Publications

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models
Michael Poli
Eric Nguyen
Daniel Y Fu
Tri Dao
Stephen Baccus
Stefano Ermon
Christopher Re
Mechanistic Mode Connectivity
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Eric J Bigelow
Robert P. Dick
David M. Krueger
Hidenori Tanaka
Nesterov Meets Optimism: Rate-Optimal Separable Minimax Optimization
Chris Junchi Li
Huizhuo Yuan
Angela Yuan
Quanquan Gu
Michael Jordan
We propose a new first-order optimization algorithm — AcceleratedGradient-OptimisticGradient (AG-OG) Descent Ascent—for separable convex… (voir plus)-concave minimax optimization. The main idea of our algorithm is to carefully leverage the structure of the minimax problem, performing Nesterov acceleration on the individual component and optimistic gradient on the coupling component. Equipped with proper restarting, we show that AG-OG achieves the optimal convergence rate (up to a constant) for a variety of settings, including bilinearly coupled strongly convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-SC-SC), bilinearly coupled convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-C-SC), and bilinear games. We also extend our algorithm to the stochastic setting and achieve the optimal convergence rate in both bi-SC-SC and bi-C-SC settings. AG-OG is the first single-call algorithm with optimal convergence rates in both deterministic and stochastic settings for bilinearly coupled minimax optimization problems.
PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds for Adversarial Generative Models
Sokhna Diarra Mbacke
Pascal Germain
Privacy-Aware Compression for Federated Learning Through Numerical Mechanism Design
Chuan Guo
Kamalika Chaudhuri
Pierre Stock
Michael G. Rabbat
Regions of Reliability in the Evaluation of Multivariate Probabilistic Forecasts
Étienne Marcotte
Valentina Zantedeschi
Multivariate probabilistic time series forecasts are commonly evaluated via proper scoring rules, i.e., functions that are minimal in expect… (voir plus)ation for the ground-truth distribution. However, this property is not sufficient to guarantee good discrimination in the non-asymptotic regime. In this paper, we provide the first systematic finite-sample study of proper scoring rules for time-series forecasting evaluation. Through a power analysis, we identify the"region of reliability"of a scoring rule, i.e., the set of practical conditions where it can be relied on to identify forecasting errors. We carry out our analysis on a comprehensive synthetic benchmark, specifically designed to test several key discrepancies between ground-truth and forecast distributions, and we gauge the generalizability of our findings to real-world tasks with an application to an electricity production problem. Our results reveal critical shortcomings in the evaluation of multivariate probabilistic forecasts as commonly performed in the literature.
Robust Perception through Equivariance
Chengzhi Mao
Lingyu Zhang
Abhishek Vaibhav Joshi
Junfeng Yang
Hao Wang
Carl Vondrick
R-U-SURE? Uncertainty-Aware Code Suggestions By Maximizing Utility Across Random User Intents
Daniel D. Johnson
Daniel Tarlow
Christian Walder
Target-based Surrogates for Stochastic Optimization
Jonathan Wilder Lavington
Mark Schmidt
Nicolas Roux
We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, … (voir plus)imitation learning and bilevel optimization. Our target optimization framework uses the (expensive) gradient computation to construct surrogate functions in a \emph{target space} (e.g. the logits output by a linear model for classification) that can be minimized efficiently. This allows for multiple parameter updates to the model, amortizing the cost of gradient computation. In the full-batch setting, we prove that our surrogate is a global upper-bound on the loss, and can be (locally) minimized using a black-box optimization algorithm. We prove that the resulting majorization-minimization algorithm ensures convergence to a stationary point of the loss. Next, we instantiate our framework in the stochastic setting and propose the
The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Ghada Sokar
Utku Evci
In this work we identify the dormant neuron phenomenon in deep reinforcement learning, where an agent's network suffers from an increasing n… (voir plus)umber of inactive neurons, thereby affecting network expressivity. We demonstrate the presence of this phenomenon across a variety of algorithms and environments, and highlight its effect on learning. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective method (ReDo) that Recycles Dormant neurons throughout training. Our experiments demonstrate that ReDo maintains the expressive power of networks by reducing the number of dormant neurons and results in improved performance.
The Statistical Benefits of Quantile Temporal-Difference Learning for Value Estimation
Mark Rowland
Yunhao Tang
Clare Lyle
Remi Munos
Bellemare Marc-Emmanuel
Will Dabney
Towards Reliable Neural Specifications
Nham Le
Zhaoyue Wang
Arie Gurfinkel