ICML 2022 论文列表

Recently, over-parameterized deep networks, with increasingly more network parameters than training samples, have dominated the performances of modern machine learning. However, when the training data is corrupted, it has been well-known that over-parameterized networks tend to overfit and do not generalize. In this work, we propose a principled approach for robust training of over-parameterized deep networks in classification tasks where a proportion of training labels are corrupted. The main idea is yet very simple: label noise is sparse and incoherent with the network learned from clean data, so we model the noise and learn to separate it from the data. Specifically, we model the label noise via another sparse over-parameterization term, and exploit implicit algorithmic regularizations to recover and separate the underlying corruptions. Remarkably, when trained using such a simple method in practice, we demonstrate state-of-the-art test accuracy against label noise on a variety of real datasets. Furthermore, our experimental results are corroborated by theory on simplified linear models, showing that exact separation between sparse noise and low-rank data can be achieved under incoherent conditions. The work opens many interesting directions for improving over-parameterized models by using sparse over-parameterization and implicit regularization. Code is available at https://github.com/shengliu66/SOP.

We study offline meta-reinforcement learning, a practical reinforcement learning paradigm that learns from offline data to adapt to new tasks. The distribution of offline data is determined jointly by the behavior policy and the task. Existing offline meta-reinforcement learning algorithms cannot distinguish these factors, making task representations unstable to the change of behavior policies. To address this problem, we propose a contrastive learning framework for task representations that are robust to the distribution mismatch of behavior policies in training and test. We design a bi-level encoder structure, use mutual information maximization to formalize task representation learning, derive a contrastive learning objective, and introduce several approaches to approximate the true distribution of negative pairs. Experiments on a variety of offline meta-reinforcement learning benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of our method over prior methods, especially on the generalization to out-of-distribution behavior policies.

The combination of Monte Carlo methods and deep learning has recently led to efficient algorithms for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions. Related learning problems are often stated as variational formulations based on associated stochastic differential equations (SDEs), which allow the minimization of corresponding losses using gradient-based optimization methods. In respective numerical implementations it is therefore crucial to rely on adequate gradient estimators that exhibit low variance in order to reach convergence accurately and swiftly. In this article, we rigorously investigate corresponding numerical aspects that appear in the context of linear Kolmogorov PDEs. In particular, we systematically compare existing deep learning approaches and provide theoretical explanations for their performances. Subsequently, we suggest novel methods that can be shown to be more robust both theoretically and numerically, leading to substantial performance improvements.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast identification is not possible. Another dominant approach is robust RL which produces a policy that can handle worst-case scenarios, but these methods are generally designed to achieve robustness to a single uncertainty set that must be specified at train time. Towards a more general solution, we formulate the multi-set robustness problem to learn a policy robust to different perturbation sets. We then design an algorithm that enjoys the benefits of both system identification and robust RL: it reduces uncertainty where possible given a few interactions, but can still act robustly with respect to the remaining uncertainty. On a diverse set of control tasks, our approach demonstrates improved worst-case performance on new environments compared to prior methods based on system identification and on robust RL alone.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a sample-efficient approach for tuning design parameters to optimize expensive-to-evaluate, black-box performance metrics. In many manufacturing processes, the design parameters are subject to random input noise, resulting in a product that is often less performant than expected. Although BO methods have been proposed for optimizing a single objective under input noise, no existing method addresses the practical scenario where there are multiple objectives that are sensitive to input perturbations. In this work, we propose the first multi-objective BO method that is robust to input noise. We formalize our goal as optimizing the multivariate value-at-risk (MVaR), a risk measure of the uncertain objectives. Since directly optimizing MVaR is computationally infeasible in many settings, we propose a scalable, theoretically-grounded approach for optimizing MVaR using random scalarizations. Empirically, we find that our approach significantly outperforms alternative methods and efficiently identifies optimal robust designs that will satisfy specifications across multiple metrics with high probability.

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.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in meta-learning techniques for tackling the few-shot learning (FSL) problem. However, the meta-learner is prone to overfitting since there are only a few available samples, which can be identified as sampling noise on a clean dataset. Besides, when handling the data with noisy labels, the meta-learner could be extremely sensitive to label noise on a corrupted dataset. To address these two challenges, we present Eigen-Reptile (ER) that updates the meta-parameters with the main direction of historical task-specific parameters. Specifically, the main direction is computed in a fast way, where the scale of the calculated matrix is related to the number of gradient steps for the specific task instead of the number of parameters. Furthermore, to obtain a more accurate main direction for Eigen-Reptile in the presence of many noisy labels, we further propose Introspective Self-paced Learning (ISPL). We have theoretically and experimentally demonstrated the soundness and effectiveness of the proposed Eigen-Reptile and ISPL. Particularly, our experiments on different tasks show that the proposed method is able to outperform or achieve highly competitive performance compared with other gradient-based methods with or without noisy labels. The code and data for the proposed method are provided for research purposes https://github.com/Anfeather/Eigen-Reptile.

In this paper, we introduce a robust non-parametric density estimator combining the popular Kernel Density Estimation method and the Median-of-Means principle (MoM-KDE). This estimator is shown to achieve robustness for a large class of anomalous data, potentially adversarial. In particular, while previous works only prove consistency results under very specific contamination models, this work provides finite-sample high-probability error-bounds without any prior knowledge on the outliers. To highlight the robustness of our method, we introduce an influence function adapted to the considered OUI framework. Finally, we show that MoM-KDE achieves competitive results when compared with other robust kernel estimators, while having significantly lower computational complexity.

In this paper, we propose a robust imitation learning (IL) framework that improves the robustness of IL when environment dynamics are perturbed. The existing IL framework trained in a single environment can catastrophically fail with perturbations in environment dynamics because it does not capture the situation that underlying environment dynamics can be changed. Our framework effectively deals with environments with varying dynamics by imitating multiple experts in sampled environment dynamics to enhance the robustness in general variations in environment dynamics. In order to robustly imitate the multiple sample experts, we minimize the risk with respect to the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the agent’s policy and each of the sample experts. Numerical results show that our algorithm significantly improves robustness against dynamics perturbations compared to conventional IL baselines.

We propose a novel quadratic programming formulation for estimating the corruption levels in group synchronization, and use these estimates to solve this problem. Our objective function exploits the cycle consistency of the group and we thus refer to our method as detection and estimation of structural consistency (DESC). This general framework can be extended to other algebraic and geometric structures. Our formulation has the following advantages: it can tolerate corruption as high as the information-theoretic bound, it does not require a good initialization for the estimates of group elements, it has a simple interpretation, and under some mild conditions the global minimum of our objective function exactly recovers the corruption levels. We demonstrate the competitive accuracy of our approach on both synthetic and real data experiments of rotation averaging.

We consider transfer learning approaches that fine-tune a pretrained deep neural network on a target task. We investigate generalization properties of fine-tuning to understand the problem of overfitting, which often happens in practice. Previous works have shown that constraining the distance from the initialization of fine-tuning improves generalization. Using a PAC-Bayesian analysis, we observe that besides distance from initialization, Hessians affect generalization through the noise stability of deep neural networks against noise injections. Motivated by the observation, we develop Hessian distance-based generalization bounds for a wide range of fine-tuning methods. Next, we investigate the robustness of fine-tuning with noisy labels. We design an algorithm that incorporates consistent losses and distance-based regularization for fine-tuning. Additionally, we prove a generalization error bound of our algorithm under class conditional independent noise in the training dataset labels. We perform a detailed empirical study of our algorithm on various noisy environments and architectures. For example, on six image classification tasks whose training labels are generated with programmatic labeling, we show a 3.26% accuracy improvement over prior methods. Meanwhile, the Hessian distance measure of the fine-tuned network using our algorithm decreases by six times more than existing approaches.

Despite considerable advances in deep reinforcement learning, it has been shown to be highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations to state observations. Recent efforts that have attempted to improve adversarial robustness of reinforcement learning can nevertheless tolerate only very small perturbations, and remain fragile as perturbation size increases. We propose Bootstrapped Opportunistic Adversarial Curriculum Learning (BCL), a novel flexible adversarial curriculum learning framework for robust reinforcement learning. Our framework combines two ideas: conservatively bootstrapping each curriculum phase with highest quality solutions obtained from multiple runs of the previous phase, and opportunistically skipping forward in the curriculum. In our experiments we show that the proposed BCL framework enables dramatic improvements in robustness of learned policies to adversarial perturbations. The greatest improvement is for Pong, where our framework yields robustness to perturbations of up to 25/255; in contrast, the best existing approach can only tolerate adversarial noise up to 5/255. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jlwu002/BCL.

Counterfactual explanations inform ways to achieve a desired outcome from a machine learning model. However, such explanations are not robust to certain real-world changes in the underlying model (e.g., retraining the model, changing hyperparameters, etc.), questioning their reliability in several applications, e.g., credit lending. In this work, we propose a novel strategy - that we call RobX - to generate robust counterfactuals for tree-based ensembles, e.g., XGBoost. Tree-based ensembles pose additional challenges in robust counterfactual generation, e.g., they have a non-smooth and non-differentiable objective function, and they can change a lot in the parameter space under retraining on very similar data. We first introduce a novel metric - that we call Counterfactual Stability - that attempts to quantify how robust a counterfactual is going to be to model changes under retraining, and comes with desirable theoretical properties. Our proposed strategy RobX works with any counterfactual generation method (base method) and searches for robust counterfactuals by iteratively refining the counterfactual generated by the base method using our metric Counterfactual Stability. We compare the performance of RobX with popular counterfactual generation methods (for tree-based ensembles) across benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our strategy generates counterfactuals that are significantly more robust (nearly 100% validity after actual model changes) and also realistic (in terms of local outlier factor) over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Generative models trained with Differential Privacy (DP) can be used to generate synthetic data while minimizing privacy risks. We analyze the impact of DP on these models vis-a-vis underrepresented classes/subgroups of data, specifically, studying: 1) the size of classes/subgroups in the synthetic data, and 2) the accuracy of classification tasks run on them. We also evaluate the effect of various levels of imbalance and privacy budgets. Our analysis uses three state-of-the-art DP models (PrivBayes, DP-WGAN, and PATE-GAN) and shows that DP yields opposite size distributions in the generated synthetic data. It affects the gap between the majority and minority classes/subgroups; in some cases by reducing it (a "Robin Hood" effect) and, in others, by increasing it (a "Matthew" effect). Either way, this leads to (similar) disparate impacts on the accuracy of classification tasks on the synthetic data, affecting disproportionately more the underrepresented subparts of the data. Consequently, when training models on synthetic data, one might incur the risk of treating different subpopulations unevenly, leading to unreliable or unfair conclusions.

We consider an online stochastic game with risk-averse agents whose goal is to learn optimal decisions that minimize the risk of incurring significantly high costs. Specifically, we use the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure that the agents can estimate using bandit feedback in the form of the cost values of only their selected actions. Since the distributions of the cost functions depend on the actions of all agents that are generally unobservable, they are themselves unknown and, therefore, the CVaR values of the costs are difficult to compute. To address this challenge, we propose a new online risk-averse learning algorithm that relies on one-point zeroth-order estimation of the CVaR gradients computed using CVaR values that are estimated by appropriately sampling the cost functions. We show that this algorithm achieves sub-linear regret with high probability. We also propose two variants of this algorithm that improve performance. The first variant relies on a new sampling strategy that uses samples from the previous iteration to improve the estimation accuracy of the CVaR values. The second variant employs residual feedback that uses CVaR values from the previous iteration to reduce the variance of the CVaR gradient estimates. We theoretically analyze the convergence properties of these variants and illustrate their performance on an online market problem that we model as a Cournot game.

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied in the computer vision domain, where 2D images are first segmented into patches and then treated as 1D sequences. Such linearization, however, impairs the notion of spatial locality in images, which bears important visual clues. To bridge the gap, we propose

There often is a dilemma between ease of optimization and robust out-of-distribution (OoD) generalization. For instance, many OoD methods rely on penalty terms whose optimization is challenging. They are either too strong to optimize reliably or too weak to achieve their goals. We propose to initialize the networks with a rich representation containing a palette of potentially useful features, ready to be used by even simple models. On the one hand, a rich representation provides a good initialization for the optimizer. On the other hand, it also provides an inductive bias that helps OoD generalization. Such a representation is constructed with the Rich Feature Construction (RFC) algorithm, also called the Bonsai algorithm, which consists of a succession of training episodes. During discovery episodes, we craft a multi-objective optimization criterion and its associated datasets in a manner that prevents the network from using the features constructed in the previous iterations. During synthesis episodes, we use knowledge distillation to force the network to simultaneously represent all the previously discovered features. Initializing the networks with Bonsai representations consistently helps six OoD methods achieve top performance on ColoredMNIST benchmark. The same technique substantially outperforms comparable results on the Wilds Camelyon17 task, eliminates the high result variance that plagues other methods, and makes hyperparameter tuning and model selection more reliable.

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after exploring. In the the tabular setting, it is well known that this is a more difficult problem than reward-aware (PAC) RL—where the agent has access to the reward function during exploration—with optimal sample complexities in the two settings differing by a factor of $|\mathcal{S}|$, the size of the state space. We show that this separation does not exist in the setting of linear MDPs. We first develop a computationally efficient algorithm for reward-free RL in a $d$-dimensional linear MDP with sample complexity scaling as $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^2 H^5/\epsilon^2)$. We then show a lower bound with matching dimension-dependence of $\Omega(d^2 H^2/\epsilon^2)$, which holds for the reward-aware RL setting. To our knowledge, our approach is the first computationally efficient algorithm to achieve optimal $d$ dependence in linear MDPs, even in the single-reward PAC setting. Our algorithm relies on a novel procedure which efficiently traverses a linear MDP, collecting samples in any given “feature direction”, and enjoys a sample complexity scaling optimally in the (linear MDP equivalent of the) maximal state visitation probability. We show that this exploration procedure can also be applied to solve the problem of obtaining “well-conditioned” covariates in linear MDPs.

We revisit the theoretical properties of Hamiltonian stochastic differential equations (SDES) for Bayesian posterior sampling, and we study the two types of errors that arise from numerical SDE simulation: the discretization error and the error due to noisy gradient estimates in the context of data subsampling. Our main result is a novel analysis for the effect of mini-batches through the lens of differential operator splitting, revising previous literature results. The stochastic component of a Hamiltonian SDE is decoupled from the gradient noise, for which we make no normality assumptions. This leads to the identification of a convergence bottleneck: when considering mini-batches, the best achievable error rate is $\mathcal{O}(\eta^2)$, with $\eta$ being the integrator step size. Our theoretical results are supported by an empirical study on a variety of regression and classification tasks for Bayesian neural networks.