This paper explores formalizing Geometric (or Clifford) algebras into the Lean 3 theorem prover, building upon the substantial body of work that is the Lean mathematics library, mathlib. As we use Lean source code to demonstrate many of our ideas, we include a brief introduction to the Lean language targeted at a reader with no prior experience with Lean or theorem provers in general. We formalize the multivectors as the quotient of the tensor algebra by a suitable relation, which provides the ring structure automatically, then go on to establish the universal property of the Clifford algebra. We show that this is quite different to the approach taken by existing formalizations of Geometric algebra in other theorem provers; most notably, our approach does not require a choice of basis. We go on to show how operations and structure such as involutions, versors, and the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-grading can be defined using the universal property alone, and how to recover an induction principle from the universal property suitable for proving statements about these definitions. We outline the steps needed to formalize the wedge product and $\mathbb{N}$-grading, and some of the gaps in mathlib that currently make this challenging.
Since the seminal works of Strassen and Valiant it has been a central theme in algebraic complexity theory to understand the relative complexity of algebraic problems, that is, to understand which algebraic problems (be it bilinear maps like matrix multiplication in Strassen's work, or the determinant and permanent polynomials in Valiant's) can be reduced to each other (under the appropriate notion of reduction). In this paper we determine precisely how many independent scalar multiplications can be reduced to a given bilinear map (this number is called the subrank, and extends the concept of matrix diagonalization to tensors), for essentially all (i.e. generic) bilinear maps. Namely, we prove for a generic bilinear map $T : V \times V \to V$ where $\dim(V) = n$ that $\theta(\sqrt{n})$ independent scalar multiplications can be reduced to $T$. Our result significantly improves on the previous upper bound from the work of Strassen (1991) and B\"urgisser (1990) which was $n^{2/3 + o(1)}$. Our full result is much more general and applies not only to bilinear maps and 3-tensors but also to $k$-tensors, for which we find that the generic subrank is $\theta(n^{1/(k-1)})$. Moreover, as an application we prove that the subrank is not additive under the direct sum. The subrank plays a central role in several areas of complexity theory (matrix multiplication algorithms, barrier results) and combinatorics (e.g., the cap set problem and sunflower problem). As a consequence of our result we obtain several large separations between the subrank and tensor methods that have received much interest recently, notably the slice rank (Tao, 2016), analytic rank (Gowers--Wolf, 2011; Lovett, 2018; Bhrushundi--Harsha--Hatami--Kopparty--Kumar, 2020), geometric rank (Kopparty--Moshkovitz--Zuiddam, 2020), and G-stable rank (Derksen, 2020).
As automated decision-making solutions are increasingly applied to all aspects of everyday life, capabilities to generate meaningful explanations for a variety of stakeholders (i.e., decision-makers, recipients of decisions, auditors, regulators...) become crucial. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of explanations that was developed as part of a holistic 'Explainability-by-Design' approach for the purposes of the project PLEAD. The taxonomy was built with a view to produce explanations for a wide range of requirements stemming from a variety of regulatory frameworks or policies set at the organizational level either to translate high-level compliance requirements or to meet business needs. The taxonomy comprises nine dimensions. It is used as a stand-alone classifier of explanations conceived as detective controls, in order to aid supportive automated compliance strategies. A machinereadable format of the taxonomy is provided in the form of a light ontology and the benefits of starting the Explainability-by-Design journey with such a taxonomy are demonstrated through a series of examples.
Factorization of matrices where the rank of the two factors diverges linearly with their sizes has many applications in diverse areas such as unsupervised representation learning, dictionary learning or sparse coding. We consider a setting where the two factors are generated from known component-wise independent prior distributions, and the statistician observes a (possibly noisy) component-wise function of their matrix product. In the limit where the dimensions of the matrices tend to infinity, but their ratios remain fixed, we expect to be able to derive closed form expressions for the optimal mean squared error on the estimation of the two factors. However, this remains a very involved mathematical and algorithmic problem. A related, but simpler, problem is extensive-rank matrix denoising, where one aims to reconstruct a matrix with extensive but usually small rank from noisy measurements. In this paper, we approach both these problems using high-temperature expansions at fixed order parameters. This allows to clarify how previous attempts at solving these problems failed at finding an asymptotically exact solution. We provide a systematic way to derive the corrections to these existing approximations, taking into account the structure of correlations particular to the problem. Finally, we illustrate our approach in detail on the case of extensive-rank matrix denoising. We compare our results with known optimal rotationally-invariant estimators, and show how exact asymptotic calculations of the minimal error can be performed using extensive-rank matrix integrals.
Many deep reinforcement learning algorithms rely on simple forms of exploration, such as the additive action-noise often used in continuous control domains. Typically, the scaling factor of this action noise is chosen as a hyper-parameter and kept constant during training. In this paper, we analyze how the learned policy is impacted by the noise type, scale, and reducing of the scaling factor over time. We consider the two most prominent types of action-noise: Gaussian and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise, and perform a vast experimental campaign by systematically varying the noise type and scale parameter, and by measuring variables of interest like the expected return of the policy and the state space coverage during exploration. For the latter, we propose a novel state-space coverage measure $\operatorname{X}_{\mathcal{U}\text{rel}}$ that is more robust to boundary artifacts than previously proposed measures. Larger noise scales generally increase state space coverage. However, we found that increasing the space coverage using a larger noise scale is often not beneficial. On the contrary, reducing the noise-scale over the training process reduces the variance and generally improves the learning performance. We conclude that the best noise-type and scale are environment dependent, and based on our observations, derive heuristic rules for guiding the choice of the action noise as a starting point for further optimization.
Estimation of a conditional mean (linking a set of features to an outcome of interest) is a fundamental statistical task. While there is an appeal to flexible nonparametric procedures, effective estimation in many classical nonparametric function spaces (e.g., multivariate Sobolev spaces) can be prohibitively difficult -- both statistically and computationally -- especially when the number of features is large. In this paper, we present (penalized) sieve estimators for regression in nonparametric tensor product spaces: These spaces are more amenable to multivariate regression, and allow us to, in-part, avoid the curse of dimensionality. Our estimators can be easily applied to multivariate nonparametric problems and have appealing statistical and computational properties. Moreover, they can effectively leverage additional structures such as feature sparsity. In this manuscript, we give theoretical guarantees, indicating that the predictive performance of our estimators scale favorably in dimension. In addition, we also present numerical examples to compare the finite-sample performance of the proposed estimators with several popular machine learning methods.
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
We describe the new field of mathematical analysis of deep learning. This field emerged around a list of research questions that were not answered within the classical framework of learning theory. These questions concern: the outstanding generalization power of overparametrized neural networks, the role of depth in deep architectures, the apparent absence of the curse of dimensionality, the surprisingly successful optimization performance despite the non-convexity of the problem, understanding what features are learned, why deep architectures perform exceptionally well in physical problems, and which fine aspects of an architecture affect the behavior of a learning task in which way. We present an overview of modern approaches that yield partial answers to these questions. For selected approaches, we describe the main ideas in more detail.
The last decade has witnessed an experimental revolution in data science and machine learning, epitomised by deep learning methods. Indeed, many high-dimensional learning tasks previously thought to be beyond reach -- such as computer vision, playing Go, or protein folding -- are in fact feasible with appropriate computational scale. Remarkably, the essence of deep learning is built from two simple algorithmic principles: first, the notion of representation or feature learning, whereby adapted, often hierarchical, features capture the appropriate notion of regularity for each task, and second, learning by local gradient-descent type methods, typically implemented as backpropagation. While learning generic functions in high dimensions is a cursed estimation problem, most tasks of interest are not generic, and come with essential pre-defined regularities arising from the underlying low-dimensionality and structure of the physical world. This text is concerned with exposing these regularities through unified geometric principles that can be applied throughout a wide spectrum of applications. Such a 'geometric unification' endeavour, in the spirit of Felix Klein's Erlangen Program, serves a dual purpose: on one hand, it provides a common mathematical framework to study the most successful neural network architectures, such as CNNs, RNNs, GNNs, and Transformers. On the other hand, it gives a constructive procedure to incorporate prior physical knowledge into neural architectures and provide principled way to build future architectures yet to be invented.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.