Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Abstract: Neural networks employ spurious correlations in their predictions, resulting in decreased performance when these correlations do not hold. Recent works suggest fixing pretrained representations and training a classification head that does not use spurious features. We investigate how spurious features are represented in pretrained representations and explore strategies for removing information about spurious features. Considering the Waterbirds dataset and a few pretrained representations, we find that even with full knowledge of spurious features, their removal is not straightforward due to entangled representation. To address this, we propose a linear autoencoder training method to separate the representation into core, spurious, and other features. We propose two effective spurious feature removal approaches that are applied to the encoding and significantly improve classification performance measured by worst group accuracy.

Abstract: In this paper, we study problem of estimating a sparse regression vector with correct support in the presence of outlier samples. The inconsistency of lasso-type methods is well known in this scenario. We propose a combinatorial version of outlier-robust lasso which also identifies clean samples. Subsequently, we use these clean samples to make a good estimation. We also provide a novel invex relaxation for the combinatorial problem and provide provable theoretical guarantees for this relaxation. Finally, we conduct experiments to validate our theory and compare our results against standard lasso.

Abstract: Knowledge graphs represent real-world entities and their relations in a semantically-rich structure supported by ontologies. Exploring this data with machine learning methods often relies on knowledge graph embeddings, which produce latent representations of entities that preserve structural and local graph neighbourhood properties, but sacrifice explainability. However, in tasks such as link or relation prediction, understanding which specific features better explain a relation is crucial to support complex or critical applications. We propose SEEK, a novel approach for explainable representations to support relation prediction in knowledge graphs. It is based on identifying relevant shared semantic aspects (i.e., subgraphs) between entities and learning representations for each subgraph, producing a multi-faceted and explainable representation. We evaluate SEEK on two real-world highly complex relation prediction tasks: protein-protein interaction prediction and gene-disease association prediction. Our extensive analysis using established benchmarks demonstrates that SEEK achieves significantly better performance than standard learning representation methods while identifying both sufficient and necessary explanations based on shared semantic aspects.

Abstract: The execution of large deep neural networks (DNN) at mobile edge devices requires considerable consumption of critical resources, such as energy, while imposing demands on hardware capabilities. In approaches based on edge computing the execution of the models is offloaded to a compute-capable device positioned at the edge of 5G infrastructures. The main issue of the latter class of approaches is the need to transport information-rich signals over wireless links with limited and time-varying capacity. The recent split computing paradigm attempts to resolve this impasse by distributing the execution of DNN models across the layers of the systems to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted while imposing minimal computing load on mobile devices. In this context, we propose a novel split computing approach based on slimmable ensemble encoders. The key advantage of our design is the ability to adapt computational load and transmitted data size in real-time with minimal overhead and time. This is in contrast with existing approaches, where the same adaptation requires costly context switching and model loading. Moreover, our model outperforms existing solutions in terms of compression efficacy and execution time, especially in the context of weak mobile devices. We present a comprehensive comparison with the most advanced split computing solutions, as well as an experimental evaluation on GPU-less devices.

Abstract: We develop an approach to efficiently grow neural networks, within which parameterization and optimization strategies are designed by considering their effects on the training dynamics. Unlike existing growing methods, which follow simple replication heuristics or utilize auxiliary gradient-based local optimization, we craft a parameterization scheme which dynamically stabilizes weight, activation, and gradient scaling as the architecture evolves, and maintains the inference functionality of the network. To address the optimization difficulty resulting from imbalanced training effort distributed to subnetworks fading in at different growth phases, we propose a learning rate adaption mechanism that rebalances the gradient contribution of these separate subcomponents. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable or better accuracy than training large fixed-size models, while saving a substantial portion of the original computation budget for training. We demonstrate that these gains translate into real wall-clock training speedups.

Abstract: Anomaly detection plays an increasingly important role in various fields for critical tasks such as intrusion detection in cybersecurity, financial risk detection, and human health monitoring. A variety of anomaly detection methods have been proposed, and a category based on the isolation forest mechanism stands out due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency, e.g., iForest is often employed as a state-of-the-art detector for real deployment. While the majority of isolation forests use the binary structure, a framework LSHiForest has demonstrated that the multi-fork isolation tree structure can lead to better detection performance. However, there is no theoretical work answering the fundamentally and practically important question on the optimal tree structure for an isolation forest with respect to the branching factor. In this paper, we establish a theory on isolation efficiency to answer the question and determine the optimal branching factor for an isolation tree. Based on the theoretical underpinning, we design a practical optimal isolation forest OptIForest incorporating clustering based learning to hash which enables more information to be learned from data for better isolation quality. The rationale of our approach relies on a better bias-variance trade-off achieved by bias reduction in OptIForest. Extensive experiments on a series of benchmarking datasets for comparative and ablation studies demonstrate that our approach can efficiently and robustly achieve better detection performance in general than the state-of-the-arts including the deep learning based methods.

Abstract: A pooling operation is essential for effective graph-level representation learning, where the node drop pooling has become one mainstream graph pooling technology. However, current node drop pooling methods usually keep the top-k nodes according to their significance scores, which ignore the graph diversity in terms of the node features and the graph structures, thus resulting in suboptimal graph-level representations. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel plug-and-play score scheme and refer to it as MID, which consists of a \textbf{M}ultidimensional score space with two operations, \textit{i.e.}, fl\textbf{I}pscore and \textbf{D}ropscore. Specifically, the multidimensional score space depicts the significance of nodes through multiple criteria; the flipscore encourages the maintenance of dissimilar node features; and the dropscore forces the model to notice diverse graph structures instead of being stuck in significant local structures. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed MID, we perform extensive experiments by applying it to a wide variety of recent node drop pooling methods, including TopKPool, SAGPool, GSAPool, and ASAP. Specifically, the proposed MID can efficiently and consistently achieve about 2.8\% average improvements over the above four methods on seventeen real-world graph classification datasets, including four social datasets (IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, REDDIT-BINARY, and COLLAB), and thirteen biochemical datasets (D\&D, PROTEINS, NCI1, MUTAG, PTC-MR, NCI109, ENZYMES, MUTAGENICITY, FRANKENSTEIN, HIV, BBBP, TOXCAST, and TOX21). Code is available at~\url{https://github.com/whuchuang/mid}.

Abstract: We introduce a novel deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach called Movement Prmitive-based Planning Policy (MP3). By integrating movement primitives (MPs) into the deep RL framework, MP3 enables the generation of smooth trajectories throughout the whole learning process while effectively learning from sparse and non-Markovian rewards. Additionally, MP3 maintains the capability to adapt to changes in the environment during execution. Although many early successes in robot RL have been achieved by combining RL with MPs, these approaches are often limited to learning single stroke-based motions, lacking the ability to adapt to task variations or adjust motions during execution. Building upon our previous work, which introduced an episode-based RL method for the non-linear adaptation of MP parameters to different task variations, this paper extends the approach to incorporating replanning strategies. This allows adaptation of the MP parameters throughout motion execution, addressing the lack of online motion adaptation in stochastic domains requiring feedback. We compared our approach against state-of-the-art deep RL and RL with MPs methods. The results demonstrated improved performance in sophisticated, sparse reward settings and in domains requiring replanning.

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy using only pre-collected and fixed data. Although avoiding the time-consuming online interactions in RL, it poses challenges for out-of-distribution (OOD) state actions and often suffers from data inefficiency for training. Despite many efforts being devoted to addressing OOD state actions, the latter (data inefficiency) receives little attention in offline RL. To address this, this paper proposes the cross-domain offline RL, which assumes offline data incorporate additional source-domain data from varying transition dynamics (environments), and expects it to contribute to the offline data efficiency. To do so, we identify a new challenge of OOD transition dynamics, beyond the common OOD state actions issue, when utilizing cross-domain offline data. Then, we propose our method BOSA, which employs two support-constrained objectives to address the above OOD issues. Through extensive experiments in the cross-domain offline RL setting, we demonstrate BOSA can greatly improve offline data efficiency: using only 10\% of the target data, BOSA could achieve {74.4\%} of the SOTA offline RL performance that uses 100\% of the target data. Additionally, we also show BOSA can be effortlessly plugged into model-based offline RL and noising data augmentation techniques (used for generating source-domain data), which naturally avoids the potential dynamics mismatch between target-domain data and newly generated source-domain data.

Abstract: Decentralized deep learning requires dealing with non-iid data across clients, which may also change over time due to temporal shifts. While non-iid data has been extensively studied in distributed settings, temporal shifts have received no attention. To the best of our knowledge, we are first with tackling the novel and challenging problem of decentralized learning with non-iid and dynamic data. We propose a novel algorithm that can automatically discover and adapt to the evolving concepts in the network, without any prior knowledge or estimation of the number of concepts. We evaluate our algorithm on standard benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms previous methods for decentralized learning.

Abstract: We address the problem of identifying the optimal policy with a fixed confidence level in a multi-armed bandit setup, when \emph{the arms are subject to linear constraints}. Unlike the standard best-arm identification problem which is well studied, the optimal policy in this case may not be deterministic and could mix between several arms. This changes the geometry of the problem which we characterize via an information-theoretic lower bound. We introduce two asymptotically optimal algorithms for this setting, one based on the Track-and-Stop method and the other based on a game-theoretic approach. Both these algorithms try to track an optimal allocation based on the lower bound and computed by a weighted projection onto the boundary of a normal cone. Finally, we provide empirical results that validate our bounds and visualize how constraints change the hardness of the problem.

Abstract: Recent research in representation learning utilizes large databases of proteins or molecules to acquire knowledge of drug and protein structures through unsupervised learning techniques. These pre-trained representations have proven to significantly enhance the accuracy of subsequent tasks, such as predicting the affinity between drugs and target proteins. In this study, we demonstrate that by incorporating knowledge graphs from diverse sources and modalities into the sequences or SMILES representation, we can further enrich the representation and achieve state-of-the-art results on established benchmark datasets. We provide preprocessed and integrated data obtained from 7 public sources, which encompass over 30M triples. Additionally, we make available the pre-trained models based on this data, along with the reported outcomes of their performance on three widely-used benchmark datasets for drug-target binding affinity prediction found in the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC) benchmarks. Additionally, we make the source code for training models on benchmark datasets publicly available. Our objective in releasing these pre-trained models, accompanied by clean data for model pretraining and benchmark results, is to encourage research in knowledge-enhanced representation learning.

Abstract: The field of 'explainable' artificial intelligence (XAI) has produced highly cited methods that seek to make the decisions of complex machine learning (ML) methods 'understandable' to humans, for example by attributing 'importance' scores to input features. Yet, a lack of formal underpinning leaves it unclear as to what conclusions can safely be drawn from the results of a given XAI method and has also so far hindered the theoretical verification and empirical validation of XAI methods. This means that challenging non-linear problems, typically solved by deep neural networks, presently lack appropriate remedies. Here, we craft benchmark datasets for three different non-linear classification scenarios, in which the important class-conditional features are known by design, serving as ground truth explanations. Using novel quantitative metrics, we benchmark the explanation performance of a wide set of XAI methods across three deep learning model architectures. We show that popular XAI methods are often unable to significantly outperform random performance baselines and edge detection methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that explanations derived from different model architectures can be vastly different; thus, prone to misinterpretation even under controlled conditions.

Abstract: Cascade systems comprise a two-model sequence, with a lightweight model processing all samples and a heavier, higher-accuracy model conditionally refining harder samples to improve accuracy. By placing the light model on the device side and the heavy model on a server, model cascades constitute a widely used distributed inference approach. With the rapid expansion of intelligent indoor environments, such as smart homes, the new setting of Multi-Device Cascade is emerging where multiple and diverse devices are to simultaneously use a shared heavy model on the same server, typically located within or close to the consumer environment. This work presents MultiTASC, a multi-tenancy-aware scheduler that adaptively controls the forwarding decision functions of the devices in order to maximize the system throughput, while sustaining high accuracy and low latency. By explicitly considering device heterogeneity, our scheduler improves the latency service-level objective (SLO) satisfaction rate by 20-25 percentage points (pp) over state-of-the-art cascade methods in highly heterogeneous setups, while serving over 40 devices, showcasing its scalability.

Abstract: The storage, management, and application of massive spatio-temporal data are widely applied in various practical scenarios, including public safety. However, due to the unique spatio-temporal distribution characteristics of re-al-world data, most existing methods have limitations in terms of the spatio-temporal proximity of data and load balancing in distributed storage. There-fore, this paper proposes an efficient partitioning method of large-scale public safety spatio-temporal data based on information loss constraints (IFL-LSTP). The IFL-LSTP model specifically targets large-scale spatio-temporal point da-ta by combining the spatio-temporal partitioning module (STPM) with the graph partitioning module (GPM). This approach can significantly reduce the scale of data while maintaining the model's accuracy, in order to improve the partitioning efficiency. It can also ensure the load balancing of distributed storage while maintaining spatio-temporal proximity of the data partitioning results. This method provides a new solution for distributed storage of mas-sive spatio-temporal data. The experimental results on multiple real-world da-tasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of IFL-LSTP.

Abstract: Federated learning is a distributed machine learning technology, which realizes the balance between data privacy protection and data sharing computing. To protect data privacy, feder-ated learning learns shared models by locally executing distributed training on participating devices and aggregating local models into global models. There is a problem in federated learning, that is, the negative impact caused by the non-independent and identical distribu-tion of data across different user terminals. In order to alleviate this problem, this paper pro-poses a strengthened federation aggregation method based on adaptive OPTICS clustering. Specifically, this method perceives the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, and models the adjustment process of parameter search direction, so as to find the best clus-tering parameters to achieve the best federated aggregation method. The core contribution of this paper is to propose an adaptive OPTICS clustering algorithm for federated learning. The algorithm combines OPTICS clustering and adaptive learning technology, and can effective-ly deal with the problem of non-independent and identically distributed data across different user terminals. By perceiving the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, the goal is to find the best parameters of the OPTICS cluster without artificial assistance, so as to obtain the best federated aggregation method and achieve better performance. The reliability and practicability of this method have been verified on the experimental data, and its effec-tiveness and superiority have been proved.

Abstract: Learning from visual observation (LfVO), aiming at recovering policies from only visual observation data, is promising yet a challenging problem. Existing LfVO approaches either only adopt inefficient online learning schemes or require additional task-specific information like goal states, making them not suited for open-ended tasks. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework for learning from visual observation. In the first stage, we introduce and pretrain State-to-Go (STG) Transformer offline to predict and differentiate latent transitions of demonstrations. Subsequently, in the second stage, the STG Transformer provides intrinsic rewards for downstream reinforcement learning tasks where an agent learns merely from intrinsic rewards. Empirical results on Atari and Minecraft show that our proposed method outperforms baselines and in some tasks even achieves performance comparable to the policy learned from environmental rewards. These results shed light on the potential of utilizing video-only data to solve difficult visual reinforcement learning tasks rather than relying on complete offline datasets containing states, actions, and rewards. The project's website and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/stgtransformer.

Abstract: Recent years have seen many successful applications of machine learning (ML) to facilitate fluid dynamic computations. As simulations grow, generating new training datasets for traditional offline learning creates I/O and storage bottlenecks. Additionally, performing inference at runtime requires non-trivial coupling of ML framework libraries with simulation codes. This work offers a solution to both limitations by simplifying this coupling and enabling in situ training and inference workflows on heterogeneous clusters. Leveraging SmartSim, the presented framework deploys a database to store data and ML models in memory, thus circumventing the file system. On the Polaris supercomputer, we demonstrate perfect scaling efficiency to the full machine size of the data transfer and inference costs thanks to a novel co-located deployment of the database. Moreover, we train an autoencoder in situ from a turbulent flow simulation, showing that the framework overhead is negligible relative to a solver time step and training epoch.

Abstract: In this work, we propose a built-in Deep Learning Physics Optimization (DLPO) framework to set up a shape optimization study of the Duisburg Test Case (DTC) container vessel. We present two different applications: (1) sensitivity analysis to detect the most promising generic basis hull shapes, and (2) multi-objective optimization to quantify the trade-off between optimal hull forms. DLPO framework allows for the evaluation of design iterations automatically in an end-to-end manner. We achieved these results by coupling Extrality's Deep Learning Physics (DLP) model to a CAD engine and an optimizer. Our proposed DLP model is trained on full 3D volume data coming from RANS simulations, and it can provide accurate and high-quality 3D flow predictions in real-time, which makes it a good evaluator to perform optimization of new container vessel designs w.r.t the hydrodynamic efficiency. In particular, it is able to recover the forces acting on the vessel by integration on the hull surface with a mean relative error of 3.84\% \pm 2.179\% on the total resistance. Each iteration takes only 20 seconds, thus leading to a drastic saving of time and engineering efforts, while delivering valuable insight into the performance of the vessel, including RANS-like detailed flow information. We conclude that DLPO framework is a promising tool to accelerate the ship design process and lead to more efficient ships with better hydrodynamic performance.

Abstract: Novel Class Discovery (NCD) is the problem of trying to discover novel classes in an unlabeled set, given a labeled set of different but related classes. The majority of NCD methods proposed so far only deal with image data, despite tabular data being among the most widely used type of data in practical applications. To interpret the results of clustering or NCD algorithms, data scientists need to understand the domain- and application-specific attributes of tabular data. This task is difficult and can often only be performed by a domain expert. Therefore, this interface allows a domain expert to easily run state-of-the-art algorithms for NCD in tabular data. With minimal knowledge in data science, interpretable results can be generated.

Abstract: Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years, and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased tremendously, but this has come at the cost of a significant increase in necessary compute. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce the computational time and memory consumption of neural networks. Many studies have shown, however, that modern transformer models tend to learn strong outliers in their activations, making them difficult to quantize. To retain acceptable performance, the existence of these outliers requires activations to be in higher bitwidth or the use of different numeric formats, extra fine-tuning, or other workarounds. We show that strong outliers are related to very specific behavior of attention heads that try to learn a "no-op" or just a partial update of the residual. To achieve the exact zeros needed in the attention matrix for a no-update, the input to the softmax is pushed to be larger and larger during training, causing outliers in other parts of the network. Based on these observations, we propose two simple (independent) modifications to the attention mechanism - clipped softmax and gated attention. We empirically show that models pre-trained using our methods learn significantly smaller outliers while maintaining and sometimes even improving the floating-point task performance. This enables us to quantize transformers to full INT8 quantization of the activations without any additional effort. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both language models (BERT, OPT) and vision transformers.

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated success in modeling relational data, especially for data that exhibits homophily: when a connection between nodes tends to imply that they belong to the same class. However, while this assumption is true in many relevant situations, there are important real-world scenarios that violate this assumption, and this has spurred research into improving GNNs for these cases. In this work, we propose Evolving Computation Graphs (ECGs), a novel method for enhancing GNNs on heterophilic datasets. Our approach builds on prior theoretical insights linking node degree, high homophily, and inter vs intra-class embedding similarity by rewiring the GNNs' computation graph towards adding edges that connect nodes that are likely to be in the same class. We utilise weaker classifiers to identify these edges, ultimately improving GNN performance on non-homophilic data as a result. We evaluate ECGs on a diverse set of recently-proposed heterophilous datasets and demonstrate improvements over the relevant baselines. ECG presents a simple, intuitive and elegant approach for improving GNN performance on heterophilic datasets without requiring prior domain knowledge.

Abstract: Change detection is of fundamental importance when analyzing data streams. Detecting changes both quickly and accurately enables monitoring and prediction systems to react, e.g., by issuing an alarm or by updating a learning algorithm. However, detecting changes is challenging when observations are high-dimensional. In high-dimensional data, change detectors should not only be able to identify when changes happen, but also in which subspace they occur. Ideally, one should also quantify how severe they are. Our approach, ABCD, has these properties. ABCD learns an encoder-decoder model and monitors its accuracy over a window of adaptive size. ABCD derives a change score based on Bernstein's inequality to detect deviations in terms of accuracy, which indicate changes. Our experiments demonstrate that ABCD outperforms its best competitor by at least 8% and up to 23% in F1-score on average. It can also accurately estimate changes' subspace, together with a severity measure that correlates with the ground truth.

Abstract: Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by learning the inherent structure of action-wise similar MDP to appropriately balance the performance degradation versus sample/computational complexity. In particular, we partition the action spaces into multiple groups based on the similarity in transition distribution and reward function, and build a linear decomposition model to capture the difference between the intra-group transition kernel and the intra-group rewards. Both our theoretical analysis and experiments reveal a \emph{surprising and counter-intuitive result}: while a more refined grouping strategy can reduce the approximation error caused by treating actions in the same group as identical, it also leads to increased estimation error when the size of samples or the computation resources is limited. This finding highlights the grouping strategy as a new degree of freedom that can be optimized to minimize the overall performance loss. To address this issue, we formulate a general optimization problem for determining the optimal grouping strategy, which strikes a balance between performance loss and sample/computational complexity. We further propose a computationally efficient method for selecting a nearly-optimal grouping strategy, which maintains its computational complexity independent of the size of the action space.

Abstract: Generative diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, can generate visually appealing, diverse, and high-resolution images for various applications. These models are trained on billions of internet-sourced images, raising significant concerns about the potential unauthorized use of copyright-protected images. In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to determine if a specific image was used in the training set, a problem known in the cybersecurity community and referred to as a membership inference attack. Our focus is on Stable Diffusion, and we address the challenge of designing a fair evaluation framework to answer this membership question. We propose a methodology to establish a fair evaluation setup and apply it to Stable Diffusion, enabling potential extensions to other generative models. Utilizing this evaluation setup, we execute membership attacks (both known and newly introduced). Our research reveals that previously proposed evaluation setups do not provide a full understanding of the effectiveness of membership inference attacks. We conclude that the membership inference attack remains a significant challenge for large diffusion models (often deployed as black-box systems), indicating that related privacy and copyright issues will persist in the foreseeable future.

Abstract: There is an increasing interest in learning reward functions that model human intent and human preferences. However, many frameworks use blackbox learning methods that, while expressive, are difficult to interpret. We propose and evaluate a novel approach for learning expressive and interpretable reward functions from preferences using Differentiable Decision Trees (DDTs) for both low- and high-dimensional state inputs. We explore and discuss the viability of learning interpretable reward functions using DDTs by evaluating our algorithm on Cartpole, Visual Gridworld environments, and Atari games. We provide evidence that that the tree structure of our learned reward function is useful in determining the extent to which a reward function is aligned with human preferences. We visualize the learned reward DDTs and find that they are capable of learning interpretable reward functions but that the discrete nature of the trees hurts the performance of reinforcement learning at test time. However, we also show evidence that using soft outputs (averaged over all leaf nodes) results in competitive performance when compared with larger capacity deep neural network reward functions.

Abstract: The Complementarity Determining Region (CDR) structure prediction of loops in antibody engineering has gained a lot of attraction by researchers. When designing antibodies, a main challenge is to predict the CDR structure of the H3 loop. Compared with the other CDR loops, that is the H1 and H2 loops, the CDR structure of the H3 loop is more challenging due to its varying length and flexible structure. In this paper, we propose a Multi-task learning model with Loop Specific Attention, namely MLSA. In particular, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to jointly learn the three CDR loops, via a novel multi-task learning strategy. In addition, to account for the structural and functional similarities and differences of the three CDR loops, we propose a loop specific attention mechanism to control the influence of each CDR loop on the training of MLSA. Our experimental evaluation on widely used benchmark data shows that the proposed MLSA method significantly reduces the prediction error of the CDR structure of the H3 loop, by at least 19%, when compared with other baseline strategies. Finally, for reproduction purposes we make the implementation of MLSA publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MLSA-2442/.

Abstract: We consider a contextual bandit problem with $S $ contexts and $A $ actions. In each round $t=1,2,\dots$ the learner observes a random context and chooses an action based on its past experience. The learner then observes a random reward whose mean is a function of the context and the action for the round. Under the assumption that the contexts can be lumped into $r\le \min\{S ,A \}$ groups such that the mean reward for the various actions is the same for any two contexts that are in the same group, we give an algorithm that outputs an $\epsilon$-optimal policy after using at most $\widetilde O(r (S +A )/\epsilon^2)$ samples with high probability and provide a matching $\widetilde\Omega(r (S +A )/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound. In the regret minimization setting, we give an algorithm whose cumulative regret up to time $T$ is bounded by $\widetilde O(\sqrt{r^3(S +A )T})$. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show the near-optimal sample complexity in the PAC setting and $\widetilde O(\sqrt{{poly}(r)(S+K)T})$ minimax regret in the online setting for this problem. We also show our algorithms can be applied to more general low-rank bandits and get improved regret bounds in some scenarios.

Abstract: We study the complexity of learning mixtures of separated Gaussians with common unknown bounded covariance matrix. Specifically, we focus on learning Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) on $\mathbb{R}^d$ of the form $P= \sum_{i=1}^k w_i \mathcal{N}(\boldsymbol \mu_i,\mathbf \Sigma_i)$, where $\mathbf \Sigma_i = \mathbf \Sigma \preceq \mathbf I$ and $\min_{i \neq j} \| \boldsymbol \mu_i - \boldsymbol \mu_j\|_2 \geq k^\epsilon$ for some $\epsilon>0$. Known learning algorithms for this family of GMMs have complexity $(dk)^{O(1/\epsilon)}$. In this work, we prove that any Statistical Query (SQ) algorithm for this problem requires complexity at least $d^{\Omega(1/\epsilon)}$. In the special case where the separation is on the order of $k^{1/2}$, we additionally obtain fine-grained SQ lower bounds with the correct exponent. Our SQ lower bounds imply similar lower bounds for low-degree polynomial tests. Conceptually, our results provide evidence that known algorithms for this problem are nearly best possible.

Abstract: Predictive models that satisfy group fairness criteria in aggregate for members of a protected class, but do not guarantee subgroup fairness, could produce biased predictions for individuals at the intersection of two or more protected classes. To address this risk, we propose Conditional Bias Scan (CBS), a flexible auditing framework for detecting intersectional biases in classification models. CBS identifies the subgroup for which there is the most significant bias against the protected class, as compared to the equivalent subgroup in the non-protected class, and can incorporate multiple commonly used fairness definitions for both probabilistic and binarized predictions. We show that this methodology can detect previously unidentified intersectional and contextual biases in the COMPAS pre-trial risk assessment tool and has higher bias detection power compared to similar methods that audit for subgroup fairness.

Abstract: Emotion recognition has become an important research topic in the field of human-computer interaction. Studies on sound and videos to understand emotions focused mainly on analyzing facial expressions and classified 6 basic emotions. In this study, the performance of different sequence models in multi-modal emotion recognition was compared. The sound and images were first processed by multi-layered CNN models, and the outputs of these models were fed into various sequence models. The sequence model is GRU, Transformer, LSTM and Max Pooling. Accuracy, precision, and F1 Score values of all models were calculated. The multi-modal CREMA-D dataset was used in the experiments. As a result of the comparison of the CREMA-D dataset, GRU-based architecture with 0.640 showed the best result in F1 score, LSTM-based architecture with 0.699 in precision metric, while sensitivity showed the best results over time with Max Pooling-based architecture with 0.620. As a result, it has been observed that the sequence models compare performances close to each other.

Abstract: Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms return a target policy maximizing a trade-off between (1) the expected performance gain over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, and (2) the risk stemming from the out-of-distribution-ness of the induced state-action occupancy. It follows that the performance of the target policy is strongly related to the performance of the behavior policy and, thus, the trajectory return distribution of the dataset. We show that in mixed datasets consisting of mostly low-return trajectories and minor high-return trajectories, state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms are overly restrained by low-return trajectories and fail to exploit high-performing trajectories to the fullest. To overcome this issue, we show that, in deterministic MDPs with stochastic initial states, the dataset sampling can be re-weighted to induce an artificial dataset whose behavior policy has a higher return. This re-weighted sampling strategy may be combined with any offline RL algorithm. We further analyze that the opportunity for performance improvement over the behavior policy correlates with the positive-sided variance of the returns of the trajectories in the dataset. We empirically show that while CQL, IQL, and TD3+BC achieve only a part of this potential policy improvement, these same algorithms combined with our reweighted sampling strategy fully exploit the dataset. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that, despite its theoretical limitation, the approach may still be efficient in stochastic environments. The code is available at https://github.com/Improbable-AI/harness-offline-rl.