We propose an approach to the estimation of infinite sets of random vectors. The problem addressed is as follows. Given two infinite sets of random vectors, find a single estimator that estimates vectors from with a controlled associated error. A new theory for the existence and implementation of such an estimator is studied. In particular, we show that the proposed estimator is asymptotically optimal. Moreover, the estimator is determined in terms of pseudo-inverse matrices and, therefore, it always exists.
Modern neural network architectures can leverage large amounts of data to generalize well within the training distribution. However, they are less capable of systematic generalization to data drawn from unseen but related distributions, a feat that is hypothesized to require compositional reasoning and reuse of knowledge. In this work, we present Neural Interpreters, an architecture that factorizes inference in a self-attention network as a system of modules, which we call \emph{functions}. Inputs to the model are routed through a sequence of functions in a way that is end-to-end learned. The proposed architecture can flexibly compose computation along width and depth, and lends itself well to capacity extension after training. To demonstrate the versatility of Neural Interpreters, we evaluate it in two distinct settings: image classification and visual abstract reasoning on Raven Progressive Matrices. In the former, we show that Neural Interpreters perform on par with the vision transformer using fewer parameters, while being transferrable to a new task in a sample efficient manner. In the latter, we find that Neural Interpreters are competitive with respect to the state-of-the-art in terms of systematic generalization
Heatmap-based methods dominate in the field of human pose estimation by modelling the output distribution through likelihood heatmaps. In contrast, regression-based methods are more efficient but suffer from inferior performance. In this work, we explore maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to develop an efficient and effective regression-based methods. From the perspective of MLE, adopting different regression losses is making different assumptions about the output density function. A density function closer to the true distribution leads to a better regression performance. In light of this, we propose a novel regression paradigm with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation (RLE) to capture the underlying output distribution. Concretely, RLE learns the change of the distribution instead of the unreferenced underlying distribution to facilitate the training process. With the proposed reparameterization design, our method is compatible with off-the-shelf flow models. The proposed method is effective, efficient and flexible. We show its potential in various human pose estimation tasks with comprehensive experiments. Compared to the conventional regression paradigm, regression with RLE bring 12.4 mAP improvement on MSCOCO without any test-time overhead. Moreover, for the first time, especially on multi-person pose estimation, our regression method is superior to the heatmap-based methods. Our code is available at //github.com/Jeff-sjtu/res-loglikelihood-regression
How to obtain good value estimation is one of the key problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current value estimation methods, such as DDPG and TD3, suffer from unnecessary over- or underestimation bias. In this paper, we explore the potential of double actors, which has been neglected for a long time, for better value function estimation in continuous setting. First, we uncover and demonstrate the bias alleviation property of double actors by building double actors upon single critic and double critics to handle overestimation bias in DDPG and underestimation bias in TD3 respectively. Next, we interestingly find that double actors help improve the exploration ability of the agent. Finally, to mitigate the uncertainty of value estimate from double critics, we further propose to regularize the critic networks under double actors architecture, which gives rise to Double Actors Regularized Critics (DARC) algorithm. Extensive experimental results on challenging continuous control tasks show that DARC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with higher sample efficiency.
Discovering causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many empirical sciences. Traditional score-based casual discovery methods rely on various local heuristics to search for a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) according to a predefined score function. While these methods, e.g., greedy equivalence search, may have attractive results with infinite samples and certain model assumptions, they are usually less satisfactory in practice due to finite data and possible violation of assumptions. Motivated by recent advances in neural combinatorial optimization, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to search for the DAG with the best scoring. Our encoder-decoder model takes observable data as input and generates graph adjacency matrices that are used to compute rewards. The reward incorporates both the predefined score function and two penalty terms for enforcing acyclicity. In contrast with typical RL applications where the goal is to learn a policy, we use RL as a search strategy and our final output would be the graph, among all graphs generated during training, that achieves the best reward. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and show that the proposed approach not only has an improved search ability but also allows a flexible score function under the acyclicity constraint.
We study the link between generalization and interference in temporal-difference (TD) learning. Interference is defined as the inner product of two different gradients, representing their alignment. This quantity emerges as being of interest from a variety of observations about neural networks, parameter sharing and the dynamics of learning. We find that TD easily leads to low-interference, under-generalizing parameters, while the effect seems reversed in supervised learning. We hypothesize that the cause can be traced back to the interplay between the dynamics of interference and bootstrapping. This is supported empirically by several observations: the negative relationship between the generalization gap and interference in TD, the negative effect of bootstrapping on interference and the local coherence of targets, and the contrast between the propagation rate of information in TD(0) versus TD($\lambda$) and regression tasks such as Monte-Carlo policy evaluation. We hope that these new findings can guide the future discovery of better bootstrapping methods.
In two-phase image segmentation, convex relaxation has allowed global minimisers to be computed for a variety of data fitting terms. Many efficient approaches exist to compute a solution quickly. However, we consider whether the nature of the data fitting in this formulation allows for reasonable assumptions to be made about the solution that can improve the computational performance further. In particular, we employ a well known dual formulation of this problem and solve the corresponding equations in a restricted domain. We present experimental results that explore the dependence of the solution on this restriction and quantify imrovements in the computational performance. This approach can be extended to analogous methods simply and could provide an efficient alternative for problems of this type.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.
Personalized recommendation systems (RS) are extensively used in many services. Many of these are based on learning algorithms where the RS uses the recommendation history and the user response to learn an optimal strategy. Further, these algorithms are based on the assumption that the user interests are rigid. Specifically, they do not account for the effect of learning strategy on the evolution of the user interests. In this paper we develop influence models for a learning algorithm that is used to optimally recommend websites to web users. We adapt the model of \cite{Ioannidis10} to include an item-dependent reward to the RS from the suggestions that are accepted by the user. For this we first develop a static optimisation scheme when all the parameters are known. Next we develop a stochastic approximation based learning scheme for the RS to learn the optimal strategy when the user profiles are not known. Finally, we describe several user-influence models for the learning algorithm and analyze their effect on the steady user interests and on the steady state optimal strategy as compared to that when the users are not influenced.
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in theoretical computer science has shown that, in appropriate distributional models, it is possible to robustly estimate the mean and covariance with polynomial time algorithms that can tolerate a constant fraction of corruptions, independent of the dimension. However, the sample and time complexity of these algorithms is prohibitively large for high-dimensional applications. In this work, we address both of these issues by establishing sample complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic factors, as well as giving various refinements that allow the algorithms to tolerate a much larger fraction of corruptions. Finally, we show on both synthetic and real data that our algorithms have state-of-the-art performance and suddenly make high-dimensional robust estimation a realistic possibility.
From only positive (P) and unlabeled (U) data, a binary classifier could be trained with PU learning, in which the state of the art is unbiased PU learning. However, if its model is very flexible, empirical risks on training data will go negative, and we will suffer from serious overfitting. In this paper, we propose a non-negative risk estimator for PU learning: when getting minimized, it is more robust against overfitting, and thus we are able to use very flexible models (such as deep neural networks) given limited P data. Moreover, we analyze the bias, consistency, and mean-squared-error reduction of the proposed risk estimator, and bound the estimation error of the resulting empirical risk minimizer. Experiments demonstrate that our risk estimator fixes the overfitting problem of its unbiased counterparts.