Downsampling or under-sampling is a technique that is utilized in the context of large and highly imbalanced classification models. We study optimal downsampling for imbalanced classification using generalized linear models (GLMs). We propose a pseudo maximum likelihood estimator and study its asymptotic normality in the context of increasingly imbalanced populations relative to an increasingly large sample size. We provide theoretical guarantees for the introduced estimator. Additionally, we compute the optimal downsampling rate using a criterion that balances statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. Our numerical experiments, conducted on both synthetic and empirical data, further validate our theoretical results, and demonstrate that the introduced estimator outperforms commonly available alternatives.

We introduce ScoreFusion, a theoretically grounded method for fusing multiple pre-trained diffusion models that are assumed to generate from auxiliary populations. ScoreFusion is particularly useful for enhancing the generative modeling of a target population with limited observed data. Our starting point considers the family of KL barycenters of the auxiliary populations, which is proven to be an optimal parametric class in the KL sense, but difficult to learn. Nevertheless, by recasting the learning problem as score matching in denoising diffusion, we obtain a tractable way of computing the optimal KL barycenter weights. We prove a dimension-free sample complexity bound in total variation distance, provided that the auxiliary models are well-fitted for their own task and the auxiliary tasks combined capture the target well. The sample efficiency of ScoreFusion is demonstrated by learning handwritten digits. We also provide a simple adaptation of a Stable Diffusion denoising pipeline that enables sampling from the KL barycenter of two auxiliary checkpoints; on a portrait generation task, our method produces faces that enhance population heterogeneity relative to the auxiliary distributions.

We explore the control of stochastic systems with potentially continuous state and action spaces, characterized by the state dynamics $X_{t+1} = f(X_t, A_t, W_t)$. Here, $X$, $A$, and $W$ represent the state, action, and exogenous random noise processes, respectively, with $f$ denoting a known function that describes state transitions. Traditionally, the noise process $(W_t)_{t \geq 0}$ is assumed to be independent and identically distributed, with a distribution that is either fully known or can be consistently estimated. However, the occurrence of distributional shifts, typical in engineering settings, necessitates the consideration of the robustness of the policy. This paper introduces a distributionally robust stochastic control paradigm that accommodates possibly adaptive adversarial perturbation to the noise distribution within a prescribed ambiguity set. We examine two adversary models: current-action-aware and current-action-unaware, leading to different dynamic programming equations. Furthermore, we characterize the optimal finite sample minimax rates for achieving uniform learning of the robust value function across continuum states under both adversary types, considering ambiguity sets defined by $f_k$-divergence and Wasserstein distance. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our framework across various real-world settings.

Causal estimands can vary significantly depending on the relationship between outcomes in treatment and control groups, leading to wide partial identification (PI) intervals that impede decision making. Incorporating covariates can substantially tighten these bounds, but requires determining the range of PI over probability models consistent with the joint distributions of observed covariates and outcomes in treatment and control groups. This problem is known to be equivalent to a conditional optimal transport (COT) optimization task, which is more challenging than standard optimal transport (OT) due to the additional conditioning constraints. In this work, we study a tight relaxation of COT that effectively reduces it to standard OT, leveraging its well-established computational and theoretical foundations. Our relaxation incorporates covariate information and ensures narrower PI intervals for any value of the penalty parameter, while becoming asymptotically exact as a penalty increases to infinity. This approach preserves the benefits of covariate adjustment in PI and results in a data-driven estimator for the PI set that is easy to implement using existing OT packages. We analyze the convergence rate of our estimator and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive simulations, highlighting its practical use and superior performance compared to existing methods.

The mean of a random variable can be understood as a *linear* functional on the space of probability distributions. Quantum computing is known to provide a quadratic speedup over classical Monte Carlo methods for mean estimation. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar quadratic speedup is achievable for estimating *non-linear* functionals of probability distributions. We propose a \textit{quantum-inside-quantum} algorithm that achieves this speedup for the broad class of nonlinear estimation problems known as nested expectations. Our algorithm improves upon the direct application of the quantum-accelerated multilevel Monte Carlo algorithm introduced by An et. al.. The existing lower bound indicates that our algorithm is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. A key innovation of our approach is a new sequence of multilevel Monte Carlo approximations specifically designed for quantum computing, which is central to the algorithm's improved performance.

In this work, we consider the data-driven assortment optimization problem under the linear multinomial logit(MNL) choice model. We first establish a improved confidence region for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the $d$-dimensional linear MNL likelihood function that removes the explicit dependency on a problem-dependent parameter $\kappa^{-1}$ in previous result (Oh and Iyengar, 2021), which scales exponentially with the radius of the parameter set. Building on the confidence region result, we investigate the data-driven assortment optimization problem in both offline and online settings. In the offline setting, the previously best-known result scales as $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{d}{\kappa n_{S^\star}}}\right)$, where $n_{S^\star}$ the number of times that optimal assortment $S^\star$ is observed (Dong et al., 2023). We propose a new pessimistic-based algorithm that, under a burn-in condition, removes the dependency on $d,\kappa^{-1}$ in the leading order bound and works under a more relaxed coverage condition, without requiring the exact observation of $S^\star$. In the online setting, we propose the first algorithm to achieve $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{dT})$ regret without a multiplicative dependency on $\kappa^{-1}$. In both settings, our results nearly achieve the corresponding lower bound when reduced to the canonical $N$-item MNL problem, demonstrating their optimality.

In this paper, we examine the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning under uncertainty. Specifically, we analyze two stochastic models of regularized learning in continuous games—one in continuous and one in discrete time—with the aim of characterizing the long run behavior of the induced sequence of play. In stark contrast to deterministic, full-information models of learning (or models with a vanishing learning rate), we show that the resulting dynamics do not converge in general. In lieu of this, we ask instead which actions are played more often in the long run, and by how much. We show that, in strongly monotone games, the dynamics of regularized learning may wander away from equilibrium infinitely often, but they always return to its vicinity in finite time (which we estimate), and their long-run distribution is sharply concentrated around a neighborhood thereof. We quantify the degree of this concentration, and we show that these favorable properties may all break down if the underlying game is not strongly monotone—underscoring in this way the limits of regularized learning in the presence of persistent randomness and uncertainty

In this paper, we examine the robustness of Nash equilibria in continuous games, under both strategic and dynamic uncertainty. Starting with the former, we introduce the notion of a robust equilibrium as those equilibria that remain invariant to small—but otherwise arbitrary—perturbations to the game’s payoff structure, and we provide a crisp geometric characterization thereof. Subsequently, we turn to the question of dynamic robustness, and we examine which equilibria may arise as stable limit points of the dynamics of “follow the regularized leader” (FTRL) in the presence of randomness and uncertainty. Despite their very distinct origins, we establish a structural correspondence between these two notions of robustness: strategic robustness implies dynamic robustness, and, conversely, the requirement of strategic robustness cannot be relaxed if dynamic robustness is to be maintained. Finally, we examine the rate of convergence to robust equilibria as a function of the underlying regularizer, and we show that entropically regularized learning converges at a geometric rate in games with affinely constrained action spaces.

Causal effect estimation seeks to determine the impact of an intervention from observational data. However, the existing causal inference literature primarily addresses treatment effects on frequently occurring events. But what if we are interested in estimating the effects of a policy intervention whose benefits, while potentially important, can only be observed and measured in rare yet impactful events, such as extreme climate events? The standard causal inference methodology is not designed for this type of inference since the events of interest may be scarce in the observed data and some degree of extrapolation is necessary. Extreme Value Theory (EVT) provides methodologies for analyzing statistical phenomena in such extreme regimes. We introduce a novel framework for assessing treatment effects in extreme data to capture the causal effect at the occurrence of rare events of interest. In particular, we employ the theory of multivariate regular variation to model extremities. We develop a consistent estimator for extreme treatment effects and present a rigorous non-asymptotic analysis of its performance. We illustrate the performance of our estimator using both synthetic and semi-synthetic data.

We present an algorithm for obtaining ϵ-minimax solutions of statistical decision problems. We are interested in problems where i) the statistician is allowed to choose randomly among I decision rules, and ii) the statistical model may have an infinite dimensional parameter space. The minimax solution of these problems admits a convex programming representation over the (I - 1)-simplex, and the algorithm suggested herein to obtain an ϵ-approximation of the minimax solution is a version of mirror subgradient descent, initialized with uniform weights and stopped after a finite number of iterations. The resulting iterative procedure is known in the computer science literature as the hedge algorithm (a particular case of the multiplicative weights update method) and it is used in algorithmic game theory as a practical tool to find approximate solutions of two-person zero-sum games. We apply the suggested algorithm to different minimax problems in the econometrics literature. An empirical application to the problem of optimally selecting sites to maximize the external validity of an experimental policy evaluation illustrates the usefulness of the suggested procedure. The full paper can be found at https://joseluismontielolea.com/epsilon_minimax_v2.pdf.

Average reward reinforcement learning (RL) provides a suitable framework for capturing the objective (i.e. long-run average reward) for continuing tasks, where there is often no natural way to identify a discount factor. However, existing average reward RL algorithms with sample complexity guarantees are not feasible, as they take as input the (unknown) mixing time of the Markov decision process (MDP). In this paper, we make initial progress towards addressing this open problem. We design a feasible average-reward $Q$-learning framework that requires no knowledge of any problem parameter as input. Our framework is based on discounted $Q$-learning, while we dynamically adapt the discount factor (and hence the effective horizon) to progressively approximate the average reward. In the synchronous setting, we solve three tasks: (i) learn a policy that is $\epsilon$-close to optimal, (ii) estimate optimal average reward with $\epsilon$-accuracy, and (iii) estimate the bias function (similar to $Q$-function in discounted case) with $\epsilon$-accuracy. We show that with carefully designed adaptation schemes, (i) can be achieved with $\tilde{O}(\frac{SA t_{\mathrm{mix}}^{8}}{\epsilon^{8}})$ samples, (ii) with $\tilde{O}(\frac{SA t_{\mathrm{mix}}^5}{\epsilon^5})$ samples, and (iii) with $\tilde{O}(\frac{SA B}{\epsilon^9})$ samples, where $t_\mathrm{mix}$ is the mixing time, and $B > 0$ is an MDP-dependent constant. To our knowledge, we provide the first finite-sample guarantees that are polynomial in $S, A, t_{\mathrm{mix}}, \epsilon$ for a feasible variant of $Q$-learning. That said, the sample complexity bounds have tremendous room for improvement, which we leave for the community’s best minds. Preliminary simulations verify that our framework is effective without prior knowledge of parameters as input.

We resolve the open question regarding the sample complexity of policy learning for maximizing the long-run average reward associated with a uniformly ergodic Markov decision process (MDP), assuming a generative model. In this context, the existing literature provides a sample complexity upper bound of $\widetilde O(|S||A|t_{\text{mix}}^2 \epsilon^{-2})$ and a lower bound of $\Omega(|S||A|t_{\text{mix}} \epsilon^{-2})$. In these expressions, $|S|$ and $|A|$ denote the cardinalities of the state and action spaces respectively, $t_{\text{mix}}$ serves as a uniform upper limit for the total variation mixing times, and $\epsilon$ signifies the error tolerance. Therefore, a notable gap of $t_{\text{mix}}$ still remains to be bridged. Our primary contribution is the development of an estimator for the optimal policy of average reward MDPs with a sample complexity of $\widetilde O(|S||A|t_{\text{mix}}\epsilon^{-2})$. This marks the first algorithm and analysis to reach the literature's lower bound. Our new algorithm draws inspiration from ideas in Li et al. (2020), Jin \& Sidford (2021), and Wang et al. (2023). Additionally, we conduct numerical experiments to validate our theoretical findings.

The performance of learning models often deteriorates when deployed in out-of-sample environments. To ensure reliable deployment, we propose a stability evaluation criterion based on distributional perturbations. Conceptually, our stability evaluation criterion is defined as the minimal perturbation required on our observed dataset to induce a prescribed deterioration in risk evaluation. In this paper, we utilize the optimal transport (OT) discrepancy with moment constraints on the (sample, density) space to quantify this perturbation. Therefore, our stability evaluation criterion can address both data corruptions and sub-population shifts—the two most common types of distribution shifts in real-world scenarios. To further realize practical benefits, we present a series of tractable convex formulations and computational methods tailored to different classes of loss functions. The key technical tool to achieve this is the strong duality theorem provided in this paper. Empirically, we validate the practical utility of our stability evaluation criterion across a host of real-world applications. These empirical studies showcase the criterion's ability not only to compare the stability of different learning models and features but also to provide valuable guidelines and strategies to further improve models.

To mitigate the limitation that the classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework heavily relies on identical training and test environments, Distributionally Robust RL (DRRL) has been proposed to enhance performance across a range of environments, possibly including unknown test environments. As a price for robustness gain, DRRL involves optimizing over a set of distributions, which is inherently more challenging than optimizing over a fixed distribution in the non-robust case. Existing DRRL algorithms are either model-based or fail to learn from a single sample trajectory. In this paper, we design a first fully model-free DRRL algorithm, called distributionally robust Q-learning with single trajectory (DRQ). We delicately design a multi-timescale framework to fully utilize each incrementally arriving sample and directly learn the optimal distributionally robust policy without modeling the environment, thus the algorithm can be trained along a single trajectory in a model-free fashion. Despite the algorithm’s complexity, we provide asymptotic convergence guarantees by generalizing classical stochastic approximation tools.Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superior robustness and sample complexity of our proposed algorithm, compared to non-robust methods and other robust RL algorithms.

Bootstrap is a popular methodology for simulating input uncertainty. However, it can be computationally expensive when the number of samples is large. We propose a new approach called Orthogonal Bootstrap that reduces the number of required Monte Carlo replications. We decomposes the target being simulated into two parts: the non-orthogonal part which has a closed-form result known as Infinitesimal Jackknife and the orthogonal part which is easier to be simulated. We theoretically and numerically show that Orthogonal Bootstrap significantly reduces the computational cost of Bootstrap while improving empirical accuracy and maintaining the same width of the constructed interval.

In this paper, we propose a novel conceptual framework to detect outliers using optimal transport with a concave cost function. Conventional outlier detection approaches typically use a two-stage procedure: first, outliers are detected and removed, and then estimation is performed on the cleaned data. However, this approach does not inform outlier removal with the estimation task, leaving room for improvement. To address this limitation, we propose an automatic outlier rectification mechanism that integrates rectification and estimation within a joint optimization framework. We take the first step to utilize the optimal transport distance with a concave cost function to construct a rectification set in the space of probability distributions. Then, we select the best distribution within the rectification set to perform the estimation task. Notably, the concave cost function we introduced in this paper is the key to making our estimator effectively identify the outlier during the optimization process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over conventional approaches in simulations and empirical analyses for mean estimation, least absolute regression, and the fitting of option implied volatility surfaces.

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output even undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a principled manner by identifying the source of the issue as the distributional shift and uncertainty of human preference in dataset. To mitigate overoptimization, we first propose a theoretical algorithm which optimizes the policy against an adversarially chosen reward model, one that simultaneously minimizes its MLE loss and a reward penalty term. The penalty pessimistically biases the uncertain rewards so as to prevent the policy from choosing actions with spursiouly high proxy rewards, resulting in provable sample efficiency of the algorithm under a partial coverage style condition. Moving from theory to practice, the proposed algorithm further enjoys an equivalent but surprisingly easy to implement form. With a clever usage of the equivalence between reward models and the corresponding optimal policy, the algorithm features a simple objective that combines (i) a preference optimization loss that directly aligns the policy with human preference, and (ii) a supervised learning loss which explicitly imitates the policy with a baseline distribution. In the context of aligning large language models (LLM), this objective fuses the direct preference optimization (DPO) loss with the supervised fune-tuning (SFT) loss to help mitigate the overoptimization towards undesired responses, for which we name the algorithm Regularized Preference Optimization (RPO). Experiments of aligning LLMs demonstrate the improved performance of our method when compared with DPO baselines. Our work sheds light on the interplay between preference optimization and SFT in tuning LLMs with both theoretical guarantees and empirical evidence.

The sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between training and testing environments, poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). A promising approach to addressing this challenge is distributionally robust RL, often framed as a robust Markov decision process (RMDP). In this framework, the objective is to find a robust policy that achieves good performance under the worst-case scenario among all environments within a pre-specified uncertainty set centered around the training environment. Unlike previous work, which relies on a generative model or a pre-collected offline dataset enjoying good coverage of the deployment environment, we tackle robust RL via interactive data collection, where the learner interacts with the training environment only and refines the policy through trial and error. In this robust RL paradigm, two main challenges emerge: managing distributional robustness while striking a balance between exploration and exploitation during data collection. Initially, we establish that sample-efficient learning without additional assumptions is unattainable owing to the curse of support shift; i.e., the potential disjointedness of the distributional supports between the training and testing environments. To circumvent such a hardness result, we introduce the vanishing minimal value assumption to RMDPs with a total-variation (TV) distance robust set, postulating that the minimal value of the optimal robust value function is zero. We prove that such an assumption effectively eliminates the support shift issue for RMDPs with a TV distance robust set, and present an algorithm with a provable sample complexity guarantee. Our work makes the initial step to uncovering the inherent difficulty of robust RL via interactive data collection and sufficient conditions for designing a sample-efficient algorithm accompanied by sharp sample complexity analysis.

Convergence rate analysis for general state-space Markov chains is fundamentally important in operations research (stochastic systems) and machine learning (stochastic optimization). This problem, however, is notoriously difficult because traditional analytical methods often do not generate practically useful convergence bounds for realistic Markov chains. We propose the Deep Contractive Drift Calculator (DCDC), the first general-purpose sample-based algorithm for bounding the convergence of Markov chains to stationarity in Wasserstein distance. The DCDC has two components. First, inspired by the new convergence analysis framework in (Qu et.al, 2023), we introduce the Contractive Drift Equation (CDE), the solution of which leads to an explicit convergence bound. Second, we develop an efficient neural-network-based CDE solver. Equipped with these two components, DCDC solves the CDE and converts the solution into a convergence bound. We analyze the sample complexity of the algorithm and further demonstrate the effectiveness of the DCDC by generating convergence bounds for realistic Markov chains arising from stochastic processing networks as well as constant step-size stochastic optimization.

Recent progress in Neural Causal Models (NCMs) showcased how identification and partial identification of causal effects can be automatically carried out via training of neural generative models that respect the constraints encoded in a given causal graph [Xia et al. 2022, Balazadeh et al. 2022]. However, formal consistency of these methods has only been proven for the case of discrete variables or only for linear causal models. In this work, we prove the consistency of partial identification via NCMs in a general setting with both continuous and categorical variables. Further, our results highlight the impact of the design of the underlying neural network architecture in terms of depth and connectivity as well as the importance of applying Lipschitz regularization in the training phase. In particular, we provide a counterexample showing that without Lipschitz regularization this method may not be asymptotically consistent. Our results are enabled by new results on the approximability of Structural Causal Models (SCMs) via neural generative models, together with an analysis of the sample complexity of the resulting architectures and how that translates into an error in the constrained optimization problem that defines the partial identification bounds.

Overparameterized stochastic differential equation (SDE) models have achieved remarkable success in various complex environments, such as PDE-constrained optimization, stochastic control and reinforcement learning, financial engineering, and neural SDEs. These models often feature system evolution coefficients that are parameterized by a high-dimensional vector $\theta \in \mathbb{R}^n$, aiming to optimize expectations of the SDE, such as a value function, through stochastic gradient ascent. Consequently, designing efficient gradient estimators for which the computational complexity scales well with $n$ is of significant interest. This paper introduces a novel unbiased stochastic gradient estimator—the generator gradient estimator—for which the computation time remains stable in $n$. In addition to establishing the validity of our methodology for general SDEs with jumps, we also perform numerical experiments that test our estimator in linear-quadratic control problems parameterized by high-dimensional neural networks. The results show a significant improvement in efficiency compared to the widely used pathwise differentiation method: Our estimator achieves near-constant computation times, increasingly outperforms its counterpart as $n$ increases, and does so without compromising estimation variance. These empirical findings highlight the potential of our proposed methodology for optimizing SDEs in contemporary applications.

The goal of this paper is to develop distributionally robust optimization (DRO) estimators, specifically for multidimensional Extreme Value Theory (EVT) statistics. EVT supports using semi-parametric models called max-stable distributions built from spatial Poisson point processes. While powerful, these models are only asymptotically valid for large samples. However, since extreme data is by definition scarce, the potential for model misspecification error is inherent to these applications, thus DRO estimators are natural. In order to mitigate over-conservative estimates while enhancing out-of-sample performance, we study DRO estimators informed by semi-parametric max-stable constraints in the space of point processes. We study both tractable convex formulations for some problems of interest (e.g. CVaR) and more general neural network based estimators. Both approaches are validated using synthetically generated data, recovering prescribed characteristics, and verifying the efficacy of the proposed techniques. Additionally, the proposed method is applied to a real data set of financial returns for comparison to a previous analysis. We established the proposed model as a novel formulation in the multivariate EVT domain, and innovative with respect to performance when compared to relevant alternate proposals.

Dynamic decision-making under distributional shifts is of fundamental interest in theory and applications of reinforcement learning: The distribution of the environment in which the data is collected can differ from that of the environment in which the model is deployed. This paper presents two novel model-free algorithms, namely the distributionally robust Q-learning and its variance-reduced counterpart, that can effectively learn a robust policy despite distributional shifts. These algorithms are designed to efficiently approximate the $q$-function of an infinite-horizon $\gamma$-discounted robust Markov decision process with Kullback-Leibler ambiguity set to an entry-wise $\epsilon$-degree of precision. Further, the variance-reduced distributionally robust Q-learning combines the synchronous Q-learning with variance-reduction techniques to enhance its performance. Consequently, we establish that it attains a minimax sample complexity upper bound of $\tilde O(|\mathbf{S}||\mathbf{A}|(1-\gamma)^{-4}\epsilon^{-2})$, where $\mathbf{S}$ and $\mathbf{A}$ denote the state and action spaces. This is the first complexity result that is independent of the ambiguity size $\delta$, thereby providing new complexity theoretic insights. Additionally, a series of numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings and the efficiency of the algorithms in handling distributional shifts.

We focus on robust estimation of the unobserved state of a discrete-time stochastic system with linear dynamics. A standard analysis of this estimation problem assumes a baseline innovation model; with Gaussian innovations we recover the Kalman filter. However, in many settings, there is insufficient or corrupted data to validate the baseline model. To cope with this problem, we minimize the worst-case mean-squared estimation error of adversarial models chosen within a Wasserstein neighborhood around the baseline. We also constrain the adversarial innovations to form a martingale difference sequence. The martingale constraint relaxes the i.i.d. assumptions which are often imposed on the baseline model. Moreover, we show that the martingale constraints guarantee that the adversarial dynamics remain adapted to the natural time-generated information. Therefore, adding the martingale constraint allows to improve upon over-conservative policies that also protect against unrealistic omniscient adversaries. We establish a strong duality result which we use to develop an efficient subgradient method to compute the distributionally robust estimation policy. If the baseline innovations are Gaussian, we show that the worst-case adversary remains Gaussian. Our numerical experiments indicate that the martingale constraint may also aid in adding a layer of robustness in the choice of the adversarial power.

We consider a reinforcement learning setting in which the deployment environment is different from the training environment. Applying a robust Markov decision processes formulation, we extend the distributionally robust Q-learning framework studied in [Liu et. al. 2022]. Further, we improve the design and analysis of their multi-level Monte Carlo estimator. Assuming access to a simulator, we prove that the worst-case expected sample complexity of our algorithm to learn the optimal robust Q-function within an $\epsilon$ error in the sup norm is upper bounded by $\tilde O(|S||A|(1-\gamma)^{-5}\epsilon^{-2}p_{\wedge}^{-6}\delta^{-4})$, where $\gamma$ is the discount rate, $p_{\wedge}$ is the non-zero minimal support probability of the transition kernels and $\delta$ is the uncertainty size. This is the first sample complexity result for the model-free robust RL problem. Simulation studies further validate our theoretical results.

The scarcity of labeled data is a long-standing challenge for many machine learning tasks. We propose our gradient flow method to leverage the existing dataset (i.e., source) to generate new samples that are close to the dataset of interest (i.e., target). We lift both datasets to the space of probability distributions on the feature-Gaussian manifold, and then develop a gradient flow method that minimizes the maximum mean discrepancy loss. To perform the gradient flow of distributions on the curved feature-Gaussian space, we unravel the Riemannian structure of the space and compute explicitly the Riemannian gradient of the loss function induced by the optimal transport metric. For practical applications, we also propose a discretized flow, and provide conditional results guaranteeing the global convergence of the flow to the optimum. We illustrate the results of our proposed gradient flow method on several real-world datasets and show our method can improve the accuracy of classification models in transfer learning settings.

This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in reducing variance. We examine a prototype estimation problem that involves simulating the moments of a Sobolev function based on observations obtained from (random) quadrature nodes. Firstly, we establish an information-theoretic lower bound for the problem. We then study a specific quadrature rule that employs a nonparametric regression-adjusted control variate to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo simulation. We demonstrate that this kind of quadrature rule can improve the Monte Carlo rate and achieve the minimax optimal rate under a sufficient smoothness assumption. Due to the Sobolev Embedding Theorem, the sufficient smoothness assumption eliminates the existence of rare and extreme events. Finally, we show that, in the presence of rare and extreme events, a truncated version of the Monte Carlo algorithm can achieve the minimax optimal rate while the control variate cannot improve the convergence rate.

We study distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks to find an optimal robust policy purely from an offline dataset that can perform well in perturbed environments. We propose a generic algorithm framework Doubly Pessimistic Model-based Policy Optimization ($\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$) for robust offline RL, which features a novel combination of a flexible model estimation subroutine and a doubly pessimistic policy optimization step. Here the double pessimism principle is crucial to overcome the distribution shift incurred by i) the mismatch between behavior policy and the family of target policies; and ii) the perturbation of the nominal model. Under certain accuracy assumptions on the model estimation subroutine, we show that $\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$ is provably sample-efficient with robust partial coverage data, which means that the offline dataset has good coverage of the distributions induced by the optimal robust policy and perturbed models around the nominal model. By tailoring specific model estimation subroutines for concrete examples including tabular Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP), factored RMDP, and RMDP with kernel and neural function approximations, we show that $\texttt{P}^2\texttt{MPO}$ enjoys a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{-1/2})$ convergence rate, where $n$ is the number of trajectories in the offline dataset. Notably, these models, except for the tabular case, are first identified and proven tractable by this paper. To the best of our knowledge, we first propose a general learning principle --- double pessimism --- for robust offline RL and show that it is provably efficient in the context of general function approximations.

In this paper, we study the problem of learning in quantum games - and other classes of semidefinite games - with scalar, payoff-based feedback. For concreteness, we focus on the widely used matrix multiplicative weights (MMW) algorithm and, instead of requiring players to have full knowledge of the game (and/or each other's chosen states), we introduce a suite of minimal-information matrix multiplicative weights (3MW) methods tailored to different information frameworks. The main difficulty to attaining convergence in this setting is that, in contrast to classical finite games, quantum games have an infinite continuum of pure states (the quantum equivalent of pure strategies), so standard importance-weighting techniques for estimating payoff vectors cannot be employed. Instead, we borrow ideas from bandit convex optimization and we design a zeroth-order gradient sampler adapted to the semidefinite geometry of the problem at hand. As a first result, we show that the 3MW method with deterministic payoff feedback retains the $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate of the vanilla, full information MMW algorithm in quantum min-max games, even though the players only observe a single scalar. Subsequently, we relax the algorithm's information requirements even further and we provide a 3MW method that only requires players to observe a random realization of their payoff observable, and converges to equilibrium at an $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/4})$ rate. Finally, going beyond zero-sum games, we show that a regularized variant of the proposed 3MW method guarantees local convergence with high probability to all equilibria that satisfy a certain first-order stability condition.

Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Most existing algorithms rely on one-sided information, such as the convexity (resp. concavity) of the primal (resp. dual) functions, or other specific structures, such as the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PŁ) and Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz (KŁ) conditions. However, verifying these regularity conditions is challenging in practice. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel universally applicable single-loop algorithm, the doubly smoothed gradient descent ascent method (DS-GDA), which naturally balances the primal and dual updates. That is, DS-GDA with the same hyperparameters is able to uniformly solve nonconvex-concave, convex-nonconcave, and nonconvex-nonconcave problems with one-sided KŁ properties, achieving convergence with $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ complexity. Sharper (even optimal) iteration complexity can be obtained when the KŁ exponent is known. Specifically, under the one-sided KŁ condition with exponent $\theta\in(0,1)$, DS-GDA converges with an iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2\max\\{2\theta,1\\}})$. They all match the corresponding best results in the literature. Moreover, we show that DS-GDA is practically applicable to general nonconvex-nonconcave problems even without any regularity conditions, such as the PŁ condition, KŁ condition, or weak Minty variational inequalities condition. For various challenging nonconvex-nonconcave examples in the literature, including *Forsaken*, *Bilinearly-coupled minimax*, *Sixth-order polynomial*, and *PolarGame*, the proposed DS-GDA can all get rid of limit cycles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first first-order algorithm to achieve convergence on all of these formidable problems.

This paper shows that dropout training in generalized linear models is the minimax solution of a two-player, zero-sum game where an adversarial nature corrupts a statistician's covariates using a multiplicative nonparametric errors-in-variables model. In this game, nature's least favorable distribution is dropout noise, where nature independently deletes entries of the covariate vector with some fixed probability $\delta$. This result implies that dropout training indeed provides out-of-sample expected loss guarantees for distributions that arise from multiplicative perturbations of in-sample data. The paper makes a concrete recommendation on how to select the tuning parameter $\delta$. The paper also provides a novel, parallelizable, unbiased multi-level Monte Carlo algorithm to speed-up the implementation of dropout training. Our algorithm has a much smaller computational cost compared to the naive implementation of dropout, provided the number of data points is much smaller than the dimension of the covariate vector.

We study the problem of transfer learning, observing that previous efforts to understand its information-theoretic limits do not fully exploit the geometric structure of the source and target domains. In contrast, our study first illustrates the benefits of incorporating a natural geometric structure within a linear regression model, which corresponds to the generalized eigenvalue problem formed by the Gram matrices of both domains. We next establish a finite-sample minimax lower bound, propose a refined model interpolation estimator that enjoys a matching upper bound, and then extend our framework to multiple source domains and generalized linear models. Surprisingly, as long as information is available on the distance between the source and target parameters, negative-transfer does not occur. Simulation studies show that our proposed interpolation estimator outperforms state-of-the-art transfer learning methods in both moderate- and high-dimensional settings.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable achievements in simulated environments. However, carrying this success to real environments requires the important attribute of robustness, which the existing RL algorithms often lack as they assume that the future deployment environment is the same as the training environment (i.e. simulator) in which the policy is learned. This assumption often does not hold due to the discrepancy between the simulator and the real environment and, as a result, and hence renders the learned policy fragile when deployed. In this paper, we propose a novel distributionally robust $Q$-learning algorithm that learns the best policy in the worst distributional perturbation of the environment. Our algorithm first transforms the infinite-dimensional learning problem (since the environment MDP perturbation lies in an infinite-dimensional space) into a finite-dimensional dual problem and subsequently uses a multi-level Monte-Carlo scheme to approximate the dual value using samples from the simulator. Despite the complexity, we show that the resulting distributionally robust $Q$-learning algorithm asymptotically converges to optimal worst-case policy, thus making it robust to future environment changes. Simulation results further demonstrate its strong empirical robustness.

In this paper, we study the statistical limits in terms of Sobolev norms of gradient descent for solving inverse problem from randomly sampled noisy observations using a general class of objective functions. Our class of objective functions includes Sobolev training for kernel regression, Deep Ritz Methods (DRM), and Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINN) for solving elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) as special cases. We consider a potentially infinite-dimensional parameterization of our model using a suitable Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space and a continuous parameterization of problem hardness through the definition of kernel integral operators. We prove that gradient descent over this objective function can also achieve statistical optimality and the optimal number of passes over the data increases with sample size. Based on our theory, we explain an implicit acceleration of using a Sobolev norm as the objective function for training, inferring that the optimal number of epochs of DRM becomes larger than the number of PINN when both the data size and the hardness of tasks increase, although both DRM and PINN can achieve statistical optimality.

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has been shown to offer a principled way to regularize learning models. In this paper, we find that Tikhonov regularization is distributionally robust in an optimal transport sense (i.e. if an adversary chooses distributions in a suitable optimal transport neighborhood of the empirical measure), provided that suitable martingale constraints are also imposed. Further, we introduce a relaxation of the martingale constraints which not only provide a unified viewpoint to a class of existing robust methods but also lead to new regularization tools. To realize these novel tools, provably efficient computational algorithms are proposed. As a byproduct, the strong duality theorem proved in this paper can be potentially applied to other problems of independent interest.

We propose a neural network architecture that enables non-parametric calibration and generation of multivariate extreme value distributions (MEVs). MEVs arise from Extreme Value Theory (EVT) as the necessary class of models when extrapolating a distributional fit over large spatial and temporal scales based on data observed in intermediate scales. In turn, EVT dictates that $d$-max-decreasing, a stronger form of convexity, is an essential shape constraint in the characterization of MEVs. As far as we know, our proposed architecture provides the first class of non-parametric estimators for MEVs that preserve these essential shape constraints. We show that the architecture approximates the dependence structure encoded by MEVs at parametric rate. Moreover, we present a new method for sampling high-dimensional MEVs using a generative model. We demonstrate our methodology on a wide range of experimental settings, ranging from environmental sciences to financial mathematics and verify that the structural properties of MEVs are retained compared to existing methods.

Consider a scenario where a player chooses an action in each round $t$ out of $T$ rounds and observes the incurred cost after a delay of $d_{t}$ rounds. The cost functions and the delay sequence are chosen by an adversary. We show that in a non-cooperative game, the expected weighted ergodic distribution of play converges to the set of coarse correlated equilibria if players use algorithms that have “no weighted-regret” in the above scenario, even if they have linear regret due to too large delays. For a two-player zero-sum game, we show that no weighted-regret is sufficient for the weighted ergodic average of play to converge to the set of Nash equilibria. We prove that the FKM algorithm with $n$ dimensions achieves an expected regret of $O\left(nT^{\frac{3}{4}}+\sqrt{n}T^{\frac{1}{3}}D^{\frac{1}{3}}\right)$ and the EXP3 algorithm with $K$ arms achieves an expected regret of $O\left(\sqrt{\log K\left(KT+D\right)}\right)$ even when $D=\sum_{t=1}^{T}d_{t}$ and $T$ are unknown. These bounds use a novel doubling trick that, under mild assumptions, provably retains the regret bound for when $D$ and $T$ are known. Using these bounds, we show that FKM and EXP3 have no weighted-regret even for $d_{t}=O\left(t\log t\right)$. Therefore, algorithms with no weighted-regret can be used to approximate a CCE of a finite or convex unknown game that can only be simulated with bandit feedback, even if the simulation involves significant delays.

While reinforcement learning has witnessed tremendous success recently in a wide range of domains, robustness–or the lack thereof–remains an important issue that remains inadequately addressed. In this paper, we provide a distributionally robust formulation of offline learning policy in tabular RL that aims to learn a policy from historical data (collected by some other behavior policy) that is robust to the future environment arising as a perturbation of the training environment. We first develop a novel policy evaluation scheme that accurately estimates the robust value (i.e. how robust it is in a perturbed environment) of any given policy and establish its finite-sample estimation error. Building on this, we then develop a novel and minimax-optimal distributionally robust learning algorithm that achieves $O_P\left(1/\sqrt{n}\right)$ regret, meaning that with high probability, the policy learned from using $n$ training data points will be $O\left(1/\sqrt{n}\right)$ close to the optimal distributionally robust policy. Finally, our simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our distributionally robust approach compared to non-robust RL algorithms.

We have developed a statistical testing framework to detect if a given machine learning classifier fails to satisfy a wide range of group fairness notions. Our test is a flexible, interpretable, and statistically rigorous tool for auditing whether exhibited biases are intrinsic to the algorithm or simply due to the randomness in the data. The statistical challenges, which may arise from multiple impact criteria that define group fairness and which are discontinuous on model parameters, are conveniently tackled by projecting the empirical measure to the set of group-fair probability models using optimal transport. This statistic is efficiently computed using linear programming, and its asymptotic distribution is explicitly obtained. The proposed framework can also be used to test for composite fairness hypotheses and fairness with multiple sensitive attributes. The optimal transport testing formulation improves interpretability by characterizing the minimal covariate perturbations that eliminate the bias observed in the audit.

Least squares estimators, when trained on few target domain samples, may predict poorly. Supervised domain adaptation aims to improve the predictive accuracy by exploiting additional labeled training samples from a source distribution that is close to the target distribution. Given available data, we investigate novel strategies to synthesize a family of least squares estimator experts that are robust with regard to moment conditions. When these moment conditions are specified using Kullback-Leibler or Wasserstein-type divergences, we can find the robust estimators efficiently using convex optimization. We use the Bernstein online aggregation algorithm on the proposed family of robust experts to generate predictions for the sequential stream of target test samples. Numerical experiments on real data show that the robust strategies systematically outperform non-robust interpolations of the empirical least squares estimators.

We propose a novel Frank-Wolfe (FW) procedure for the optimization of infinite-dimensional functionals of probability measures - a task which arises naturally in a wide range of areas including statistical learning (e.g. variational inference) and artificial intelligence (e.g. generative adversarial networks). Our FW procedure takes advantage of Wasserstein gradient flows and strong duality results recently developed in Distributionally Robust Optimization so that gradient steps (in the Wasserstein space) can be efficiently computed using finite-dimensional, convex optimization methods. We show how to choose the step sizes in order to guarantee exponentially fast iteration convergence, under mild assumptions on the functional to optimize. We apply our algorithm to a range of functionals arising from applications in nonparametric estimation.

Many machine learning tasks that involve predicting an output response can be solved by training a weighted regression model. Unfortunately, the predictive power of this type of models may severely deteriorate under low sample sizes or under covariate perturbations. Reweighting the training samples has aroused as an effective mitigation strategy to these problems. In this paper, we propose a novel and coherent scheme for kernel-reweighted regression by reparametrizing the sample weights using a doubly non-negative matrix. When the weighting matrix is confined in an uncertainty set using either the log-determinant divergence or the Bures-Wasserstein distance, we show that the adversarially reweighted estimate can be solved efficiently using first-order methods. Numerical experiments show that our reweighting strategy delivers promising results on numerous datasets.

We build a Bayesian contextual classification model using an optimistic score ratio for robust binary classification when there is limited information on the class-conditional, or contextual, distribution. The optimistic score searches for the distribution that is most plausible to explain the observed outcomes in the testing sample among all distributions belonging to the contextual ambiguity set which is prescribed using a limited structural constraint on the mean vector and the covariance matrix of the underlying contextual distribution. We show that the Bayesian classifier using the optimistic score ratio is conceptually attractive, delivers solid statistical guarantees and is computationally tractable. We showcase the power of the proposed optimistic score ratio classifier on both synthetic and empirical data.

Policy learning using historical observational data is an important problem that has found widespread applications. However, existing literature rests on the crucial assumption that the future environment where the learned policy will be deployed is the same as the past environment that has generated the data{–}an assumption that is often false or too coarse an approximation. In this paper, we lift this assumption and aim to learn a distributionally robust policy with bandit observational data. We propose a novel learning algorithm that is able to learn a robust policy to adversarial perturbations and unknown covariate shifts. We first present a policy evaluation procedure in the ambiguous environment and also give a heuristic algorithm to solve the distributionally robust policy learning problems efficiently. Additionally, we provide extensive simulations to demonstrate the robustness of our policy.

Conditional estimation given specific covariate values (i.e., local conditional estimation or functional estimation) is ubiquitously useful with applications in engineering, social and natural sciences. Existing data-driven non-parametric estimators mostly focus on structured homogeneous data (e.g., weakly independently and stationary data), thus they are sensitive to adversarial noise and may perform poorly under a low sample size. To alleviate these issues, we propose a new distributionally robust estimator that generates non-parametric local estimates by minimizing the worst-case conditional expected loss over all adversarial distributions in a Wasserstein ambiguity set. We show that despite being generally intractable, the local estimator can be efficiently found via convex optimization under broadly applicable settings, and it is robust to the corruption and heterogeneity of the data. Various experiments show the competitive performance of this new class of estimator.

We consider the parameter estimation problem of a probabilistic generative model prescribed using a natural exponential family of distributions. For this problem, the typical maximum likelihood estimator usually overfits under limited training sample size, is sensitive to noise and may perform poorly on downstream predictive tasks. To mitigate these issues, we propose a distributionally robust maximum likelihood estimator that minimizes the worst-case expected log-loss uniformly over a parametric Kullback-Leibler ball around a parametric nominal distribution. Leveraging the analytical expression of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two distributions in the same natural exponential family, we show that the min-max estimation problem is tractable in a broad setting, including the robust training of generalized linear models. Our novel robust estimator also enjoys statistical consistency and delivers promising empirical results in both regression and classification tasks.

We consider the problem of estimating the Wasserstein distance between the empirical measure and a set of probability measures whose expectations over a class of functions (hypothesis class) are constrained. If this class is sufficiently rich to characterize a particular distribution (e.g., all Lipschitz functions), then our formulation recovers the Wasserstein distance to such a distribution. We establish a strong duality result that generalizes the celebrated Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality. We also show that our formulation can be used to beat the curse of dimensionality, which is well known to affect the rates of statistical convergence of the empirical Wasserstein distance. In particular, examples of infinite-dimensional hypothesis classes are presented, informed by a complex correlation structure, for which it is shown that the empirical Wasserstein distance to such classes converges to zero at the standard parametric rate. Our formulation provides insights that help clarify why, despite the curse of dimensionality, the Wasserstein distance enjoys favorable empirical performance across a wide range of statistical applications.

The goal of this paper is to provide a unifying view of a wide range of problems of interest in machine learning by framing them as the minimization of functionals defined on the space of probability measures. In particular, we show that generative adversarial networks, variational inference, and actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning can all be seen through the lens of our framework. We then discuss a generic optimization algorithm for our formulation, called probability functional descent (PFD), and show how this algorithm recovers existing methods developed independently in the settings mentioned earlier.

Consider a player that in each of T rounds chooses one of K arms. An adversary chooses the cost of each arm in a bounded interval, and a sequence of feedback delays \left{ d_{t}\right} that are unknown to the player. After picking arm a_{t} at round t, the player receives the cost of playing this arm d_{t} rounds later. In cases where t+d_{t}>T, this feedback is simply missing. We prove that the EXP3 algorithm (that uses the delayed feedback upon its arrival) achieves a regret of O\left(\sqrt{\ln K\left(KT+\sum_{t=1}^{T}d_{t}\right)}\right). For the case where \sum_{t=1}^{T}d_{t} and T are unknown, we propose a novel doubling trick for online learning with delays and prove that this adaptive EXP3 achieves a regret of O\left(\sqrt{\ln K\left(K^{2}T+\sum_{t=1}^{T}d_{t}\right)}\right). We then consider a two player zero-sum game where players experience asynchronous delays. We show that even when the delays are large enough such that players no longer enjoy the “no-regret property”, (e.g., where d_{t}=O\left(t\log t\right)) the ergodic average of the strategy profile still converges to the set of Nash equilibria of the game. The result is made possible by choosing an adaptive step size \eta_{t} that is not summable but is square summable, and proving a “weighted regret bound” for this general case.

This paper proposes a novel non-parametric multidimensional convex regression estimator which is designed to be robust to adversarial perturbations in the empirical measure. We minimize over convex functions the maximum (over Wasserstein perturbations of the empirical measure) of the absolute regression errors. The inner maximization is solved in closed form resulting in a regularization penalty involves the norm of the gradient. We show consistency of our estimator and a rate of convergence of order $ \widetilde{O}\left( n^{-1/d}\right) $, matching the bounds of alternative estimators based on square-loss minimization. Contrary to all of the existing results, our convergence rates hold without imposing compactness on the underlying domain and with no a priori bounds on the underlying convex function or its gradient norm.

Motivated by the application of real-time pricing in e-commerce platforms, we consider the problem of revenue-maximization in a setting where the seller can leverage contextual information describing the customer's history and the product's type to predict her valuation of the product. However, her true valuation is unobservable to the seller, only binary outcome in the form of success-failure of a transaction is observed. Unlike in usual contextual bandit settings, the optimal price/arm given a covariate in our setting is sensitive to the detailed characteristics of the residual uncertainty distribution. We develop a semi-parametric model in which the residual distribution is non-parametric and provide the first algorithm which learns both regression parameters and residual distribution with $\tilde O(\sqrt{n})$ regret. We empirically test a scalable implementation of our algorithm and observe good performance.

In this paper, we consider online learning in generalized linear contextual bandits where rewards are not immediately observed. Instead, rewards are available to the decision maker only after some delay, which is unknown and stochastic, even though a decision must be made at each time step for an incoming set of contexts. We study the performance of upper confidence bound (UCB) based algorithms adapted to this delayed setting. In particular, we design a delay-adaptive algorithm, which we call Delayed UCB, for generalized linear contextual bandits using UCB-style exploration and establish regret bounds under various delay assumptions. In the important special case of linear contextual bandits, we further modify this algorithm and establish a tighter regret bound under the same delay assumptions. Our results contribute to the broad landscape of contextual bandits literature by establishing that UCB algorithms, which are widely deployed in modern recommendation engines, can be made robust to delays.

In many platforms, user arrivals exhibit a self-reinforcing behavior: future user arrivals are likely to have preferences similar to users who were satisfied in the past. In other words, arrivals exhibit {\em positive externalities}. We study multiarmed bandit (MAB) problems with positive externalities. We show that the self-reinforcing preferences may lead standard benchmark algorithms such as UCB to exhibit linear regret. We develop a new algorithm, Balanced Exploration (BE), which explores arms carefully to avoid suboptimal convergence of arrivals before sufficient evidence is gathered. We also introduce an adaptive variant of BE which successively eliminates suboptimal arms. We analyze their asymptotic regret, and establish optimality by showing that no algorithm can perform better.

Regularized estimators in the context of group variables have been applied successfully in model and feature selection in order to preserve interpretability. We formulate a Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) problem which recovers popular estimators, such as Group Square Root Lasso (GSRL). Our DRO formulation allows us to interpret GSRL as a game, in which we learn a regression parameter while an adversary chooses a perturbation of the data. We wish to pick the parameter to minimize the expected loss under any plausible model chosen by the adversary - who, on the other hand, wishes to increase the expected loss. The regularization parameter turns out to be precisely determined by the amount of perturbation on the training data allowed by the adversary. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven (statistical) criterion for the optimal choice of regularization, which we evaluate asymptotically, in closed form, as the size of the training set increases. Our easy-to-evaluate regularization formula is compared against cross-validation, showing comparable performance.

Assortment planning is an important problem that arises in many industries such as retailing and airlines. One of the key challenges in an assortment planning problem is to identify the "right model" for the substitution behavior of customers from the data. Error in model selection can lead to highly sub-optimal decisions. In this paper, we present a new choice model that is a simultaneous approximation for all random utility based discrete choice models including the multinomial logit, the nested logit and mixtures of multinomial logit models. Our model is based on a new primitive for substitution behavior where substitution from one product to another is modeled as a state transition of a Markov chain. In particular, we consider a Markov chain where there is a state for each product, and model the substitution behavior as follows: a customer arrives in the state corresponding to his most preferred product. If that product is not available, he/she transitions to other product states according to the transition probabilities of the Markov chain. Therefore, the preferences of the customers are approximated by Markovian transitions in this choice model.