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 Statistical Learning


S3GC: Scalable Self-Supervised Graph Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of clustering graphs with additional side-information of node features. The problem is extensively studied, and several existing methods exploit Graph Neural Networks to learn node representations. However, most of the existing methods focus on generic representations instead of their cluster-ability or do not scale to large scale graph datasets. In this work, we propose S3GC which uses contrastive learning along with Graph Neural Networks and node features to learn clusterable features. We empirically demonstrate that S3GC is able to learn the correct cluster structure even when graph information or node features are individually not informative enough to learn correct clusters.


Emergence of heavy tails in homogenized stochastic gradient descent

Neural Information Processing Systems

It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized stochastic gradient descent (hSGD), and show in a regularized linear regression framework that it leads to an asymptotically heavy-tailed parameter distribution, even though local gradient noise is Gaussian. We give explicit upper and lower bounds on the tail-index of the resulting parameter distribution and validate these bounds in numerical experiments. Moreover, the explicit form of these bounds enables us to quantify the interplay between optimization hyperparameters and the tail-index. Doing so, we contribute to the ongoing discussion on links between heavy tails and the generalization performance of neural networks as well as the ability of SGD to avoid suboptimal local minima.


Expected Probabilistic Hierarchies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Hierarchical clustering has usually been addressed by discrete optimization using heuristics or continuous optimization of relaxed scores for hierarchies. In this work, we propose to optimize expected scores under a probabilistic model over hierarchies. EPH uses differentiable hierarchy sampling enabling end-to-end gradient descent based optimization, and an unbiased subgraph sampling approach to scale to large datasets. EPH outperforms all other approaches quantitatively and provides meaningful hierarchies in qualitative evaluations.


Tight Nonparametric Convergence Rates for Stochastic Gradient Descent under the Noiseless Linear Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

In the context of statistical supervised learning, the noiseless linear model assumes that there exists a deterministic linear relation Y \langle \theta_*, \Phi(U) \rangle between the random output Y and the random feature vector \Phi(U), a potentially non-linear transformation of the inputs U . We analyze the convergence of single-pass, fixed step-size stochastic gradient descent on the least-square risk under this model. The convergence of the iterates to the optimum \theta_* and the decay of the generalization error follow polynomial convergence rates with exponents that both depend on the regularities of the optimum \theta_* and of the feature vectors \Phi(U) . We interpret our result in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space framework. As a special case, we analyze an online algorithm for estimating a real function on the unit hypercube from the noiseless observation of its value at randomly sampled points; the convergence depends on the Sobolev smoothness of the function and of a chosen kernel.


Peri-midFormer: Periodic Pyramid Transformer for Time Series Analysis

Neural Information Processing Systems

Time series analysis finds wide applications in fields such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and behavior recognition. Previous methods attempted to model temporal variations directly using 1D time series. However, this has been quite challenging due to the discrete nature of data points in time series and the complexity of periodic variation. In terms of periodicity, taking weather and traffic data as an example, there are multi-periodic variations such as yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily, etc. In order to break through the limitations of the previous methods, we decouple the implied complex periodic variations into inclusion and overlap relationships among different level periodic components based on the observation of the multi-periodicity therein and its inclusion relationships.


Navigating the Effect of Parametrization for Dimensionality Reduction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Parametric dimensionality reduction methods have gained prominence for their ability to generalize to unseen datasets, an advantage that traditional non-parametric approaches typically lack. Despite their growing popularity, there remains a prevalent misconception among practitioners about the equivalence in performance between parametric and non-parametric methods. Here, we show that these methods are not equivalent -- parametric methods retain global structure but lose significant local details. To explain this, we provide evidence that parameterized approaches lack the ability to repulse negative samples, and the choice of loss function also has an impact.Addressing these issues, we developed a new parametric method, ParamRepulsor, that incorporates Hard Negative Mining and a loss function that applies a strong repulsive force. This new method achieves state-of-the-art performance on local structure preservation for parametric methods without sacrificing the fidelity of global structural representation.


Non-asymptotic Analysis of Biased Adaptive Stochastic Approximation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in several recent deep learning and reinforcement learning applications that use Monte Carlo methods.This paper provides a comprehensive non-asymptotic analysis of SGD with biased gradients and adaptive steps for non-convex smooth functions. Our study incorporates time-dependent bias and emphasizes the importance of controlling the bias of the gradient estimator. In particular, we establish that Adagrad, RMSProp, and AMSGRAD, an exponential moving average variant of Adam, with biased gradients, converge to critical points for smooth non-convex functions at a rate similar to existing results in the literature for the unbiased case. Finally, we provide experimental results using Variational Autoenconders (VAE) and applications to several learning frameworks that illustrate our convergence results and show how the effect of bias can be reduced by appropriate hyperparameter tuning.


Generalization Bounds for Stochastic Gradient Descent via Localized \varepsilon -Covers

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose a new covering technique localized for the trajectories of SGD. This localization provides an algorithm-specific complexity measured by the covering number, which can have dimension-independent cardinality in contrast to standard uniform covering arguments that result in exponential dimension dependency. Based on this localized construction, we show that if the objective function is a finite perturbation of a piecewise strongly convex and smooth function with P pieces, i.e., non-convex and non-smooth in general, the generalization error can be upper bounded by O(\sqrt{(\log n\log(nP))/n}), where n is the number of data samples. In particular, this rate is independent of dimension and does not require early stopping and decaying step size. Finally, we employ these results in various contexts and derive generalization bounds for multi-index linear models, multi-class support vector machines, and K -means clustering for both hard and soft label setups, improving the previously known state-of-the-art rates.


Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent with Fixed-Size Minibatches: Tighter RDP Guarantees with or without Replacement

Neural Information Processing Systems

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has been instrumental in privately training deep learning models by providing a framework to control and track the privacy loss incurred during training. At the core of this computation lies a subsampling method that uses a privacy amplification lemma to enhance the privacy guarantees provided by the additive noise. Fixed size subsampling is appealing for its constant memory usage, unlike the variable sized minibatches in Poisson subsampling. It is also of interest in addressing class imbalance and federated learning. Current computable guarantees for fixed-size subsampling are not tight and do not consider both add/remove and replace-one adjacency relationships.


On Convergence of Adam for Stochastic Optimization under Relaxed Assumptions

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we study Adam in non-convex smooth scenarios with potential unbounded gradients and affine variance noise. We consider a general noise model which governs affine variance noise, bounded noise, and sub-Gaussian noise. We show that Adam with a specific hyper-parameter setup can find a stationary point with a \mathcal{O}(\text{poly}(\log T)/\sqrt{T}) rate in high probability under this general noise model where T denotes total number iterations, matching the lower rate of stochastic first-order algorithms up to logarithm factors. We also provide a probabilistic convergence result for Adam under a generalized smooth condition which allows unbounded smoothness parameters and has been illustrated empirically to capture the smooth property of many practical objective functions more accurately.