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The empirical success of multi-agent reinforcement learning is encouraging, while few theoretical guarantees have been revealed. In this work, we prove that the plug-in solver approach, probably the most natural reinforcement learning algorithm, achieves minimax sample complexity for turn-based stochastic game (TBSG). Specifically, we perform planning in an empirical TBSG by utilizing a `simulator&#39; that allows sampling from arbitrary state-action pair. We show that the empirical Nash equilibrium strategy is an approximate Nash equilibrium strategy in the true TBSG and give both problem-dependent and problem-independent bound. We develop reward perturbation techniques to tackle the non-stationarity in the game and Taylor-expansion-type analysis to improve the dependence on approximation error. With these novel techniques, we prove the minimax sample complexity of turn-based stochastic game.

UAI 2021

Minimax Sample Complexity for Turn-based Stochastic Game

stochastic game

sample complexity

reinforcement learning

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

The NAML workshop is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team.

The goals of NAML are:

* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications

* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements

* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

**Watch this video to hear about the AFCEA purpose.**

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NAML 2021

The empirical success of multi-agent reinforcement learning is encouraging, while few theoretical guarantees have been revealed. In this work, we prove that the plug-in solver approach, probably the most natural reinforcement learning algorithm, achieves minimax sample complexity for turn-based stochastic game (TBSG). Specifically, we perform planning in an empirical TBSG by utilizing a `simulator' that allows sampling from arbitrary state-action pair. We show that the empirical Nash equilibrium strategy is an approximate Nash equilibrium strategy in the true TBSG and give both problem-dependent and problem-independent bound. We develop reward perturbation techniques to tackle the non-stationarity in the game and Taylor-expansion-type analysis to improve the dependence on approximation error. With these novel techniques, we prove the minimax sample complexity of turn-based stochastic game.

lightning talk

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
<br>
<br>Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
<br>UAI 2021 Program Chairs
<br>uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

Deep learning architectures with a huge number of parameters are often compressed using pruning techniques to ensure computational efficiency of inference during deployment. Despite multitude of empirical advances, there is a lack of theoretical understanding of the effectiveness of different pruning methods. We inspect different pruning techniques under the statistical mechanics formulation of a teacher-student framework and derive their generalization error (GE) bounds. It has been shown that Determinantal Point Process (DPP) based node pruning method is notably superior to competing approaches when tested on real datasets. Using GE bounds in the aforementioned setup we provide theoretical guarantees for their empirical observations. Another consistent finding in literature is that sparse neural networks (edge pruned) generalize better than dense neural networks (node pruned) for a fixed number of parameters. We use our theoretical setup to prove this finding and show that even the baseline random edge pruning method performs better than the DPP node pruning method. We also validate this empirically on real datasets.

Statistical Mechanical Analysis of Neural Network Pruning

Infinite width limits of deep neural networks often have tractable forms. They have been used to analyse the behaviour of finite networks, as well as being useful methods in their own right. When investigating infinitely wide convolutional neural networks (CNNs), it was observed that the correlations arising from spatial weight sharing disappear in the infinite limit. This is undesirable, as spatial correlation is the main motivation behind CNNs. We show that the loss of this property is not a consequence of the infinite limit, but rather of choosing an independent weight prior. Correlating the weights maintains the correlations in the activations. Varying the amount of correlation interpolates between independent-weight limits and mean-pooling. Empirical evaluation of the infinitely wide network shows that optimal performance is achieved between the extremes, indicating that correlations can be useful.

Correlated Weights in Infinite Limits of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Inspired by recent advances in the field of expert-based approximations of Gaussian processes (GPs), we present an expert-based approach to large-scale multi-output regression using single-output GP experts. Employing a deeply structured mixture of single-output GPs encoded via a probabilistic circuit allows us to capture correlations between multiple output dimensions accurately. By recursively partitioning the covariate space and the output space, posterior inference in our model reduces to inference on single-output GP experts, which only need to be conditioned on a small subset of the observations. We show that inference can be performed exactly and efficiently in our model, that it can capture correlations between output dimensions and, hence, often outperforms approaches that do not incorporate inter-output correlations, as demonstrated on several data sets in terms of the negative log predictive density.

Leveraging Probabilistic Circuits for Nonparametric Multi-Output Regression

Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams (PSDDs) are effective tools for combining uncertain knowledge in the form of (learned) probabilities and certain knowledge in the form of logical constraints. Despite some promising recent advances in the topic, very little attention has been given to the problem of effectively learning PSDDs from data and logical constraints in large domains. In this paper we show that a simple strategy of sampling and averaging PSDDs leads to state-of-the-art performance in many tasks. We overcome some of the issues with previous methods by employing a top-down generation of circuits from a logic formula represented as a BDD. We discuss how to locally grow the circuit while achieving a good trade-off between complexity and goodness-of-fit of the resulting model. Generalization error is further decreased by aggregating sampled circuits through Bayesian model combination. Experiments with various domains show that the approach efficiently learns good models even in very low data regimes, while remaining competitive for large sample sizes.

Learning Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams Under Logic Constraints by Sampling and Averaging

Natural data are often well-described as belonging to latent clusters. When the number of clusters is unknown, Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) models can provide a flexible and powerful technique to model the data. However, algorithms for inference in nonparametric mixture models fail to meet two critical requirements for practical use: (1) that inference can be performed online, and (2) that inference is efficient in the large time/sample limit. In this work, we propose a novel Bayesian recursion to efficiently infer a posterior distribution over discrete latent variables from a sequence of observations in an online manner, assuming a Chinese Restaurant Process prior on the sequence of latent variables. Our recursive filter, which we call the Recursive Chinese Restaurant Process (R-CRP), has quasilinear average time complexity and logarithmic average space complexity in the total number of observations. We experimentally compare our filtering method against both online and offline inference algorithms including Markov chain Monte Carlo, variational approximations and DP-Means, and demonstrate that our inference algorithm achieves comparable or better performance for a fraction of the runtime.

Efficient Online Inference for Nonparametric Mixture Models

As the representations output by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes important to ensure that these representations are fair and stable. In this work, we establish a key connection between counterfactual fairness and stability and leverage it to propose a novel framework, NIFTY (uNIfying Fairness and stabiliTY), which can be used with any GNN to learn fair and stable representations. We introduce a novel objective function that simultaneously accounts for fairness and stability and develop a layer-wise weight normalization using the Lipschitz constant to enhance neural message passing in GNNs. In doing so, we enforce fairness and stability both in the objective function as well as in the GNN architecture. Further, we show theoretically that our layer-wise weight normalization promotes counterfactual fairness and stability in the resulting representations. We introduce three new graph datasets comprising of high-stakes decisions in criminal justice and financial lending domains. Extensive experimentation with the above datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our framework.

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

Quantifying the probability of a label prediction being correct on a given test point enables users to better decide how to use those predictions. Combining aspects of prior work on conformal predictionsand selective classification, we provide a unifying framework for confidence requirements that allows for distinguishing between various sources of uncertainty in the learning process as well as various region specifications.Our first contribution is to expand a taxonomy of formal notions of confidence in label prediction of specific domain instances and of domain sub-regions. We then consider various common prior assumptions on the data generation process and what confidence guarantees they provably entail. Further, we show how, in various cases, unlabeled data can enhance the confidence of predictions and we analyze the sample complexity (both labeled and unlabeled) of learning meaningful pointwise label confidence guarantees.

Identifying Regions of Trusted Predictions

In this paper, we initiate a rigorous study of certification and PAC learnability under the instance-targeted poisoning attacks where the adversary may slightly change the training set with the goal of confusing the learner at a specific target instance. We show that when the budget of the adversary scales sublinearly with the sample complexity, PAC learnability and certification are achievable. In contrast, when the adversary's budget grows linearly with the sample complexity, not only PAC learnability is impossible (even in the improper sense) but also that the adversary can drive up the expected loss to one (for the 0-1 loss in binary classification). We further extend our results to distribution-specific PAC learning under instance-targeted poisoning attack and show that proper learning with certification against strong adversaries that may have access to the randomness used by the learner is indeed possible. Finally, we empirically study the robustness of K nearest neighbour, logistic regression, multi-layer perceptron, and convolutional neural network on real data sets. Interestingly, we observe that methods with high standard accuracy are more vulnerable to instance-targeted poisoning attacks.

Learning and Certification under Instance-targeted Poisoning

This paper presents Gaussian process meta-learning (GPML) for few-shot regression, which explicitly exploits the distance between regression problems/tasks using a novel task kernel. It contrasts sharply with the popular metric-based meta-learning approach which is based on the distance between data inputs or their embeddings in the few-shot learning literature. Apart from the superior predictive performance by capturing the diversity of different tasks, GPML offers a set of representative tasks that are useful for understanding the task distribution. We empirically demonstrate the performance and interpretability of GPML in several few-shot regression problems involving a multimodal task distribution and real-world datasets.

Learning to Learn with Gaussian Processes

Information-based Bayesian optimization (BO) algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art performance in optimizing a black-box objective function. However, they usually require several approximations or simplifying assumptions (without clearly understanding their effects on the BO performance) and/or their generalization to batch BO is computationally unwieldy, especially with an increasing batch size. To alleviate these issues, this paper presents a novel trusted-maximizers entropy search (TES) acquisition function: It measures how much an input query contributes to the information gain on the maximizer over a ﬁnite set of trusted maximizers, i.e., inputs optimizing functions that are sampled from the Gaussian process posterior belief of the objective function. Evaluating TES requires either only a stochastic approximation with sampling or a deterministic approximation with expectation propagation, both of which are investigated and empirically evaluated using synthetic benchmark objective functions and real-world optimization problems, e.g., hyperparameter tuning of a convolutional neural network and synthesizing ‘physically realizable’ faces to fool a black-box face recognition system. Though TES can naturally be generalized to a batch variant with either approximation, the latter is amenable to be scaled to a much larger batch size in our experiments.

Minimax Sample Complexity for Turn-based Stochastic Game

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