Multiple-objective optimization (MOO) aims to simultaneously optimize multiple conflicting objectives and has found important applications in machine learning, such as minimizing classification loss and discrepancy in treating different populations for fairness. At optimality, further optimizing one objective will necessarily harm at least another objective, and decision-makers need to comprehensively explore multiple optima (called Pareto front) to pinpoint one final solution. We address the efficiency of finding the Pareto front. First, finding the front from scratch using stochastic multi-gradient descent (SMGD) is expensive with large neural networks and datasets. We propose to explore the Pareto front as a manifold from a few initial optima, based on a predictor-corrector method. Second, for each exploration step, the predictor solves a large-scale linear system that scales quadratically in the number of model parameters and requires one backpropagation to evaluate a second-order Hessian-vector product per iteration of the solver. We propose a Gauss-Newton approximation that only scales linearly, and that requires only first-order inner-product per iteration. This also allows for a choice between the MINRES and conjugate gradient methods when approximately solving the linear system. The innovations make predictor-corrector possible for large networks. Experiments on multi-objective (fairness and accuracy) misinformation detection tasks show that 1) the predictor-corrector method can find Pareto fronts better than or similar to SMGD with less time; and 2) the proposed first-order method does not harm the quality of the Pareto front identified by the second-order method, while further reduce running time.
In evolutionary multiobjective optimization, effectiveness refers to how an evolutionary algorithm performs in terms of converging its solutions into the Pareto front and also diversifying them over the front. This is not an easy job, particularly for optimization problems with more than three objectives, dubbed many-objective optimization problems. In such problems, classic Pareto-based algorithms fail to provide sufficient selection pressure towards the Pareto front, whilst recently developed algorithms, such as decomposition-based ones, may struggle to maintain a set of well-distributed solutions on certain problems (e.g., those with irregular Pareto fronts). Another issue in some many-objective optimizers is rapidly increasing computational requirement with the number of objectives, such as hypervolume-based algorithms and shift-based density estimation (SDE) methods. In this paper, we aim to address this problem and develop an effective and efficient evolutionary algorithm (E3A) that can handle various many-objective problems. In E3A, inspired by SDE, a novel population maintenance method is proposed to select high-quality solutions in the environmental selection procedure. We conduct extensive experiments and show that E3A performs better than 11 state-of-the-art many-objective evolutionary algorithms in quickly finding a set of well-converged and well-diversified solutions.
Evaluating safety performance in a resource-efficient way is crucial for the development of autonomous systems. Simulation of parameterized scenarios is a popular testing strategy but parameter sweeps can be prohibitively expensive. To address this, we propose HiddenGems: a sample-efficient method for discovering the boundary between compliant and non-compliant behavior via active learning. Given a parameterized scenario, one or more compliance metrics, and a simulation oracle, HiddenGems maps the compliant and non-compliant domains of the scenario. The methodology enables critical test case identification, comparative analysis of different versions of the system under test, as well as verification of design objectives. We evaluate HiddenGems on a scenario with a jaywalker crossing in front of an autonomous vehicle and obtain compliance boundary estimates for collision, lane keep, and acceleration metrics individually and in combination, with 6 times fewer simulations than a parameter sweep. We also show how HiddenGems can be used to detect and rectify a failure mode for an unprotected turn with 86% fewer simulations.
In this paper, we establish the global optimality and convergence rate of an off-policy actor critic algorithm in the tabular setting without using density ratio to correct the discrepancy between the state distribution of the behavior policy and that of the target policy. Our work goes beyond existing works on the optimality of policy gradient methods in that existing works use the exact policy gradient for updating the policy parameters while we use an approximate and stochastic update step. Our update step is not a gradient update because we do not use a density ratio to correct the state distribution, which aligns well with what practitioners do. Our update is approximate because we use a learned critic instead of the true value function. Our update is stochastic because at each step the update is done for only the current state action pair. Moreover, we remove several restrictive assumptions from existing works in our analysis. Central to our work is the finite sample analysis of a generic stochastic approximation algorithm with time-inhomogeneous update operators on time-inhomogeneous Markov chains, based on its uniform contraction properties.
In this paper we discuss an application of Stochastic Approximation to statistical estimation of high-dimensional sparse parameters. The proposed solution reduces to resolving a penalized stochastic optimization problem on each stage of a multistage algorithm; each problem being solved to a prescribed accuracy by the non-Euclidean Composite Stochastic Mirror Descent (CSMD) algorithm. Assuming that the problem objective is smooth and quadratically minorated and stochastic perturbations are sub-Gaussian, our analysis prescribes the method parameters which ensure fast convergence of the estimation error (the radius of a confidence ball of a given norm around the approximate solution). This convergence is linear during the first "preliminary" phase of the routine and is sublinear during the second "asymptotic" phase. We consider an application of the proposed approach to sparse Generalized Linear Regression problem. In this setting, we show that the proposed algorithm attains the optimal convergence of the estimation error under weak assumptions on the regressor distribution. We also present a numerical study illustrating the performance of the algorithm on high-dimensional simulation data.
Social and real-world considerations such as robustness, fairness, social welfare and multi-agent tradeoffs have given rise to multi-distribution learning paradigms, such as collaborative, group distributionally robust, and fair federated learning. In each of these settings, a learner seeks to minimize its worst-case loss over a set of $n$ predefined distributions, while using as few samples as possible. In this paper, we establish the optimal sample complexity of these learning paradigms and give algorithms that meet this sample complexity. Importantly, our sample complexity bounds exceed that of the sample complexity of learning a single distribution only by an additive factor of $n \log(n) / \epsilon^2$. These improve upon the best known sample complexity of agnostic federated learning by Mohri et al. by a multiplicative factor of $n$, the sample complexity of collaborative learning by Nguyen and Zakynthinou by a multiplicative factor $\log n / \epsilon^3$, and give the first sample complexity bounds for the group DRO objective of Sagawa et al. To achieve optimal sample complexity, our algorithms learn to sample and learn from distributions on demand. Our algorithm design and analysis is enabled by our extensions of stochastic optimization techniques for solving stochastic zero-sum games. In particular, we contribute variants of Stochastic Mirror Descent that can trade off between players' access to cheap one-off samples or more expensive reusable ones.
In domains where sample sizes are limited, efficient learning algorithms are critical. Learning using privileged information (LuPI) offers increased sample efficiency by allowing prediction models access to auxiliary information at training time which is unavailable when the models are used. In recent work, it was shown that for prediction in linear-Gaussian dynamical systems, a LuPI learner with access to intermediate time series data is never worse and often better in expectation than any unbiased classical learner. We provide new insights into this analysis and generalize it to nonlinear prediction tasks in latent dynamical systems, extending theoretical guarantees to the case where the map connecting latent variables and observations is known up to a linear transform. In addition, we propose algorithms based on random features and representation learning for the case when this map is unknown. A suite of empirical results confirm theoretical findings and show the potential of using privileged time-series information in nonlinear prediction.
We study the enumeration of answers to Unions of Conjunctive Queries (UCQs) with optimal time guarantees. More precisely, we wish to identify the queries that can be solved with linear preprocessing time and constant delay. Despite the basic nature of this problem, it was shown only recently that UCQs can be solved within these time bounds if they admit free-connex union extensions, even if all individual CQs in the union are intractable with respect to the same complexity measure. Our goal is to understand whether there exist additional tractable UCQs, not covered by the currently known algorithms. As a first step, we show that some previously unclassified UCQs are hard using the classic 3SUM hypothesis, via a known reduction from 3SUM to triangle listing in graphs. As a second step, we identify a question about a variant of this graph task which is unavoidable if we want to classify all self-join free UCQs: is it possible to decide the existence of a triangle in a vertex-unbalanced tripartite graph in linear time? We prove that this task is equivalent in hardness to some family of UCQs. Finally, we show a dichotomy for unions of two self-join-free CQs if we assume the answer to this question is negative. As a result, to reason about a class of enumeration problems defined by UCQs, it is enough to study the single decision problem of detecting triangles in unbalanced graphs. As of today, we know of no algorithm that comes close to solving this decision problem within the required time bounds. Our conclusion is that, without a breakthrough for triangle detection, we have no hope to find an efficient algorithm for additional unions of two self-join free CQs. On the other hand, if we will one day have such a triangle detection algorithm, we will immediately obtain an efficient algorithm for a family of UCQs that are currently not known to be tractable.
We study a non standard mixed formulation of the Poisson problem, sometimes known as dual mixed formulation. For reasons related to the equilibration of the flux, we use finite elements that are conforming in H(div) for the approximation of the gradients, even if the formulation would allow for discontinuous finite elements. The scheme is not uniformly inf-sup stable, but we can show existence and uniqueness of the solution, as well as optimal error estimates for the gradient variable when suitable regularity assumptions are made. Several additional remarks complete the paper, shedding some light on the sources of instability for mixed formulations.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
Salient object detection is a problem that has been considered in detail and many solutions proposed. In this paper, we argue that work to date has addressed a problem that is relatively ill-posed. Specifically, there is not universal agreement about what constitutes a salient object when multiple observers are queried. This implies that some objects are more likely to be judged salient than others, and implies a relative rank exists on salient objects. The solution presented in this paper solves this more general problem that considers relative rank, and we propose data and metrics suitable to measuring success in a relative objects saliency landscape. A novel deep learning solution is proposed based on a hierarchical representation of relative saliency and stage-wise refinement. We also show that the problem of salient object subitizing can be addressed with the same network, and our approach exceeds performance of any prior work across all metrics considered (both traditional and newly proposed).