Supervised Learning
Fairness constraints can help exact inference in structured prediction
Many inference problems in structured prediction can be modeled as maximizing a score function on a space of labels, where graphs are a natural representation to decompose the total score into a sum of unary (nodes) and pairwise (edges) scores. Given a generative model with an undirected connected graph G and true vector of binary labels \bar{y}, it has been previously shown that when G has good expansion properties, such as complete graphs or d-regular expanders, one can exactly recover \bar{y} (with high probability and in polynomial time) from a single noisy observation of each edge and node. We analyze the previously studied generative model by Globerson et al. (2015) under a notion of statistical parity. That is, given a fair binary node labeling, we ask the question whether it is possible to recover the fair assignment, with high probability and in polynomial time, from single edge and node observations. We find that, in contrast to the known trade-offs between fairness and model performance, the addition of the fairness constraint improves the probability of exact recovery.
Provably adaptive reinforcement learning in metric spaces
We study reinforcement learning in continuous state and action spaces endowed with a metric. We provide a refined analysis of the algorithm of Sinclair, Banerjee, and Yu (2019) and show that its regret scales with the zooming dimension of the instance. This parameter, which originates in the bandit literature, captures the size of the subsets of near optimal actions and is always smaller than the covering dimension used in previous analyses. As such, our results are the first provably adaptive guarantees for reinforcement learning in metric spaces.
First-Order Algorithms for Min-Max Optimization in Geodesic Metric Spaces
From optimal transport to robust dimensionality reduction, many machine learning applicationscan be cast into the min-max optimization problems over Riemannian manifolds. Though manymin-max algorithms have been analyzed in the Euclidean setting, it has been elusive how theseresults translate to the Riemannian case. Zhang et al. (2022) have recently identified that geodesic convexconcave Riemannian problems admit always Sion's saddle point solutions. Immediately, an importantquestion that arises is if a performance gap between the Riemannian and the optimal Euclidean spaceconvex concave algorithms is necessary. Our work is the first to answer the question in the negative:We prove that the Riemannian corrected extragradient (RCEG) method achieves last-iterate at alinear convergence rate at the geodesically strongly convex concave case, matching the euclidean one.Our results also extend to the stochastic or non-smooth case where RCEG & Riemanian gradientascent descent (RGDA) achieve respectively near-optimal convergence rates up to factors dependingon curvature of the manifold.
Structured Prediction with Projection Oracles
We propose in this paper a general framework for deriving loss functions for structured prediction. In our framework, the user chooses a convex set including the output space and provides an oracle for projecting onto that set. Given that oracle, our framework automatically generates a corresponding convex and smooth loss function. As we show, adding a projection as output layer provably makes the loss smaller. We identify the marginal polytope, the output space's convex hull, as the best convex set on which to project.
Refining Language Models with Compositional Explanations
Pre-trained language models have been successful on text classification tasks, but are prone to learning spurious correlations from biased datasets, and are thus vulnerable when making inferences in a new domain. Prior work reveals such spurious patterns via post-hoc explanation algorithms which compute the importance of input features. Further, the model is regularized to align the importance scores with human knowledge, so that the unintended model behaviors are eliminated. However, such a regularization technique lacks flexibility and coverage, since only importance scores towards a pre-defined list of features are adjusted, while more complex human knowledge such as feature interaction and pattern generalization can hardly be incorporated. In this work, we propose to refine a learned language model for a target domain by collecting human-provided compositional explanations regarding observed biases. By parsing these explanations into executable logic rules, the human-specified refinement advice from a small set of explanations can be generalized to more training examples.
Beyond Vector Spaces: Compact Data Representation as Differentiable Weighted Graphs
Learning useful representations is a key ingredient to the success of modern machine learning. Currently, representation learning mostly relies on embedding data into Euclidean space. However, recent work has shown that data in some domains is better modeled by non-euclidean metric spaces, and inappropriate geometry can result in inferior performance. In this paper, we aim to eliminate the inductive bias imposed by the embedding space geometry. Namely, we propose to map data into more general non-vector metric spaces: a weighted graph with a shortest path distance.
Exact inference in structured prediction
Structured prediction can be thought of as a simultaneous prediction of multiple labels. This is often done by maximizing a score function on the space of labels, which decomposes as a sum of pairwise and unary potentials. The above is naturally modeled with a graph, where edges and vertices are related to pairwise and unary potentials, respectively. We consider the generative process proposed by Globerson et al. (2015) and apply it to general connected graphs. We analyze the structural conditions of the graph that allow for the exact recovery of the labels.
Structured Prediction for Conditional Meta-Learning
The goal of optimization-based meta-learning is to find a single initialization shared across a distribution of tasks to speed up the process of learning new tasks. Conditional meta-learning seeks task-specific initialization to better capture complex task distributions and improve performance. However, many existing conditional methods are difficult to generalize and lack theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose a new perspective on conditional meta-learning via structured prediction. We derive task-adaptive structured meta-learning (TASML), a principled framework that yields task-specific objective functions by weighing meta-training data on target tasks. Our non-parametric approach is model-agnostic and can be combined with existing meta-learning methods to achieve conditioning.
Localized Structured Prediction
Key to structured prediction is exploiting the problem's structure to simplify the learning process. A major challenge arises when data exhibit a local structure (i.e., are made by parts'') that can be leveraged to better approximate the relation between (parts of) the input and (parts of) the output. Recent literature on signal processing, and in particular computer vision, shows that capturing these aspects is indeed essential to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, in this context algorithms are typically derived on a case-by-case basis. In this work we propose the first theoretical framework to deal with part-based data from a general perspective and study a novel method within the setting of statistical learning theory.
Reviews: Manifold Structured Prediction
Summary: This paper is an extension of the results presented in "A Consistent Regularization Approach for Structured Prediction" by Ciliberto et al. It focuses on the specific case where the output space is a Riemannian manifold, and describes/proves sufficient conditions for loss functions defined over manifolds to have the properties of what is called a "Structure Encoding Loss Function" (SELF). Ciliberto et al presents an estimator that, when used with a SELF, has provable universal consistency and learning rates; this paper extends this estimator and these prior theoretical results to be used also with the aforementioned class of loss functions defined over manifolds, with a specific focus placed on the squared geodesic distance. After describing how inference can be achieved using the previously defined estimator for the specific output spaces defined here, experiments are run on a synthetic dataset with the goal of learning the inverse function over the set of positive-definite matrices and a real dataset consisting of fingerprint reconstruction. Comments: This work is well-written and well-organized, and it is easy to follow all of the concepts being presented.