Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Genre


On the Complexity of Adversarial Decision Making

Neural Information Processing Systems

A central problem in online learning and decision making--from bandits to reinforcement learning--is to understand what modeling assumptions lead to sampleefficient learning guarantees. We consider a general adversarial decision making framework that encompasses (structured) bandit problems with adversarial rewards and reinforcement learning problems with adversarial dynamics. Our main result is to show--via new upper and lower bounds--that the Decision-Estimation Coefficient, a complexity measure introduced by Foster et al. [17] in the stochastic counterpart to our setting, is necessary and sufficient to obtain low regret for adversarial decision making. However, compared to the stochastic setting, one must apply the Decision-Estimation Coefficient to the convex hull of the class of models (or, hypotheses) under consideration. This establishes that the price of accommodating adversarial rewards or dynamics is governed by the behavior of the model class under convexification, and recovers a number of existing results--both positive and negative. En route to obtaining these guarantees, we provide new structural results that connect the Decision-Estimation Coefficient to variants of other well-known complexity measures, including the Information Ratio of Russo and Van Roy [47] and the Exploration-by-Optimization objective of Lattimore and Gyรถrgy [32].



On the Double Descent of Random Features Models Trained with SGD

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study generalization properties of random features (RF) regression in high dimensions optimized by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in under-/overparameterized regime. In this work, we derive precise non-asymptotic error bounds of RF regression under both constant and polynomial-decay step-size SGD setting, and observe the double descent phenomenon both theoretically and empirically. Our analysis shows how to cope with multiple randomness sources of initialization, label noise, and data sampling (as well as stochastic gradients) with no closedform solution, and also goes beyond the commonly-used Gaussian/spherical data assumption. Our theoretical results demonstrate that, with SGD training, RF regression still generalizes well for interpolation learning, and is able to characterize the double descent behavior by the unimodality of variance and monotonic decrease of bias. Besides, we also prove that the constant step-size SGD setting incurs no loss in convergence rate when compared to the exact minimum-norm interpolator, as a theoretical justification of using SGD in practice.


Fully Convolutional One-Stage 3DObject Detection on LiDARRange Images

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a simple yet effective fully convolutional one-stage 3D object detector for LiDAR point clouds of autonomous driving scenes, termed FCOS-LiDAR. Unlike the dominant methods that use the bird-eye view (BEV), our proposed detector detects objects from the range view (RV, a.k.a.



PALMER: Perception-Action Loop with Memory for Long-Horizon Planning

Neural Information Processing Systems

To achieve autonomy in a priori unknown real-world scenarios, agents should be able to: i) act from high-dimensional sensory observations (e.g., images), ii) learn from past experience to adapt and improve, and iii) be capable of long horizon planning.


On Learning Fairness and Accuracy on Multiple Subgroups

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose an analysis in fair learning that preserves the utility of the data while reducing prediction disparities under the criteria of group sufficiency. We focus on the scenario where the data contains multiple or even many subgroups, each with limited number of samples. As a result, we present a principled method for learning a fair predictor for all subgroups via formulating it as a bilevel objective. In the lower-level, the subgroup-specific predictors are learned through a small amount of data and the fair predictor. In the upper-level, the fair predictor is updated to be close to all subgroup specific predictors. We further prove that such a bilevel objective can effectively control the group sufficiency and generalization error. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world datasets. Empirical evidence suggests the consistently improved fair predictions, as well as the comparable accuracy to the baselines.


VoxGRAF: Fast 3D-Aware Image Synthesis with Sparse Voxel Grids

Neural Information Processing Systems

State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering. Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance. Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper. Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization. To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D). In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity.


Bridging the Gap between Object and Image-level Representations for Open-Vocabulary Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing open-vocabulary object detectors typically enlarge their vocabulary sizes by leveraging different forms of weak supervision. This helps generalize to novel objects at inference. Two popular forms of weak-supervision used in openvocabulary detection (OVD) include pretrained CLIP model and image-level supervision. We note that both these modes of supervision are not optimally aligned for the detection task: CLIP is trained with image-text pairs and lacks precise localization of objects while the image-level supervision has been used with heuristics that do not accurately specify local object regions. In this work, we propose to address this problem by performing object-centric alignment of the language embeddings from the CLIP model. Furthermore, we visually ground the objects with only imagelevel supervision using a pseudo-labeling process that provides high-quality object proposals and helps expand the vocabulary during training.


Towards Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Model Reassembly

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper focuses on addressing the practical yet challenging problem of model heterogeneity in federated learning, where clients possess models with different network structures. To track this problem, we propose a novel framework called pFedHR, which leverages heterogeneous model reassembly to achieve personalized federated learning. In particular, we approach the problem of heterogeneous model personalization as a model-matching optimization task on the server side. Moreover, pFedHRautomatically and dynamically generates informative and diverse personalized candidates with minimal human intervention. Furthermore, our proposed heterogeneous model reassembly technique mitigates the adverse impact introduced by using public data with different distributions from the client data to a certain extent. Experimental results demonstrate that pFedHRoutperforms baselines on three datasets under both IID and Non-IID settings. Additionally, pFedHReffectively reduces the adverse impact of using different public data and dynamically generates diverse personalized models in an automated manner2.