We study the problem of solving matrix games of the form $\max_{\mathbf{w}\in\mathcal{W}}\min_{\mathbf{p}\in\Delta}\mathbf{p}^{\top}A\mathbf{w}$, where $A$ is some matrix and $\Delta$ is the probability simplex. This problem encapsulates canonical tasks such as finding a linear separator and computing Nash equilibria in zero-sum games. However, perhaps surprisingly, its inherent complexity (as formalized in the standard framework of oracle complexity [Nemirovski and Yudin, 1983]) is not well-understood. In this work, we first identify different oracle models which are implicitly used by prior algorithms, amounting to multiplying the matrix $A$ by a vector from either one or both sides. We then prove complexity lower bounds for algorithms under both access models, which in particular imply a separation between them. Specifically, we start by proving that algorithms for linear separability based on one-sided multiplications must require $\Omega(\gamma_A^{-2})$ iterations, where $\gamma_A$ is the margin, as matched by the Perceptron algorithm. We then prove that accelerated algorithms for this task, which utilize multiplications from both sides, must require $\tilde{\Omega}(\gamma_{A}^{-2/3})$ iterations, establishing the first oracle complexity barrier for such algorithms. Finally, by adapting our lower bound to $\ell_1$ geometry, we prove that computing an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium requires $\tilde{\Omega}(\epsilon^{-2/5})$ iterations, which is an exponential improvement over the previously best-known lower bound due to Hadiji et al. [2024].
With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
Agent-based modeling and simulation has evolved as a powerful tool for modeling complex systems, offering insights into emergent behaviors and interactions among diverse agents. Integrating large language models into agent-based modeling and simulation presents a promising avenue for enhancing simulation capabilities. This paper surveys the landscape of utilizing large language models in agent-based modeling and simulation, examining their challenges and promising future directions. In this survey, since this is an interdisciplinary field, we first introduce the background of agent-based modeling and simulation and large language model-empowered agents. We then discuss the motivation for applying large language models to agent-based simulation and systematically analyze the challenges in environment perception, human alignment, action generation, and evaluation. Most importantly, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent works of large language model-empowered agent-based modeling and simulation in multiple scenarios, which can be divided into four domains: cyber, physical, social, and hybrid, covering simulation of both real-world and virtual environments. Finally, since this area is new and quickly evolving, we discuss the open problems and promising future directions.
Graphs are used widely to model complex systems, and detecting anomalies in a graph is an important task in the analysis of complex systems. Graph anomalies are patterns in a graph that do not conform to normal patterns expected of the attributes and/or structures of the graph. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been studied extensively and have successfully performed difficult machine learning tasks in node classification, link prediction, and graph classification thanks to the highly expressive capability via message passing in effectively learning graph representations. To solve the graph anomaly detection problem, GNN-based methods leverage information about the graph attributes (or features) and/or structures to learn to score anomalies appropriately. In this survey, we review the recent advances made in detecting graph anomalies using GNN models. Specifically, we summarize GNN-based methods according to the graph type (i.e., static and dynamic), the anomaly type (i.e., node, edge, subgraph, and whole graph), and the network architecture (e.g., graph autoencoder, graph convolutional network). To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive review of graph anomaly detection methods based on GNNs.
Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This allows one to reason about the effects of changes to this process (i.e., interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (i.e., counterfactuals). We categorize work in \causalml into five groups according to the problems they tackle: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, (5) causal reinforcement learning. For each category, we systematically compare its methods and point out open problems. Further, we review modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
In multi-turn dialog, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences \cite{Carbonell1983DiscoursePA}, which naturally makes understanding the dialog context more difficult. However, it is essential to fully grasp the dialog context to generate a reasonable response. Hence, in this paper, we propose to improve the response generation performance by examining the model's ability to answer a reading comprehension question, where the question is focused on the omitted information in the dialog. Enlightened by the multi-task learning scheme, we propose a joint framework that unifies these two tasks, sharing the same encoder to extract the common and task-invariant features with different decoders to learn task-specific features. To better fusing information from the question and the dialog history in the encoding part, we propose to augment the Transformer architecture with a memory updater, which is designed to selectively store and update the history dialog information so as to support downstream tasks. For the experiment, we employ human annotators to write and examine a large-scale dialog reading comprehension dataset. Extensive experiments are conducted on this dataset, and the results show that the proposed model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines on both tasks. In this way, we demonstrate that reasoning can indeed help better response generation and vice versa. We release our large-scale dataset for further research.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.