United States

Consider a network of $N$ decentralized computing agents collaboratively solving a nonconvex stochastic composite problem. In this work, we propose a single-loop algorithm, called DEEPSTORM, that achieves optimal sample complexity for this setting. Unlike double-loop algorithms that require a large batch size to compute the (stochastic) gradient once in a while, DEEPSTORM uses a small batch size, creating advantages in occasions such as streaming data and online learning. This is the first method achieving optimal sample complexity for decentralized nonconvex stochastic composite problems, requiring $\mathcal{O}(1)$ batch size. We conduct convergence analysis for DEEPSTORM with both constant and diminishing step sizes. Additionally, under proper initialization and a small enough desired solution error, we show that DEEPSTORM with a constant step size achieves a network-independent sample complexity, with an additional linear speed-up with respect to $N$ over centralized methods. All codes are made available at https://github.com/gmancino/DEEPSTORM.

AAAI 2023

Proximal Stochastic Recursive Momentum Methods for Nonconvex Composite Decentralized Optimization

distributed machine learning & federated learning

machine learning

optimization

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Standard multi-modal models assume the use of the same modalities in training and inference stages. However, in practice, the environment in which multi-modal models operate may not satisfy such assumption. As such, their performances degrade drastically if any modality is missing in the inference stage. We ask: how can we train a model that is robust to missing modalities? This paper seeks a set of good practices for multi-modal action recognition, with a particular interest in circumstances where some modalities are not available at an inference time. First, we show how to effectively regularize the model during training (e.g., data augmentation). Second, we investigate on fusion methods for robustness to missing modalities: we find that transformer-based fusion shows better robustness for missing modality than summation or concatenation. Third, we propose a simple modular network, ActionMAE, which learns missing modality predictive coding by randomly dropping modality features and tries to reconstruct them with the remaining modality features. Coupling these good practices, we build a model that is not only effective in multi-modal action recognition but also robust to modality missing. Our model achieves the state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmarks and maintains competitive performances even in missing modality scenarios.

Towards Good Practices for Missing Modality Robust Action Recognition

We study PAC learnability and PAC stabilizability of Hedonic Games (HGs), i.e., efficiently inferring preferences or core-stable partitions from samples. We first expand the known learnability/stabilizability landscape for some of the most prominent HGs classes, providing results for Friends and Enemies Games, Bottom Responsive, and Anonymous HGs. Then, having a broader view in mind, we attempt to shed light on the structural properties leading to learnability/stabilizability, or lack thereof, for specific HGs classes. Along this path, we focus on the fully expressive Hedonic Coalition Nets representation of HGs. We identify two sets of conditions that lead to efficient learnability, and which encompass all of the known positive learnability results. On the side of stability, we reveal that, while the freedom of choosing an ad hoc adversarial distribution is the most obvious hurdle to achieving PAC stability, it is not the only one. First, we show a distribution independent necessary condition for PAC stability. Then, we focus on $\W$-games, where players have individual preferences over other players and evaluate coalitions based on the least preferred member. We prove that these games are PAC stabilizable under the class of bounded distributions, which assign positive probability mass to all coalitions. Finally, we discuss why such a result is not easily extendable to other HGs classes even in this promising scenario. Namely, we establish a purely computational property necessary for achieving PAC stability.

PAC learning and stabilizing Hedonic Games: towards a unifying approach.

Behavioral metrics can calculate the distance between states or state-action pairs from the rewards and transitions difference. By virtue of their capability to filter out task-irrelevant information in theory, using them to shape a state embedding space becomes a new trend of representation learning for deep reinforcement learning (RL), especially when there are explicit distracting factors in observation backgrounds. However, due to the tight coupling between the metric and the RL policy, such metric-based methods may result in less informative embedding spaces which can weaken their aid to the baseline RL algorithm and even consume more samples to learn. We resolve this by proposing a new behavioral metric. It decouples the learning of RL policy and metric owing to its independence on RL policy. We theoretically justify its scalability to continuous state and action spaces and design a practical way to incorporate it into an RL procedure as a representation learning target. We evaluate our approach on DeepMind control tasks with default and distracting backgrounds. By statistically reliable evaluation protocols, our experiments demonstrate our approach is superior to previous metric-based methods in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance in both backgrounds.

Policy-Independent Behavioral Metric-Based Representation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Value Decomposition (VD) aims to deduce the contributions of agents for decentralized policies in the presence of only global rewards, and has recently emerged as a powerful credit assignment paradigm for tackling cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. One of the main challenges in VD is to promote diverse behaviors among agents, while existing methods directly encourage the diversity of learned agent networks with various strategies. However, we argue that these dedicated designs for agent networks are still limited by the indistinguishable VD network, leading to homogeneous agent behaviors and thus downgrading the cooperation capability. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive Identity-Aware learning (CIA) method, explicitly boosting the credit-level distinguishability of the VD network to break the bottleneck of multi-agent diversity. Specifically, our approach leverages contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between the temporal credits and identity representations of different agents, encouraging the full expressiveness of credit assignment and further the emergence of individualities. The algorithm implementation of the proposed CIA module is simple yet effective that can be readily incorporated into various VD architectures. Experiments on the SMAC benchmarks and across different VD backbones demonstrate that the proposed method yields results superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts. Our code is available at https://github.com/liushunyu/CIA.

Contrastive Identity-Aware Learning for Multi-Agent Value Decomposition

Clustering with outliers is one of the most fundamental problems in Computer Science.  Given a set $X$ of $n$ points and two numbers $k,m$, the clustering with outliers aims to exclude $m$ points from $X$ and partition the remaining points into $k$ clusters that minimizes a certain cost function. In this paper, we give a general approach for solving clustering with outliers, which results in a fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithm in $k$ and $m$, that almost matches the approximation ratio for its outlier-free counterpart. As a corollary, we obtain FPT approximation algorithms with optimal approximation ratios for $k$-\textsc{Median} and $k$-\textsc{Means} with outliers in general and Euclidean metrics. We also exhibit more applications of our approach to other variants of the problem that impose additional constraints on the clustering, such as fairness or matroid constraints. 

Clustering What Matters: Optimal Approximation for Clustering with Outliers

Most entropy measures depend on the spread of the probability distribution over the sample space X, and the maximum entropy achievable scales proportionately with the sample space cardinality |X|. For a finite |X|, this yields robust entropy measures which satisfy many important properties, such as invariance to bijections, while the same is not true for continuous spaces (where |X|=infinity).
Furthermore, since R and R^d (d in Z+) have the same cardinality (from Cantor's correspondence argument), cardinality-dependent entropy measures cannot encode the data dimensionality. In this work, we question the role of cardinality and distribution spread in defining entropy measures for continuous spaces, which can undergo multiple rounds of transformations and distortions, e.g., in neural networks. We find that the average value of the local intrinsic dimension of a distribution, denoted as ID-Entropy, can serve as a robust entropy measure for continuous spaces, while capturing the data dimensionality. We find that ID-Entropy satisfies many desirable properties and can be extended to conditional entropy, joint entropy and mutual-information variants. ID-Entropy also yields new information bottleneck principles and also links to causality. In the context of deep learning, for feedforward architectures, we show, theoretically and empirically, that the ID-Entropy of a hidden layer directly controls the generalization gap for both supervised and unsupervised scenarios, when the target function is Lipschitz continuous. Our work primarily shows that, for continuous spaces, taking a structural rather than a statistical approach yields entropy measures which preserve intrinsic data dimensionality, while being relevant for studying supervised and unsupervised architectures.

Local Intrinsic Dimensional Entropy

Real-time Detection Of Robotic Traffic in Online Advertising

AI and Parallelism in CS1: Experiences and Analysis

There has been a surge of interest in learning optimal decision trees using mixed-integer programs (MIP) in recent years, as heuristic-based methods do not guarantee optimality and find it challenging to incorporate constraints that are critical for many practical applications.    However, existing MIP methods which build on an \emph{arc-based} formulation do not scale well as the number of binary variables is in the order of $\mathcal{O}(2^dN)$, where $d$ and $N$ refer to the depth of the tree and the size of the dataset. Moreover, they can only handle sample-level constraints and linear metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel \emph{path-based} MIP formulation where the number of decision variables is independent of %both $d$ and $N$. We present a scalable column generation framework to solve the MIP to optimality. Our framework produces a multiway-split tree which is more interpretable than the typical binary-split trees due to its shorter rules. Our framework is more general as it can handle nonlinear metrics such as F1 score, and incorporate a broader class of constraints. We demonstrate its efficacy with extensive experiments. We present results on datasets containing up to 1,008,372  samples while existing MIP-based decision tree models do not scale well on data beyond a few thousand points. We report superior or competitive results compared to the state-of-art MIP-based methods with up to a 24X reduction in runtime.

Scalable Optimal Multiway-Split Decision Trees with Constraints

Robots will play a crucial role in the future and need to work as a team in increasingly more complex applications. Advances in robotics have laid the hardware foundations for building large-scale multi-robot systems, such as for mobile robots and drones. But how to coordinate robots intelligently is a difficult problem. In this talk, I will introduce intelligent planning algorithms for solving this challenge with a focus on one fundamental problem: letting a large team of agents navigate without collisions in congested environments while minimizing their travel times. I will present principled planning algorithms that can efficiently coordinate hundreds of agents while providing rigorous guarantees on completeness and even optimality. I will also present techniques to apply these algorithms to real-world problems with robustness guarantees, such as warehouse robot coordination, railway planning, and multi-arm assembly.

Proximal Stochastic Recursive Momentum Methods for Nonconvex Composite Decentralized Optimization

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Towards Good Practices for Missing Modality Robust Action Recognition

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