As distributed learning applications such as Federated Learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Edge Computing grow, it is critical to address the shortcomings of such technologies from a theoretical perspective. As an abstraction, we consider decentralized learning over a network of communicating clients or nodes and tackle two major challenges: data heterogeneity and adversarial robustness. We propose a decentralized minimax optimization method that employs two important modules: local updates and gradient tracking. Minimax optimization is the key tool to enable adversarial training for ensuring robustness. Having local updates is essential in Federated Learning (FL) applications to mitigate the communication bottleneck, and utilizing gradient tracking is essential to proving convergence in the case of data heterogeneity. We analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm, Dec-FedTrack, in the case of nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization, and prove that it converges a stationary point. We also conduct numerical experiments to support our theoretical findings.
We present Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPO), an algorithm for reinforcement learning from human feedback. Our approach is minimalist in that it does not require training a reward model nor unstable adversarial training and is therefore rather simple to implement. Our approach is maximalist in that it provably handles non-Markovian, intransitive, and stochastic preferences while being robust to the compounding errors that plague offline approaches to sequential prediction. To achieve the preceding qualities, we build upon the concept of a Minimax Winner (MW), a notion of preference aggregation from the social choice theory literature that frames learning from preferences as a zero-sum game between two policies. By leveraging the symmetry of this game, we prove that rather than using the traditional technique of dueling two policies to compute the MW, we can simply have a single agent play against itself while maintaining strong convergence guarantees. Practically, this corresponds to sampling multiple trajectories from a policy, asking a preference or teacher model to compare them, and then using the proportion of wins as the reward for a particular trajectory. We demonstrate that on a suite of continuous control tasks, we are able to learn significantly more efficiently than reward-model based approaches while maintaining robustness to the intransitive and stochastic preferences that frequently occur in practice when aggregating human judgments.
Noise is a fundamental problem in learning theory with huge effects in the application of Machine Learning (ML) methods, due to real world data tendency to be noisy. Additionally, introduction of malicious noise can make ML methods fail critically, as is the case with adversarial attacks. Thus, finding and developing alternatives to improve robustness to noise is a fundamental problem in ML. In this paper, we propose a method to deal with noise: mitigating its effect through the use of data abstractions. The goal is to reduce the effect of noise over the model's performance through the loss of information produced by the abstraction. However, this information loss comes with a cost: it can result in an accuracy reduction due to the missing information. First, we explored multiple methodologies to create abstractions, using the training dataset, for the specific case of numerical data and binary classification tasks. We also tested how these abstractions can affect robustness to noise with several experiments that explore the robustness of an Artificial Neural Network to noise when trained using raw data \emph{vs} when trained using abstracted data. The results clearly show that using abstractions is a viable approach for developing noise robust ML methods.
Domain generalization (DG) is about training models that generalize well under domain shift. Previous research on DG has been conducted mostly in single-source or multi-source settings. In this paper, we consider a third, lesser-known setting where a training domain is endowed with a collection of pairs of examples that share the same semantic information. Such semantic sharing (SS) pairs can be created via data augmentation and then utilized for consistency regularization (CR). We present a theory showing CR is conducive to DG and propose a novel CR method called Logit Attribution Matching (LAM). We conduct experiments on five DG benchmarks and four pretrained models with SS pairs created by both generic and targeted data augmentation methods. LAM outperforms representative single/multi-source DG methods and various CR methods that leverage SS pairs. The code and data of this project are available at //github.com/Gaohan123/LAM
In most real-world reinforcement learning applications, state information is only partially observable, which breaks the Markov decision process assumption and leads to inferior performance for algorithms that conflate observations with state. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), on the other hand, provide a general framework that allows for partial observability to be accounted for in learning, exploration and planning, but presents significant computational and statistical challenges. To address these difficulties, we develop a representation-based perspective that leads to a coherent framework and tractable algorithmic approach for practical reinforcement learning from partial observations. We provide a theoretical analysis for justifying the statistical efficiency of the proposed algorithm, and also empirically demonstrate the proposed algorithm can surpass state-of-the-art performance with partial observations across various benchmarks, advancing reliable reinforcement learning towards more practical applications.
Recently, Conditional Neural Fields (NeFs) have emerged as a powerful modelling paradigm for PDEs, by learning solutions as flows in the latent space of the Conditional NeF. Although benefiting from favourable properties of NeFs such as grid-agnosticity and space-time-continuous dynamics modelling, this approach limits the ability to impose known constraints of the PDE on the solutions -- e.g. symmetries or boundary conditions -- in favour of modelling flexibility. Instead, we propose a space-time continuous NeF-based solving framework that - by preserving geometric information in the latent space - respects known symmetries of the PDE. We show that modelling solutions as flows of pointclouds over the group of interest $G$ improves generalization and data-efficiency. We validated that our framework readily generalizes to unseen spatial and temporal locations, as well as geometric transformations of the initial conditions - where other NeF-based PDE forecasting methods fail - and improve over baselines in a number of challenging geometries.
Mutual Coupling (MC) emerges as an inherent feature in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), particularly, when they are fabricated with sub-wavelength inter-element spacing. Hence, any physically-consistent model of the RIS operation needs to accurately describe MC-induced effects. In addition, the design of the ElectroMagnetic (EM) transmit/receive radiation patterns constitutes another critical factor for efficient RIS operation. The latter two factors lead naturally to the emergence of non-local RIS structures, whose operation can be effectively described via non-diagonal phase shift matrices. In this paper, we focus on jointly optimizing MC and the radiation patterns in multi-user MIMO communication systems assisted by non-local RISs, which are modeled via the scattering parameters. We particularly present a novel problem formulation for the joint optimization of MC, radiation patterns, and the active and passive beamforming in a physically-consistent manner, considering either reflective or transmissive RIS setups. Differently from the current approaches that design the former two parameters on the fly, we present an offline optimization method which is solved for both considered RIS functionalities. Our extensive simulation results, using both parametric and geometric channel models, showcase the validity of the proposed optimization framework over benchmark schemes, indicating that improved performance is achievable without the need for optimizing MC and the radiation patterns of the RIS on the fly, which can be rather cumbersome.
Neural operators learn mappings between function spaces, which is practical for learning solution operators of PDEs and other scientific modeling applications. Among them, the Fourier neural operator (FNO) is a popular architecture that performs global convolutions in the Fourier space. However, such global operations are often prone to over-smoothing and may fail to capture local details. In contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNN) can capture local features but are limited to training and inference at a single resolution. In this work, we present a principled approach to operator learning that can capture local features under two frameworks by learning differential operators and integral operators with locally supported kernels. Specifically, inspired by stencil methods, we prove that we obtain differential operators under an appropriate scaling of the kernel values of CNNs. To obtain local integral operators, we utilize suitable basis representations for the kernels based on discrete-continuous convolutions. Both these approaches preserve the properties of operator learning and, hence, the ability to predict at any resolution. Adding our layers to FNOs significantly improves their performance, reducing the relative L2-error by 34-72% in our experiments, which include a turbulent 2D Navier-Stokes and the spherical shallow water equations.
We consider the computational efficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) and Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods applied to partial differential equations with random coefficients. These arise, for example, in groundwater flow modelling, where a commonly used model for the unknown parameter is a random field. We make use of the circulant embedding procedure for sampling from the aforementioned coefficient. To improve the computational complexity of the MLMC estimator in the case of highly oscillatory random fields, we devise and implement a smoothing technique integrated into the circulant embedding method. This allows to choose the coarsest mesh on the first level of MLMC independently of the correlation length of the covariance function of the random field, leading to considerable savings in computational cost. We illustrate this with numerical experiments, where we see a saving of factor 5-10 in computational cost for accuracies of practical interest.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.