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Robust and Fully-Dynamic Coreset for Continuous-and-Bounded Learning (With Outliers) Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

In many machine learning tasks, a common approach for dealing with large-scale data is to build a small summary, {\em e.g.,} coreset, that can efficiently represent the original input. However, real-world datasets usually contain outliers and most existing coreset construction methods are not resilient against outliers (in particular, an outlier can be located arbitrarily in the space by an adversarial attacker). In this paper, we propose a novel robust coreset method for the {\em continuous-and-bounded learning} problems (with outliers) which includes a broad range of popular optimization objectives in machine learning, {\em e.g.,} logistic regression and $ k $-means clustering. Moreover, our robust coreset can be efficiently maintained in fully-dynamic environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first robust and fully-dynamic coreset construction method for these optimization problems. Another highlight is that our coreset size can depend on the doubling dimension of the parameter space, rather than the VC dimension of the objective function which could be very large or even challenging to compute. Finally, we conduct the experiments on real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed robust coreset method.


Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Heavy Decoder: Toward Large Scale Generalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach for solving challenging combinatorial optimization problems without specialized algorithm design by experts. However, most constructive NCO methods cannot solve problems with large-scale instance sizes, which significantly diminishes their usefulness for real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel Light Encoder and Heavy Decoder (LEHD) model with a strong generalization ability to address this critical issue. The LEHD model can learn to dynamically capture the relationships between all available nodes of varying sizes, which is beneficial for model generalization to problems of various scales. Moreover, we develop a data-efficient training scheme and a flexible solution construction mechanism for the proposed LEHD model. By training on small-scale problem instances, the LEHD model can generate nearly optimal solutions for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) with up to 1000 nodes, and also generalizes well to solve real-world TSPLib and CVRPLib problems. These results confirm our proposed LEHD model can significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance for constructive NCO.


A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Column Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Column Generation (CG) is an iterative algorithm for solving linear programs (LPs) with an extremely large number of variables (columns). CG is the workhorse for tackling large-scale integer linear programs, which rely on CG to solve LP relaxations within a branch and bound algorithm. Two canonical applications are the Cutting Stock Problem (CSP) and Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). In VRPTW, for example, each binary variable represents the decision to include or exclude a route, of which there are exponentially many; CG incrementally grows the subset of columns being used, ultimately converging to an optimal solution. We propose RLCG, the first Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach for CG. Unlike typical column selection rules which myopically select a column based on local information at each iteration, we treat CG as a sequential decision-making problem, as the column selected in an iteration affects subsequent iterations of the algorithm. This perspective lends itself to a Deep Reinforcement Learning approach that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to represent the variable-constraint structure in the LP of interest. We perform an extensive set of experiments using the publicly available BPPLIB benchmark for CSP and Solomon benchmark for VRPTW. RLCG converges faster and reduces the number of CG iterations by 22.4% for CSP and 40.9% for VRPTW on average compared to a commonly used greedy policy.


Domain Adaptation as a Problem of Inference on Graphical Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper is concerned with data-driven unsupervised domain adaptation, where it is unknown in advance how the joint distribution changes across domains, i.e., what factors or modules of the data distribution remain invariant or change across domains. To develop an automated way of domain adaptation with multiple source domains, we propose to use a graphical model as a compact way to encode the change property of the joint distribution, which can be learned from data, and then view domain adaptation as a problem of Bayesian inference on the graphical models. Such a graphical model distinguishes between constant and varied modules of the distribution and specifies the properties of the changes across domains, which serves as prior knowledge of the changing modules for the purpose of deriving the posterior of the target variable $Y$ in the target domain. This provides an end-to-end framework of domain adaptation, in which additional knowledge about how the joint distribution changes, if available, can be directly incorporated to improve the graphical representation. We discuss how causality-based domain adaptation can be put under this umbrella. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework for domain adaptation.