A recent line of research investigates how algorithms can be augmented with machine-learned predictions to overcome worst case lower bounds. This area has revealed interesting algorithmic insights into problems, with particular success in the design of competitive online algorithms. However, the question of improving algorithm running times with predictions has largely been unexplored.
We take a first step in this direction by combining the idea of machine-learned predictions with the idea of "warm-starting" primal-dual algorithms. We consider one of the most important primitives in combinatorial optimization: weighted bipartite matching and its generalization to $b$-matching. We identify three key challenges when using learned dual variables in a primal-dual algorithm. First, predicted duals may be infeasible, so we give an algorithm that efficiently maps predicted infeasible duals to nearby feasible solutions. Second, once the duals are feasible, they may not be optimal, so we show that they can be used to quickly find an optimal solution. Finally, such predictions are useful only if they can be learned, so we show that the problem of learning duals for matching has low sample complexity. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on both real and synthetic data. As a result we give a rigorous, practical, and empirically effective method to compute bipartite matchings.
Blackwell approachability is a framework for reasoning about repeated games with vector-valued payoffs. We introduce predictive Blackwell approachability, where an estimate of the next payoff vector is given, and the decision maker tries to achieve better performance based on the accuracy of that estimator. In order to derive algorithms that achieve predictive Blackwell approachability, we start by showing a powerful connection between four well-known algorithms. Follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) and online mirror descent (OMD) are the most prevalent regret minimizers in online convex optim…
Infinia ML, Inc.（Infinia ML公司）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
A novel Gromov-Wasserstein learning framework is proposed to jointly match (align) graphs and learn embedding vectors for the associated graph nodes. Using Gromov-Wasserstein discrepancy, we measure the dissimilarity between two graphs and find their correspondence, according to the learned optimal transport. The node embeddings associated with the two graphs are learned under the guidance of the optimal transport, the distance of which not only reflects the topological structure of each graph but also yields the correspondence across the graphs. These two learning steps are mutually-beneficia…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Imperceptible poisoning attacks on entire datasets have recently been touted as methods for protecting data privacy. However, among a number of defenses preventing the practical use of these techniques, early-stopping stands out as a simple, yet effective defense. To gauge poisons' vulnerability to early-stopping, we benchmark error-minimizing, error-maximizing, and synthetic poisons in terms of peak test accuracy over 100 epochs and make a number of surprising observations. First, we find that poisons that reach a low training loss faster have lower peak test accuracy. Second, we find that a …
We study the problem of decision-making in the setting of a scarcity of shared resources when the preferences of agents are unknown a priori and must be learned from data. Taking the two-sided matching market as a running example, we focus on the decentralized setting, where agents do not share their learned preferences with a central authority. Our approach is based on the representation of preferences in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, and a learning algorithm for preferences that accounts for uncertainty due to the competition among the agents in the market. Under regularity conditions,…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
A trained neural network can be interpreted as a structural causal model (SCM) that provides the effect of changing input variables on the model's output. However, if training data contains both causal and correlational relationships, a model that optimizes prediction accuracy may not necessarily learn the true causal relationships between input and output variables. On the other hand, expert users often have prior knowledge of the causal relationship between certain input variables and output from domain knowledge. Therefore, we propose a regularization method that aligns the learned causal e…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；MIT-IBM Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM实验室）；Harvard SEAS（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）
Large language models can produce powerful contextual representations that lead to improvements across many NLP tasks. Since these models are typically guided by a sequence of learned self attention mechanisms and may comprise undesired inductive biases, it is paramount to be able to explore what the attention has learned. While static analyses of these models lead to targeted insights, interactive tools are more dynamic and can help humans better gain an intuition for the model-internal reasoning process. We present exBERT, an interactive tool named after the popular BERT language model, that…
To Glue or Not to Glue? Classical vs Learned Image Matching for Mobile Mapping Cameras to Textured Semantic 3D Building Models
Professorship of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich（摄影测量与遥感教授职位，技术大学慕尼黑工程与设计学院，技术大学慕尼黑）
Improving Probabilistic Diffusion Models With Optimal Diagonal Covariance Matching
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Tubingen（蒂宾根大学）；IMPRS-IS（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所国际马克斯·普朗克研究学院）
Spatial data is ubiquitous. Massive amounts of data are generated every day from billions of GPS-enabled devices such as cell phones, cars, sensors, and various consumer-based applications such as Uber, Tinder, location-tagged posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This exponential growth in spatial data has led the research community to focus on building systems and applications that can process spatial data efficiently. In the meantime, recent research has introduced learned index structures. In this work, we use techniques proposed from a state-of-the art learned multi-dimensional inde…
To compare entities of differing types and structural components, the artificial neural network paradigm was used to cross-compare structural components between heterogeneous documents. Trainable weighted structural components were input into machine-learned activation functions of the neurons. The model was used for matching news articles and videos, where the inputs and activation functions respectively consisted of term vectors and cosine similarity measures between the weighted structural components. The model was tested with different weights, achieving as high as 59.2% accuracy for match…
Differential equations in general and neural ODEs in particular are an essential technique in continuous-time system identification. While many deterministic learning algorithms have been designed based on numerical integration via the adjoint method, many downstream tasks such as active learning, exploration in reinforcement learning, robust control, or filtering require accurate estimates of predictive uncertainties. In this work, we propose a novel approach towards estimating epistemically uncertain neural ODEs, avoiding the numerical integration bottleneck. Instead of modeling uncertainty …
DreamSat-Pose: Spacecraft Pose Estimation from Single-View 3D Reconstructions and Learned 2D-3D Feature Matching
Wellesley College（韦尔斯利学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
SKooP: Symmetric Koopman Predictions for Faster and More Generalizable Legged Robot Locomotion with Reinforcement Learning
Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)（意大利理工学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Dynamic Legged Systems Laboratory, IIT（意大利理工学院动态腿式系统实验室）；Generative Bionics S.R.L（生成仿生学有限公司）；DAUIN, Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学DAUIN）；Rehab Technologies Lab, IIT（意大利理工学院康复技术实验室）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）
This paper demonstrates how to recover causal graphs from the score of the data distribution in non-linear additive (Gaussian) noise models. Using score matching algorithms as a building block, we show how to design a new generation of scalable causal discovery methods. To showcase our approach, we also propose a new efficient method for approximating the score's Jacobian, enabling to recover the causal graph. Empirically, we find that the new algorithm, called SCORE, is competitive with state-of-the-art causal discovery methods while being significantly faster.
Temporal abstractions in the form of options have been shown to help reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn faster. However, despite prior work on this topic, the problem of discovering options through interaction with an environment remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel meta-gradient approach for discovering useful options in multi-task RL environments. Our approach is based on a manager-worker decomposition of the RL agent, in which a manager maximises rewards from the environment by learning a task-dependent policy over both a set of task-independent discovered-options …
Lockheed Martin Artificial Intelligence Center (LAIC)（洛克希德·马丁人工智能中心（LAIC））；Lockheed Martin – Applied AI Team（洛克希德·马丁应用人工智能团队）；Primordial Labs（原始实验室）
Reusing previously trained models is critical in deep reinforcement learning to speed up training of new agents. However, it is unclear how to acquire new skills when objectives and constraints are in conflict with previously learned skills. Moreover, when retraining, there is an intrinsic conflict between exploiting what has already been learned and exploring new skills. In soft actor-critic (SAC) methods, a temperature parameter can be dynamically adjusted to weight the action entropy and balance the explore $\times$ exploit trade-off. However, controlling a single coefficient can be challen…
