We develop a methodology that utilizes deep learning to simultaneously solve and estimate canonical continuous-time general equilibrium models in financial economics. We illustrate our method in two examples: (1) industrial dynamics of firms and (2) macroeconomic models with financial frictions. Through these applications, we illustrate the advantages of our method: generality, simultaneous solution and estimation, leveraging the state-of-art machine-learning techniques, and handling large state space. The method is versatile and can be applied to a vast variety of problems.
We develop a flexible stochastic approximation framework for analyzing the long-run behavior of learning in games (both continuous and finite). The proposed analysis template incorporates a wide array of popular learning algorithms, including gradient-based methods, the exponential/multiplicative weights algorithm for learning in finite games, optimistic and bandit variants of the above, etc. In addition to providing an integrated view of these algorithms, our framework further allows us to obtain several new convergence results, both asymptotic and in finite time, in both continuous and finite games. Specifically, we provide a range of criteria for identifying classes of Nash equilibria and sets of action profiles that are attracting with high probability, and we also introduce the notion of coherence, a game-theoretic property that includes strict and sharp equilibria, and which leads to convergence in finite time. Importantly, our analysis applies to both oracle-based and bandit, payoff-based methods - that is, when players only observe their realized payoffs.
The chain graph model admits both undirected and directed edges in one graph, where symmetric conditional dependencies are encoded via undirected edges and asymmetric causal relations are encoded via directed edges. Though frequently encountered in practice, the chain graph model has been largely under investigated in literature, possibly due to the lack of identifiability conditions between undirected and directed edges. In this paper, we first establish a set of novel identifiability conditions for the Gaussian chain graph model, exploiting a low rank plus sparse decomposition of the precision matrix. Further, an efficient learning algorithm is built upon the identifiability conditions to fully recover the chain graph structure. Theoretical analysis on the proposed method is conducted, assuring its asymptotic consistency in recovering the exact chain graph structure. The advantage of the proposed method is also supported by numerical experiments on both simulated examples and a real application on the Standard & Poor 500 index data.
We study sampling problems associated with potentials that lack smoothness. The potentials can be either convex or non-convex. Departing from the standard smooth setting, the potentials are only assumed to be weakly smooth or non-smooth, or the summation of multiple such functions. We develop a sampling algorithm that resembles proximal algorithms in optimization for this challenging sampling task. Our algorithm is based on a special case of Gibbs sampling known as the alternating sampling framework (ASF). The key contribution of this work is a practical realization of the ASF based on rejection sampling for both non-convex and convex potentials that are not necessarily smooth. In almost all the cases of sampling considered in this work, our proximal sampling algorithm achieves better complexity than all existing methods.
The Gaussian graphical model (GGM) incorporates an undirected graph to represent the conditional dependence between variables, with the precision matrix encoding partial correlation between pair of variables given the others. To achieve flexible and accurate estimation and inference of GGM, we propose the novel method FLAG, which utilizes the random effects model for pairwise conditional regression to estimate the precision matrix and applies statistical tests to recover the graph. Compared with existing methods, FLAG has several unique advantages: (i) it provides accurate estimation without sparsity assumptions on the precision matrix, (ii) it allows for element-wise inference of the precision matrix, (iii) it achieves computational efficiency by developing an efficient PX-EM algorithm and a MM algorithm accelerated with low-rank updates, and (iv) it enables joint estimation of multiple graphs using FLAG-Meta or FLAG-CA. The proposed methods are evaluated using various simulation settings and real data applications, including gene expression in the human brain, term association in university websites, and stock prices in the U.S. financial market. The results demonstrate that FLAG and its extensions provide accurate precision estimation and graph recovery.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.