In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for both stochastic convex and non-convex optimization with sub-Gaussian noise. In previous works for convex optimization, either the convergence is only in expectation or the bound depends on the diameter of the domain. Instead, we show high probability convergence with bounds depending on the initial distance to the optimal solution. The algorithms use step sizes analogous to the standard settings and are universal to Lipschitz functions, smooth functions, and their linear combinations. This method can be applied to the non-convex case. We demonstrate an $O((1+\sigma^{2}\log(1/\delta))/T+\sigma/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate when the number of iterations $T$ is known and an $O((1+\sigma^{2}\log(T/\delta))/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate when $T$ is unknown for SGD, where $1-\delta$ is the desired success probability. These bounds improve over existing bounds in the literature. Additionally, we demonstrate that our techniques can be used to obtain high probability bound for AdaGrad-Norm (Ward et al., 2019) that removes the bounded gradients assumption from previous works. Furthermore, our technique for AdaGrad-Norm extends to the standard per-coordinate AdaGrad algorithm (Duchi et al., 2011), providing the first noise-adapted high probability convergence for AdaGrad.
Existing analysis of AdaGrad and other adaptive methods for smooth convex optimization is typically for functions with bounded domain diameter. In unconstrained problems, previous works guarantee an asymptotic convergence rate without an explicit constant factor that holds true for the entire function class. Furthermore, in the stochastic setting, only a modified version of AdaGrad, different from the one commonly used in practice, in which the latest gradient is not used to update the stepsize, has been analyzed. Our paper aims at bridging these gaps and developing a deeper understanding of AdaGrad and its variants in the standard setting of smooth convex functions as well as the more general setting of quasar convex functions. First, we demonstrate new techniques to explicitly bound the convergence rate of the vanilla AdaGrad for unconstrained problems in both deterministic and stochastic settings. Second, we propose a variant of AdaGrad for which we can show the convergence of the last iterate, instead of the average iterate. Finally, we give new accelerated adaptive algorithms and their convergence guarantee in the deterministic setting with explicit dependency on the problem parameters, improving upon the asymptotic rate shown in previous works.
We extend the global convergence result of Chatterjee \cite{chatterjee2022convergence} by considering the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for non-convex objective functions. With minimal additional assumptions that can be realized by finitely wide neural networks, we prove that if we initialize inside a local region where the \L{}ajasiewicz condition holds, with a positive probability, the stochastic gradient iterates converge to a global minimum inside this region. A key component of our proof is to ensure that the whole trajectories of SGD stay inside the local region with a positive probability. For that, we assume the SGD noise scales with the objective function, which is called machine learning noise and achievable in many real examples. Furthermore, we provide a negative argument to show why using the boundedness of noise with Robbins-Monro type step sizes is not enough to keep the key component valid.
We consider additive Schwarz methods for boundary value problems involving the $p$-Laplacian. While the existing theoretical estimates for the convergence rate of additive Schwarz methods for the $p$-Laplacian are sublinear, the actual convergence rate observed by numerical experiments is linear. In this paper, we bridge the gap between these theoretical and numerical results by analyzing the linear convergence rate of additive Schwarz methods for the $p$-Laplacian. In order to estimate the linear convergence rate of the methods, we present two essential components. Firstly, we present a new abstract convergence theory of additive Schwarz methods written in terms of a quasi-norm. This quasi-norm exhibits behavior similar to the Bregman distance of the convex energy functional associated to the problem. Secondly, we provide a quasi-norm version of the Poincar'{e}--Friedrichs inequality, which is essential for deriving a quasi-norm stable decomposition for a two-level domain decomposition setting.
Probabilistic variants of Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods have recently emerged for improving stability and computational performance of classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic Reduced Basis Method (RBM) for the approximation of a family of parameter-dependent functions. It relies on a probabilistic greedy algorithm with an error indicator that can be written as an expectation of some parameter-dependent random variable. Practical algorithms relying on Monte Carlo estimates of this error indicator are discussed. In particular, when using Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bandit algorithm, the resulting procedure is proven to be a weak greedy algorithm with high probability. Intended applications concern the approximation of a parameter-dependent family of functions for which we only have access to (noisy) pointwise evaluations. As a particular application, we consider the approximation of solution manifolds of linear parameter-dependent partial differential equations with a probabilistic interpretation through the Feynman-Kac formula.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
This PhD thesis contains several contributions to the field of statistical causal modeling. Statistical causal models are statistical models embedded with causal assumptions that allow for the inference and reasoning about the behavior of stochastic systems affected by external manipulation (interventions). This thesis contributes to the research areas concerning the estimation of causal effects, causal structure learning, and distributionally robust (out-of-distribution generalizing) prediction methods. We present novel and consistent linear and non-linear causal effects estimators in instrumental variable settings that employ data-dependent mean squared prediction error regularization. Our proposed estimators show, in certain settings, mean squared error improvements compared to both canonical and state-of-the-art estimators. We show that recent research on distributionally robust prediction methods has connections to well-studied estimators from econometrics. This connection leads us to prove that general K-class estimators possess distributional robustness properties. We, furthermore, propose a general framework for distributional robustness with respect to intervention-induced distributions. In this framework, we derive sufficient conditions for the identifiability of distributionally robust prediction methods and present impossibility results that show the necessity of several of these conditions. We present a new structure learning method applicable in additive noise models with directed trees as causal graphs. We prove consistency in a vanishing identifiability setup and provide a method for testing substructure hypotheses with asymptotic family-wise error control that remains valid post-selection. Finally, we present heuristic ideas for learning summary graphs of nonlinear time-series models.
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today's Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach of recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories, spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data, and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions of this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their codes repositories in //github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems.
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the local geometry and update iteratively. Even though solving non-convex functions is NP-hard in the worst case, the optimization quality in practice is often not an issue -- optimizers are largely believed to find approximate global minima. Researchers hypothesize a unified explanation for this intriguing phenomenon: most of the local minima of the practically-used objectives are approximately global minima. We rigorously formalize it for concrete instances of machine learning problems.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.