No Arabic abstract
Systems of interacting agents can often be modeled as contextual games, where the context encodes additional information, beyond the control of any agent (e.g. weather for traffic and fiscal policy for market economies). In such systems, the most likely outcome is given by a Nash equilibrium. In many practical settings, only game equilibria are observed, while the optimal parameters for a game model are unknown. This work introduces Nash Fixed Point Networks (N-FPNs), a class of implicit-depth neural networks that output Nash equilibria of contextual games. The N-FPN architecture fuses data-driven modeling with provided constraints. Given equilibrium observations of a contextual game, N-FPN parameters are learnt to predict equilibria outcomes given only the context. We present an end-to-end training scheme for N-FPNs that is simple and memory efficient to implement with existing autodifferentiation tools. N-FPNs also exploit a novel constraint decoupling scheme to avoid costly projections. Provided numerical examples show the efficacy of N-FPNs on atomic and non-atomic games (e.g. traffic routing).
We reconsider the training objective of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) from the mixed Nash Equilibria (NE) perspective. Inspired by the classical prox methods, we develop a novel algorithmic framework for GANs via an infinite-dimensional two-player game and prove rigorous convergence rates to the mixed NE, resolving the longstanding problem that no provably convergent algorithm exists for general GANs. We then propose a principled procedure to reduce our novel prox methods to simple sampling routines, leading to practically efficient algorithms. Finally, we provide experimental evidence that our approach outperforms methods that seek pure strategy equilibria, such as SGD, Adam, and RMSProp, both in speed and quality.
Inverse problems consist of recovering a signal from a collection of noisy measurements. These problems can often be cast as feasibility problems; however, additional regularization is typically necessary to ensure accurate and stable recovery with respect to data perturbations. Hand-chosen analytic regularization can yield desirable theoretical guarantees, but such approaches have limited effectiveness recovering signals due to their inability to leverage large amounts of available data. To this end, this work fuses data-driven regularization and convex feasibility in a theoretically sound manner. This is accomplished using feasibility-based fixed point networks (F-FPNs). Each F-FPN defines a collection of nonexpansive operators, each of which is the composition of a projection-based operator and a data-driven regularization operator. Fixed point iteration is used to compute fixed points of these operators, and weights of the operators are tuned so that the fixed points closely represent available data. Numerical examples demonstrate performance increases by F-FPNs when compared to standard TV-based recovery methods for CT reconstruction and a comparable neural network based on algorithm unrolling.
Railway systems require regular manual maintenance, a large part of which is dedicated to inspecting track deformation. Such deformation might severely impact trains runtime security, whereas such inspections remain costly for both finance and human resources. Therefore, a more precise and efficient approach to detect railway track deformation is in urgent need. In this paper, we showcase an application framework for predicting vertical track irregularity, based on a real-world, large-scale dataset produced by several operating railways in China. We have conducted extensive experiments on various machine learning & ensemble learning algorithms in an effort to maximize the models capability in capturing any irregularity. We also proposed a novel approach for handling imbalanced data in multivariate time series prediction tasks with adaptive data sampling and penalized loss. Such an approach has proven to reduce models sensitivity to the imbalanced target domain, thus improving its performance in predicting rare extreme values.
Owing to their connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs), saddle-point problems have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning and beyond. By necessity, most theoretical guarantees revolve around convex-concave (or even linear) problems; however, making theoretical inroads towards efficient GAN training depends crucially on moving beyond this classic framework. To make piecemeal progress along these lines, we analyze the behavior of mirror descent (MD) in a class of non-monotone problems whose solutions coincide with those of a naturally associated variational inequality - a property which we call coherence. We first show that ordinary, vanilla MD converges under a strict version of this condition, but not otherwise; in particular, it may fail to converge even in bilinear models with a unique solution. We then show that this deficiency is mitigated by optimism: by taking an extra-gradient step, optimistic mirror descent (OMD) converges in all coherent problems. Our analysis generalizes and extends the results of Daskalakis et al. (2018) for optimistic gradient descent (OGD) in bilinear problems, and makes concrete headway for establishing convergence beyond convex-concave games. We also provide stochastic analogues of these results, and we validate our analysis by numerical experiments in a wide array of GAN models (including Gaussian mixture models, as well as the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets).
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) represent a zero-sum game between two machine players, a generator and a discriminator, designed to learn the distribution of data. While GANs have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several benchmark learning tasks, GAN minimax optimization still poses great theoretical and empirical challenges. GANs trained using first-order optimization methods commonly fail to converge to a stable solution where the players cannot improve their objective, i.e., the Nash equilibrium of the underlying game. Such issues raise the question of the existence of Nash equilibrium solutions in the GAN zero-sum game. In this work, we show through several theoretical and numerical results that indeed GAN zero-sum games may not have any local Nash equilibria. To characterize an equilibrium notion applicable to GANs, we consider the equilibrium of a new zero-sum game with an objective function given by a proximal operator applied to the original objective, a solution we call the proximal equilibrium. Unlike the Nash equilibrium, the proximal equilibrium captures the sequential nature of GANs, in which the generator moves first followed by the discriminator. We prove that the optimal generative model in Wasserstein GAN problems provides a proximal equilibrium. Inspired by these results, we propose a new approach, which we call proximal training, for solving GAN problems. We discuss several numerical experiments demonstrating the existence of proximal equilibrium solutions in GAN minimax problems.