No Arabic abstract
We consider black box optimization of an unknown function in the nonparametric Gaussian process setting when the noise in the observed function values can be heavy tailed. This is in contrast to existing literature that typically assumes sub-Gaussian noise distributions for queries. Under the assumption that the unknown function belongs to the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) induced by a kernel, we first show that an adaptation of the well-known GP-UCB algorithm with reward truncation enjoys sublinear $tilde{O}(T^{frac{2 + alpha}{2(1+alpha)}})$ regret even with only the $(1+alpha)$-th moments, $alpha in (0,1]$, of the reward distribution being bounded ($tilde{O}$ hides logarithmic factors). However, for the common squared exponential (SE) and Mat{e}rn kernels, this is seen to be significantly larger than a fundamental $Omega(T^{frac{1}{1+alpha}})$ lower bound on regret. We resolve this gap by developing novel Bayesian optimization algorithms, based on kernel approximation techniques, with regret bounds matching the lower bound in order for the SE kernel. We numerically benchmark the algorithms on environments based on both synthetic models and real-world data sets.
We revisit the classic regret-minimization problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting when the arm-distributions are allowed to be heavy-tailed. Regret minimization has been well studied in simpler settings of either bounded support reward distributions or distributions that belong to a single parameter exponential family. We work under the much weaker assumption that the moments of order $(1+epsilon)$ are uniformly bounded by a known constant B, for some given $epsilon > 0$. We propose an optimal algorithm that matches the lower bound exactly in the first-order term. We also give a finite-time bound on its regret. We show that our index concentrates faster than the well known truncated or trimmed empirical mean estimators for the mean of heavy-tailed distributions. Computing our index can be computationally demanding. To address this, we develop a batch-based algorithm that is optimal up to a multiplicative constant depending on the batch size. We hence provide a controlled trade-off between statistical optimality and computational cost.
We present two algorithms for Bayesian optimization in the batch feedback setting, based on Gaussian process upper confidence bound and Thompson sampling approaches, along with frequentist regret guarantees and numerical results.
Heavy-tailed distributions have been studied in statistics, random matrix theory, physics, and econometrics as models of correlated systems, among other domains. Further, heavy-tail distributed eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of the weight matrices in neural networks have been shown to empirically correlate with test set accuracy in several works (e.g. arXiv:1901.08276), but a formal relationship between heavy-tail distributed parameters and generalization bounds was yet to be demonstrated. In this work, the compression framework of arXiv:1802.05296 is utilized to show that matrices with heavy-tail distributed matrix elements can be compressed, resulting in networks with sparse weight matrices. Since the parameter count has been reduced to a sum of the non-zero elements of sparse matrices, the compression framework allows us to bound the generalization gap of the resulting compressed network with a non-vacuous generalization bound. Further, the action of these matrices on a vector is discussed, and how they may relate to compression and resilient classification is analyzed.
We study stochastic convex optimization with heavy-tailed data under the constraint of differential privacy. Most prior work on this problem is restricted to the case where the loss function is Lipschitz. Instead, as introduced by Wang, Xiao, Devadas, and Xu, we study general convex loss functions with the assumption that the distribution of gradients has bounded $k$-th moments. We provide improved upper bounds on the excess population risk under approximate differential privacy of $tilde{O}left(sqrt{frac{d}{n}}+left(frac{d}{epsilon n}right)^{frac{k-1}{k}}right)$ and $tilde{O}left(frac{d}{n}+left(frac{d}{epsilon n}right)^{frac{2k-2}{k}}right)$ for convex and strongly convex loss functions, respectively. We also prove nearly-matching lower bounds under the constraint of pure differential privacy, giving strong evidence that our bounds are tight.
Building surrogate models is one common approach when we attempt to learn unknown black-box functions. Bayesian optimization provides a framework which allows us to build surrogate models based on sequential samples drawn from the function and find the optimum. Tuning algorithmic parameters to optimize the performance of large, complicated black-box application codes is a specific important application, which aims at finding the optima of black-box functions. Within the Bayesian optimization framework, the Gaussian process model produces smooth or continuous sample paths. However, the black-box function in the tuning problem is often non-smooth. This difficult tuning problem is worsened by the fact that we usually have limited sequential samples from the black-box function. Motivated by these issues encountered in tuning, we propose a novel additive Gaussian process model called clustered Gaussian process (cGP), where the additive components are induced by clustering. In the examples we studied, the performance can be improved by as much as 90% among repetitive experiments. By using this surrogate model, we want to capture the non-smoothness of the black-box function. In addition to an algorithm for constructing this model, we also apply the model to several artificial and real applications to evaluate it.