setup
A single algorithm for both restless and rested rotting bandits
Seznec, Julien, Ménard, Pierre, Lazaric, Alessandro, Valko, Michal
In many application domains (e.g., recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems), the rewards associated to the actions tend to decrease over time. This decay is either caused by the actions executed in the past (e.g., a user may get bored when songs of the same genre are recommended over and over) or by an external factor (e.g., content becomes outdated). These two situations can be modeled as specific instances of the rested and restless bandit settings, where arms are rotting (i.e., their value decrease over time). These problems were thought to be significantly different, since Levine et al. (2017) showed that state-of-the-art algorithms for restless bandit perform poorly in the rested rotting setting. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm, Rotting Adaptive Window UCB (RAW-UCB), that achieves near-optimal regret in both rotting rested and restless bandit, without any prior knowledge of the setting (rested or restless) and the type of non-stationarity (e.g., piece-wise constant, bounded variation). This is in striking contrast with previous negative results showing that no algorithm can achieve similar results as soon as rewards are allowed to increase. We confirm our theoretical findings on a number of synthetic and dataset-based experiments.
- Europe > France > Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur > Bouches-du-Rhône > Marseille (0.04)
- North America > United States (0.04)
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- (2 more...)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Data Science > Data Mining > Big Data (0.46)
Expectation Maximization (EM) Converges for General Agnostic Mixtures
Mixture of linear regression is well studied in statistics and machine learning, where the data points are generated probabilistically using $k$ linear models. Algorithms like Expectation Maximization (EM) may be used to recover the ground truth regressors for this problem. Recently, in \cite{pal2022learning,ghosh_agnostic} the mixed linear regression problem is studied in the agnostic setting, where no generative model on data is assumed. Rather, given a set of data points, the objective is \emph{fit} $k$ lines by minimizing a suitable loss function. It is shown that a modification of EM, namely gradient EM converges exponentially to appropriately defined loss minimizer even in the agnostic setting. In this paper, we study the problem of \emph{fitting} $k$ parametric functions to given set of data points. We adhere to the agnostic setup. However, instead of fitting lines equipped with quadratic loss, we consider any arbitrary parametric function fitting equipped with a strongly convex and smooth loss. This framework encompasses a large class of problems including mixed linear regression (regularized), mixed linear classifiers (mixed logistic regression, mixed Support Vector Machines) and mixed generalized linear regression. We propose and analyze gradient EM for this problem and show that with proper initialization and separation condition, the iterates of gradient EM converge exponentially to appropriately defined population loss minimizers with high probability. This shows the effectiveness of EM type algorithm which converges to \emph{optimal} solution in the non-generative setup beyond mixture of linear regression.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
- Asia > India > Maharashtra > Mumbai (0.04)
- Asia > China (0.04)
Distributed Gradient Clustering: Convergence and the Effect of Initialization
Armacki, Aleksandar, Sharma, Himkant, Bajović, Dragana, Jakovetić, Dušan, Chakraborty, Mrityunjoy, Kar, Soummya
We study the effects of center initialization on the performance of a family of distributed gradient-based clustering algorithms introduced in [1], that work over connected networks of users. In the considered scenario, each user contains a local dataset and communicates only with its immediate neighbours, with the aim of finding a global clustering of the joint data. We perform extensive numerical experiments, evaluating the effects of center initialization on the performance of our family of methods, demonstrating that our methods are more resilient to the effects of initialization, compared to centralized gradient clustering [2]. Next, inspired by the $K$-means++ initialization [3], we propose a novel distributed center initialization scheme, which is shown to improve the performance of our methods, compared to the baseline random initialization.
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania > Allegheny County > Pittsburgh (0.14)
- Europe > Serbia > Vojvodina > South Bačka District > Novi Sad (0.05)
- Asia > India > West Bengal > Kharagpur (0.04)
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The Best Monitor Arms in 2026 to Clear Up Your Desk Space
Your monitor needs a monitor arm, and I've been testing every single one I can get my hands on to see which is best. A monitor arm should be one of those simple products you buy once and never think about again. But I've seen horror stories of cheap, knock-off models that collapse, damaging both the desk and the monitor. Anything that mounts a very heavy piece of expensive tech like a high-end monitor should be high-quality, which is true of all the options below. Each of the monitor arms on our list have been hand-tested by us. Most are currently clamped down to a desk of one of our product reviewers.
- North America > United States > California (0.04)
- Europe > Slovakia (0.04)
- Europe > Czechia (0.04)
Stochastic Optimization for Large-scale Optimal Transport
Optimal transport (OT) defines a powerful framework to compare probability distributions in a geometrically faithful way. However, the practical impact of OT is still limited because of its computational burden. We propose a new class of stochastic optimization algorithms to cope with large-scale problems routinely encountered in machine learning applications. These methods are able to manipulate arbitrary distributions (either discrete or continuous) by simply requiring to be able to draw samples from them, which is the typical setup in high-dimensional learning problems.
Pipe-SGD: A Decentralized Pipelined SGD Framework for Distributed Deep Net Training
Distributed training of deep nets is an important technique to address some of the present day computing challenges like memory consumption and computational demands. Classical distributed approaches, synchronous or asynchronous, are based on the parameter server architecture, i.e., worker nodes compute gradients which are communicated to the parameter server while updated parameters are returned. Recently, distributed training with AllReduce operations gained popularity as well. While many of those operations seem appealing, little is reported about wall-clock training time improvements. In this paper, we carefully analyze the AllReduce based setup, propose timing models which include network latency, bandwidth, cluster size and compute time, and demonstrate that a pipelined training with a width of two combines the best of both synchronous and asynchronous training. Specifically, for a setup consisting of a four-node GPU cluster we show wall-clock time training improvements of up to 5.4x compared to conventional approaches.
3d779cae2d46cf6a8a99a35ba4167977-AuthorFeedback.pdf
Our approach is purely based on 2D convolutions. Nevertheless, it3 outperforms or performs comparably to many more costly 3D models. We thank the reviewers for pointing out some related (or missing) references. The12 Timeception layers involve group convolutions at different time scales while our TAM layers only use depthwise13 convolution. As a result, the Timeception has significantly more parameters than the TAM (10% vs. 0.1% of the14 totalmodelparameters).
_NeurIPS_2022__On_the_Effectiveness_of_Fine_tuning_Versus_Meta_reinforcement_Learning (1)
Do the main claims made in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper's contributions and If you ran experiments... (a) Did you specify all the training details (e.g., data splits, hyperparameters, how they were chosen)? Please refer to both main text and appendix for experiment details. Did you report error bars (e.g., with respect to the random seed after running experiments multiple All adaptation experiments in Procgen and RLBench are run for 3 seeds. Did you include the total amount of compute and the type of resources used (e.g., type of GPUs, internal As stated in section 2, we use RTX A5000 GPUs each with 24GB memory. C2F-ARM algorithm and training framework are built based on the original author's implementation Did you mention the license of the assets?