We study the problem of estimating an unknown parameter in a distributed and online manner. Existing work on distributed online learning typically either focuses on asymptotic analysis, or provides bounds on regret. However, these results may not directly translate into bounds on the error of the learned model after a finite number of time-steps. In this paper, we propose a distributed online estimation algorithm which enables each agent in a network to improve its estimation accuracy by communicating with neighbors. We provide non-asymptotic bounds on the estimation error, leveraging the statistical properties of the underlying model. Our analysis demonstrates a trade-off between estimation error and communication costs. Further, our analysis allows us to determine a time at which the communication can be stopped (due to the costs associated with communications), while meeting a desired estimation accuracy. We also provide a numerical example to validate our results.
We consider local kernel metric learning for off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic policies in contextual bandits with continuous action spaces. Our work is motivated by practical scenarios where the target policy needs to be deterministic due to domain requirements, such as prescription of treatment dosage and duration in medicine. Although importance sampling (IS) provides a basic principle for OPE, it is ill-posed for the deterministic target policy with continuous actions. Our main idea is to relax the target policy and pose the problem as kernel-based estimation, where we learn the kernel metric in order to minimize the overall mean squared error (MSE). We present an analytic solution for the optimal metric, based on the analysis of bias and variance. Whereas prior work has been limited to scalar action spaces or kernel bandwidth selection, our work takes a step further being capable of vector action spaces and metric optimization. We show that our estimator is consistent, and significantly reduces the MSE compared to baseline OPE methods through experiments on various domains.
Domain adaptation arises as an important problem in statistical learning theory when the data-generating processes differ between training and test samples, respectively called source and target domains. Recent theoretical advances show that the success of domain adaptation algorithms heavily relies on their ability to minimize the divergence between the probability distributions of the source and target domains. However, minimizing this divergence cannot be done independently of the minimization of other key ingredients such as the source risk or the combined error of the ideal joint hypothesis. The trade-off between these terms is often ensured by algorithmic solutions that remain implicit and not directly reflected by the theoretical guarantees. To get to the bottom of this issue, we propose in this paper a new theoretical framework for domain adaptation through hierarchical optimal transport. This framework provides more explicit generalization bounds and allows us to consider the natural hierarchical organization of samples in both domains into classes or clusters. Additionally, we provide a new divergence measure between the source and target domains called Hierarchical Wasserstein distance that indicates under mild assumptions, which structures have to be aligned to lead to a successful adaptation.
In the modern paradigm of federated learning, a large number of users are involved in a global learning task, in a collaborative way. They alternate local computations and two-way communication with a distant orchestrating server. Communication, which can be slow and costly, is the main bottleneck in this setting. To reduce the communication load and therefore accelerate distributed gradient descent, two strategies are popular: 1) communicate less frequently; that is, perform several iterations of local computations between the communication rounds; and 2) communicate compressed information instead of full-dimensional vectors. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm for distributed optimization and federated learning, which harnesses these two strategies jointly and converges linearly to an exact solution, with a doubly accelerated rate: our algorithm benefits from the two acceleration mechanisms provided by local training and compression, namely a better dependency on the condition number of the functions and on the dimension of the model, respectively.
In this paper we discuss an application of Stochastic Approximation to statistical estimation of high-dimensional sparse parameters. The proposed solution reduces to resolving a penalized stochastic optimization problem on each stage of a multistage algorithm; each problem being solved to a prescribed accuracy by the non-Euclidean Composite Stochastic Mirror Descent (CSMD) algorithm. Assuming that the problem objective is smooth and quadratically minorated and stochastic perturbations are sub-Gaussian, our analysis prescribes the method parameters which ensure fast convergence of the estimation error (the radius of a confidence ball of a given norm around the approximate solution). This convergence is linear during the first "preliminary" phase of the routine and is sublinear during the second "asymptotic" phase. We consider an application of the proposed approach to sparse Generalized Linear Regression problem. In this setting, we show that the proposed algorithm attains the optimal convergence of the estimation error under weak assumptions on the regressor distribution. We also present a numerical study illustrating the performance of the algorithm on high-dimensional simulation data.
Bayesian optimisation (BO) algorithms have shown remarkable success in applications involving expensive black-box functions. Traditionally BO has been set as a sequential decision-making process which estimates the utility of query points via an acquisition function and a prior over functions, such as a Gaussian process. Recently, however, a reformulation of BO via density-ratio estimation (BORE) allowed reinterpreting the acquisition function as a probabilistic binary classifier, removing the need for an explicit prior over functions and increasing scalability. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of BORE's regret and an extension of the algorithm with improved uncertainty estimates. We also show that BORE can be naturally extended to a batch optimisation setting by recasting the problem as approximate Bayesian inference. The resulting algorithms come equipped with theoretical performance guarantees and are assessed against other batch and sequential BO baselines in a series of experiments.
We study a non standard mixed formulation of the Poisson problem, sometimes known as dual mixed formulation. For reasons related to the equilibration of the flux, we use finite elements that are conforming in H(div) for the approximation of the gradients, even if the formulation would allow for discontinuous finite elements. The scheme is not uniformly inf-sup stable, but we can show existence and uniqueness of the solution, as well as optimal error estimates for the gradient variable when suitable regularity assumptions are made. Several additional remarks complete the paper, shedding some light on the sources of instability for mixed formulations.
The paper proposes a decoupled numerical scheme of the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations under temporal gauge. For the order parameter and the magnetic potential, the discrete scheme adopts the second type Ned${\rm \acute{e}}$lec element and the linear element for spatial discretization, respectively, and a fully linearized backward Euler method and the first order exponential time differencing method for time discretization, respectively. The maximum bound principle of the order parameter and the energy dissipation law in the discrete sense are proved for this finite element-based scheme. This allows the application of the adaptive time stepping method which can significantly speed up long-time simulations compared to existing numerical schemes, especially for superconductors with complicated shapes. The error estimate is rigorously established in the fully discrete sense. Numerical examples verify the theoretical results of the proposed scheme and demonstrate the vortex motions of superconductors in an external magnetic field.
Motivated by applications in cloud computing spot markets and selling banner ads on popular websites, we study the online resource allocation problem with "costly buyback". To model this problem, we consider the classic edge-weighted fractional online matching problem with a tweak, where the decision maker can recall (i.e., buyback) any fraction of an offline resource that is pre-allocated to an earlier online vertex; however, by doing so not only the decision maker loses the previously allocated reward (which equates the edge-weight), it also has to pay a non-negative constant factor $f$ of this edge-weight as an extra penalty. Parameterizing the problem by the buyback factor $f$, our main result is obtaining optimal competitive algorithms for all possible values of $f$ through a novel primal-dual family of algorithms. We establish the optimality of our results by obtaining separate lower-bounds for each of small and large buyback factor regimes, and showing how our primal-dual algorithm exactly matches this lower-bound by appropriately tuning a parameter as a function of $f$. We further study lower and upper bounds on the competitive ratio in variants of this model, e.g., single-resource with different demand sizes, or matching with deterministic integral allocations. We show how algorithms in the our family of primal-dual algorithms can obtain the exact optimal competitive ratio in all of these variants -- which in turn demonstrates the power of our algorithmic framework for online resource allocations with costly buyback.
Variational Bayes methods are a scalable estimation approach for many complex state space models. However, existing methods exhibit a trade-off between accurate estimation and computational efficiency. This paper proposes a variational approximation that mitigates this trade-off. This approximation is based on importance densities that have been proposed in the context of efficient importance sampling. By directly conditioning on the observed data, the proposed method produces an accurate approximation to the exact posterior distribution. Because the steps required for its calibration are computationally efficient, the approach is faster than existing variational Bayes methods. The proposed method can be applied to any state space model that has a closed-form measurement density function and a state transition distribution that belongs to the exponential family of distributions. We illustrate the method in numerical experiments with stochastic volatility models and a macroeconomic empirical application using a high-dimensional state space model.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.