Dimension is an inherent bottleneck to some modern learning tasks, where optimization methods suffer from the size of the data. In this paper, we study non-isotropic distributions of data and develop tools that aim at reducing these dimensional costs by a dependency on an effective dimension rather than the ambient one. Based on non-asymptotic estimates of the metric entropy of ellipsoids -- that prove to generalize to infinite dimensions -- and on a chaining argument, our uniform concentration bounds involve an effective dimension instead of the global dimension, improving over existing results. We show the importance of taking advantage of non-isotropic properties in learning problems with the following applications: i) we improve state-of-the-art results in statistical preconditioning for communication-efficient distributed optimization, ii) we introduce a non-isotropic randomized smoothing for non-smooth optimization. Both applications cover a class of functions that encompasses empirical risk minization (ERM) for linear models.
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.
The modeling of dependence between maxima is an important subject in several applications in risk analysis. To this aim, the extreme value copula function, characterised via the madogram, can be used as a margin-free description of the dependence structure. From a practical point of view, the family of extreme value distributions is very rich and arise naturally as the limiting distribution of properly normalised component-wise maxima. In this paper, we investigate the nonparametric estimation of the madogram where data are completely missing at random. We provide the functional central limit theorem for the considered multivariate madrogram correctly normalized, towards a tight Gaussian process for which the covariance function depends on the probabilities of missing. Explicit formula for the asymptotic variance is also given. Our results are illustrated in a finite sample setting with a simulation study.
We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic convex risk measures. We employ a time-consistent dynamic programming principle to determine the value of a particular policy, and develop policy gradient update rules. We further develop an actor-critic style algorithm using neural networks to optimize over policies. Finally, we demonstrate the performance and flexibility of our approach by applying it to optimization problems in statistical arbitrage trading and obstacle avoidance robot control.
Disentanglement is a useful property in representation learning which increases the interpretability of generative models such as Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), Generative Adversarial Models, and their many variants. Typically in such models, an increase in disentanglement performance is traded-off with generation quality. In the context of latent space models, this work presents a representation learning framework that explicitly promotes disentanglement by encouraging orthogonal directions of variations. The proposed objective is the sum of an auto-encoder error term along with a Principal Component Analysis reconstruction error in the feature space. This has an interpretation of a Restricted Kernel Machine with the eigenvector matrix valued on the Stiefel manifold. Our analysis shows that such a construction promotes disentanglement by matching the principal directions in the latent space with the directions of orthogonal variation in data space. In an alternating minimization scheme, we use Cayley ADAM algorithm -- a stochastic optimization method on the Stiefel manifold along with the ADAM optimizer. Our theoretical discussion and various experiments show that the proposed model improves over many VAE variants in terms of both generation quality and disentangled representation learning.
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.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
We consider the question: how can you sample good negative examples for contrastive learning? We argue that, as with metric learning, learning contrastive representations benefits from hard negative samples (i.e., points that are difficult to distinguish from an anchor point). The key challenge toward using hard negatives is that contrastive methods must remain unsupervised, making it infeasible to adopt existing negative sampling strategies that use label information. In response, we develop a new class of unsupervised methods for selecting hard negative samples where the user can control the amount of hardness. A limiting case of this sampling results in a representation that tightly clusters each class, and pushes different classes as far apart as possible. The proposed method improves downstream performance across multiple modalities, requires only few additional lines of code to implement, and introduces no computational overhead.
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.
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach builds off of techniques for distributionally robust optimization and Owen's empirical likelihood, and we provide a number of finite-sample and asymptotic results characterizing the theoretical performance of the estimator. In particular, we show that our procedure comes with certificates of optimality, achieving (in some scenarios) faster rates of convergence than empirical risk minimization by virtue of automatically balancing bias and variance. We give corroborating empirical evidence showing that in practice, the estimator indeed trades between variance and absolute performance on a training sample, improving out-of-sample (test) performance over standard empirical risk minimization for a number of classification problems.