No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose a new multi-objective contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem with two objectives, where one of the objectives dominates the other objective. Unlike single-objective MAB problems in which the learner obtains a random scalar reward for each arm it selects, in the proposed problem, the learner obtains a random reward vector, where each component of the reward vector corresponds to one of the objectives and the distribution of the reward depends on the context that is provided to the learner at the beginning of each round. We call this problem contextual multi-armed bandit with a dominant objective (CMAB-DO). In CMAB-DO, the goal of the learner is to maximize its total reward in the non-dominant objective while ensuring that it maximizes its total reward in the dominant objective. In this case, the optimal arm given a context is the one that maximizes the expected reward in the non-dominant objective among all arms that maximize the expected reward in the dominant objective. First, we show that the optimal arm lies in the Pareto front. Then, we propose the multi-objective contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm (MOC-MAB), and define two performance measures: the 2-dimensional (2D) regret and the Pareto regret. We show that both the 2D regret and the Pareto regret of MOC-MAB are sublinear in the number of rounds. We also compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with other state-of-the-art methods in synthetic and real-world datasets. The proposed model and the algorithm have a wide range of real-world applications that involve multiple and possibly conflicting objectives ranging from wireless communication to medical diagnosis and recommender systems.
Meta learning with multiple objectives can be formulated as a Multi-Objective Bi-Level optimization Problem (MOBLP) where the upper-level subproblem is to solve several possible conflicting targets for the meta learner. However, existing studies either apply an inefficient evolutionary algorithm or linearly combine multiple objectives as a single-objective problem with the need to tune combination weights. In this paper, we propose a unified gradient-based Multi-Objective Meta Learning (MOML) framework and devise the first gradient-based optimization algorithm to solve the MOBLP by alternatively solving the lower-level and upper-level subproblems via the gradient descent method and the gradient-based multi-objective optimization method, respectively. Theoretically, we prove the convergence properties of the proposed gradient-based optimization algorithm. Empirically, we show the effectiveness of the proposed MOML framework in several meta learning problems, including few-shot learning, neural architecture search, domain adaptation, and multi-task learning.
The early sections of this paper present an analysis of a Markov decision model that is known as the multi-armed bandit under the assumption that the utility function of the decision maker is either linear or exponential. The analysis includes efficient procedures for computing the expected utility associated with the use of a priority policy and for identifying a priority policy that is optimal. The methodology in these sections is novel, building on the use of elementary row operations. In the later sections of this paper, the analysis is adapted to accommodate constraints that link the bandits.
Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is a prevalent challenge for Deep Learning, however, there exists no scalable MOO solution for truly deep neural networks. Prior work either demand optimizing a new network for every point on the Pareto front, or induce a large overhead to the number of trainable parameters by using hyper-networks conditioned on modifiable preferences. In this paper, we propose to condition the network directly on these preferences by augmenting them to the feature space. Furthermore, we ensure a well-spread Pareto front by penalizing the solutions to maintain a small angle to the preference vector. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our Pareto fronts achieve state-of-the-art quality despite being computed significantly faster. Furthermore, we showcase the scalability as our method approximates the full Pareto front on the CelebA dataset with an EfficientNet network at a tiny training time overhead of 7% compared to a simple single-objective optimization. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ruchtem/cosmos.
Federated learning has emerged as a promising, massively distributed way to train a joint deep model over large amounts of edge devices while keeping private user data strictly on device. In this work, motivated from ensuring fairness among users and robustness against malicious adversaries, we formulate federated learning as multi-objective optimization and propose a new algorithm FedMGDA+ that is guaranteed to converge to Pareto stationary solutions. FedMGDA+ is simple to implement, has fewer hyperparameters to tune, and refrains from sacrificing the performance of any participating user. We establish the convergence properties of FedMGDA+ and point out its connections to existing approaches. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets confirm that FedMGDA+ compares favorably against state-of-the-art.
Counterfactual explanations are one of the most popular methods to make predictions of black box machine learning models interpretable by providing explanations in the form of `what-if scenarios. Most current approaches optimize a collapsed, weighted sum of multiple objectives, which are naturally difficult to balance a-priori. We propose the Multi-Objective Counterfactuals (MOC) method, which translates the counterfactual search into a multi-objective optimization problem. Our approach not only returns a diverse set of counterfactuals with different trade-offs between the proposed objectives, but also maintains diversity in feature space. This enables a more detailed post-hoc analysis to facilitate better understanding and also more options for actionable user responses to change the predicted outcome. Our approach is also model-agnostic and works for numerical and categorical input features. We show the usefulness of MOC in concrete cases and compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods for counterfactual explanations.