Sim-to-real transfer presents a difficult challenge, where models trained in simulation are to be deployed in the real world. The distribution shift between the two settings leads to biased representations of the perceived real-world environment, and thus to suboptimal predictions. In this work, we tackle the challenge of sim-to-real transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) agents for coverage path planning (CPP). In CPP, the task is for a robot to find a path that visits every point of a confined area. Specifically, we consider the case where the environment is unknown, and the agent needs to plan the path online while mapping the environment. We bridge the sim-to-real gap through a semi-virtual environment with a simulated sensor and obstacles, while including real robot kinematics and real-time aspects. We investigate what level of fine-tuning is needed for adapting to a realistic setting, comparing to an agent trained solely in simulation. We find that a high model inference frequency is sufficient for reducing the sim-to-real gap, while fine-tuning degrades performance initially. By training the model in simulation and deploying it at a high inference frequency, we transfer state-of-the-art results from simulation to the real domain, where direct learning would take in the order of weeks with manual interaction, i.e., would be completely infeasible.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies are critically vulnerable to adversarial noise in observations, posing severe risks in safety-critical scenarios. For example, a self-driving car receiving manipulated sensory inputs about traffic signs could lead to catastrophic outcomes. Existing strategies to fortify RL algorithms against such adversarial perturbations generally fall into two categories: (a) using regularization methods that enhance robustness by incorporating adversarial loss terms into the value objectives, and (b) adopting "maximin" principles, which focus on maximizing the minimum value to ensure robustness. While regularization methods reduce the likelihood of successful attacks, their effectiveness drops significantly if an attack does succeed. On the other hand, maximin objectives, although robust, tend to be overly conservative. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel objective called Adversarial Counterfactual Error (ACoE), which naturally balances optimizing value and robustness against adversarial attacks. To optimize ACoE in a scalable manner in model-free settings, we propose a theoretically justified surrogate objective known as Cumulative-ACoE (C-ACoE). The core idea of optimizing C-ACoE is utilizing the belief about the underlying true state given the adversarially perturbed observation. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches for addressing adversarial RL problems across all established benchmarks (MuJoCo, Atari, and Highway) used in the literature.

The problem of reward design examines the interaction between a leader and a follower, where the leader aims to shape the follower's behavior to maximize the leader's payoff by modifying the follower's reward function. Current approaches to reward design rely on an accurate model of how the follower responds to reward modifications, which can be sensitive to modeling inaccuracies. To address this issue of sensitivity, we present a solution that offers robustness against uncertainties in modeling the follower, including 1) how the follower breaks ties in the presence of nonunique best responses, 2) inexact knowledge of how the follower perceives reward modifications, and 3) bounded rationality of the follower. Our robust solution is guaranteed to exist under mild conditions and can be obtained numerically by solving a mixed-integer linear program. Numerical experiments on multiple test cases demonstrate that our solution improves robustness compared to the standard approach without incurring significant additional computing costs.

With the increasing computational costs associated with deep learning, automated hyperparameter optimization methods, strongly relying on black-box Bayesian optimization (BO), face limitations. Freeze-thaw BO offers a promising grey-box alternative, strategically allocating scarce resources incrementally to different configurations. However, the frequent surrogate model updates inherent to this approach pose challenges for existing methods, requiring retraining or fine-tuning their neural network surrogates online, introducing overhead, instability, and hyper-hyperparameters. In this work, we propose FT-PFN, a novel surrogate for Freeze-thaw style BO. FT-PFN is a prior-data fitted network (PFN) that leverages the transformers' in-context learning ability to efficiently and reliably do Bayesian learning curve extrapolation in a single forward pass. Our empirical analysis across three benchmark suites shows that the predictions made by FT-PFN are more accurate and 10-100 times faster than those of the deep Gaussian process and deep ensemble surrogates used in previous work. Furthermore, we show that, when combined with our novel acquisition mechanism (MFPI-random), the resulting in-context freeze-thaw BO method (ifBO), yields new state-of-the-art performance in the same three families of deep learning HPO benchmarks considered in prior work.

The local and global interpretability of various ML models has been studied extensively in recent years. However, despite significant progress in the field, many known results remain informal or lack sufficient mathematical rigor. We propose a framework for bridging this gap, by using computational complexity theory to assess local and global perspectives of interpreting ML models. We begin by proposing proofs for two novel insights that are essential for our analysis: (1) a duality between local and global forms of explanations; and (2) the inherent uniqueness of certain global explanation forms. We then use these insights to evaluate the complexity of computing explanations, across three model types representing the extremes of the interpretability spectrum: (1) linear models; (2) decision trees; and (3) neural networks. Our findings offer insights into both the local and global interpretability of these models. For instance, under standard complexity assumptions such as P != NP, we prove that selecting global sufficient subsets in linear models is computationally harder than selecting local subsets. Interestingly, with neural networks and decision trees, the opposite is true: it is harder to carry out this task locally than globally. We believe that our findings demonstrate how examining explainability through a computational complexity lens can help us develop a more rigorous grasp of the inherent interpretability of ML models.

Temporal distribution shifts are ubiquitous in time series data. One of the most popular methods assumes that the temporal distribution shift occurs uniformly to disentangle the stationary and nonstationary dependencies. But this assumption is difficult to meet, as we do not know when the distribution shifts occur. To solve this problem, we propose to learn IDentifiable latEnt stAtes (IDEA) to detect when the distribution shifts occur. Beyond that, we further disentangle the stationary and nonstationary latent states via sufficient observation assumption to learn how the latent states change. Specifically, we formalize the causal process with environment-irrelated stationary and environment-related nonstationary variables. Under mild conditions, we show that latent environments and stationary/nonstationary variables are identifiable. Based on these theories, we devise the IDEA model, which incorporates an autoregressive hidden Markov model to estimate latent environments and modular prior networks to identify latent states. The IDEA model outperforms several latest nonstationary forecasting methods on various benchmark datasets, highlighting its advantages in real-world scenarios.

An example of this is question answering (QA): given a question from the user, the model may provide a brief answer, but it may also follow with supporting facts and explanations, which can vary in form and detail. The user can be satisfied by a wide variety of responses, irrespective of their style or (to some extent) the choice of supporting facts included. Free-form NLG poses significant challenges to uncertainty quantification: some aspects of generation are irrelevant to the task's purpose and best excluded from uncertainty quantification, but it often appears that we are unable to characterize them precisely. If left unaddressed, however, the model's variation in the irrelevant aspects may dominate in standard uncertainty measures such as token-level entropy (Kuhn et al., 2023), making them uninformative about the model's actual performance on the task. Starting from Kuhn et al. (2023), a recent line of work (Kuhn et al., 2023; Lin et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2023; Aichberger et al., 2024) studied this issue and proposed measuring the "semantic uncertainty" of generation; "semantics" is defined as the equivalence class of textual responses that logically entail one another. Empirical improvements in downstream tasks evidenced their contributions and highlighted the importance of task-specific uncertainty quantification, but important conceptual and practical issues remain. From a practical perspective, semantic equivalence is estimated using machine learning models, resulting in imprecise estimates that do not necessarily define an equivalence relation.

A Bayesian nonparametric model known as the Wishart process has been shown to be effective in this situation, but its inference remains highly challenging. In this work, we introduce a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler for the Wishart process, and show how it compares to conventional inference approaches, namely MCMC and variational inference. Using simulations we show that SMC sampling results in the most robust estimates and out-of-sample predictions of dynamic covariance. SMC especially outperforms the alternative approaches when using composite covariance functions with correlated parameters. We demonstrate the practical applicability of our proposed approach on a dataset of clinical depression (n = 1), and show how using an accurate representation of the posterior distribution can be used to test for dynamics on covariance.

We investigate how to select the number of communities for weighted networks without a full likelihood modeling. First, we propose a novel weighted degree-corrected stochastic block model (DCSBM), in which the mean adjacency matrix is modeled as the same as in standard DCSBM, while the variance profile matrix is assumed to be related to the mean adjacency matrix through a given variance function. Our method of selection the number of communities is based on a sequential testing framework, in each step the weighed DCSBM is fitted via some spectral clustering method. A key step is to carry out matrix scaling on the estimated variance profile matrix. The resulting scaling factors can be used to normalize the adjacency matrix, from which the testing statistic is obtained. Under mild conditions on the weighted DCSBM, our proposed procedure is shown to be consistent in estimating the true number of communities. Numerical experiments on both simulated and real network data also demonstrate the desirable empirical properties of our method.

We present a formulation of flow matching as variational inference, which we refer to as variational flow matching (VFM). Based on this formulation we develop CatFlow, a flow matching method for categorical data. CatFlow is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and achieves strong results on graph generation tasks. In VFM, the objective is to approximate the posterior probability path, which is a distribution over possible end points of a trajectory. We show that VFM admits both the CatFlow objective and the original flow matching objective as special cases. We also relate VFM to score-based models, in which the dynamics are stochastic rather than deterministic, and derive a bound on the model likelihood based on a reweighted VFM objective. We evaluate CatFlow on one abstract graph generation task and two molecular generation tasks. In all cases, CatFlow exceeds or matches performance of the current state-of-the-art models.