Deletion based view maintenance is a building block in many query explanation and analytics applications, such as sensitivity analysis, what-if analysis, data cleaning, and probabilistic databases, which require exploring how a query's output result changes when excluding (deleting) subsets of input relations (referred to as “deletion interventions”). These applications' ability to remain interactive is limited by how fast they can recompute output results, especially over complex queries and large data. A critical limitation in existing engines is their performance. To remain interactive, existing approaches either restrict the types of aggregation functions, require explanations to be pre-specified, or apply sampling and approximation. We show how to build an interactive deletion intervention evaluation engine for SPJA queries, by Ieveraging recent advances in fast fine-grained provenance that captures input/output relationship for each physical operator in a denormalized compact pointer-free format. We use provenance to propagate the deletion status of tuples per operator, in a tight loop that leads to improvement in instruction and data locality. In addition, this representation is amenable to a variety of physical optimizations, such as dictionary-encoding, bit-packing, vectorization, and parallelization. Operators' output tuples can be evenly split across threads, and their deletion status can be computed independently. Our preliminary results show that on the TPC-H workload, our engine takes on average 9ms to evaluate 1K deletion interventions at a time, achieving on average wins of 3 orders of magnitude over DBToaster, a state-of-the art IVM based engine, and wins of 4 orders of magnitude against existing provenance based approaches. Utilizing tight loops and a cache-friendly provenance and intervention representation enable us to evaluate thousands of deletion interventions at interactive speed, and enable interactive time query explanations over more complex queries and data than previously possible.

What-if queries are the building blocks for many explanation and analytics applications—sensitivity analysis, hypothetical reasoning, data cleaning, probabilistic databases—that explore how a query's output changes due to input data changes. Their response time is bounded by intervention evaluation latency, which can be in the minute or hours for complex queries and large datasets. FaDE is a compilation engine that uses provenance to evaluate hypothetical deletion and scaling interventions at low latency and high throughput. FaDE forgoes conventional provenance representations as symbolic expressions and leverages their underlying relational structure. This accelerates intervention evaluation on average by 1000× against IVM and 10,000× against prior provenance-based approaches. In addition, FaDE develops a suite of optimizations (e.g., compilation, parallelization, incremental evaluation, sparse representations) that collectively raise evaluation throughput to >1 million interventions per sec—a rate that can brute-force existing applications within 1 s.

Modern databases support queries that perform model inference (inference queries). Although powerful and widely used, inference queries are susceptible to incorrect results if the model is biased due to training data errors. Recently, prior work Rain proposed complaint-driven data debugging which uses user-specified errors in the output of inference queries (Complaints) to rank erroneous training examples that most likely caused the complaint. This can help users better interpret results and debug training sets. Rain combined influence analysis from the ML literature with relaxed query provenance polynomials from the DB literature to approximate the derivative of complaints w.r.t. training examples. Although effective, the runtime is O(|T|d), where T and d are the training set and model sizes, due to its reliance on the model's second order derivatives (the Hessian). On a Wide Resnet Network (WRN) model with 1.5 million parameters, it takes >1 minute to debug a complaint. We observe that most complaint debugging costs are independent of the complaint, and that modern models are overparameterized. In response, Rain++ uses precomputation techniques, based on non-trivial insights unique to data debugging, to reduce debugging latencies to a constant factor independent of model size. We also develop optimizations when the queried database is known apriori, and for standing queries over streaming databases. Combining these optimizations in Rain++ ensures interactive debugging latencies (~1ms) on models with millions of parameters.

Data is often stored in a database management system (DBMS) but dataframe libraries are widely used among data scientists. An important but challenging problem is how to bridge the gap between databases and dataframes. To solve this problem, we present ConnectorX, a client library that enables fast and memory-efficient data loading from various databases to different dataframes. We first investigate why the loading process is slow and consumes large memory. We surprisingly find that the main overhead comes from the client-side rather than query execution or data transfer. We integrate several existing and new techniques to reduce the overhead and carefully design the system architecture and interface to make ConnectorX easy to extend to various databases and dataframes. Moreover, we propose server-side result partitioning that can be adopted by DBMSs in order to better support exporting data to data science tools. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate ConnectorX and compare it with popular libraries. The results show that ConnectorX significantly outperforms existing solutions. ConnectorX is open sourced at: https://github.com/sfu-db/connector-x.

Many recent AI architectures are inspired by zero-sum games, however, the behavior of their dynamics is still not well understood. Inspired by this, we study standard gradient descent ascent (GDA) dynamics in a specific class of non-convex non-concave zero-sum games, that we call hidden zero-sum games. In this class, players control the inputs of smooth but possibly non-linear functions whose outputs are being applied as inputs to a convex-concave game. Unlike general zero-sum games, these games have a well-defined notion of solution; outcomes that implement the von-Neumann equilibrium of the ``hidden" convex-concave game. We provide conditions under which vanilla GDA provably converges not merely to local Nash, but the actual von-Neumann solution. If the hidden game lacks strict convexity properties, GDA may fail to converge to any equilibrium, however, by applying standard regularization techniques we can prove convergence to a von-Neumann solution of a slightly perturbed zero-sum game. Our convergence results are non-local despite working in the setting of non-convex non-concave games. Critically, under proper assumptions we combine the Center-Stable Manifold Theorem along with novel type of initialization dependent Lyapunov functions to prove that almost all initial conditions converge to the solution. Finally, we discuss diverse applications of our framework ranging from generative adversarial networks to evolutionary biology.

How can we debug a logistic regression model in a federated learning setting when seeing the model behave unexpectedly (e.g., the model rejects all high-income customers' loan applications)? The SQL-based training data debugging framework has proved effective to fix this kind of issue in a non-federated learning setting. Given an unexpected query result over model predictions, this framework automatically removes the label errors from training data such that the unexpected behavior disappears in the retrained model. In this paper, we enable this powerful framework for federated learning. The key challenge is how to develop a security protocol for federated debugging which is proved to be secure, efficient, and accurate. Achieving this goal requires us to investigate how to seamlessly integrate the techniques from multiple fields (Databases, Machine Learning, and Cybersecurity). We first propose FedRain, which extends Rain, the state-of-the-art SQL-based training data debugging framework, to our federated learning setting. We address several technical challenges to make FedRain work and analyze its security guarantee and time complexity. The analysis results show that FedRain falls short in terms of both efficiency and security. To overcome these limitations, we redesign our security protocol and propose Frog, a novel SQL-based training data debugging framework tailored for federated learning. Our theoretical analysis shows that Frog is more secure, more accurate, and more efficient than FedRain. We conduct extensive experiments using several real-world datasets and a case study. The experimental results are consistent with our theoretical analysis and validate the effectiveness of Frog in practice.

SATNet is an award-winning MAXSAT solver that can be used to infer logical rules and integrated as a differentiable layer in a deep neural network. It had been shown to solve Sudoku puzzles visually from examples of puzzle digit images, and was heralded as an impressive achievement towards the longstanding AI goal of combining pattern recognition with logical reasoning. In this paper, we clarify SATNet's capabilities by showing that in the absence of intermediate labels that identify individual Sudoku digit images with their logical representations, SATNet completely fails at visual Sudoku (0% test accuracy). More generally, the failure can be pinpointed to its inability to learn to assign symbols to perceptual phenomena, also known as the symbol grounding problem, which has long been thought to be a prerequisite for intelligent agents to perform real-world logical reasoning. We propose an MNIST based test as an easy instance of the symbol grounding problem that can serve as a sanity check for differentiable symbolic solvers in general. Naive applications of SATNet on this test lead to performance worse than that of models without logical reasoning capabilities. We report on the causes of SATNet’s failure and how to prevent them.

Understanding the behavior of no-regret dynamics in general N-player games is a fundamental question in online learning and game theory. A folk result in the field states that, in finite games, the empirical frequency of play under no-regret learning converges to the game’s set of coarse correlated equilibria. By contrast, our understanding of how the day-to-day behavior of the dynamics correlates to the game’s Nash equilibria is much more limited, and only partial results are known for certain classes of games (such as zero-sum or congestion games). In this paper, we study the dynamics of follow the regularized leader (FTRL), arguably the most well-studied class of no-regret dynamics, and we establish a sweeping negative result showing that the notion of mixed Nash equilibrium is antithetical to no-regret learning. Specifically, we show that any Nash equilibrium which is not strict (in that every player has a unique best response) cannot be stable and attracting under the dynamics of FTRL. This result has significant implications for predicting the outcome of a learning process as it shows unequivocally that only strict (and hence, pure) Nash equilibria can emerge as stable limit points thereof.

As the need for machine learning (ML) increases rapidly across all industry sectors, there is a significant interest among commercial database providers to support "Query 2.0", which integrates model inference into SQL queries. Debugging Query 2.0 is very challenging since an unexpected query result may be caused by the bugs in training data (e.g., wrong labels, corrupted features). In response, we propose Rain, a complaint-driven training data debugging system. Rain allows users to specify complaints over the query's intermediate or final output, and aims to return a minimum set of training examples so that if they were removed, the complaints would be resolved. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this problem. A naive solution requires retraining an exponential number of ML models. We propose two novel heuristic approaches based on influence functions which both require linear retraining steps. We provide an in-depth analytical and empirical analysis of the two approaches and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate their effectiveness using four real-world datasets. Results show that Rain achieves the highest [email protected] among all the baselines while still returns results interactively.

We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite differences, we establish asymptotic convergence to second order stationary points using a carefully tailored application of the Stable Manifold Theorem. Regarding efficiency, we introduce a noisy zero-order method that converges to second order stationary points, i.e avoids saddle points. Our algorithm uses only $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1 / \epsilon^2)$ approximate gradient calculations and, thus, it matches the converge rate guarantees of their exact gradient counterparts up to constants. In contrast to previous work, our convergence rate analysis avoids imposing additional dimension dependent slowdowns in the number of iterations required for non-convex zero order optimization.

We study a wide class of non-convex non-concave min-max games that generalizes over standard bilinear zero-sum games. In this class, players control the inputs of a smooth function whose output is being applied to a bilinear zero-sum game. This class of games is motivated by the indirect nature of the competition in Generative Adversarial Networks, where players control the parameters of a neural network while the actual competition happens between the distributions that the generator and discriminator capture. We establish theoretically, that depending on the specific instance of the problem gradient-descent-ascent dynamics can exhibit a variety of behaviors antithetical to convergence to the game theoretically meaningful min-max solution. Specifically, different forms of recurrent behavior (including periodicity and Poincar\'{e} recurrence) are possible as well as convergence to spurious (non-min-max) equilibria for a positive measure of initial conditions. At the technical level, our analysis combines tools from optimization theory, game theory and dynamical systems.