NeurIPS 2016 论文列表

We consider the problem of estimating a function defined over $n$ locations on a $d$-dimensional grid (having all side lengths equal to $n^{1/d}$). When the function is constrained to have discrete total variation bounded by $C_n$, we derive the minimax optimal (squared) $\ell_2$ estimation error rate, parametrized by $n, C_n$. Total variation denoising, also known as the fused lasso, is seen to be rate optimal. Several simpler estimators exist, such as Laplacian smoothing and Laplacian eigenmaps. A natural question is: can these simpler estimators perform just as well? We prove that these estimators, and more broadly all estimators given by linear transformations of the input data, are suboptimal over the class of functions with bounded variation. This extends fundamental findings of Donoho and Johnstone (1998) on 1-dimensional total variation spaces to higher dimensions. The implication is that the computationally simpler methods cannot be used for such sophisticated denoising tasks, without sacrificing statistical accuracy. We also derive minimax rates for discrete Sobolev spaces over $d$-dimensional grids, which are, in some sense, smaller than the total variation function spaces. Indeed, these are small enough spaces that linear estimators can be optimal---and a few well-known ones are, such as Laplacian smoothing and Laplacian eigenmaps, as we show. Lastly, we investigate the adaptivity of the total variation denoiser to these smaller Sobolev function spaces.

We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of m convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs randomized optimization. For smooth functions, we show that accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and an accelerated variant of SVRG are optimal in the deterministic and randomized settings respectively, and that a gradient oracle is sufficient for the optimal rate. For non-smooth functions, having access to prox oracles reduces the complexity and we present optimal methods based on smoothing that improve over methods using just gradient accesses.

Decision making under uncertainty is commonly modelled as a process of competitive stochastic evidence accumulation to threshold (the drift-diffusion model). However, it is unknown how animals learn these decision thresholds. We examine threshold learning by constructing a reward function that averages over many trials to Wald's cost function that defines decision optimality. These rewards are highly stochastic and hence challenging to optimize, which we address in two ways: first, a simple two-factor reward-modulated learning rule derived from Williams' REINFORCE method for neural networks; and second, Bayesian optimization of the reward function with a Gaussian process. Bayesian optimization converges in fewer trials than REINFORCE but is slower computationally with greater variance. The REINFORCE method is also a better model of acquisition behaviour in animals and a similar learning rule has been proposed for modelling basal ganglia function.

We consider the \emph{Threshold Bandit} setting, a variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which the reward on each round depends on a piece of side information known as a \emph{threshold value}. The learner selects one of $K$ actions (arms), this action generates a random sample from a fixed distribution, and the action then receives a unit payoff in the event that this sample exceeds the threshold value. We consider two versions of this problem, the \emph{uncensored} and \emph{censored} case, that determine whether the sample is always observed or only when the threshold is not met. Using new tools to understand the popular UCB algorithm, we show that the uncensored case is essentially no more difficult than the classical multi-armed bandit setting. Finally we show that the censored case exhibits more challenges, but we give guarantees in the event that the sequence of threshold values is generated optimistically.

In PU learning, a binary classifier is trained from positive (P) and unlabeled (U) data without negative (N) data. Although N data is missing, it sometimes outperforms PN learning (i.e., ordinary supervised learning). Hitherto, neither theoretical nor experimental analysis has been given to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, we theoretically compare PU (and NU) learning against PN learning based on the upper bounds on estimation errors. We find simple conditions when PU and NU learning are likely to outperform PN learning, and we prove that, in terms of the upper bounds, either PU or NU learning (depending on the class-prior probability and the sizes of P and N data) given infinite U data will improve on PN learning. Our theoretical findings well agree with the experimental results on artificial and benchmark data even when the experimental setup does not match the theoretical assumptions exactly.

Semidefinite programs (SDP's) can be solved in polynomial time by interior point methods, but scalability can be an issue. To address this shortcoming, over a decade ago, Burer and Monteiro proposed to solve SDP's with few equality constraints via rank-restricted, non-convex surrogates. Remarkably, for some applications, local optimization methods seem to converge to global optima of these non-convex surrogates reliably. Although some theory supports this empirical success, a complete explanation of it remains an open question. In this paper, we consider a class of SDP's which includes applications such as max-cut, community detection in the stochastic block model, robust PCA, phase retrieval and synchronization of rotations. We show that the low-rank Burer-Monteiro formulation of SDP's in that class almost never has any spurious local optima.

We introduce the Stochastic Asynchronous Proximal Alternating Linearized Minimization (SAPALM) method, a block coordinate stochastic proximal-gradient method for solving nonconvex, nonsmooth optimization problems. SAPALM is the first asynchronous parallel optimization method that provably converges on a large class of nonconvex, nonsmooth problems. We prove that SAPALM matches the best known rates of convergence --- among synchronous or asynchronous methods --- on this problem class. We provide upper bounds on the number of workers for which we can expect to see a linear speedup, which match the best bounds known for less complex problems, and show that in practice SAPALM achieves this linear speedup. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on several matrix factorization problems.

We formalize notions of robustness for composite estimators via the notion of a breakdown point. A composite estimator successively applies two (or more) estimators: on data decomposed into disjoint parts, it applies the first estimator on each part, then the second estimator on the outputs of the first estimator. And so on, if the composition is of more than two estimators. Informally, the breakdown point is the minimum fraction of data points which if significantly modified will also significantly modify the output of the estimator, so it is typically desirable to have a large breakdown point. Our main result shows that, under mild conditions on the individual estimators, the breakdown point of the composite estimator is the product of the breakdown points of the individual estimators. We also demonstrate several scenarios, ranging from regression to statistical testing, where this analysis is easy to apply, useful in understanding worst case robustness, and sheds powerful insights onto the associated data analysis.

We introduce a theoretical and algorithmic framework for multi-way graph partitioning that relies on a multiplicative cut-based objective. We refer to this objective as the Product Cut. We provide a detailed investigation of the mathematical properties of this objective and an effective algorithm for its optimization. The proposed model has strong mathematical underpinnings, and the corresponding algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark data sets.

We consider the problem of optimization from samples of monotone submodular functions with bounded curvature. In numerous applications, the function optimized is not known a priori, but instead learned from data. What are the guarantees we have when optimizing functions from sampled data? In this paper we show that for any monotone submodular function with curvature c there is a (1 - c)/(1 + c - c^2) approximation algorithm for maximization under cardinality constraints when polynomially-many samples are drawn from the uniform distribution over feasible sets. Moreover, we show that this algorithm is optimal. That is, for any c < 1, there exists a submodular function with curvature c for which no algorithm can achieve a better approximation. The curvature assumption is crucial as for general monotone submodular functions no algorithm can obtain a constant-factor approximation for maximization under a cardinality constraint when observing polynomially-many samples drawn from any distribution over feasible sets, even when the function is statistically learnable.

This paper studies the trade-off between two different kinds of pure exploration: breadth versus depth. We focus on the most biased coin problem, asking how many total coin flips are required to identify a ``heavy'' coin from an infinite bag containing both ``heavy'' coins with mean $\theta_1 \in (0,1)$, and ``light" coins with mean $\theta_0 \in (0,\theta_1)$, where heavy coins are drawn from the bag with proportion $\alpha \in (0,1/2)$. When $\alpha,\theta_0,\theta_1$ are unknown, the key difficulty of this problem lies in distinguishing whether the two kinds of coins have very similar means, or whether heavy coins are just extremely rare. While existing solutions to this problem require some prior knowledge of the parameters $\theta_0,\theta_1,\alpha$, we propose an adaptive algorithm that requires no such knowledge yet still obtains near-optimal sample complexity guarantees. In contrast, we provide a lower bound showing that non-adaptive strategies require at least quadratically more samples. In characterizing this gap between adaptive and nonadaptive strategies, we make connections to anomaly detection and prove lower bounds on the sample complexity of differentiating between a single parametric distribution and a mixture of two such distributions.

In many applications of black-box optimization, one can evaluate multiple points simultaneously, e.g. when evaluating the performances of several different neural network architectures in a parallel computing environment. In this paper, we develop a novel batch Bayesian optimization algorithm --- the parallel knowledge gradient method. By construction, this method provides the one-step Bayes optimal batch of points to sample. We provide an efficient strategy for computing this Bayes-optimal batch of points, and we demonstrate that the parallel knowledge gradient method finds global optima significantly faster than previous batch Bayesian optimization algorithms on both synthetic test functions and when tuning hyperparameters of practical machine learning algorithms, especially when function evaluations are noisy.

Many real world graphs, such as the graphs of molecules, exhibit structure at multiple different scales, but most existing kernels between graphs are either purely local or purely global in character. In contrast, by building a hierarchy of nested subgraphs, the Multiscale Laplacian Graph kernels (MLG kernels) that we define in this paper can account for structure at a range of different scales. At the heart of the MLG construction is another new graph kernel, called the Feature Space Laplacian Graph kernel (FLG kernel), which has the property that it can lift a base kernel defined on the vertices of two graphs to a kernel between the graphs. The MLG kernel applies such FLG kernels to subgraphs recursively. To make the MLG kernel computationally feasible, we also introduce a randomized projection procedure, similar to the Nystro ̈m method, but for RKHS operators.

We introduce the Multiple Quantile Graphical Model (MQGM), which extends the neighborhood selection approach of Meinshausen and Buhlmann for learning sparse graphical models. The latter is defined by the basic subproblem of modeling the conditional mean of one variable as a sparse function of all others. Our approach models a set of conditional quantiles of one variable as a sparse function of all others, and hence offers a much richer, more expressive class of conditional distribution estimates. We establish that, under suitable regularity conditions, the MQGM identifies the exact conditional independencies with probability tending to one as the problem size grows, even outside of the usual homoskedastic Gaussian data model. We develop an efficient algorithm for fitting the MQGM using the alternating direction method of multipliers. We also describe a strategy for sampling from the joint distribution that underlies the MQGM estimate. Lastly, we present detailed experiments that demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the MQGM in modeling hetereoskedastic non-Gaussian data.

We study a variant of the classical stochastic $K$-armed bandit where observing the outcome of each arm is expensive, but cheap approximations to this outcome are available. For example, in online advertising the performance of an ad can be approximated by displaying it for shorter time periods or to narrower audiences. We formalise this task as a \emph{multi-fidelity} bandit, where, at each time step, the forecaster may choose to play an arm at any one of $M$ fidelities. The highest fidelity (desired outcome) expends cost $\costM$. The $m$\ssth fidelity (an approximation) expends $\costm < \costM$ and returns a biased estimate of the highest fidelity. We develop \mfucb, a novel upper confidence bound procedure for this setting and prove that it naturally adapts to the sequence of available approximations and costs thus attaining better regret than naive strategies which ignore the approximations. For instance, in the above online advertising example, \mfucbs would use the lower fidelities to quickly eliminate suboptimal ads and reserve the larger expensive experiments on a small set of promising candidates. We complement this result with a lower bound and show that \mfucbs is nearly optimal under certain conditions.

We study regression and classification in a setting where the learning algorithm is allowed to access only a limited number of attributes per example, known as the limited attribute observation model. In this well-studied model, we provide the first lower bounds giving a limit on the precision attainable by any algorithm for several variants of regression, notably linear regression with the absolute loss and the squared loss, as well as for classification with the hinge loss. We complement these lower bounds with a general purpose algorithm that gives an upper bound on the achievable precision limit in the setting of learning with missing data.

The reparameterization gradient has become a widely used method to obtain Monte Carlo gradients to optimize the variational objective. However, this technique does not easily apply to commonly used distributions such as beta or gamma without further approximations, and most practical applications of the reparameterization gradient fit Gaussian distributions. In this paper, we introduce the generalized reparameterization gradient, a method that extends the reparameterization gradient to a wider class of variational distributions. Generalized reparameterizations use invertible transformations of the latent variables which lead to transformed distributions that weakly depend on the variational parameters. This results in new Monte Carlo gradients that combine reparameterization gradients and score function gradients. We demonstrate our approach on variational inference for two complex probabilistic models. The generalized reparameterization is effective: even a single sample from the variational distribution is enough to obtain a low-variance gradient.

We introduce the Forget-me-not Process, an efficient, non-parametric meta-algorithm for online probabilistic sequence prediction for piecewise stationary, repeating sources. Our method works by taking a Bayesian approach to partition a stream of data into postulated task-specific segments, while simultaneously building a model for each task. We provide regret guarantees with respect to piecewise stationary data sources under the logarithmic loss, and validate the method empirically across a range of sequence prediction and task identification problems.

Functional brain networks are well described and estimated from data with Gaussian Graphical Models (GGMs), e.g.\ using sparse inverse covariance estimators. Comparing functional connectivity of subjects in two populations calls for comparing these estimated GGMs. Our goal is to identify differences in GGMs known to have similar structure. We characterize the uncertainty of differences with confidence intervals obtained using a parametric distribution on parameters of a sparse estimator. Sparse penalties enable statistical guarantees and interpretable models even in high-dimensional and low-sample settings. Characterizing the distributions of sparse models is inherently challenging as the penalties produce a biased estimator. Recent work invokes the sparsity assumptions to effectively remove the bias from a sparse estimator such as the lasso. These distributions can be used to give confidence intervals on edges in GGMs, and by extension their differences. However, in the case of comparing GGMs, these estimators do not make use of any assumed joint structure among the GGMs. Inspired by priors from brain functional connectivity we derive the distribution of parameter differences under a joint penalty when parameters are known to be sparse in the difference. This leads us to introduce the debiased multi-task fused lasso, whose distribution can be characterized in an efficient manner. We then show how the debiased lasso and multi-task fused lasso can be used to obtain confidence intervals on edge differences in GGMs. We validate the techniques proposed on a set of synthetic examples as well as neuro-imaging dataset created for the study of autism.