## T: Online Learning and Bandits/Learning Theory

##### Room 327 - 329

Moderator: Branislav Kveton

Abstract:

Chat is not available.

Wed 20 July 10:15 - 10:35 PDT

(Oral)
##### Generative Trees: Adversarial and Copycat

Richard Nock · Mathieu Guillame-Bert

While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) achieve spectacular results on unstructured data like images, there is still a gap on \textit{tabular data}, data for which state of the art \textit{supervised learning} still favours decision tree (DT)-based models. This paper proposes a new path forward for the generation of tabular data, exploiting decades-old understanding of the supervised task's best components for DT induction, from losses (properness), models (tree-based) to algorithms (boosting). The \textit{properness} condition on the supervised loss -- which postulates the optimality of Bayes rule -- leads us to a variational GAN-style loss formulation which is \textit{tight} when discriminators meet a calibration property trivially satisfied by DTs, and, under common assumptions about the supervised loss, yields "one loss to train against them all" for the generator: the $\chi^2$. We then introduce tree-based generative models, \textit{generative trees} (GTs), meant to mirror on the generative side the good properties of DTs for classifying tabular data, with a boosting-compliant \textit{adversarial} training algorithm for GTs. We also introduce \textit{copycat training}, in which the generator copies at run time the underlying tree (graph) of the discriminator DT and completes it for the hardest discriminative task, with boosting compliant convergence. We test our algorithms on tasks including fake/real distinction and missing data imputation.

Wed 20 July 10:35 - 10:40 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### A Resilient Distributed Boosting Algorithm

Yuval filmus · Idan Mehalel · Shay Moran

Given a learning task where the data is distributed among several parties, communication is one of the fundamental resources which the parties would like to minimize.We present a distributed boosting algorithm which is resilient to a limited amount of noise. Our algorithm is similar to classical boosting algorithms, although it is equipped with a new component, inspired by Impagliazzo's hard-core lemma (Impagliazzo, 1995), adding a robustness quality to the algorithm. We also complement this result by showing that resilience to any asymptotically larger noise is not achievable by a communication-efficient algorithm.

Wed 20 July 10:40 - 10:45 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Online Learning and Pricing with Reusable Resources: Linear Bandits with Sub-Exponential Rewards

Huiwen Jia · Cong Shi · Siqian Shen

We consider a price-based revenue management problem with reusable resources over a finite time horizon $T$. The problem finds important applications in car/bicycle rental, ridesharing, cloud computing, and hospitality management. Customers arrive following a price-dependent Poisson process and each customer requests one unit of $c$ homogeneous reusable resources. If there is an available unit, the customer gets served within a price-dependent exponentially distributed service time; otherwise, she waits in a queue until the next available unit. The decision maker assumes that the inter-arrival and service intervals have an unknown linear dependence on a $d_f$-dimensional feature vector associated with the posted price. We propose a rate-optimal online learning and pricing algorithm, termed Batch Linear Confidence Bound (BLinUCB), and prove that the cumulative regret is $\tilde{O}( d_f \sqrt{T } )$. In establishing the regret, we bound the transient system performance upon price changes via a coupling argument, and also generalize linear bandits to accommodate sub-exponential rewards.

Wed 20 July 10:45 - 10:50 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### On Well-posedness and Minimax Optimal Rates of Nonparametric Q-function Estimation in Off-policy Evaluation

Xiaohong Chen · Zhengling Qi

We study the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem in an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with continuous states and actions. We recast the $Q$-function estimation into a special form of the nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) estimation problem. We first show that under one mild condition the NPIV formulation of $Q$-function estimation is well-posed in the sense of $L^2$-measure of ill-posedness with respect to the data generating distribution, bypassing a strong assumption on the discount factor $\gamma$ imposed in the recent literature for obtaining the $L^2$ convergence rates of various $Q$-function estimators. Thanks to this new well-posed property, we derive the first minimax lower bounds for the convergence rates of nonparametric estimation of $Q$-function and its derivatives in both sup-norm and $L^2$-norm, which are shown to be the same as those for the classical nonparametric regression (Stone, 1982). We then propose a sieve two-stage least squares estimator and establish its rate-optimality in both norms under some mild conditions. Our general results on the well-posedness and the minimax lower bounds are of independent interest to study not only other nonparametric estimators for $Q$-function but also efficient estimation on the value of any target policy in off-policy settings.

Wed 20 July 10:50 - 10:55 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Congested Bandits: Optimal Routing via Short-term Resets

Pranjal Awasthi · Kush Bhatia · Sreenivas Gollapudi · Kostas Kollias

For traffic routing platforms, the choice of which route to recommend to a user depends on the congestion on these routes -- indeed, an individual's utility depends on the number of people using the recommended route at that instance. Motivated by this, we introduce the problem of Congested Bandits where each arm's reward is allowed to depend on the number of times it was played in the past $\Delta$ timesteps. This dependence on past history of actions leads to a dynamical system where an algorithm's present choices also affect its future pay-offs, and requires an algorithm to plan for this. We study the congestion aware formulation in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) setup and in the contextual bandit setup with linear rewards. For the multi-armed setup, we propose a UCB style algorithm and show that its policy regret scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{K \Delta T})$. For the linear contextual bandit setup, our algorithm, based on an iterative least squares planner, achieves policy regret $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{dT} + \Delta)$. From an experimental standpoint, we corroborate the no-regret properties of our algorithms via a simulation study.

Wed 20 July 10:55 - 11:00 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Stochastic Rising Bandits

Alberto Maria Metelli · Francesco Trovò · Matteo Pirola · Marcello Restelli

This paper is in the field of stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs), i.e., those sequential selection techniques able to learn online using only the feedback given by the chosen option (a.k.a. arm). We study a particular case of the rested and restless bandits in which the arms' expected payoff is monotonically non-decreasing. This characteristic allows designing specifically crafted algorithms that exploit the regularity of the payoffs to provide tight regret bounds. We design an algorithm for the rested case (R-ed-UCB) and one for the restless case (R-less-UCB), providing a regret bound depending on the properties of the instance and, under certain circumstances, of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{\frac{2}{3}})$. We empirically compare our algorithms with state-of-the-art methods for non-stationary MABs over several synthetically generated tasks and an online model selection problem for a real-world dataset. Finally, using synthetic and real-world data, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches compared with state-of-the-art algorithms for the non-stationary bandits.

Wed 20 July 11:00 - 11:20 PDT

(Oral)
##### Agnostic Learnability of Halfspaces via Logistic Loss

Ziwei Ji · Kwangjun Ahn · Pranjal Awasthi · Satyen Kale · Stefani Karp

We investigate approximation guarantees provided by logistic regression for the fundamental problem of agnostic learning of homogeneous halfspaces. Previously, for a certain broad class of “well-behaved” distributions on the examples, Diakonikolas et al. (2020) proved an tilde{Omega}(OPT) lower bound, while Frei et al. (2021) proved an tilde{O}(sqrt{OPT}) upper bound, where OPT denotes the best zero-one/misclassification risk of a homogeneous halfspace. In this paper, we close this gap by constructing a well-behaved distribution such that the global minimizer of the logistic risk over this distribution only achieves Omega(sqrt{OPT}) misclassification risk, matching the upper bound in (Frei et al., 2021). On the other hand, we also show that if we impose a radial-Lipschitzness condition in addition to well-behaved-ness on the distribution, logistic regression on a ball of bounded radius reaches tilde{O}(OPT) misclassification risk. Our techniques also show for any well-behaved distribution, regardless of radial Lipschitzness, we can overcome the Omega(sqrt{OPT}) lower bound for logistic loss simply at the cost of one additional convex optimization step involving the hinge loss and attain tilde{O}(OPT) misclassification risk. This two-step convex optimization algorithm is simpler than previous methods obtaining this guarantee, all of which require solving O(log(1/OPT)) minimization problems.

Wed 20 July 11:20 - 11:25 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Fluctuations, Bias, Variance & Ensemble of Learners: Exact Asymptotics for Convex Losses in High-Dimension

Bruno Loureiro · Cedric Gerbelot · Maria Refinetti · Gabriele Sicuro · FLORENT KRZAKALA

From the sampling of data to the initialisation of parameters, randomness is ubiquitous in modern Machine Learning practice. Understanding the statistical fluctuations engendered by the different sources of randomness in prediction is therefore key to understanding robust generalisation. In this manuscript we develop a quantitative and rigorous theory for the study of fluctuations in an ensemble of generalised linear models trained on different, but correlated, features in high-dimensions. In particular, we provide a complete description of the asymptotic joint distribution of the empirical risk minimiser for generic convex loss and regularisation in the high-dimensional limit. Our result encompasses a rich set of classification and regression tasks, such as the lazy regime of overparametrised neural networks, or equivalently the random features approximation of kernels. While allowing to study directly the mitigating effect of ensembling (or bagging) on the bias-variance decomposition of the test error, our analysis also helps disentangle the contribution of statistical fluctuations, and the singular role played by the interpolation threshold that are at the roots of the double-descent'' phenomenon.

Wed 20 July 11:25 - 11:30 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### PDE-Based Optimal Strategy for Unconstrained Online Learning

Zhiyu Zhang · Ashok Cutkosky · Ioannis Paschalidis

Unconstrained Online Linear Optimization (OLO) is a practical problem setting to study the training of machine learning models. Existing works proposed a number of potential-based algorithms, but in general the design of these potential functions relies heavily on guessing. To streamline this workflow, we present a framework that generates new potential functions by solving a Partial Differential Equation (PDE). Specifically, when losses are 1-Lipschitz, our framework produces a novel algorithm with anytime regret bound $C\sqrt{T}+||u||\sqrt{2T}[\sqrt{\log(1+||u||/C)}+2]$, where $C$ is a user-specified constant and $u$ is any comparator unknown and unbounded a priori. Such a bound attains an optimal loss-regret trade-off without the impractical doubling trick. Moreover, a matching lower bound shows that the leading order term, including the constant multiplier $\sqrt{2}$, is tight. To our knowledge, the proposed algorithm is the first to achieve such optimalities.

Wed 20 July 11:30 - 11:35 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Provable Acceleration of Heavy Ball beyond Quadratics for a Class of Polyak-Lojasiewicz Functions when the Non-Convexity is Averaged-Out

Jun-Kun Wang · Chi-Heng Lin · Andre Wibisono · Bin Hu

Heavy Ball (HB) nowadays is one of the most popular momentum methods in non-convex optimization. It has been widely observed that incorporating the Heavy Ball dynamic in gradient-based methods accelerates the training process of modern machine learning models. However, the progress on establishing its theoretical foundation of acceleration is apparently far behind its empirical success. Existing provable acceleration results are of the quadratic or close-to-quadratic functions, as the current techniques of showing HB's acceleration are limited to the case when the Hessian is fixed. In this work, we develop some new techniques that help show acceleration beyond quadratics, which is achieved by analyzing how the change of the Hessian at two consecutive time points affects the convergence speed. Based on our technical results, a class of Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) optimization problems for which provable acceleration can be achieved via HB is identified. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates a benefit of adaptively setting the momentum parameter.

Wed 20 July 11:35 - 11:40 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### On Learning Mixture of Linear Regressions in the Non-Realizable Setting

Soumyabrata Pal · Arya Mazumdar · Rajat Sen · Avishek Ghosh

While mixture of linear regressions (MLR) is a well-studied topic, prior works usually do not analyze such models for prediction error. In fact, \emph{prediction} and \emph{loss} are not well-defined in the context of mixtures. In this paper, first we show that MLR can be used for prediction where instead of predicting a label, the model predicts a list of values (also known as \emph{list-decoding}). The list size is equal to the number of components in the mixture, and the loss function is defined to be minimum among the losses resulted by all the component models. We show that with this definition, a solution of the empirical risk minimization (ERM) achieves small probability of prediction error. This begs for an algorithm to minimize the empirical risk for MLR, which is known to be computationally hard. Prior algorithmic works in MLR focus on the \emph{realizable} setting, i.e., recovery of parameters when data is probabilistically generated by a mixed linear (noisy) model. In this paper we show that a version of the popular expectation minimization (EM) algorithm finds out the best fit lines in a dataset even when a realizable model is not assumed, under some regularity conditions on the dataset and the initial points, and thereby provides a solution for the ERM. We further provide an algorithm that runs in polynomial time in the number of datapoints, and recovers a good approximation of the best fit lines. The two algorithms are experimentally compared.

Wed 20 July 11:40 - 11:45 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Random Forest Density Estimation

Hongwei Wen · Hanyuan Hang

We propose a density estimation algorithm called \textit{random forest density estimation} (\textit{RFDE}) based on random trees where the split of cell is along the midpoint of the randomly chosen dimension. By combining the efficient random tree density estimation (RTDE) and the ensemble procedure, RFDE can alleviate the problems of boundary discontinuity suffered by partition-based density estimations. From the theoretical perspective, we first prove the fast convergence rates of RFDE if the density function lies in the H\"{o}lder space $C^{0,\alpha}$. Moreover, if the target function resides in the subspace $C^{1,\alpha}$, which contains smoother density functions, we for the first time manage to explain the benefits of the ensemble learning in density estimation. To be specific, we show that the upper bound of the ensemble estimator RFDE turns out to be strictly smaller than the lower bound of its base estimator RTDE in terms of convergence rates. In the experiments, we verify the theoretical results and show the promising performance of RFDE on both synthetic and real world datasets. Moreover, we evaluate our RFDE through the problem of anomaly detection as a possible application.