This paper proposes a novel framework for identifying an agent's risk aversion using interactive questioning. Our study is conducted in two scenarios: a one-period case and an infinite horizon case. In the one-period case, we assume that the agent's risk aversion is characterized by a cost function of the state and a distortion risk measure. In the infinite horizon case, we model risk aversion with an additional component, a discount factor. Assuming the access to a finite set of candidates containing the agent's true risk aversion, we show that asking the agent to demonstrate her optimal policies in various environment, which may depend on their previous answers, is an effective means of identifying the agent's risk aversion. Specifically, we prove that the agent's risk aversion can be identified as the number of questions tends to infinity, and the questions are randomly designed. We also develop an algorithm for designing optimal questions and provide empirical evidence that our method learns risk aversion significantly faster than randomly designed questions in simulations. Our framework has important applications in robo-advising and provides a new approach for identifying an agent's risk preferences.
Machine learning approaches relying on such criteria as adversarial robustness or multi-agent settings have raised the need for solving game-theoretic equilibrium problems. Of particular relevance to these applications are methods targeting finite-sum structure, which generically arises in empirical variants of learning problems in these contexts. Further, methods with computable approximation errors are highly desirable, as they provide verifiable exit criteria. Motivated by these applications, we study finite-sum monotone inclusion problems, which model broad classes of equilibrium problems. Our main contributions are variants of the classical Halpern iteration that employ variance reduction to obtain improved complexity guarantees in which $n$ component operators in the finite sum are ``on average'' either cocoercive or Lipschitz continuous and monotone, with parameter $L$. The resulting oracle complexity of our methods, which provide guarantees for the last iterate and for a (computable) operator norm residual, is $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}( n + \sqrt{n}L\varepsilon^{-1})$, which improves upon existing methods by a factor up to $\sqrt{n}$. This constitutes the first variance reduction-type result for general finite-sum monotone inclusions and for more specific problems such as convex-concave optimization when operator norm residual is the optimality measure. We further argue that, up to poly-logarithmic factors, this complexity is unimprovable in the monotone Lipschitz setting; i.e., the provided result is near-optimal.
This work studies the problem of learning unbiased algorithms from biased feedback for recommendation. We address this problem from a novel distribution shift perspective. Recent works in unbiased recommendation have advanced the state-of-the-art with various techniques such as re-weighting, multi-task learning, and meta-learning. Despite their empirical successes, most of them lack theoretical guarantees, forming non-negligible gaps between theories and recent algorithms. In this paper, we propose a theoretical understanding of why existing unbiased learning objectives work for unbiased recommendation. We establish a close connection between unbiased recommendation and distribution shift, which shows that existing unbiased learning objectives implicitly align biased training and unbiased test distributions. Built upon this connection, we develop two generalization bounds for existing unbiased learning methods and analyze their learning behavior. Besides, as a result of the distribution shift, we further propose a principled framework, Adversarial Self-Training (AST), for unbiased recommendation. Extensive experiments on real-world and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AST.
This paper presents a novel approach to generating the 3D motion of a human interacting with a target object, with a focus on solving the challenge of synthesizing long-range and diverse motions, which could not be fulfilled by existing auto-regressive models or path planning-based methods. We propose a hierarchical generation framework to solve this challenge. Specifically, our framework first generates a set of milestones and then synthesizes the motion along them. Therefore, the long-range motion generation could be reduced to synthesizing several short motion sequences guided by milestones. The experiments on the NSM, COUCH, and SAMP datasets show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin in both quality and diversity. The source code is available on our project page //zju3dv.github.io/hghoi.
Autonomous agents operating in real-world scenarios frequently encounter uncertainty and make decisions based on incomplete information. Planning under uncertainty can be mathematically formalized using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, finding an optimal plan for POMDPs can be computationally expensive and is feasible only for small tasks. In recent years, approximate algorithms, such as tree search and sample-based methodologies, have emerged as state-of-the-art POMDP solvers for larger problems. Despite their effectiveness, these algorithms offer only probabilistic and often asymptotic guarantees toward the optimal solution due to their dependence on sampling. To address these limitations, we derive a deterministic relationship between a simplified solution that is easier to obtain and the theoretically optimal one. First, we derive bounds for selecting a subset of the observations to branch from while computing a complete belief at each posterior node. Then, since a complete belief update may be computationally demanding, we extend the bounds to support reduction of both the state and the observation spaces. We demonstrate how our guarantees can be integrated with existing state-of-the-art solvers that sample a subset of states and observations. As a result, the returned solution holds deterministic bounds relative to the optimal policy. Lastly, we substantiate our findings with supporting experimental results.
We study the problem of enumerating the satisfying assignments for circuit classes from knowledge compilation, where assignments are ranked in a specific order. In particular, we show how this problem can be used to efficiently perform ranked enumeration of the answers to MSO queries over trees, with the order being given by a ranking function satisfying a subset-monotonicity property. Assuming that the number of variables is constant, we show that we can enumerate the satisfying assignments in ranked order for so-called multivalued circuits that are smooth, decomposable, and in negation normal form (smooth multivalued DNNF). There is no preprocessing and the enumeration delay is linear in the size of the circuit times the number of values, plus a logarithmic term in the number of assignments produced so far. If we further assume that the circuit is deterministic (smooth multivalued d-DNNF), we can achieve linear-time preprocessing in the circuit, and the delay only features the logarithmic term.
This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for recommendation, which enables maximizing cumulative user rewards without online exploration. Specifically, we first introduce a probabilistic generative model for interactive recommendation, and then propose an effective inference algorithm for discrete and stochastic policy learning based on logged feedbacks. In order to perform offline learning more effectively, we propose five approaches to minimize the distribution mismatch between the logging policy and recommendation policy: support constraints, supervised regularization, policy constraints, dual constraints and reward extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments on two public real-world datasets, demonstrating that the proposed methods can achieve superior performance over existing supervised learning and reinforcement learning methods for recommendation.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Triple extraction is an essential task in information extraction for natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we revisit the end-to-end triple extraction task for sequence generation. Since generative triple extraction may struggle to capture long-term dependencies and generate unfaithful triples, we introduce a novel model, contrastive triple extraction with a generative transformer. Specifically, we introduce a single shared transformer module for encoder-decoder-based generation. To generate faithful results, we propose a novel triplet contrastive training object. Moreover, we introduce two mechanisms to further improve model performance (i.e., batch-wise dynamic attention-masking and triple-wise calibration). Experimental results on three datasets (i.e., NYT, WebNLG, and MIE) show that our approach achieves better performance than that of baselines.
We propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.