Search for: All records

Transfer operators provide a rich framework for representing the dynamics of very general, nonlinear dynamical systems. When interacting with reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), descriptions of dynamics often incur prohibitive data storage requirements, motivating dataset sparsification as a precursory step to computation. Further, in practice, data is available in the form of trajectories, introducing correlation between samples. In this work, we present a method for sparse learning of transfer operators from $\beta$-mixing stochastic processes, in both discrete and continuous time, and provide sample complexity analysis extending existing theoretical guarantees for learning from non-sparse, i.i.d. data. In addressing continuous-time settings, we develop precise descriptions using covariance-type operators for the infinitesimal generator that aids in the sample complexity analysis. We empirically illustrate the efficacy of our sparse embedding approach through deterministic and stochastic nonlinear system examples. 

Differentiable Search Index is a recently proposed paradigm for document retrieval, that encodes information about a corpus of documents within the parameters of a neural network and directly maps queries to corresponding documents. These models have achieved state-of-the-art performances for document retrieval across many benchmarks. These kinds of models have a significant limitation: it is not easy to add new documents after a model is trained. We propose IncDSI, a method to add documents in real time (about 20-50ms per document), without retraining the model on the entire dataset (or even parts thereof). Instead we formulate the addition of documents as a constrained optimization problem that makes minimal changes to the network parameters. Although orders of magnitude faster, our approach is competitive with re-training the model on the whole dataset and enables the development of document retrieval systems that can be updated with new information in real-time. Our code for IncDSI is available at \href{https://github.com/varshakishore/IncDSI}{https://github.com/varshakishore/IncDSI}. 

The parameter space for any fixed architecture of feedforward ReLU neural networks serves as a proxy during training for the associated class of functions - but how faithful is this representation? It is known that many different parameter settings $\theta$ can determine the same function $f$. Moreover, the degree of this redundancy is inhomogeneous: for some networks, the only symmetries are permutation of neurons in a layer and positive scaling of parameters at a neuron, while other networks admit additional hidden symmetries. In this work, we prove that, for any network architecture where no layer is narrower than the input, there exist parameter settings with no hidden symmetries. We also describe a number of mechanisms through which hidden symmetries can arise, and empirically approximate the functional dimension of different network architectures at initialization. These experiments indicate that the probability that a network has no hidden symmetries decreases towards 0 as depth increases, while increasing towards 1 as width and input dimension increase. 

We consider a deep matrix factorization model of covariance matrices trained with the Bures-Wasserstein distance. While recent works have made advances in the study of the optimization problem for overparametrized low-rank matrix approximation, much emphasis has been placed on discriminative settings and the square loss. In contrast, our model considers another type of loss and connects with the generative setting. We characterize the critical points and minimizers of the Bures-Wasserstein distance over the space of rank-bounded matrices. The Hessian of this loss at low-rank matrices can theoretically blow up, which creates challenges to analyze convergence of gradient optimization methods. We establish convergence results for gradient flow using a smooth perturbative version of the loss as well as convergence results for finite step size gradient descent under certain assumptions on the initial weights. 

Many real-world problems like Social Influence Maximization face the dilemma of choosing the best $K$ out of $N$ options at a given time instant. This setup can be modeled as a combinatorial bandit which chooses $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time, with an aim to achieve an efficient trade-off between exploration and exploitation. This is the first work for combinatorial bandits where the feedback received can be a non-linear function of the chosen $K$ arms. The direct use of multi-armed bandit requires choosing among $N$-choose-$K$ options making the state space large. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm which is computationally efficient and the storage is linear in $N$. The proposed algorithm is a divide-and-conquer based strategy, that we call CMAB-SM. Further, the proposed algorithm achieves a \textit{regret bound} of $\tilde O(K^{\frac{1}{2}}N^{\frac{1}{3}}T^{\frac{2}{3}})$ for a time horizon $T$, which is \textit{sub-linear} in all parameters $T$, $N$, and $K$. 

In real-world recommendation problems, especially those with a formidably large item space, users have to gradually learn to estimate the utility of any fresh recommendations from their experience about previously consumed items. This in turn affects their interaction dynamics with the system and can invalidate previous algorithms built on the omniscient user assumption. In this paper, we formalize a model to capture such ”learning users” and design an efficient system-side learning solution, coined Noise-Robust Active Ellipsoid Search (RAES), to confront the challenges brought by the non-stationary feedback from such a learning user. Interestingly, we prove that the regret of RAES deteriorates gracefully as the convergence rate of user learning becomes worse, until reaching linear regret when the user’s learning fails to converge. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate the strength of RAES for such a contemporaneous system-user learning problem. Our study provides a novel perspective on modeling the feedback loop in recommendation problems. 

Recent work has found that adversarially-robust deep networks used for image classification are more interpretable: their feature attributions tend to be sharper, and are more concentrated on the objects associated with the image’s ground- truth class. We show that smooth decision boundaries play an important role in this enhanced interpretability, as the model’s input gradients around data points will more closely align with boundaries’ normal vectors when they are smooth. Thus, because robust models have smoother boundaries, the results of gradient- based attribution methods, like Integrated Gradients and DeepLift, will capture more accurate information about nearby decision boundaries. This understanding of robust interpretability leads to our second contribution: boundary attributions, which aggregate information about the normal vectors of local decision bound- aries to explain a classification outcome. We show that by leveraging the key fac- tors underpinning robust interpretability, boundary attributions produce sharper, more concentrated visual explanations{—}even on non-robust models. 

We study adversarial attacks on linear stochastic bandits: by manipulating the rewards, an adversary aims to control the behaviour of the bandit algorithm. Perhaps surprisingly, we first show that some attack goals can never be achieved. This is in a sharp contrast to context-free stochastic bandits, and is intrinsically due to the correlation among arms in linear stochastic bandits. Motivated by this finding, this paper studies the attackability of a $k$-armed linear bandit environment. We first provide a complete necessity and sufficiency characterization of attackability based on the geometry of the arms’ context vectors. We then propose a two-stage attack method against LinUCB and Robust Phase Elimination. The method first asserts whether the given environment is attackable; and if yes, it poisons the rewards to force the algorithm to pull a target arm linear times using only a sublinear cost. Numerical experiments further validate the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of the proposed attack method. 

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable achievements in simulated environments. However, carrying this success to real environments requires the important attribute of robustness, which the existing RL algorithms often lack as they assume that the future deployment environment is the same as the training environment (i.e. simulator) in which the policy is learned. This assumption often does not hold due to the discrepancy between the simulator and the real environment and, as a result, and hence renders the learned policy fragile when deployed. In this paper, we propose a novel distributionally robust Q-learning algorithm that learns the best policy in the worst distributional perturbation of the environment. Our algorithm first transforms the infinite-dimensional learning problem (since the environment MDP perturbation lies in an infinite-dimensional space) into a finite-dimensional dual problem and subsequently uses a multi-level Monte-Carlo scheme to approximate the dual value using samples from the simulator. Despite the complexity, we show that the resulting distributionally robust Q-learning algorithm asymptotically converges to optimal worst-case policy, thus making it robust to future environment changes. Simulation results further demonstrate its strong empirical robustness.