Loss function learning is a new meta-learning paradigm that aims to automate the essential task of designing a loss function for a machine learning model. Existing techniques for loss function learning have shown promising results, often improving a model's training dynamics and final inference performance. However, a significant limitation of these techniques is that the loss functions are meta-learned in an offline fashion, where the meta-objective only considers the very first few steps of training, which is a significantly shorter time horizon than the one typically used for training deep neural networks. This causes significant bias towards loss functions that perform well at the very start of training but perform poorly at the end of training. To address this issue we propose a new loss function learning technique for adaptively updating the loss function online after each update to the base model parameters. The experimental results show that our proposed method consistently outperforms the cross-entropy loss and offline loss function learning techniques on a diverse range of neural network architectures and datasets.
Large Transformer models are capable of implementing a plethora of so-called in-context learning algorithms. These include gradient descent, classification, sequence completion, transformation, and improvement. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs), which never explicitly encountered the task of black-box optimization, are in principle capable of implementing evolutionary optimization algorithms. While previous works have solely focused on language-based task specification, we move forward and focus on the zero-shot application of LLMs to black-box optimization. We introduce a novel prompting strategy, consisting of least-to-most sorting of discretized population members and querying the LLM to propose an improvement to the mean statistic, i.e. perform a type of black-box recombination operation. Empirically, we find that our setup allows the user to obtain an LLM-based evolution strategy, which we call `EvoLLM', that robustly outperforms baseline algorithms such as random search and Gaussian Hill Climbing on synthetic BBOB functions as well as small neuroevolution tasks. Hence, LLMs can act as `plug-in' in-context recombination operators. We provide several comparative studies of the LLM's model size, prompt strategy, and context construction. Finally, we show that one can flexibly improve EvoLLM's performance by providing teacher algorithm information via instruction fine-tuning on previously collected teacher optimization trajectories.
Excellent tail performance is crucial for modern machine learning tasks, such as algorithmic fairness, class imbalance, and risk-sensitive decision making, as it ensures the effective handling of challenging samples within a dataset. Tail performance is also a vital determinant of success for personalized recommender systems to reduce the risk of losing users with low satisfaction. This study introduces a "safe" collaborative filtering method that prioritizes recommendation quality for less-satisfied users rather than focusing on the average performance. Our approach minimizes the conditional value at risk (CVaR), which represents the average risk over the tails of users' loss. To overcome computational challenges for web-scale recommender systems, we develop a robust yet practical algorithm that extends the most scalable method, implicit alternating least squares (iALS). Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates the excellent tail performance of our approach while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.
Abstractive citation text generation is usually framed as an infilling task, where a sequence-to-sequence model is trained to generate a citation given a reference paper and the context window around the target; the generated citation should be a brief discussion of the reference paper as it relates to the citing context. However, examining a recent LED-based citation generation system, we find that many of the generated citations are generic summaries of the reference papers main contribution, ignoring the citation contexts focus on a different topic. To address this problem, we propose a simple modification to the citation text generation task: the generation target is not only the citation itself, but the entire context window, including the target citation. This approach can be easily applied to any abstractive citation generation system, and our experimental results show that training in this way is preferred by human readers and allows the generation model to make use of contextual clues about what topic to discuss and what stance to take.
Diffusion processes are a class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) providing a rich family of expressive models that arise naturally in dynamic modelling tasks. Probabilistic inference and learning under generative models with latent processes endowed with a non-linear diffusion process prior are intractable problems. We build upon work within variational inference, approximating the posterior process as a linear diffusion process, and point out pathologies in the approach. We propose an alternative parameterization of the Gaussian variational process using a site-based exponential family description. This allows us to trade a slow inference algorithm with fixed-point iterations for a fast algorithm for convex optimization akin to natural gradient descent, which also provides a better objective for learning model parameters.
Factor analysis is a statistical technique that explains correlations among observed random variables with the help of a smaller number of unobserved factors. In traditional full factor analysis, each observed variable is influenced by every factor. However, many applications exhibit interesting sparsity patterns, that is, each observed variable only depends on a subset of the factors. In this paper, we study such sparse factor analysis models from an algebro-geometric perspective. Under mild conditions on the sparsity pattern, we examine the dimension of the set of covariance matrices that corresponds to a given model. Moreover, we study algebraic relations among the covariances in sparse two-factor models. In particular, we identify cases in which a Gr\"obner basis for these relations can be derived via a 2-delightful term order and joins of toric edge ideals.
Federated learning (FL) goes beyond traditional, centralized machine learning by distributing model training among a large collection of edge clients. These clients cooperatively train a global, e.g., cloud-hosted, model without disclosing their local, private training data. The global model is then shared among all the participants which use it for local predictions. In this paper, we put forward a novel attacker model aiming at turning FL systems into covert channels to implement a stealth communication infrastructure. The main intuition is that, during federated training, a malicious sender can poison the global model by submitting purposely crafted examples. Although the effect of the model poisoning is negligible to other participants, and does not alter the overall model performance, it can be observed by a malicious receiver and used to transmit a single bit.
We study the problem of online learning in contextual bandit problems where the loss function is assumed to belong to a known parametric function class. We propose a new analytic framework for this setting that bridges the Bayesian theory of information-directed sampling due to Russo and Van Roy (2018) and the worst-case theory of Foster, Kakade, Qian, and Rakhlin (2021) based on the decision-estimation coefficient. Drawing from both lines of work, we propose a algorithmic template called Optimistic Information-Directed Sampling and show that it can achieve instance-dependent regret guarantees similar to the ones achievable by the classic Bayesian IDS method, but with the major advantage of not requiring any Bayesian assumptions. The key technical innovation of our analysis is introducing an optimistic surrogate model for the regret and using it to define a frequentist version of the Information Ratio of Russo and Van Roy (2018), and a less conservative version of the Decision Estimation Coefficient of Foster et al. (2021). Keywords: Contextual bandits, information-directed sampling, decision estimation coefficient, first-order regret bounds.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.