHK\right)\right)$ regret, approaching the $\Omega \left(\sqrt{SAK}\right)$ lower bound of contextual bandits. Notably, this result 1) exponentially improves the state-of-the-art polynomial-time algorithms by Dann et al. [2019], Zanette et al. [2019], and Zhang et al. [2020] in terms of the dependency on H, and 2) exponentially improves the running time in [Wang et al. 2020] and significantly improves the dependency on S, A and K in sample complexity.

Dongruo Zhou, Quanquan Gu, Csaba Szepesvari

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation where the underlying transition probability kernel of the Markov decision process (MDP) is a linear mixture model (Jia et al., 2020; Ayoub et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020) and the learning agent has access to either an integration or a sampling oracle of the individual basis kernels. For the fixed-horizon episodic setting with inhomogeneous transition kernels, we propose a new, computationally efficient algorithm that uses the basis kernels to approximate value functions. We show that the new algorithm, which we call ${\text{UCRL-VTR}}^{+}$, attains an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret where $d$ is the number of basis kernels, $H$ is the length of the episode and $T$ is the number of interactions with the MDP. We also prove a matching lower bound $\Omega (dH\sqrt{T})$ for this setting, which shows that ${\text{UCRL-VTR}}^{+}$ is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors. At the core of our results are (1) a weighted least squares estimator for the unknown transitional probability; and (2) a new Bernstein-type concentration inequality for self-normalized vector-valued martingales with bounded increments. Together, these new tools enable tight control of the Bellman error and lead to a nearly minimax regret. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computationally efficient, nearly minimax optimal algorithm for RL with linear function approximation.

Abhinav Aggarwal, Shiva Kasiviswanathan, Zekun Xu, Oluwaseyi Feyisetan, Nathanael Teissier

Log-loss (also known as cross-entropy loss) metric is ubiquitously used across machine learning applications to assess the performance of classification algorithms. In this paper, we investigate the problem of inferring the labels of a dataset from single (or multiple) log-loss score(s), without any other access to the dataset. Surprisingly, we show that for any finite number of label classes, it is possible to accurately infer the labels of the dataset from the reported log-loss score of a single carefully constructed prediction vector if we allow arbitrary precision arithmetic. Additionally, we present label inference algorithms (attacks) that succeed even under addition of noise to the log-loss scores and under limited precision arithmetic. All our algorithms rely on ideas from number theory and combinatorics and require no model training. We run experimental simulations on some real datasets to demonstrate the ease of running these attacks in practice.

Sattar Vakili, Jonathan Scarlett, Tara Javidi

Confidence intervals are a crucial building block in the analysis of various online learning problems. The analysis of kernel-based bandit and reinforcement learning problems utilize confidence intervals applicable to the elements of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, the existing confidence bounds do not appear to be tight, resulting in suboptimal regret bounds. In fact, the existing regret bounds for several kernelized bandit algorithms (e.g., GP-UCB, GP-TS, and their variants) may fail to even be sublinear. It is unclear whether the suboptimal regret bound is a fundamental shortcoming of these algorithms or an artifact of the proof, and the main challenge seems to stem from the online (sequential) nature of the observation points. We formalize the question of online confidence intervals in the RKHS setting and overview the existing results.

Susan Amin, Maziar Gomrokchi, Hossein Aboutalebi, Harsh Satija, Doina Precup

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce, the agent should rely on some form of short-term memory in order to cover its environment efficiently. We propose a new exploration method, based on two intuitions: (1) the choice of the next exploratory action should depend not only on the (Markovian) state of the environment, but also on the agent's trajectory so far, and (2) the agent should utilize a measure of spread in the state space to avoid getting stuck in a small region. Our method leverages concepts often used in statistical physics to provide explanations for the behavior of simplified (polymer) chains in order to generate persistent (locally self-avoiding) trajectories in state space. We discuss the theoretical properties of locally self-avoiding walks and their ability to provide a kind of short-term memory through a decaying temporal correlation within the trajectory. We provide empirical evaluations of our approach in a simulated 2D navigation task, as well as higher-dimensional MuJoCo continuous control locomotion tasks with sparse rewards.

Nishanth Anand, Doina Precup

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are visited. When the agent lands in a state, its value can be used to compute the TD-error, which is then propagated to other states. However, it may be interesting, when computing updates, to take into account other information than whether a state is visited or not. For example, some states might be more important than others (such as states which are frequently seen in a successful trajectory). Or, some states might have unreliable value estimates (for example, due to partial observability or lack of data), making their values less desirable as targets. We propose an approach to re-weighting states used in TD updates, both when they are the input and when they provide the target for the update. We prove that our approach converges with linear function approximation and illustrate its desirable empirical behaviour compared to other TD-style methods.

Hilal Asi, Vitaly Feldman, Tomer Koren, Kunal Talwar

Stochastic convex optimization over an ${\ell }_1$-bounded domain is ubiquitous in machine learning applications such as LASSO but remains poorly understood when learning with differential privacy. We show that, up to logarithmic factors the optimal excess population loss of any $(ϵ,\delta )$-differentially private optimizer is $\sqrt{\log (d)/n}+\sqrt{d}/ϵn.$ The upper bound is based on a new algorithm that combines the iterative localization approach of Feldman et al. (2020) with a new analysis of private regularized mirror descent. It applies to ${\ell }_p$ bounded domains for $p\in [1,2]$ and queries at most $n^{3/2}$ gradients improving over the best previously known algorithm for the ${\ell }_2$ case which needs $n^2$ gradients. Further, we show that when the loss functions satisfy additional smoothness assumptions, the excess loss is upper bounded (up to logarithmic factors) by $\sqrt{\log (d)/n}+(\log (d)/ϵn{)}^{2/3}.$ This bound is achieved by a new variance-reduced version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm that requires just a single pass over the data. We also show that the lower bound in this case is the minimum of the two rates mentioned above.

Dilip Arumugam, Benjamin Van Roy

Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal policy can become infeasible. These scenarios give rise to an important trade-off between the information an agent must acquire to learn and the sub-optimality of the resulting policy. While an agent designer has a preference for how this trade-off is resolved, existing approaches further require that the designer translate these preferences into a fixed learning target for the agent. In this work, leveraging rate-distortion theory, we automate this process such that the designer need only express their preferences via a single hyperparameter and the agent is endowed with the ability to compute its own learning targets that best achieve the desired trade-off. We establish a general bound on expected discounted regret for an agent that decides what to learn in this manner along with computational experiments that illustrate the expressiveness of designer preferences and even show improvements over Thompson sampling in identifying an optimal policy.

Alexia Atsidakou, Orestis Papadigenopoulos, Soumya Basu, Constantine Caramanis, Sanjay Shakkottai

Recent work has considered natural variations of the {\em multi-armed bandit} problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable) model is that of {\em blocking bandits}, where an arm becomes unavailable for a deterministic number of rounds after each play. In this work, we extend the above model in two directions: (i) We consider the general combinatorial setting where more than one arms can be played at each round, subject to feasibility constraints. (ii) We allow the blocking time of each arm to be stochastic. We first study the computational/unconditional hardness of the above setting and identify the necessary conditions for the problem to become tractable (even in an approximate sense). Based on these conditions, we provide a tight analysis of the approximation guarantee of a natural greedy heuristic that always plays the maximum expected reward feasible subset among the available (non-blocked) arms. When the arms' expected rewards are unknown, we adapt the above heuristic into a bandit algorithm, based on UCB, for which we provide sublinear (approximate) regret guarantees, matching the theoretical lower bounds in the limiting case of absence of delays.

Yu Bai, Song Mei, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong

Modern machine learning models with high accuracy are often miscalibrated---the predicted top probability does not reflect the actual accuracy, and tends to be \emph{over-confident}. It is commonly believed that such over-confidence is mainly due to \emph{over-parametrization}, in particular when the model is large enough to memorize the training data and maximize the confidence. In this paper, we show theoretically that over-parametrization is not the only reason for over-confidence. We prove that \emph{logistic regression is inherently over-confident}, in the realizable, under-parametrized setting where the data is generated from the logistic model, and the sample size is much larger than the number of parameters. Further, this over-confidence happens for general well-specified binary classification problems as long as the activation is symmetric and concave on the positive part. Perhaps surprisingly, we also show that over-confidence is not always the case---there exists another activation function (and a suitable loss function) under which the learned classifier is \emph{under-confident} at some probability values. Overall, our theory provides a precise characterization of calibration in realizable binary classification, which we verify on simulations and real data experiments.

Amir Bar, Roi Herzig, Xiaolong Wang, Anna Rohrbach, Gal Chechik, Trevor Darrell, Amir Globerson

Videos of actions are complex signals containing rich compositional structure in space and time. Current video generation methods lack the ability to condition the generation on multiple coordinated and potentially simultaneous timed actions. To address this challenge, we propose to represent the actions in a graph structure called Action Graph and present the new "Action Graph To Video" synthesis task. Our generative model for this task (AG2Vid) disentangles motion and appearance features, and by incorporating a scheduling mechanism for actions facilitates a timely and coordinated video generation. We train and evaluate AG2Vid on CATER and Something-Something V2 datasets, which results in videos that have better visual quality and semantic consistency compared to baselines. Finally, our model demonstrates zero-shot abilities by synthesizing novel compositions of the learned actions.

Fan Bao, Kun Xu, Chongxuan Li, Lanqing Hong, Jun Zhu, Bo Zhang

This paper presents new estimates of the score function and its gradient with respect to the model parameters in a general energy-based latent variable model (EBLVM). The score function and its gradient can be expressed as combinations of expectation and covariance terms over the (generally intractable) posterior of the latent variables. New estimates are obtained by introducing a variational posterior to approximate the true posterior in these terms. The variational posterior is trained to minimize a certain divergence (e.g., the KL divergence) between itself and the true posterior. Theoretically, the divergence characterizes upper bounds of the bias of the estimates. In principle, our estimates can be applied to a wide range of objectives, including kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), score matching (SM)-based methods and exact Fisher divergence with a minimal model assumption. In particular, these estimates applied to SM-based methods outperform existing methods in learning EBLVMs on several image datasets.

Dominique Beaini, Saro Passaro, Vincent Létourneau, Will Hamilton, Gabriele Corso, Pietro Lió

The lack of anisotropic kernels in graph neural networks (GNNs) strongly limits their expressiveness, contributing to well-known issues such as over-smoothing. To overcome this limitation, we propose the first globally consistent anisotropic kernels for GNNs, allowing for graph convolutions that are defined according to topologicaly-derived directional flows. First, by defining a vector field in the graph, we develop a method of applying directional derivatives and smoothing by projecting node-specific messages into the field. Then, we propose the use of the Laplacian eigenvectors as such vector field. We show that the method generalizes CNNs on an $n$-dimensional grid and is provably more discriminative than standard GNNs regarding the Weisfeiler-Lehman 1-WL test. We evaluate our method on different standard benchmarks and see a relative error reduction of 8% on the CIFAR10 graph dataset and 11% to 32% on the molecular ZINC dataset, and a relative increase in precision of 1.6% on the MolPCBA dataset. An important outcome of this work is that it enables graph networks to embed directions in an unsupervised way, thus allowing a better representation of the anisotropic features in different physical or biological problems.

Khan Mohammad Al Farabi, Somdeb Sarkhel, Deepak Venugopal

Existing techniques for improving scalability of weight learning in Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) are typically effective when the parameters of the MLN are tied, i.e., several ground formulas in the MLN share the same weight. However, to improve accuracy in real-world problems, we typically need to learn separate weights for different groundings of the MLN. In this paper, we present an approach to perform efficient weight learning in MLNs containing high-dimensional, untied formulas. The fundamental idea in our approach is to help the learning algorithm navigate the parameter search-space more efficiently by a) tying together groundings of untied formulas that are likely to have similar weights, and b) setting good initial values for the parameters. To do this, we follow a hierarchical approach, where we first learn the parameters that are to be tied using a non-relational learner. We then use a relational learner to learn the tied-parameter MLN with initial values derived from parameters learned by the non-relational learner. We illustrate the promise of our approach on three different real-world problems and show that our approach yields much more scalable and accurate results compared to existing state-of-the-art relational learning systems.

Thanh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Huong Ha, Santu Rana, Svetha Venkatesh

Bayesian quadrature optimization (BQO) maximizes the expectation of an expensive black-box integrand taken over a known probability distribution. In this work, we study BQO under distributional uncertainty in which the underlying probability distribution is unknown except for a limited set of its i.i.d samples. A standard BQO approach maximizes the Monte Carlo estimate of the true expected objective given the fixed sample set. Though Monte Carlo estimate is unbiased, it has high variance given a small set of samples; thus can result in a spurious objective function. We adopt the distributionally robust optimization perspective to this problem by maximizing the expected objective under the most adversarial distribution. In particular, we propose a novel posterior sampling based algorithm, namely distributionally robust BQO (DRBQO) for this purpose. We demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our proposed framework in synthetic and real-world problems, and characterize its theoretical convergence via Bayesian regret.

Gang Wang, Georgios B. Giannakis

Inspired by the widespread use of Q-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL), this present paper studies a class of biased stochastic approximation (SA) procedures under an ‘ergodic-like’ assumption on the underlying stochastic noise sequence. Leveraging a \emph{multistep Lyapunov function} that looks ahead to several future updates to accommodate the gradient bias, we prove a general result on the convergence of the iterates, and use it to derive finite-time bounds on the mean-square error in the case of constant stepsizes. This novel viewpoint renders the finite-time analysis of \emph{biased SA} algorithms under a broad family of stochastic perturbations possible. For direct comparison with past works, we also demonstrate these bounds by applying them to Q-learning with linear function approximation, under the realistic Markov chain observation model. The resultant finite-time error bound for Q-learning is \emph{the first of its kind}, in the sense that it holds: i) for the unmodified version (i.e., without making any modifications to the updates), and ii), for Markov chains starting from any initial distribution, at least one of which has to be violated for existing results to be applicable.

Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Daniel Cullina, Vikash Sehwag, Prateek Mittal

Understanding the fundamental limits of robust supervised learning has emerged as a problem of immense interest, from both practical and theoretical standpoints. In particular, it is critical to determine classifier-agnostic bounds on the training loss to establish when learning is possible. In this paper, we determine optimal lower bounds on the cross-entropy loss in the presence of test-time adversaries, along with the corresponding optimal classification outputs. Our formulation of the bound as a solution to an optimization problem is general enough to encompass any loss function depending on soft classifier outputs. We also propose and provide a proof of correctness for a bespoke algorithm to compute this lower bound efficiently, allowing us to determine lower bounds for multiple practical datasets of interest. We use our lower bounds as a diagnostic tool to determine the effectiveness of current robust training methods and find a gap from optimality at larger budgets. Finally, we investigate the possibility of using of optimal classification outputs as soft labels to empirically improve robust training.

Hangrui Bi, Hengyi Wang, Chence Shi, Connor Coley, Jian Tang, Hongyu Guo

Reliably predicting the products of chemical reactions presents a fundamental challenge in synthetic chemistry. Existing machine learning approaches typically produce a reaction product by sequentially forming its subparts or intermediate molecules. Such autoregressive methods, however, not only require a pre-defined order for the incremental construction but preclude the use of parallel decoding for efficient computation. To address these issues, we devise a non-autoregressive learning paradigm that predicts reaction in one shot. Leveraging the fact that chemical reactions can be described as a redistribution of electrons in molecules, we formulate a reaction as an arbitrary electron flow and predict it with a novel multi-pointer decoding network. Experiments on the USPTO-MIT dataset show that our approach has established a new state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy and achieves at least 27 times inference speedup over the state-of-the-art methods. Also, our predictions are easier for chemists to interpret owing to predicting the electron flows.

Ilai Bistritz, Nicholas Bambos

Consider N players that each uses a mixture of K resources. Each of the players' reward functions includes a linear pricing term for each resource that is controlled by the game manager. We assume that the game is strongly monotone, so if each player runs gradient descent, the dynamics converge to a unique Nash equilibrium (NE). Unfortunately, this NE can be inefficient since the total load on a given resource can be very high. In principle, we can control the total loads by tuning the coefficients of the pricing terms. However, finding pricing coefficients that balance the loads requires knowing the players' reward functions and their action sets. Obtaining this game structure information is infeasible in a large-scale network and violates the users' privacy. To overcome this, we propose a simple algorithm that learns to shift the NE of the game to meet the total load constraints by adjusting the pricing coefficients in an online manner. Our algorithm only requires the total load per resource as feedback and does not need to know the reward functions or the action sets. We prove that our algorithm guarantees convergence in L2 to a NE that meets target total load constraints. Simulations show the effectiveness of our approach when applied to smart grid demand-side management or power control in wireless networks.

Cristian Bodnar, Fabrizio Frasca, Yuguang Wang, Nina Otter, Guido Montufar, Pietro Lió, Michael Bronstein

The pairwise interaction paradigm of graph machine learning has predominantly governed the modelling of relational systems. However, graphs alone cannot capture the multi-level interactions present in many complex systems and the expressive power of such schemes was proven to be limited. To overcome these limitations, we propose Message Passing Simplicial Networks (MPSNs), a class of models that perform message passing on simplicial complexes (SCs). To theoretically analyse the expressivity of our model we introduce a Simplicial Weisfeiler-Lehman (SWL) colouring procedure for distinguishing non-isomorphic SCs. We relate the power of SWL to the problem of distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs and show that SWL and MPSNs are strictly more powerful than the WL test and not less powerful than the 3-WL test. We deepen the analysis by comparing our model with traditional graph neural networks (GNNs) with ReLU activations in terms of the number of linear regions of the functions they can represent. We empirically support our theoretical claims by showing that MPSNs can distinguish challenging strongly regular graphs for which GNNs fail and, when equipped with orientation equivariant layers, they can improve classification accuracy in oriented SCs compared to a GNN baseline.

Avrim Blum, Nika Haghtalab, Richard Lanas Phillips, Han Shao

In recent years, federated learning has been embraced as an approach for bringing about collaboration across large populations of learning agents. However, little is known about how collaboration protocols should take agents' incentives into account when allocating individual resources for communal learning in order to maintain such collaborations. Inspired by game theoretic notions, this paper introduces a framework for incentive-aware learning and data sharing in federated learning. Our stable and envy-free equilibria capture notions of collaboration in the presence of agents interested in meeting their learning objectives while keeping their own sample collection burden low. For example, in an envy-free equilibrium, no agent would wish to swap their sampling burden with any other agent and in a stable equilibrium, no agent would wish to unilaterally reduce their sampling burden. In addition to formalizing this framework, our contributions include characterizing the structural properties of such equilibria, proving when they exist, and showing how they can be computed. Furthermore, we compare the sample complexity of incentive-aware collaboration with that of optimal collaboration when one ignores agents' incentives.