Randomized linear solvers randomly compress and solve a linear system with compelling theoretical convergence rates and computational complexities. However, such solvers suffer a substantial disconnect between their theoretical rates and actual efficiency in practice. Fortunately, these solvers are quite flexible and can be adapted to specific problems and computing environments to ensure high efficiency in practice, even at the cost of lower effectiveness (i.e., having a slower theoretical rate of convergence). While highly efficient adapted solvers can be readily designed by application experts, will such solvers still converge and at what rate? To answer this, we distill three general criteria for randomized adaptive solvers, which, as we show, will guarantee a worst-case exponential rate of convergence of the solver applied to consistent and inconsistent linear systems irrespective of whether such systems are over-determined, under-determined or rank-deficient. As a result, we enable application experts to design randomized adaptive solvers that achieve efficiency and can be verified for effectiveness using our theory. We demonstrate our theory on twenty-six solvers, nine of which are novel or novel block extensions of existing methods to the best of our knowledge.
In this work we propose tailored model order reduction for varying boundary optimal control problems governed by parametric partial differential equations. With varying boundary control, we mean that a specific parameter changes where the boundary control acts on the system. This peculiar formulation might benefit from model order reduction. Indeed, fast and reliable simulations of this model can be of utmost usefulness in many applied fields, such as geophysics and energy engineering. However, varying boundary control features very complicated and diversified parametric behaviour for the state and adjoint variables. The state solution, for example, changing the boundary control parameter, might feature transport phenomena. Moreover, the problem loses its affine structure. It is well known that classical model order reduction techniques fail in this setting, both in accuracy and in efficiency. Thus, we propose reduced approaches inspired by the ones used when dealing with wave-like phenomena. Indeed, we compare standard proper orthogonal decomposition with two tailored strategies: geometric recasting and local proper orthogonal decomposition. Geometric recasting solves the optimization system in a reference domain simplifying the problem at hand avoiding hyper-reduction, while local proper orthogonal decomposition builds local bases to increase the accuracy of the reduced solution in very general settings (where geometric recasting is unfeasible). We compare the various approaches on two different numerical experiments based on geometries of increasing complexity.
We introduce a transformation framework that can be utilized to develop online algorithms with low $\epsilon$-approximate regret in the random-order model from offline approximation algorithms. We first give a general reduction theorem that transforms an offline approximation algorithm with low average sensitivity to an online algorithm with low $\epsilon$-approximate regret. We then demonstrate that offline approximation algorithms can be transformed into a low-sensitivity version using a coreset construction method. To showcase the versatility of our approach, we apply it to various problems, including online $(k,z)$-clustering, online matrix approximation, and online regression, and successfully achieve polylogarithmic $\epsilon$-approximate regret for each problem. Moreover, we show that in all three cases, our algorithm also enjoys low inconsistency, which may be desired in some online applications.
Many stochastic continuous-state dynamical systems can be modeled as probabilistic programs with nonlinear non-polynomial updates in non-nested loops. We present two methods, one approximate and one exact, to automatically compute, without sampling, moment-based invariants for such probabilistic programs as closed-form solutions parameterized by the loop iteration. The exact method applies to probabilistic programs with trigonometric and exponential updates and is embedded in the Polar tool. The approximate method for moment computation applies to any nonlinear random function as it exploits the theory of polynomial chaos expansion to approximate non-polynomial updates as the sum of orthogonal polynomials. This translates the dynamical system to a non-nested loop with polynomial updates, and thus renders it conformable with the Polar tool that computes the moments of any order of the state variables. We evaluate our methods on an extensive number of examples ranging from modeling monetary policy to several physical motion systems in uncertain environments. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our approach with respect to the current state-of-the-art.
The training of high-dimensional regression models on comparably sparse data is an important yet complicated topic, especially when there are many more model parameters than observations in the data. From a Bayesian perspective, inference in such cases can be achieved with the help of shrinkage prior distributions, at least for generalized linear models. However, real-world data usually possess multilevel structures, such as repeated measurements or natural groupings of individuals, which existing shrinkage priors are not built to deal with. We generalize and extend one of these priors, the R2D2 prior by Zhang et al. (2020), to linear multilevel models leading to what we call the R2D2M2 prior. The proposed prior enables both local and global shrinkage of the model parameters. It comes with interpretable hyperparameters, which we show to be intrinsically related to vital properties of the prior, such as rates of concentration around the origin, tail behavior, and amount of shrinkage the prior exerts. We offer guidelines on how to select the prior's hyperparameters by deriving shrinkage factors and measuring the effective number of non-zero model coefficients. Hence, the user can readily evaluate and interpret the amount of shrinkage implied by a specific choice of hyperparameters. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on simulated and real data, showing that our inference procedure for the prior is well calibrated, has desirable global and local regularization properties and enables the reliable and interpretable estimation of much more complex Bayesian multilevel models than was previously possible.
Considering the field of functional data analysis, we developed a new Bayesian method for variable selection in function-on-scalar regression (FOSR). Our approach uses latent variables, allowing an adaptive selection since it can determine the number of variables and which ones should be selected for a function-on-scalar regression model. Simulation studies show the proposed method's main properties, such as its accuracy in estimating the coefficients and high capacity to select variables correctly. Furthermore, we conducted comparative studies with the main competing methods, such as the BGLSS method as well as the group LASSO, the group MCP and the group SCAD. We also used a COVID-19 dataset and some socioeconomic data from Brazil for real data application. In short, the proposed Bayesian variable selection model is extremely competitive, showing significant predictive and selective quality.
In collaborative learning with streaming data, nodes (e.g., organizations) jointly and continuously learn a machine learning (ML) model by sharing the latest model updates computed from their latest streaming data. For the more resourceful nodes to be willing to share their model updates, they need to be fairly incentivized. This paper explores an incentive design that guarantees fairness so that nodes receive rewards commensurate to their contributions. Our approach leverages an explore-then-exploit formulation to estimate the nodes' contributions (i.e., exploration) for realizing our theoretically guaranteed fair incentives (i.e., exploitation). However, we observe a "rich get richer" phenomenon arising from the existing approaches to guarantee fairness and it discourages the participation of the less resourceful nodes. To remedy this, we additionally preserve asymptotic equality, i.e., less resourceful nodes achieve equal performance eventually to the more resourceful/"rich" nodes. We empirically demonstrate in two settings with real-world streaming data: federated online incremental learning and federated reinforcement learning, that our proposed approach outperforms existing baselines in fairness and learning performance while remaining competitive in preserving equality.
Hyperparameter optimization, also known as hyperparameter tuning, is a widely recognized technique for improving model performance. Regrettably, when training private ML models, many practitioners often overlook the privacy risks associated with hyperparameter optimization, which could potentially expose sensitive information about the underlying dataset. Currently, the sole existing approach to allow privacy-preserving hyperparameter optimization is to uniformly and randomly select hyperparameters for a number of runs, subsequently reporting the best-performing hyperparameter. In contrast, in non-private settings, practitioners commonly utilize "adaptive" hyperparameter optimization methods such as Gaussian process-based optimization, which select the next candidate based on information gathered from previous outputs. This substantial contrast between private and non-private hyperparameter optimization underscores a critical concern. In our paper, we introduce DP-HyPO, a pioneering framework for "adaptive" private hyperparameter optimization, aiming to bridge the gap between private and non-private hyperparameter optimization. To accomplish this, we provide a comprehensive differential privacy analysis of our framework. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of DP-HyPO on a diverse set of real-world and synthetic datasets.
Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Unfortunately, most existing algorithms cannot be guaranteed to converge globally and even suffer from limit cycles. To address this issue, we propose a novel single-loop algorithm called doubly smoothed gradient descent ascent method (DSGDA), which naturally balances the primal and dual updates. The proposed DSGDA can get rid of limit cycles in various challenging nonconvex-nonconcave examples in the literature, including Forsaken, Bilinearly-coupled minimax, Sixth-order polynomial, and PolarGame. We further show that under an one-sided Kurdyka-\L{}ojasiewicz condition with exponent $\theta\in(0,1)$ (resp. convex primal/concave dual function), DSGDA can find a game-stationary point with an iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2\max\{2\theta,1\}})$ (resp. $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$). These match the best results for single-loop algorithms that solve nonconvex-concave or convex-nonconcave minimax problems, or problems satisfying the rather restrictive one-sided Polyak-\L{}ojasiewicz condition. Our work demonstrates, for the first time, the possibility of having a simple and unified single-loop algorithm for solving nonconvex-nonconcave, nonconvex-concave, and convex-nonconcave minimax problems.
Parameter inference for ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is of fundamental importance in many scientific applications. While ODE solutions are typically approximated by deterministic algorithms, new research on probabilistic solvers indicates that they produce more reliable parameter estimates by better accounting for numerical errors. However, many ODE systems are highly sensitive to their parameter values. This produces deep local minima in the likelihood function -- a problem which existing probabilistic solvers have yet to resolve. Here, we show that a Bayesian filtering paradigm for probabilistic ODE solution can dramatically reduce sensitivity to parameters by learning from the noisy ODE observations in a data-adaptive manner. Our method is applicable to ODEs with partially unobserved components and with arbitrary non-Gaussian noise. Several examples demonstrate that it is more accurate than existing probabilistic ODE solvers, and even in some cases than the exact ODE likelihood.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.