The idea of embedding optimization problems into deep neural networks as optimization layers to encode constraints and inductive priors has taken hold in recent years. Most existing methods focus on implicitly differentiating Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions in a way that requires expensive computations on the Jacobian matrix, which can be slow and memory-intensive. In this paper, we developed a new framework, named Alternating Differentiation (Alt-Diff), that differentiates optimization problems (here, specifically in the form of convex optimization problems with polyhedral constraints) in a fast and recursive way. Alt-Diff decouples the differentiation procedure into a primal update and a dual update in an alternating way. Accordingly, Alt-Diff substantially decreases the dimensions of the Jacobian matrix especially for optimization with large-scale constraints and thus increases the computational speed of implicit differentiation. We show that the gradients obtained by Alt-Diff are consistent with those obtained by differentiating KKT conditions. In addition, we propose to truncate Alt-Diff to further accelerate the computational speed. Under some standard assumptions, we show that the truncation error of gradients is upper bounded by the same order of variables' estimation error. Therefore, Alt-Diff can be truncated to further increase computational speed without sacrificing much accuracy. A series of comprehensive experiments validate the superiority of Alt-Diff.
In many industrial applications, obtaining labeled observations is not straightforward as it often requires the intervention of human experts or the use of expensive testing equipment. In these circumstances, active learning can be highly beneficial in suggesting the most informative data points to be used when fitting a model. Reducing the number of observations needed for model development alleviates both the computational burden required for training and the operational expenses related to labeling. Online active learning, in particular, is useful in high-volume production processes where the decision about the acquisition of the label for a data point needs to be taken within an extremely short time frame. However, despite the recent efforts to develop online active learning strategies, the behavior of these methods in the presence of outliers has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we investigate the performance of online active linear regression in contaminated data streams. Our study shows that the currently available query strategies are prone to sample outliers, whose inclusion in the training set eventually degrades the predictive performance of the models. To address this issue, we propose a solution that bounds the search area of a conditional D-optimal algorithm and uses a robust estimator. Our approach strikes a balance between exploring unseen regions of the input space and protecting against outliers. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed method is effective in improving the performance of online active learning in the presence of outliers, thus expanding the potential applications of this powerful tool.
In this paper we present a new perspective on error analysis of Legendre approximations for differentiable functions. We start by introducing a sequence of Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto polynomials and prove their theoretical properties, such as an explicit and optimal upper bound. We then apply these properties to derive a new and explicit bound for the Legendre coefficients of differentiable functions and establish some explicit and optimal error bounds for Legendre projections in the $L^2$ and $L^{\infty}$ norms. Illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the sharpness of our new results.
Privacy noise may negate the benefits of using adaptive optimizers in differentially private model training. Prior works typically address this issue by using auxiliary information (e.g., public data) to boost the effectiveness of adaptive optimization. In this work, we explore techniques to estimate and efficiently adapt to gradient geometry in private adaptive optimization without auxiliary data. Motivated by the observation that adaptive methods can tolerate stale preconditioners, we propose differentially private adaptive training with delayed preconditioners (DP^2), a simple method that constructs delayed but less noisy preconditioners to better realize the benefits of adaptivity. Theoretically, we provide convergence guarantees for our method for both convex and non-convex problems, and analyze trade-offs between delay and privacy noise reduction. Empirically, we explore DP^2 across several real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can improve convergence speed by as much as 4x relative to non-adaptive baselines and match the performance of state-of-the-art optimization methods that require auxiliary data.
In this work, we prove rigorous error estimates for a hybrid method introduced in [15] for solving the time-dependent radiation transport equation (RTE). The method relies on a splitting of the kinetic distribution function for the radiation into uncollided and collided components. A high-resolution method (in angle) is used to approximate the uncollided components and a low-resolution method is used to approximate the the collided component. After each time step, the kinetic distribution is reinitialized to be entirely uncollided. For this analysis, we consider a mono-energetic problem on a periodic domains, with constant material cross-sections of arbitrary size. To focus the analysis, we assume the uncollided equation is solved exactly and the collided part is approximated in angle via a spherical harmonic expansion ($\text{P}_N$ method). Using a non-standard set of semi-norms, we obtain estimates of the form $C(\varepsilon,\sigma,\Delta t)N^{-s}$ where $s\geq 1$ denotes the regularity of the solution in angle, $\varepsilon$ and $\sigma$ are scattering parameters, $\Delta t$ is the time-step before reinitialization, and $C$ is a complicated function of $\varepsilon$, $\sigma$, and $\Delta t$. These estimates involve analysis of the multiscale RTE that includes, but necessarily goes beyond, usual spectral analysis. We also compute error estimates for the monolithic $\text{P}_N$ method with the same resolution as the collided part in the hybrid. Our results highlight the benefits of the hybrid approach over the monolithic discretization in both highly scattering and streaming regimes.
Bilevel optimization has recently regained interest owing to its applications in emerging machine learning fields such as hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, and reinforcement learning. Recent results have shown that simple alternating (implicit) gradient-based algorithms can achieve the same convergence rate of single-level gradient descent (GD) for bilevel problems with a strongly convex lower-level objective. However, it remains unclear whether this result can be generalized to bilevel problems beyond this basic setting. In this paper, we propose a Generalized ALternating mEthod for bilevel opTimization (GALET) with a nonconvex lower-level objective that satisfies the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) condition. We first introduce a stationary metric for the considered bilevel problems, which generalizes the existing metric. We then establish that GALET achieves an $\epsilon$-stationary metric for the considered problem within $\tilde{\cal O}(\epsilon^{-1})$ iterations, which matches the iteration complexity of GD for smooth nonconvex problems.
Stochastic optimization is one of the central problems in Machine Learning and Theoretical Computer Science. In the standard model, the algorithm is given a fixed distribution known in advance. In practice though, one may acquire at a cost extra information to make better decisions. In this paper, we study how to buy information for stochastic optimization and formulate this question as an online learning problem. Assuming the learner has an oracle for the original optimization problem, we design a $2$-competitive deterministic algorithm and a $e/(e-1)$-competitive randomized algorithm for buying information. We show that this ratio is tight as the problem is equivalent to a robust generalization of the ski-rental problem, which we call super-martingale stopping. We also consider an adaptive setting where the learner can choose to buy information after taking some actions for the underlying optimization problem. We focus on the classic optimization problem, Min-Sum Set Cover, where the goal is to quickly find an action that covers a given request drawn from a known distribution. We provide an $8$-competitive algorithm running in polynomial time that chooses actions and decides when to buy information about the underlying request.
In this paper, we aim at unifying, simplifying and improving the convergence rate analysis of Lagrangian-based methods for convex optimization problems. We first introduce the notion of nice primal algorithmic map, which plays a central role in the unification and in the simplification of the analysis of most Lagrangian-based methods. Equipped with a nice primal algorithmic map, we then introduce a versatile generic scheme, which allows for the design and analysis of Faster LAGrangian (FLAG) methods with new provably sublinear rate of convergence expressed in terms of function values and feasibility violation of the original (non-ergodic) generated sequence. To demonstrate the power and versatility of our approach and results, we show that most well-known iconic Lagrangian-based schemes admit a nice primal algorithmic map, and hence share the new faster rate of convergence results within their corresponding FLAG.
Most prior results on differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) are derived under the simplistic assumption of uniform Lipschitzness, i.e., the per-sample gradients are uniformly bounded. We generalize uniform Lipschitzness by assuming that the per-sample gradients have sample-dependent upper bounds, i.e., per-sample Lipschitz constants, which themselves may be unbounded. We provide principled guidance on choosing the clip norm in DP-SGD for convex over-parameterized settings satisfying our general version of Lipschitzness when the per-sample Lipschitz constants are bounded; specifically, we recommend tuning the clip norm only till values up to the minimum per-sample Lipschitz constant. This finds application in the private training of a softmax layer on top of a deep network pre-trained on public data. We verify the efficacy of our recommendation via experiments on 8 datasets. Furthermore, we provide new convergence results for DP-SGD on convex and nonconvex functions when the Lipschitz constants are unbounded but have bounded moments, i.e., they are heavy-tailed.
Classic algorithms and machine learning systems like neural networks are both abundant in everyday life. While classic computer science algorithms are suitable for precise execution of exactly defined tasks such as finding the shortest path in a large graph, neural networks allow learning from data to predict the most likely answer in more complex tasks such as image classification, which cannot be reduced to an exact algorithm. To get the best of both worlds, this thesis explores combining both concepts leading to more robust, better performing, more interpretable, more computationally efficient, and more data efficient architectures. The thesis formalizes the idea of algorithmic supervision, which allows a neural network to learn from or in conjunction with an algorithm. When integrating an algorithm into a neural architecture, it is important that the algorithm is differentiable such that the architecture can be trained end-to-end and gradients can be propagated back through the algorithm in a meaningful way. To make algorithms differentiable, this thesis proposes a general method for continuously relaxing algorithms by perturbing variables and approximating the expectation value in closed form, i.e., without sampling. In addition, this thesis proposes differentiable algorithms, such as differentiable sorting networks, differentiable renderers, and differentiable logic gate networks. Finally, this thesis presents alternative training strategies for learning with algorithms.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.