In this discussion draft, we explore heterogeneous oligopoly games of increasing players with quadratic costs, where the market is supposed to have the isoelastic demand. For each of the models considered in this draft, we analytically investigate the necessary and sufficient condition of the local stability of its positive equilibrium. Furthermore, we rigorously prove that the stability regions are enlarged as the number of involved firms is increasing.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
Numerical solution of heterogeneous Helmholtz problems presents various computational challenges, with descriptive theory remaining out of reach for many popular approaches. Robustness and scalability are key for practical and reliable solvers in large-scale applications, especially for large wave number problems. In this work we explore the use of a GenEO-type coarse space to build a two-level additive Schwarz method applicable to highly indefinite Helmholtz problems. Through a range of numerical tests on a 2D model problem, discretised by finite elements on pollution-free meshes, we observe robust convergence, iteration counts that do not increase with the wave number, and good scalability of our approach. We further provide results showing a favourable comparison with the DtN coarse space. Our numerical study shows promise that our solver methodology can be effective for challenging heterogeneous applications.
The success of large-scale models in recent years has increased the importance of statistical models with numerous parameters. Several studies have analyzed over-parameterized linear models with high-dimensional data that may not be sparse; however, existing results depend on the independent setting of samples. In this study, we analyze a linear regression model with dependent time series data under over-parameterization settings. We consider an estimator via interpolation and developed a theory for excess risk of the estimator under multiple dependence types. This theory can treat infinite-dimensional data without sparsity and handle long-memory processes in a unified manner. Moreover, we bound the risk in our theory via the integrated covariance and nondegeneracy of autocorrelation matrices. The results show that the convergence rate of risks with short-memory processes is identical to that of cases with independent data, while long-memory processes slow the convergence rate. We also present several examples of specific dependent processes that can be applied to our setting.
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and inferred risk can be incomplete and sampling inefficient. Some formal verification methods suffer from the model precision and other surrogate assumptions. In this paper, we propose a scenario sampling based testing framework that characterizes the overall safety performance of a legged robot by specifying (i) where (in terms of a set of states) the robot is potentially safe, and (ii) how safe the robot is within the specified set. The framework can also help certify the commercial deployment of the legged robot in real-world environment along with human and compare safety performance among legged robots with different mechanical structures and dynamic properties. The proposed framework is further deployed to evaluate a group of state-of-the-art legged robot locomotion controllers from various model-based, deep neural network involved, and reinforcement learning based methods in the literature. Among a series of intended work domains of the studied legged robots (e.g. tracking speed on sloped surface, with abrupt changes on demanded velocity, and against adversarial push-over disturbances), we show that the method can adequately capture the overall safety characterization and the subtle performance insights. Many of the observed safety outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, have never been reported by the existing work in the legged robot literature.
The numerical solution of singular eigenvalue problems is complicated by the fact that small perturbations of the coefficients may have an arbitrarily bad effect on eigenvalue accuracy. However, it has been known for a long time that such perturbations are exceptional and standard eigenvalue solvers, such as the QZ algorithm, tend to yield good accuracy despite the inevitable presence of roundoff error. Recently, Lotz and Noferini quantified this phenomenon by introducing the concept of $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers. In this work, we consider singular quadratic eigenvalue problems and two popular linearizations. Our results show that a correctly chosen linearization increases $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers only marginally, justifying the use of these linearizations in numerical solvers also in the singular case. We propose a very simple but often effective algorithm for computing well-conditioned eigenvalues of a singular quadratic eigenvalue problems by adding small random perturbations to the coefficients. We prove that the eigenvalue condition number is, with high probability, a reliable criterion for detecting and excluding spurious eigenvalues created from the singular part.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.
Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (\aka~embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this work, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, and \etc.~from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.