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Self-Consistent Models and Values

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learned models of the environment provide reinforcement learning (RL) agents with flexible ways of making predictions about the environment. In particular, models enable planning, i.e. using more computation to improve value functions or policies, without requiring additional environment interactions. In this work, we investigate a way of augmenting model-based RL, by additionally encouraging a learned model and value function to be jointly self-consistent. Our approach differs from classic planning methods such as Dyna, which only update values to be consistent with the model. We propose multiple self-consistency updates, evaluate these in both tabular and function approximation settings, and find that, with appropriate choices, self-consistency helps both policy evaluation and control.


SOAR: Improved Indexing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper introduces SOAR: Spilling with Orthogonality-Amplified Residuals, a novel data indexing technique for approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. SOAR extends upon previous approaches to ANN search, such as spill trees, that utilize multiple redundant representations while partitioning the data to reduce the probability of missing a nearest neighbor during search. Rather than training and computing these redundant representations independently, however, SOAR uses an orthogonality-amplified residual loss, which optimizes each representation to compensate for cases where other representations perform poorly. This drastically improves the overall index quality, resulting in state-of-the-art ANN benchmark performance while maintaining fast indexing times and low memory consumption.


0e0157ce5ea15831072be4744cbd5334-Supplemental-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Dataset Details & Evaluation Metrics As stated earlier, the main application of Extreme Multi-label Text Classification is in e-commerce - product recommendation and dynamic search advertisement - and in document tagging, where the objective of an algorithm is to correctly recommend/advertise among the top-k slots. Thus, for evaluation of the methods, we use precision at k (denoted by P@k), and its propensity scored variant (denoted by PSP@k) [17]. These are standard and widely used metrics by the XMC community [4]. Since P@k treats all the labels equally, it doesn't reveal the performance of the model on tail labels. However, because of the long-tailed distribution in XMC datasets, one of the main challenges is to predict tail labels correctly, which may be more valuable and informative compared to head classes.



GOOD: AGraph Out-of-Distribution Benchmark

Neural Information Processing Systems

Out-of-distribution (OOD) learning deals with scenarios in which training and test data follow different distributions. Although general OOD problems have been intensively studied in machine learning, graph OOD is only an emerging area of research. Currently, there lacks a systematic benchmark tailored to graph OOD method evaluation. In this work, we aim at developing an OOD benchmark, known as GOOD, for graphs specifically. We explicitly make distinctions between covariate and concept shifts and design data splits that accurately reflect different shifts. We consider both graph and node prediction tasks as there are key differences in designing shifts. Overall, GOOD contains 11 datasets with 17 domain selections. When combined with covariate, concept, and no shifts, we obtain 51 different splits. We provide performance results on 10 commonly used baseline methods with 10 random runs.




09723c9f291f6056fd1885081859c186-Supplemental-Datasets_and_Benchmarks.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Table 7: Available network architectures and survival models These components are compatible with multiple algorithms. Comparisons are based on the software versions available at the time of writing.


Synthcity: a benchmark framework for diverse use cases of tabular synthetic data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accessible high-quality data is the bread and butter of machine learning research,1 and the demand for data has exploded as larger and more advanced ML models are2 built across different domains. Yet, real data often contain sensitive information,3 subject to various biases, and are costly to acquire, which compromise their quality4 and accessibility. Synthetic data have thus emerged as a complement, sometimes5 even a replacement, to real data for ML training. However, the landscape of6 synthetic data research has been fragmented due to the large number of data7 modalities (e.g., tabular data, time series data, images, etc.) and various use cases8 (e.g., privacy, fairness, data augmentation, etc.). This poses practical challenges9 in comparing and selecting synthetic data generators in different problem settings.10 To this end, we develop Synthcity, an open-source Python library that allows11 researchers and practitioners to perform one-click benchmarking of synthetic data12 generators across data modalities and use cases. In addition, Synthcity's plug-in13 style API makes it easy to incorporate additional data generators into the framework.14 Beyond benchmarking, it also offers a single access point to a diverse range of15 cutting-edge data generators. Through examples on tabular data generation and16 data augmentation, we illustrate the general applicability of Synthcity, and the17 insight one can obtain.18