No Arabic abstract
While deep neural networks provide good performance for a range of challenging tasks, calibration and uncertainty estimation remain major challenges, especially under distribution shift. In this paper, we propose the amortized conditional normalized maximum likelihood (ACNML) method as a scalable general-purpose approach for uncertainty estimation, calibration, and out-of-distribution robustness with deep networks. Our algorithm builds on the conditional normalized maximum likelihood (CNML) coding scheme, which has minimax optimal properties according to the minimum description length principle, but is computationally intractable to evaluate exactly for all but the simplest of model classes. We propose to use approximate Bayesian inference technqiues to produce a tractable approximation to the CNML distribution. Our approach can be combined with any approximate inference algorithm that provides tractable posterior densities over model parameters. We demonstrate that ACNML compares favorably to a number of prior techniques for uncertainty estimation in terms of calibration on out-of-distribution inputs.
In this work we consider data-driven optimization problems where one must maximize a function given only queries at a fixed set of points. This problem setting emerges in many domains where function evaluation is a complex and expensive process, such as in the design of materials, vehicles, or neural network architectures. Because the available data typically only covers a small manifold of the possible space of inputs, a principal challenge is to be able to construct algorithms that can reason about uncertainty and out-of-distribution values, since a naive optimizer can easily exploit an estimated model to return adversarial inputs. We propose to tackle this problem by leveraging the normalized maximum-likelihood (NML) estimator, which provides a principled approach to handling uncertainty and out-of-distribution inputs. While in the standard formulation NML is intractable, we propose a tractable approximation that allows us to scale our method to high-capacity neural network models. We demonstrate that our method can effectively optimize high-dimensional design problems in a variety of disciplines such as chemistry, biology, and materials engineering.
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized linear bandits problems. We develop novel index policies that we prove achieve order-optimality, and show that they achieve empirical performance competitive with the state-of-the-art benchmark methods in extensive experiments. The new policies achieve this with low computation time per pull for linear bandits, and thereby resulting in both favorable regret as well as computational efficiency.
Perhaps surprisingly, recent studies have shown probabilistic model likelihoods have poor specificity for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and often assign higher likelihoods to OOD data than in-distribution data. To ameliorate this issue we propose DoSE, the density of states estimator. Drawing on the statistical physics notion of ``density of states, the DoSE decision rule avoids direct comparison of model probabilities, and instead utilizes the ``probability of the model probability, or indeed the frequency of any reasonable statistic. The frequency is calculated using nonparametric density estimators (e.g., KDE and one-class SVM) which measure the typicality of various model statistics given the training data and from which we can flag test points with low typicality as anomalous. Unlike many other methods, DoSE requires neither labeled data nor OOD examples. DoSE is modular and can be trivially applied to any existing, trained model. We demonstrate DoSEs state-of-the-art performance against other unsupervised OOD detectors on previously established ``hard benchmarks.
We propose an efficient algorithm for approximate computation of the profile maximum likelihood (PML), a variant of maximum likelihood maximizing the probability of observing a sufficient statistic rather than the empirical sample. The PML has appealing theoretical properties, but is difficult to compute exactly. Inspired by observations gleaned from exactly solvable cases, we look for an approximate PML solution, which, intuitively, clumps comparably frequent symbols into one symbol. This amounts to lower-bounding a certain matrix permanent by summing over a subgroup of the symmetric group rather than the whole group during the computation. We extensively experiment with the approximate solution, and find the empirical performance of our approach is competitive and sometimes significantly better than state-of-the-art performance for various estimation problems.
Inspired by the Reward-Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate method of adaptive control, we propose RBMLE -- a novel family of learning algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (SMABs). For a broad range of SMABs including both the parametric Exponential Family as well as the non-parametric sub-Gaussian/Exponential family, we show that RBMLE yields an index policy. To choose the bias-growth rate $alpha(t)$ in RBMLE, we reveal the nontrivial interplay between $alpha(t)$ and the regret bound that generally applies in both the Exponential Family as well as the sub-Gaussian/Exponential family bandits. To quantify the finite-time performance, we prove that RBMLE attains order-optimality by adaptively estimating the unknown constants in the expression of $alpha(t)$ for Gaussian and sub-Gaussian bandits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed RBMLE achieves empirical regret performance competitive with the state-of-the-art methods, while being more computationally efficient and scalable in comparison to the best-performing ones among them.