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Active Multiple-Prediction-Powered Inference
Brawand, Nicholas, Leclerc, Nima, Ngo, Anhthy, Peterson, Matthew, Vishwanath, Sriram, Alhussein, Laith, Wellner, Ben
Post-deployment monitoring of healthcare AI requires statistically valid, label-efficient methods, but gold-standard labels from clinician chart review are expensive. Prediction-powered inference (PPI) and active statistical inference (ASI) reduce label cost by combining a small labeled sample with abundant model predictions, but both are restricted to a single predictor, a poor fit for modern clinical pipelines that have multiple predictors of differing cost and accuracy available at inference time. We propose Active Multiple-Prediction-Powered Inference (AM-PPI), which routes each instance to a cost-appropriate predictor subset, samples gold-standard labels in proportion to the chosen subset's residual uncertainty, and reweights predictions to minimize estimator variance, all under a single deployment-time budget. AM-PPI generalizes ASI to leverage multiple predictors and extends Multiple-PPI from global per-predictor allocation to per-instance adaptive routing. We derive closed-form Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions for all three decisions and prove, via biconvexity and strong duality, that the resulting fixed point is a global optimum despite the joint problem being non-jointly-convex. We establish asymptotic normality with valid coverage, minimum-variance unbiasedness within the linear-prediction augmented inverse propensity weighted (AIPW) class, and a closed-form criterion identifying when multiple predictors help. On synthetic data and three healthcare monitoring tasks, AM-PPI produces 10 to 40 percent narrower confidence intervals (CIs) than single-predictor ASI in the budget regime where routing matters, and matches the better baseline elsewhere.
Vanishing L2 regularization for the softmax Multi Armed Bandit
Anita, Stefana-Lucia, Turinici, Gabriel
Multi Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms are a cornerstone of reinforcement learning and have been studied both theoretically and numerically. One of the most commonly used implementation uses a softmax mapping to prescribe the optimal policy and served as the foundation for downstream algorithms, including REINFORCE. Distinct from vanilla approaches, we consider here the L2 regularized softmax policy gradient where a quadratic term is subtracted from the mean reward. Previous studies exploiting convexity failed to identify a suitable theoretical framework to analyze its convergence when the regularization parameter vanishes. We prove here theoretical convergence results and confirm empirically that this regime makes the L2 regularization numerically advantageous on standard benchmarks.
Black-box optimization of noisy functions with unknown smoothness
Grill, Jean-Bastien, Valko, Michal, Munos, Rรฉmi
We study the problem of black-box optimization of a function f of any dimension, given function evaluations perturbed by noise. The function is assumed to be locally smooth around one of its global optima, but this smoothness is unknown. Our contribution is an adaptive optimization algorithm, POO or parallel optimistic optimization, that is able to deal with this setting. POO performs almost as well as the best known algorithms requiring the knowledge of the smoothness. Furthermore, POO works for a larger class of functions than what was previously considered, especially for functions that are difficult to optimize, in a very precise sense. We provide a finite-time analysis of POO's performance, which shows that its error after n evaluations is at most a factor of sqrt(ln n) away from the error of the best known optimization algorithms using the knowledge of the smoothness.
A supplementary for the paper Falconn++: ALocality-sensitive Filtering Approach for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
We define ยต = ยต1 ยต2 > 0 and set the threshold t = ยต1 = (1 r2/2) 2lnD. Since ยต/ฯ2 is monotonic with respect to c, further points has a higher probability of being discarded. Therefore, the second property holds for any far away point y, i.e. y q cr. The first property holds for any close point x, i.e. x q r, since their projection value onto r1 follows a Gaussian distribution with mean ยต ยต1. Figure 1 shows the recall-speed comparison between Falconn++ and recent theoretical LSF frameworks [2, 3]. All 3 data sets use L = 100, ฮฑ = {0.1,0.5},
ACloser Look at the Worst-case Behavior of Multi-armed Bandit Algorithms
One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) policy is among the simplest optimism-based MAB algorithms that naturally adapts to this gap: for a horizon of play n, it achieves optimal O(log n) regret in instances with "large" gaps, and a near-optimal O nlog n minimax regret when the gap can be arbitrarily "small." This paper provides new results on the arm-sampling behavior of UCB, leading to several important insights. Among these, it is shown that arm-sampling rates under UCB are asymptotically deterministic, regardless of the problem complexity.
ACloser Look at the Worst-case Behavior of Multi-armed Bandit Algorithms
One of the key drivers of complexity in the classical (stochastic) multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is the difference between mean rewards in the top two arms, also known as the instance gap. The celebrated Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) policy is among the simplest optimism-based MAB algorithms that naturally adapts to this gap: for a horizon of play n, it achieves optimal O(logn) regret in instances with "large" gaps, and a near-optimal O p nlogn minimax regret when the gap can be arbitrarily "small." This paper provides new results on the arm-sampling behavior of UCB, leading to several important insights. Among these, it is shown that arm-sampling rates under UCB are asymptotically deterministic, regardless of the problem complexity.
Sample Complexity Bounds for Active Ranking from Multi-wise Comparisons
We study the sample complexity (i.e., the number of comparisons needed) bounds for actively ranking a set of n items from multi-wise comparisons. Here, a multiwise comparison takes m items as input and returns a (noisy) result about the best item (the winner feedback) or the order of these items (the full-ranking feedback). We consider two basic ranking problems: top-k items selection and full ranking. Unlike previous works that study ranking from multi-wise comparisons, in this paper, we do not require any parametric model or assumption and work on the fundamental setting where each comparison returns the correct result with probability 1or a certain probability larger than 12. This paper helps understand whether and to what degree utilizing multi-wise comparisons can reduce the sample complexity for the ranking problems compared to ranking from pairwise comparisons. Specifically, under the winner feedback setting, one can reduce the sample complexity for top-k selection up to an m factor and that for full ranking up to a logm factor. Under the full-ranking feedback setting, one can reduce the sample complexity for top-k selection up to an m factor and that for full ranking up to an mlogm factor. We also conduct numerical simulations to confirm our theoretical results.