Education
AGang of Adversarial Bandits
We consider running multiple instances of multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems in parallel. A main motivation for this study are online recommendation systems, in which each of N users is associated with a MAB problem and the goal is to exploit users' similarity in order to learn users' preferences to K items more efficiently. We consider the adversarial MAB setting, whereby an adversary is free to choose which user and which loss to present to the learner during the learning process. Users are in a social network and the learner is aided by a-priori knowledge of the strengths of the social links between all pairs of users. It is assumed that if the social link between two users is strong then they tend to share the same action.
Meta-Album: Multi-domain Meta-Dataset for Few-Shot Image Classification
We introduce Meta-Album, an image classification meta-dataset designed to facilitate few-shot learning, transfer learning, meta-learning, among other tasks. It includes 40 open datasets, each having at least 20 classes with 40 examples per class, with verified licences. They stem from diverse domains, such as ecology (fauna and flora), manufacturing (textures, vehicles), human actions, and optical character recognition, featuring various image scales (microscopic, human scales, remote sensing). All datasets are preprocessed, annotated, and formatted uniformly, and come in 3 versions (Micro Mini Extended) to match users' computational resources.
1102a326d5f7c9e04fc3c89d0ede88c9-Supplemental.pdf
This is the distribution over datasets one obtains by first sampling a task t from Pt, and then sampling a dataset S from Pmz|t. Here p(S) corresponds to the marginal distribution over datasets S. Note that the last line above holds because E P f(,S) does not depend on t. Thus, in this section, we present a specialization of the bound for Gaussian distributions. Let P have mean µ and covariance; thus P = N(µ,) and analogously P,0 = N(µ0, 0). We can then apply the analytical form for the KL-divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions to the bound presented in Theorem 3. The result is the following bound holding under the same assumptions as Theorem 3: L(P,Pt) 1 l We implement the above bound in code instead of the non-specialized form of the KL divergence to speed up computations and simplify gradient computations. A.3.2 Few-Shot Learning Bound with Validation Data In this section, we will assume that, in addition to the training data S Pmz|t, we have access to validation data Sva Pnz|t at meta-training time. We will show that a meta-learning generalization bound can still be obtained in this case.
Generalization Bounds for Meta-Learning via PAC-Bayes and Uniform Stability
We are motivated by the problem of providing strong generalization guarantees in the context of meta-learning. Existing generalization bounds are either challenging to evaluate or provide vacuous guarantees in even relatively simple settings. We derive a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound for gradient-based metalearning using two different generalization frameworks in order to deal with the qualitatively different challenges of generalization at the "base" and "meta" levels. We employ bounds for uniformly stable algorithms at the base level and bounds from the PAC-Bayes framework at the meta level. The result of this approach is a novel PAC bound that is tighter when the base learner adapts quickly, which is precisely the goal of meta-learning. We show that our bound provides a tighter guarantee than other bounds on a toy non-convex problem on the unit sphere and a text-based classification example. We also present a practical regularization scheme motivated by the bound in settings where the bound is loose and demonstrate improved performance over baseline techniques.
Online Clustering of Bandits with Misspecified User Models
The contextual linear bandit is an important online learning problem where given arm features, a learning agent selects an arm at each round to maximize the cumulative rewards in the long run. A line of works, called the clustering of bandits (CB), utilize the collaborative effect over user preferences and have shown significant improvements over classic linear bandit algorithms. However, existing CB algorithms require well-specified linear user models and can fail when this critical assumption does not hold. Whether robust CB algorithms can be designed for more practical scenarios with misspecified user models remains an open problem. In this paper, we are the first to present the important problem of clustering of bandits with misspecified user models (CBMUM), where the expected rewards in user models can be perturbed away from perfect linear models. We devise two robust CB algorithms, RCLUMB and RSCLUMB (representing the learned clustering structure with dynamic graph and sets, respectively), that can accommodate the inaccurate user preference estimations and erroneous clustering caused by model misspecifications. We prove regret upper bounds of O(ϵ T mdlogT + d mT logT) for our algorithms under milder assumptions than previous CB works (notably, we move past a restrictive technical assumption on the distribution of the arms), which match the lower bound asymptotically in T up to logarithmic factors, and also match the state-of-the-art results in several degenerate cases. The techniques in proving the regret caused by misclustering users are quite general and may be of independent interest. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show our outperformance over previous algorithms.
Fair Canonical Correlation Analysis
This paper investigates fairness and bias in Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), a widely used statistical technique for examining the relationship between two sets of variables. We present a framework that alleviates unfairness by minimizing the correlation disparity error associated with protected attributes. Our approach enables CCA to learn global projection matrices from all data points while ensuring that these matrices yield comparable correlation levels to group-specific projection matrices. Experimental evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our method in reducing correlation disparity error without compromising CCA accuracy.
0d441de75945e5acbc865406fc9a2559-Supplemental.pdf
A.1 Connection to online learning In Section 2 we motivated the update (2) as a way to adjust the size of our prediction sets in response to the realized historical miscoverage frequency. Alternatively, one could also derive (2) as an online gradient descent algorithm with respect to the pinball loss. To be more precise let t:= sup{: Yt 2 Cˆt()}, where we remark that Cˆt( t) can be thought of as the smallest prediction set containing Yt. Because the pinball loss is convex, this gradient descent update falls within a well understood class of algorithms that have been extensively studied in the online learning literature (see e.g. Unfortunately, this notion of regret fails to capture our intuition that t is adaptively tracking the moving target .