Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques have become increasingly used in various fields for decision-making processes. However, a challenge that often arises is the trade-off between both the computational efficiency of the decision-making process and the ability of the learned agent to solve a particular task. This is particularly critical in real-time settings such as video games where the agent needs to take relevant decisions at a very high frequency, with a very limited inference time. In this work, we propose a generic offline learning approach where the computation cost of the input features is taken into account. We derive the Budgeted Decision Transformer as an extension of the Decision Transformer that incorporates cost constraints to limit its cost at inference. As a result, the model can dynamically choose the best input features at each timestep. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several tasks, including D4RL benchmarks and complex 3D environments similar to those found in video games, and show that it can achieve similar performance while using significantly fewer computational resources compared to classical approaches.
It is important to retrain a machine learning (ML) model in order to maintain its performance as the data changes over time. However, this can be costly as it usually requires processing the entire dataset again. This creates a trade-off between retraining too frequently, which leads to unnecessary computing costs, and not retraining often enough, which results in stale and inaccurate ML models. To address this challenge, we propose ML systems that make automated and cost-effective decisions about when to retrain an ML model. We aim to optimize the trade-off by considering the costs associated with each decision. Our research focuses on determining whether to retrain or keep an existing ML model based on various factors, including the data, the model, and the predictive queries answered by the model. Our main contribution is a Cost-Aware Retraining Algorithm called Cara, which optimizes the trade-off over streams of data and queries. To evaluate the performance of Cara, we analyzed synthetic datasets and demonstrated that Cara can adapt to different data drifts and retraining costs while performing similarly to an optimal retrospective algorithm. We also conducted experiments with real-world datasets and showed that Cara achieves better accuracy than drift detection baselines while making fewer retraining decisions, ultimately resulting in lower total costs.
In recent years, there has been significant interest in the development of machine learning-based optimization proxies for AC Optimal Power Flow (AC-OPF). Although significant progress has been achieved in predicting high-quality primal solutions, no existing learning-based approach can provide valid dual bounds for AC-OPF. This paper addresses this gap by training optimization proxies for a convex relaxation of AC-OPF. Namely, the paper considers a second-order cone (SOC) relaxation of ACOPF, and proposes a novel dual architecture that embeds a fast, differentiable (dual) feasibility recovery, thus providing valid dual bounds. The paper combines this new architecture with a self-supervised learning scheme, which alleviates the need for costly training data generation. Extensive numerical experiments on medium- and large-scale power grids demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed methodology.
In the past few years, there has been an explosive surge in the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to address combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, especially mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs). Despite the achievements, the limited availability of real-world instances often leads to sub-optimal decisions and biased solver assessments, which motivates a suite of synthetic MILP instance generation techniques. However, existing methods either rely heavily on expert-designed formulations or struggle to capture the rich features of real-world instances. To tackle this problem, we propose G2MILP, which to the best of our knowledge is the first deep generative framework for MILP instances. Specifically, G2MILP represents MILP instances as bipartite graphs, and applies a masked variational autoencoder to iteratively corrupt and replace parts of the original graphs to generate new ones. The appealing feature of G2MILP is that it can learn to generate novel and realistic MILP instances without prior expert-designed formulations, while preserving the structures and computational hardness of real-world datasets, simultaneously. Thus the generated instances can facilitate downstream tasks for enhancing MILP solvers under limited data availability. We design a suite of benchmarks to evaluate the quality of the generated MILP instances. Experiments demonstrate that our method can produce instances that closely resemble real-world datasets in terms of both structures and computational hardness.
The past decade has seen vast progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) on the back of algorithms manually designed by human researchers. Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to meta-learn update rules, with the hope of discovering algorithms that can perform well on a wide range of RL tasks. Despite impressive initial results from algorithms such as Learned Policy Gradient (LPG), there remains a generalization gap when these algorithms are applied to unseen environments. In this work, we examine how characteristics of the meta-training distribution impact the generalization performance of these algorithms. Motivated by this analysis and building on ideas from Unsupervised Environment Design (UED), we propose a novel approach for automatically generating curricula to maximize the regret of a meta-learned optimizer, in addition to a novel approximation of regret, which we name algorithmic regret (AR). The result is our method, General RL Optimizers Obtained Via Environment Design (GROOVE). In a series of experiments, we show that GROOVE achieves superior generalization to LPG, and evaluate AR against baseline metrics from UED, identifying it as a critical component of environment design in this setting. We believe this approach is a step towards the discovery of truly general RL algorithms, capable of solving a wide range of real-world environments.
Branching and merging are common practices in collaborative software development, increasing developer's productivity. Despite such benefits, developers need to merge software and resolve merge conflicts. While modern merge techniques can resolve textual conflicts automatically, they fail when the conflict arises at the semantic level. Although semantic merge tools have been proposed, they are usually based on heavyweight static analyses or need explicit specifications of program behavior. In this work, we take a different route and propose SAM (SemAntic Merge), a semantic merge tool based on the automated generation of unit tests that are used as partial specifications. To evaluate SAM's feasibility for detecting conflicts, we perform an empirical study analyzing more than 80 pairs of changes integrated into common class elements from 51 merge scenarios. Furthermore, we also assess how the four unit-test generation tools used by SAM contribute to conflict identification. We propose and assess the adoption of Testability Transformations and Serialization. Our results show that SAM best performs when combining only the tests generated by Differential EvoSuite and EvoSuite and using the proposed Testability Transformations (nine detected conflicts out of 28). These results reinforce previous findings about the potential of using test-case generation to detect test conflicts.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
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.