We study the optimal variance reduction solutions for online controlled experiments by applying flexible machine learning tools to incorporate covariates that are independent from the treatment but have predictive power for the outcomes. Employing cross-fitting, we propose variance reduction procedures for both count metrics and ratio metrics in online experiments based on which the inference of the estimands are valid under mild convergence conditions. We also establish the asymptotic optimality of all these procedures under consistency condition of the machine learning estimators. In complement to the proposed nonlinear optimal procedure, a linear adjustment method for ratio metrics is also derived as a special case that is computationally efficient and can flexibly incorporate any pre-treatment covariates. Comprehensive simulation studies are performed and practical suggestions are given. When tested on real online experiment data from LinkedIn, the proposed optimal procedure for ratio metrics can reduce up to $80\%$ of variance compared to the standard difference-in-mean estimator and also further reduce up to $30\%$ of variance compared to the CUPED approach by going beyond linearity and incorporating a large number of extra covariates.
We propose nonparametric estimators for the second-order central moments of spherical random fields within a functional data context. We consider a measurement framework where each field among an identically distributed collection of spherical random fields is sampled at a few random directions, possibly subject to measurement error. The collection of fields could be i.i.d. or serially dependent. Though similar setups have already been explored for random functions defined on the unit interval, the nonparametric estimators proposed in the literature often rely on local polynomials, which do not readily extend to the (product) spherical setting. We therefore formulate our estimation procedure as a variational problem involving a generalized Tikhonov regularization term. The latter favours smooth covariance/autocovariance functions, where the smoothness is specified by means of suitable Sobolev-like pseudo-differential operators. Using the machinery of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, we establish representer theorems that fully characterizing the form of our estimators. We determine their uniform rates of convergence as the number of fields diverges, both for the dense (increasing number of spatial samples) and sparse (bounded number of spatial samples) regimes. We moreover validate and demonstrate the practical feasibility of our estimation procedure in a simulation setting, assuming a fixed number of samples per field. Our numerical estimation procedure leverages the sparsity and second-order Kronecker structure of our setup to reduce the computational and memory requirements by approximately three orders of magnitude compared to a naive implementation would require.
Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular reinforcement learning (RL) methods where a baseline is often applied to reduce the variance of gradient estimates. In multi-agent RL (MARL), although the PG theorem can be naturally extended, the effectiveness of multi-agent PG (MAPG) methods degrades as the variance of gradient estimates increases rapidly with the number of agents. In this paper, we offer a rigorous analysis of MAPG methods by, firstly, quantifying the contributions of the number of agents and agents' explorations to the variance of MAPG estimators. Based on this analysis, we derive the optimal baseline (OB) that achieves the minimal variance. In comparison to the OB, we measure the excess variance of existing MARL algorithms such as vanilla MAPG and COMA. Considering using deep neural networks, we also propose a surrogate version of OB, which can be seamlessly plugged into any existing PG methods in MARL. On benchmarks of Multi-Agent MuJoCo and StarCraft challenges, our OB technique effectively stabilises training and improves the performance of multi-agent PPO and COMA algorithms by a significant margin.
We study the problem of learning in the stochastic shortest path (SSP) setting, where an agent seeks to minimize the expected cost accumulated before reaching a goal state. We design a novel model-based algorithm EB-SSP that carefully skews the empirical transitions and perturbs the empirical costs with an exploration bonus to guarantee both optimism and convergence of the associated value iteration scheme. We prove that EB-SSP achieves the minimax regret rate $\widetilde{O}(B_{\star} \sqrt{S A K})$, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions and $B_{\star}$ bounds the expected cumulative cost of the optimal policy from any state, thus closing the gap with the lower bound. Interestingly, EB-SSP obtains this result while being parameter-free, i.e., it does not require any prior knowledge of $B_{\star}$, nor of $T_{\star}$ which bounds the expected time-to-goal of the optimal policy from any state. Furthermore, we illustrate various cases (e.g., positive costs, or general costs when an order-accurate estimate of $T_{\star}$ is available) where the regret only contains a logarithmic dependence on $T_{\star}$, thus yielding the first horizon-free regret bound beyond the finite-horizon MDP setting.
Leveraging biased click data for optimizing learning to rank systems has been a popular approach in information retrieval. Because click data is often noisy and biased, a variety of methods have been proposed to construct unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) algorithms for the learning of unbiased ranking models. Among them, automatic unbiased learning to rank (AutoULTR) algorithms that jointly learn user bias models (i.e., propensity models) with unbiased rankers have received a lot of attention due to their superior performance and low deployment cost in practice. Despite their differences in theories and algorithm design, existing studies on ULTR usually use uni-variate ranking functions to score each document or result independently. On the other hand, recent advances in context-aware learning-to-rank models have shown that multivariate scoring functions, which read multiple documents together and predict their ranking scores jointly, are more powerful than uni-variate ranking functions in ranking tasks with human-annotated relevance labels. Whether such superior performance would hold in ULTR with noisy data, however, is mostly unknown. In this paper, we investigate existing multivariate scoring functions and AutoULTR algorithms in theory and prove that permutation invariance is a crucial factor that determines whether a context-aware learning-to-rank model could be applied to existing AutoULTR framework. Our experiments with synthetic clicks on two large-scale benchmark datasets show that AutoULTR models with permutation-invariant multivariate scoring functions significantly outperform those with uni-variate scoring functions and permutation-variant multivariate scoring functions.
UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a novel manifold learning technique for dimension reduction. UMAP is constructed from a theoretical framework based in Riemannian geometry and algebraic topology. The result is a practical scalable algorithm that applies to real world data. The UMAP algorithm is competitive with t-SNE for visualization quality, and arguably preserves more of the global structure with superior run time performance. Furthermore, UMAP has no computational restrictions on embedding dimension, making it viable as a general purpose dimension reduction technique for machine learning.
Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of reinforcement learning (RL) models in noisy settings. The sources of noises differ across scenarios. For instance, in practice, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise (e.g., when observed rewards are collected through sensors), and thus observed rewards may not be credible as a result. Also, in applications such as robotics, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm can be manipulated to produce arbitrary errors. In this paper, we consider noisy RL problems where observed rewards by RL agents are generated with a reward confusion matrix. We call such observed rewards as perturbed rewards. We develop an unbiased reward estimator aided robust RL framework that enables RL agents to learn in noisy environments while observing only perturbed rewards. Our framework draws upon approaches for supervised learning with noisy data. The core ideas of our solution include estimating a reward confusion matrix and defining a set of unbiased surrogate rewards. We prove the convergence and sample complexity of our approach. Extensive experiments on different DRL platforms show that policies based on our estimated surrogate reward can achieve higher expected rewards, and converge faster than existing baselines. For instance, the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm is able to obtain 67.5% and 46.7% improvements in average on five Atari games, when the error rates are 10% and 30% respectively.
This work considers the problem of provably optimal reinforcement learning for episodic finite horizon MDPs, i.e. how an agent learns to maximize his/her long term reward in an uncertain environment. The main contribution is in providing a novel algorithm --- Variance-reduced Upper Confidence Q-learning (vUCQ) --- which enjoys a regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{HSAT} + H^5SA)$, where the $T$ is the number of time steps the agent acts in the MDP, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, and $H$ is the (episodic) horizon time. This is the first regret bound that is both sub-linear in the model size and asymptotically optimal. The algorithm is sub-linear in that the time to achieve $\epsilon$-average regret for any constant $\epsilon$ is $O(SA)$, which is a number of samples that is far less than that required to learn any non-trivial estimate of the transition model (the transition model is specified by $O(S^2A)$ parameters). The importance of sub-linear algorithms is largely the motivation for algorithms such as $Q$-learning and other "model free" approaches. vUCQ algorithm also enjoys minimax optimal regret in the long run, matching the $\Omega(\sqrt{HSAT})$ lower bound. Variance-reduced Upper Confidence Q-learning (vUCQ) is a successive refinement method in which the algorithm reduces the variance in $Q$-value estimates and couples this estimation scheme with an upper confidence based algorithm. Technically, the coupling of both of these techniques is what leads to the algorithm enjoying both the sub-linear regret property and the asymptotically optimal regret.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach builds off of techniques for distributionally robust optimization and Owen's empirical likelihood, and we provide a number of finite-sample and asymptotic results characterizing the theoretical performance of the estimator. In particular, we show that our procedure comes with certificates of optimality, achieving (in some scenarios) faster rates of convergence than empirical risk minimization by virtue of automatically balancing bias and variance. We give corroborating empirical evidence showing that in practice, the estimator indeed trades between variance and absolute performance on a training sample, improving out-of-sample (test) performance over standard empirical risk minimization for a number of classification problems.
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it is possible to robustly estimate the mean and covariance with polynomial time algorithms that can tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions, independent of the dimension. However, the sample and time complexity of these algorithms is prohibitively large for high-dimensional applications. In this work, we address both of these issues by establishing sample complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic factors, as well as giving various refinements that allow the algorithms to tolerate a much larger fraction of corruptions. Finally, we show on both synthetic and real data that our algorithms have state-of-the-art performance and suddenly make high-dimensional robust estimation a realistic possibility.