Technology
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.
equizero_neurips23_format
Proof of Thm. 2. We want to show M G(hx)= hM G(x) for all x 2X and h 2 G. From the definition of M G in equation 4, we have M G(hx)= 1P Similar to Yarotsky (2022), we first define Ksym = S g2G gK. Note that Ksym is also a compact set and Ksym X . We want to show that M G,equi(gx)= gM G,equi(x). Hence, ( h(gx) 1gx) is invariant to actions of G. The proof for invariance of M G,inv(x) follows similarly. In addition to properties discussed in section 3.3, here we show that equizero models have autoregressive and invertibility properties. These properties have not been used in the main paper, but we believe they could be of use for future work in this area.
Efficient Equivariant Transfer Learning from Pretrained Models
Efficient transfer learning algorithms are key to the success of foundation models on diverse downstream tasks even with limited data. Recent works of Basu et al. (2023) and Kaba et al. (2022) propose group averaging (equitune) and optimizationbased methods, respectively, over features from group-transformed inputs to obtain equivariant outputs from non-equivariant neural networks. While Kaba et al. (2022) are only concerned with training from scratch, we find that equitune performs poorly on equivariant zero-shot tasks despite good finetuning results. We hypothesize that this is because pretrained models provide better quality features for certain transformations than others and simply averaging them is deleterious. Hence, we propose ฮป-equitune that averages the features using importance weights, ฮปs. These weights are learned directly from the data using a small neural network, leading to excellent zero-shot and finetuned results that outperform equitune. Further, we prove that ฮป-equitune is equivariant and a universal approximator of equivariant functions. Additionally, we show that the method of Kaba et al. (2022) used with appropriate loss functions, which we call equizero, also gives excellent zero-shot and finetuned performance.
Robust Semi-Supervised Learning when Not All Classes have Labels
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a powerful framework for leveraging unlabeled data. Existing SSL typically requires all classes have labels. However, in many real-world applications, there may exist some classes that are difficult to label or newly occurred classes that cannot be labeled in time, resulting in there are unseen classes in unlabeled data. Unseen classes will be misclassified as seen classes, causing poor classification performance. The performance of seen classes is also harmed by the existence of unseen classes.
Uncoupled Learning Dynamics with O(log T) Swap Regret in Multiplayer Games
In this paper we establish efficient and uncoupled learning dynamics so that, when employed by all players in a general-sum multiplayer game, the swap regret of each player after T repetitions of the game is bounded by O(logT), improving over the prior best bounds of O(log4(T)). At the same time, we guarantee optimal O( T) swap regret in the adversarial regime as well. To obtain these results, our primary contribution is to show that when all players follow our dynamics with a time-invariant learning rate, the second-order path lengths of the dynamics up to time T are bounded by O(logT), a fundamental property which could have further implications beyond near-optimally bounding the (swap) regret. Our proposed learning dynamics combine in a novel way optimistic regularized learning with the use of self-concordant barriers. Further, our analysis is remarkably simple, bypassing the cumbersome framework of higher-order smoothness recently developed by Daskalakis, Fishelson, and Golowich (NeurIPS'21).
Circa: Stochastic ReLUs for Private Deep Learning
The simultaneous rise of machine learning as a service and concerns over user privacy have increasingly motivated the need for private inference (PI). While recent work demonstrates PI is possible using cryptographic primitives, the computational overheads render it impractical. State-of-art deep networks are inadequate in this context because the source of slowdown in PI stems from the ReLU operations whereas optimizations for plaintext inference focus on reducing FLOPs. In this paper we re-think ReLU computations and propose optimizations for PI tailored to properties of neural networks. Specifically, we reformulate ReLU as an approximate sign test and introduce a novel truncation method for the sign test that significantly reduces the cost per ReLU. These optimizations result in a specific type of stochastic ReLU. The key observation is that the stochastic fault behavior is well suited for the fault-tolerant properties of neural network inference. Thus, we provide significant savings without impacting accuracy. We collectively call the optimizations Circa and demonstrate improvements of up to 4.7 storage and 3 runtime over baseline implementations; we further show that Circa can be used on top of recent PI optimizations to obtain 1.8 additional speedup.
Supplementary Material Proofs from Section 2
The proof of Claim 2.3 is obtained via the following calculation, using the definition of Hermite tensor (Definition 2.2). We will use i,j for indexes in [d]. The above is equivalent to Hk(Bx) = B kHk(x). We construct the truncated distribution A as follows. We first sample x A, then we reject x unless x 2 B. Let A be the distribution of the samples we get from this process. Using Markov's inequality and union bound, we have Then it only remains to verify Ex A [Hk(x)] Ex Nm[Hk(x)] 2 for any k < d.