Meta-learning has enabled learning statistical models that can be quickly adapted to new prediction tasks. Motivated by use-cases in personalized federated learning, we study the often overlooked aspect of the modern meta-learning algorithms—their data efficiency. To shed more light on which methods are more efficient, we use techniques from algorithmic stability to derive bounds on the transfer risk that have important practical implications, indicating how much supervision is needed and how it must be allocated for each method to attain the desired level of generalization. Further, we introduce a new simple framework for evaluating meta-learning methods under a limit on the available supervision, conduct an empirical study of MAML, Reptile, andProtoNets, and demonstrate the differences in the behavior of these methods on few-shot and federated learning benchmarks. Finally, we propose active meta-learning, which incorporates active data selection into learning-to-learn, leading to better performance of all methods in the limited supervision regime.

Meta-learning has achieved great success in leveraging the historical learned knowledge to facilitate the learning process of the new task.However, merely learning the knowledge from the historical tasks, adopted by current meta-learning algorithms, may not generalize well to testing tasks when they are not well-supported by training tasks.This paper studies a low-resource text classification problem and bridges the gap between meta-training and meta-testing tasks by leveraging the external knowledge bases.Specifically, we propose KGML to introduce additional representation for each sentence learned from the extracted sentence-specific knowledge graph.The extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of KGML under both supervised adaptation and unsupervised adaptation settings.

Bowen Tan, Zichao Yang, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Most of the work on interpretable machine learning has focused on designing either inherently interpretable models, which typically trade-off accuracy for interpretability, or post-hoc explanation systems, whose explanation quality can be unpredictable. Our method, ExpO, is a hybridization of these approaches that regularizes a model for explanation quality at training time. Importantly, these regularizers are differentiable, model agnostic, and require no domain knowledge to define. We demonstrate that post-hoc explanations for ExpO-regularized models have better explanation quality, as measured by the common fidelity and stability metrics. We verify that improving these metrics leads to significantly more useful explanations with a user study on a realistic task.

Modern learning algorithms excel at producing accurate but complex models of the data. However, deploying such models in the real-world requires extra care: we must ensure their reliability, robustness, and absence of undesired biases. This motivates the development of models that are equally accurate but can be also easily inspected and assessed beyond their predictive performance. To this end, we introduce contextual explanation networks (CENs)---a class of architectures that learn to predict by generating and utilizing intermediate, simplified probabilistic models. Specifically, CENs generate parameters for intermediate graphical models which are further used for prediction and play the role of explanations. Contrary to the existing post-hoc model-explanation tools, CENs learn to predict and to explain simultaneously. Our approach offers two major advantages: (i) for each prediction, valid, instance-specific explanation is generated with no computational overhead and (ii) prediction via explanation acts as a regularizer and boosts performance in data-scarce settings. We analyze the proposed framework theoretically and experimentally. Our results on image and text classification and survival analysis tasks demonstrate that CENs are not only competitive with the state-of-the-art methods but also offer additional insights behind each prediction, that can be valuable for decision support. We also show that while post-hoc methods may produce misleading explanations in certain cases, CENs are consistent and allow to detect such cases systematically.

By enabling correct differentiation in Stochastic Computation Graphs (SCGs), the infinitely differentiable Monte-Carlo estimator (DiCE) can generate correct estimates for the higher order gradients that arise in, e.g., multi-agent reinforcement learning and meta-learning. However, the baseline term in DiCE that serves as a control variate for reducing variance applies only to first order gradient estimation, limiting the utility of higher-order gradient estimates. To improve the sample efficiency of DiCE, we propose a new baseline term for higher order gradient estimation. This term may be easily included in the objective, and produces unbiased variance-reduced estimators under (automatic) differentiation, without affecting the estimate of the objective itself or of the first order gradient estimate. It reuses the same baseline function (e.g., the state-value function in reinforcement learning) already used for the first order baseline. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations of this new baseline, which demonstrate that it can dramatically reduce the variance of DiCE’s second order gradient estimators and also show empirically that it reduces the variance of third and fourth order gradients. This computational tool can be easily used to estimate higher order gradients with unprecedented efficiency and simplicity wherever automatic differentiation is utilised, and it has the potential to unlock applications of higher order gradients in reinforcement learning and meta-learning.

The score function estimator is widely used for estimating gradients of stochastic objectives in stochastic computation graphs (SCG), eg., in reinforcement learning and meta-learning. While deriving the first-order gradient estimators by differentiating a surrogate loss (SL) objective is computationally and conceptually simple, using the same approach for higher-order derivatives is more challenging. Firstly, analytically deriving and implementing such estimators is laborious and not compliant with automatic differentiation. Secondly, repeatedly applying SL to construct new objectives for each order derivative involves increasingly cumbersome graph manipulations. Lastly, to match the first-order gradient under differentiation, SL treats part of the cost as a fixed sample, which we show leads to missing and wrong terms for estimators of higher-order derivatives. To address all these shortcomings in a unified way, we introduce DiCE, which provides a single objective that can be differentiated repeatedly, generating correct estimators of derivatives of any order in SCGs. Unlike SL, DiCE relies on automatic differentiation for performing the requisite graph manipulations. We verify the correctness of DiCE both through a proof and numerical evaluation of the DiCE derivative estimates. We also use DiCE to propose and evaluate a novel approach for multi-agent learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/alshedivat/lola.

Modeling agent behavior is central to understanding the emergence of complex phenomena in multiagent systems. Prior work in agent modeling has largely been task-specific and driven by hand-engineering domain-specific prior knowledge. We propose a general learning framework for modeling agent behavior in any multiagent system using only a handful of interaction data. Our framework casts agent modeling as a representation learning problem. Consequently, we construct a novel objective inspired by imitation learning and agent identification and design an algorithm for unsupervised learning of representations of agent policies. We demonstrate empirically the utility of the proposed framework in (i) a challenging high-dimensional competitive environment for continuous control and (ii) a cooperative environment for communication, on supervised predictive tasks, unsupervised clustering, and policy optimization using deep reinforcement learning.

Many applications in speech, robotics, finance, and biology deal with sequential data, where ordering matters and recurrent structures are common. However, this structure cannot be easily captured by standard kernel functions. To model such structure, we propose expressive closed-form kernel functions for Gaussian processes. The resulting model, GP-LSTM, fully encapsulates the inductive biases of long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent networks, while retaining the non-parametric probabilistic advantages of Gaussian processes. We learn the properties of the proposed kernels by optimizing the Gaussian process marginal likelihood using a new provably convergent semi-stochastic gradient procedure, and exploit the structure of these kernels for scalable training and prediction. This approach provides a practical representation for Bayesian LSTMs. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, and thoroughly investigate a consequential autonomous driving application, where the predictive uncertainties provided by GP- LSTM are uniquely valuable.

Multi-label classification is a generalization of binary classification where the task consists in predicting \emphsets of labels. With the availability of ever larger datasets, the multi-label setting has become a natural one in many applications, and the interest in solving multi-label problems has grown significantly. As expected, deep learning approaches are now yielding state-of-the-art performance for this class of problems. Unfortunately, they usually do not take into account the often unknown but nevertheless rich relationships between labels. In this paper, we propose to make use of this underlying structure by learning to partition the labels into a Markov Blanket Chain and then applying a novel deep architecture that exploits the partition. Experiments on several popular and large multi-label datasets demonstrate that our approach not only yields significant improvements, but also helps to overcome trade-offs specific to the multi-label classification setting.

Memristive devices have been shown to exhibit slow and stochastic resistive switching behavior under low-voltage, low-current operating conditions. Here we explore such mechanisms to emulate stochastic plasticity in memristor crossbar synapse arrays. Interfaced with integrate-and-fire spiking neurons, the memristive synapse arrays are capable of implementing stochastic forms of spike-timing dependent plasticity which parallel mean-rate models of stochastic learning with binary synapses. We present theory and experiments with spike-based stochastic learning in memristor crossbar arrays, including simplified modeling as well as detailed physical simulation of memristor stochastic resistive switching characteristics due to voltage and current induced filament formation and collapse.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in using spectral methods for estimating latent variable models. However, it is usually assumed that the distribution of the observations conditioned on the latent variables is either discrete or belongs to a parametric family. In this paper, we study the estimation of an $m$-state hidden Markov model (HMM) with only smoothness assumptions, such as H\"olderian conditions, on the emission densities. By leveraging some recent advances in continuous linear algebra and numerical analysis, we develop a computationally efficient spectral algorithm for learning nonparametric HMMs. Our technique is based on computing an SVD on nonparametric estimates of density functions by viewing them as \emph{continuous matrices}. We derive sample complexity bounds via concentration results for nonparametric density estimation and novel perturbation theory results for continuous matrices. We implement our method using Chebyshev polynomial approximations. Our method is competitive with other baselines on synthetic and real problems and is also very computationally efficient.

A combination of the sparse coding and transfer learning techniques was shown to be accurate and robust in classification tasks where training and testing objects have a shared feature space but are sampled from different underlying distributions, i.e., belong to different domains. The key assumption in such case is that in spite of the domain disparity, samples from different domains share some common hidden factors. Previous methods often assumed that all the objects in the target domain are unlabeled, and thus the training set solely comprised objects from the source domain. However, in real world applications, the target domain often has some labeled objects, or one can always manually label a small number of them. In this paper, we explore such possibility and show how a small number of labeled data in the target domain can significantly leverage classification accuracy of the state-of-the-art transfer sparse coding methods. We further propose a unified framework named supervised transfer sparse coding (STSC) which simultaneously optimizes sparse representation, domain transfer and classification. Experimental results on three applications demonstrate that a little manual labeling and then learning the model in a supervised fashion can significantly improve classification accuracy.