We show that "full-bang" control is optimal in a problem that combines features of (i) sequential least-squares {\it estimation} with Bayesian updating, for a random quantity observed in a bath of white noise; (ii) bounded {\it control} of the rate at which observations are received, with a superquadratic cost per unit time; and (iii) "fast" discretionary {\it stopping}. We develop also the optimal filtering and stopping rules in this context.
In this paper we prove upper and lower bounds on the minimal spherical dispersion. In particular, we see that the inverse $N(\varepsilon,d)$ of the minimal spherical dispersion is, for fixed $\varepsilon>0$, up to logarithmic terms linear in the dimension $d$. We also derive upper and lower bounds on the expected dispersion for points chosen independently and uniformly at random from the Euclidean unit sphere.
Estimating and reacting to external disturbances is of fundamental importance for robust control of quadrotors. Existing estimators typically require significant tuning or training with a large amount of data, including the ground truth, to achieve satisfactory performance. This paper proposes a data-efficient differentiable moving horizon estimation (DMHE) algorithm that can automatically tune the MHE parameters online and also adapt to different scenarios. We achieve this by deriving the analytical gradient of the estimated trajectory from MHE with respect to the tuning parameters, enabling end-to-end learning for auto-tuning. Most interestingly, we show that the gradient can be calculated efficiently from a Kalman filter in a recursive form. Moreover, we develop a model-based policy gradient algorithm to learn the parameters directly from the trajectory tracking errors without the need for the ground truth. The proposed DMHE can be further embedded as a layer with other neural networks for joint optimization. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method via both simulation and experiments on quadrotors, where challenging scenarios such as sudden payload change and flying in downwash are examined.
The memorization effect of deep neural network (DNN) plays a pivotal role in many state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods. To exploit this property, the early stopping trick, which stops the optimization at the early stage of training, is usually adopted. Current methods generally decide the early stopping point by considering a DNN as a whole. However, a DNN can be considered as a composition of a series of layers, and we find that the latter layers in a DNN are much more sensitive to label noise, while their former counterparts are quite robust. Therefore, selecting a stopping point for the whole network may make different DNN layers antagonistically affected each other, thus degrading the final performance. In this paper, we propose to separate a DNN into different parts and progressively train them to address this problem. Instead of the early stopping, which trains a whole DNN all at once, we initially train former DNN layers by optimizing the DNN with a relatively large number of epochs. During training, we progressively train the latter DNN layers by using a smaller number of epochs with the preceding layers fixed to counteract the impact of noisy labels. We term the proposed method as progressive early stopping (PES). Despite its simplicity, compared with the early stopping, PES can help to obtain more promising and stable results. Furthermore, by combining PES with existing approaches on noisy label training, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification benchmarks.
This paper discusses the estimation of the generalization gap, the difference between a generalization error and an empirical error, for overparameterized models (e.g., neural networks). We first show that a functional variance, a key concept in defining a widely-applicable information criterion, characterizes the generalization gap even in overparameterized settings where a conventional theory cannot be applied. We also propose a computationally efficient approximation of the function variance, the Langevin approximation of the functional variance (Langevin FV). This method leverages only the $1$st-order gradient of the squared loss function, without referencing the $2$nd-order gradient; this ensures that the computation is efficient and the implementation is consistent with gradient-based optimization algorithms. We demonstrate the Langevin FV numerically by estimating the generalization gaps of overparameterized linear regression and non-linear neural network models.
Recently, many studies have shed light on the high adaptivity of deep neural network methods in nonparametric regression models, and their superior performance has been established for various function classes. Motivated by this development, we study a deep neural network method to estimate the drift coefficient of a multi-dimensional diffusion process from discrete observations. We derive generalization error bounds for least squares estimates based on deep neural networks and show that they achieve the minimax rate of convergence up to a logarithmic factor when the drift function has a compositional structure.
We study the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation and present efficient and practical algorithms that come with strong optimality guarantees. We begin by proving lower bounds that establish baselines on both the deterministic error and stochastic error in this problem. In particular, we prove an oracle complexity lower bound on the deterministic error in an instance-dependent norm associated with the stationary distribution of the transition kernel, and use the local asymptotic minimax machinery to prove an instance-dependent lower bound on the stochastic error in the i.i.d. observation model. Existing algorithms fail to match at least one of these lower bounds: To illustrate, we analyze a variance-reduced variant of temporal difference learning, showing in particular that it fails to achieve the oracle complexity lower bound. To remedy this issue, we develop an accelerated, variance-reduced fast temporal difference algorithm (VRFTD) that simultaneously matches both lower bounds and attains a strong notion of instance-optimality. Finally, we extend the VRFTD algorithm to the setting with Markovian observations, and provide instance-dependent convergence results that match those in the i.i.d. setting up to a multiplicative factor that is proportional to the mixing time of the chain. Our theoretical guarantees of optimality are corroborated by numerical experiments.
Covariance matrix estimation is a fundamental statistical task in many applications, but the sample covariance matrix is sub-optimal when the sample size is comparable to or less than the number of features. Such high-dimensional settings are common in modern genomics, where covariance matrix estimation is frequently employed as a method for inferring gene networks. To achieve estimation accuracy in these settings, existing methods typically either assume that the population covariance matrix has some particular structure, for example sparsity, or apply shrinkage to better estimate the population eigenvalues. In this paper, we study a new approach to estimating high-dimensional covariance matrices. We first frame covariance matrix estimation as a compound decision problem. This motivates defining a class of decision rules and using a nonparametric empirical Bayes g-modeling approach to estimate the optimal rule in the class. Simulation results and gene network inference in an RNA-seq experiment in mouse show that our approach is comparable to or can outperform a number of state-of-the-art proposals, particularly when the sample eigenvectors are poor estimates of the population eigenvectors.
A fundamental problem in numerical analysis and approximation theory is approximating smooth functions by polynomials. A much harder version under recent consideration is to enforce bounds constraints on the approximating polynomial. In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating functions by polynomials whose Bernstein coefficients with respect to a given degree satisfy such bounds, which implies such bounds on the approximant. We frame the problem as an inequality-constrained optimization problem and give an algorithm for finding the Bernstein coefficients of the exact solution. Additionally, our method can be modified slightly to include equality constraints such as mass preservation. It also extends naturally to multivariate polynomials over a simplex.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.