arXiv subjects

Constantinos Daskalakis

Publications and source records attributed to Constantinos Daskalakis.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Near-Optimal No-Regret Learning in General Games

We show that Optimistic Hedge -- a common variant of multiplicative-weights-updates with recency bias -- attains ${\rm poly}(\log T)$ regret in multi-player general-sum games. In particular, when every player of the game uses Optimistic Hedge to iteratively update her strategy in response to the history of play so far, then after $T$ rounds of interaction, each player experiences total regret that is ${\rm poly}(\log T)$. Our bound improves, exponentially, the $O({T}^{1/2})$ regret attainable by standard no-regret learners in games, the $O(T^{1/4})$ regret attainable by no-regret learners with recency bias (Syrgkanis et al., 2015), and the ${O}(T^{1/6})$ bound that was recently shown for Optimistic Hedge in the special case of two-player games (Chen & Pen, 2020). A corollary of our bound is that Optimistic Hedge converges to coarse correlated equilibrium in general games at a rate of $\tilde{O}\left(\frac 1T\right)$.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Near-Optimal No-Regret Learning for Correlated Equilibria in Multi-Player General-Sum Games

Recently, Daskalakis, Fishelson, and Golowich (DFG) (NeurIPS`21) showed that if all agents in a multi-player general-sum normal-form game employ Optimistic Multiplicative Weights Update (OMWU), the external regret of every player is $O(\textrm{polylog}(T))$ after $T$ repetitions of the game. We extend their result from external regret to internal regret and swap regret, thereby establishing uncoupled learning dynamics that converge to an approximate correlated equilibrium at the rate of $\tilde{O}(T^{-1})$. This substantially improves over the prior best rate of convergence for correlated equilibria of $O(T^{-3/4})$ due to Chen and Peng (NeurIPS`20), and it is optimal -- within the no-regret framework -- up to polylogarithmic factors in $T$. To obtain these results, we develop new techniques for establishing higher-order smoothness for learning dynamics involving fixed point operations. Specifically, we establish that the no-internal-regret learning dynamics of Stoltz and Lugosi (Mach Learn`05) are equivalently simulated by no-external-regret dynamics on a combinatorial space. This allows us to trade the computation of the stationary distribution on a polynomial-sized Markov chain for a (much more well-behaved) linear transformation on an exponential-sized set, enabling us to leverage similar techniques as DFG to near-optimally bound the internal regret. Moreover, we establish an $O(\textrm{polylog}(T))$ no-swap-regret bound for the classic algorithm of Blum and Mansour (BM) (JMLR`07). We do so by introducing a technique based on the Cauchy Integral Formula that circumvents the more limited combinatorial arguments of DFG. In addition to shedding clarity on the near-optimal regret guarantees of BM, our arguments provide insights into the various ways in which the techniques by DFG can be extended and leveraged in the analysis of more involved learning algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

What Makes A Good Fisherman? Linear Regression under Self-Selection Bias

In the classical setting of self-selection, the goal is to learn $k$ models, simultaneously from observations $(x^{(i)}, y^{(i)})$ where $y^{(i)}$ is the output of one of $k$ underlying models on input $x^{(i)}$. In contrast to mixture models, where we observe the output of a randomly selected model, here the observed model depends on the outputs themselves, and is determined by some known selection criterion. For example, we might observe the highest output, the smallest output, or the median output of the $k$ models. In known-index self-selection, the identity of the observed model output is observable; in unknown-index self-selection, it is not. Self-selection has a long history in Econometrics and applications in various theoretical and applied fields, including treatment effect estimation, imitation learning, learning from strategically reported data, and learning from markets at disequilibrium. In this work, we present the first computationally and statistically efficient estimation algorithms for the most standard setting of this problem where the models are linear. In the known-index case, we require poly$(1/\varepsilon, k, d)$ sample and time complexity to estimate all model parameters to accuracy $\varepsilon$ in $d$ dimensions, and can accommodate quite general selection criteria. In the more challenging unknown-index case, even the identifiability of the linear models (from infinitely many samples) was not known. We show three results in this case for the commonly studied $\max$ self-selection criterion: (1) we show that the linear models are indeed identifiable, (2) for general $k$ we provide an algorithm with poly$(d) \exp(\text{poly}(k))$ sample and time complexity to estimate the regression parameters up to error $1/\text{poly}(k)$, and (3) for $k = 2$ we provide an algorithm for any error $\varepsilon$ and poly$(d, 1/\varepsilon)$ sample and time complexity.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

EM's Convergence in Gaussian Latent Tree Models

We study the optimization landscape of the log-likelihood function and the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in latent Gaussian tree models, i.e. tree-structured Gaussian graphical models whose leaf nodes are observable and non-leaf nodes are unobservable. We show that the unique non-trivial stationary point of the population log-likelihood is its global maximum, and establish that the expectation-maximization algorithm is guaranteed to converge to it in the single latent variable case. Our results for the landscape of the log-likelihood function in general latent tree models provide support for the extensive practical use of maximum likelihood based-methods in this setting. Our results for the EM algorithm extend an emerging line of work on obtaining global convergence guarantees for this celebrated algorithm. We show our results for the non-trivial stationary points of the log-likelihood by arguing that a certain system of polynomial equations obtained from the EM updates has a unique non-trivial solution. The global convergence of the EM algorithm follows by arguing that all trivial fixed points are higher-order saddle points.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

STay-ON-the-Ridge: Guaranteed Convergence to Local Minimax Equilibrium in Nonconvex-Nonconcave Games

Min-max optimization problems involving nonconvex-nonconcave objectives have found important applications in adversarial training and other multi-agent learning settings. Yet, no known gradient descent-based method is guaranteed to converge to (even local notions of) min-max equilibrium in the nonconvex-nonconcave setting. For all known methods, there exist relatively simple objectives for which they cycle or exhibit other undesirable behavior different from converging to a point, let alone to some game-theoretically meaningful one~\cite{flokas2019poincare,hsieh2021limits}. The only known convergence guarantees hold under the strong assumption that the initialization is very close to a local min-max equilibrium~\cite{wang2019solving}. Moreover, the afore-described challenges are not just theoretical curiosities. All known methods are unstable in practice, even in simple settings. We propose the first method that is guaranteed to converge to a local min-max equilibrium for smooth nonconvex-nonconcave objectives. Our method is second-order and provably escapes limit cycles as long as it is initialized at an easy-to-find initial point. Both the definition of our method and its convergence analysis are motivated by the topological nature of the problem. In particular, our method is not designed to decrease some potential function, such as the distance of its iterate from the set of local min-max equilibria or the projected gradient of the objective, but is designed to satisfy a topological property that guarantees the avoidance of cycles and implies its convergence.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Multi-item Non-truthful Auctions Achieve Good Revenue

We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format $A$ satisfying certain technical conditions, we run simultaneous item auctions augmented with a personalized entry fee for each bidder that must be paid before the auction can be accessed. These entry fees depend only on the prior distribution of bidder types, and in particular are independent of realized bids. We bound the revenue of the resulting two-part tariff mechanism using a novel geometric technique that enables revenue guarantees for many common non-truthful auctions that previously had none. Our approach adapts and extends the duality framework of Cai et al [CDW16] beyond truthful auctions. Our framework can be used with many common auction formats, such as simultaneous first-price, simultaneous second-price, and simultaneous all-pay auctions. Our results for first price and all-pay are the first revenue guarantees of non-truthful mechanisms in multi-dimensional environments, addressing an open question in the literature [RST17]. If all-pay auctions are used, we prove that the resulting mechanism is also credible in the sense that the auctioneer cannot benefit by deviating from the stated mechanism after observing agent bids. This is the first static credible mechanism for multi-item additive auctions that achieves a constant factor of the optimal revenue. If second-price auctions are used, we obtain a truthful $O(1)$-approximate mechanism with fixed entry fees that are amenable to tuning via online learning techniques.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Efficient Truncated Linear Regression with Unknown Noise Variance

Truncated linear regression is a classical challenge in Statistics, wherein a label, $y = w^T x + \varepsilon$, and its corresponding feature vector, $x \in \mathbb{R}^k$, are only observed if the label falls in some subset $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}$; otherwise the existence of the pair $(x, y)$ is hidden from observation. Linear regression with truncated observations has remained a challenge, in its general form, since the early works of~\citet{tobin1958estimation,amemiya1973regression}. When the distribution of the error is normal with known variance, recent work of~\citet{daskalakis2019truncatedregression} provides computationally and statistically efficient estimators of the linear model, $w$. In this paper, we provide the first computationally and statistically efficient estimators for truncated linear regression when the noise variance is unknown, estimating both the linear model and the variance of the noise. Our estimator is based on an efficient implementation of Projected Stochastic Gradient Descent on the negative log-likelihood of the truncated sample. Importantly, we show that the error of our estimates is asymptotically normal, and we use this to provide explicit confidence regions for our estimates.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Score-Guided Intermediate Layer Optimization: Fast Langevin Mixing for Inverse Problems

We prove fast mixing and characterize the stationary distribution of the Langevin Algorithm for inverting random weighted DNN generators. This result extends the work of Hand and Voroninski from efficient inversion to efficient posterior sampling. In practice, to allow for increased expressivity, we propose to do posterior sampling in the latent space of a pre-trained generative model. To achieve that, we train a score-based model in the latent space of a StyleGAN-2 and we use it to solve inverse problems. Our framework, Score-Guided Intermediate Layer Optimization (SGILO), extends prior work by replacing the sparsity regularization with a generative prior in the intermediate layer. Experimentally, we obtain significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art, especially in the low measurement regime.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Estimation of Standard Auction Models

We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the price they paid in a sequence of identical auctions, we provide algorithms for non-parametrically estimating the bid distribution of each bidder, as well as their value distributions under equilibrium assumptions. We provide finite-sample estimation bounds which are uniform in that their error rates do not depend on the bid/value distributions being estimated. Our estimation guarantees advance a body of work in Econometrics wherein only identification results have been obtained, unless the setting is symmetric, parametric, or all bids are observable. Our guarantees also provide computationally and statistically effective alternatives to classical techniques from reliability theory. Finally, our results are immediately applicable to Dutch and English auctions.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

Fast Rates for Nonparametric Online Learning: From Realizability to Learning in Games

We study fast rates of convergence in the setting of nonparametric online regression, namely where regret is defined with respect to an arbitrary function class which has bounded complexity. Our contributions are two-fold: - In the realizable setting of nonparametric online regression with the absolute loss, we propose a randomized proper learning algorithm which gets a near-optimal cumulative loss in terms of the sequential fat-shattering dimension of the hypothesis class. In the setting of online classification with a class of Littlestone dimension $d$, our bound reduces to $d \cdot {\rm poly} \log T$. This result answers a question as to whether proper learners could achieve near-optimal cumulative loss; previously, even for online classification, the best known cumulative loss was $\tilde O( \sqrt{dT})$. Further, for the real-valued (regression) setting, a cumulative loss bound with near-optimal scaling on sequential fat-shattering dimension was not even known for improper learners, prior to this work. - Using the above result, we exhibit an independent learning algorithm for general-sum binary games of Littlestone dimension $d$, for which each player achieves regret $\tilde O(d^{3/4} \cdot T^{1/4})$. This result generalizes analogous results of Syrgkanis et al. (2015) who showed that in finite games the optimal regret can be accelerated from $O(\sqrt{T})$ in the adversarial setting to $O(T^{1/4})$ in the game setting. To establish the above results, we introduce several new techniques, including: a hierarchical aggregation rule to achieve the optimal cumulative loss for real-valued classes, a multi-scale extension of the proper online realizable learner of Hanneke et al. (2021), an approach to show that the output of such nonparametric learning algorithms is stable, and a proof that the minimax theorem holds in all online learnable games.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

The Complexity of Markov Equilibrium in Stochastic Games

We show that computing approximate stationary Markov coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) in general-sum stochastic games is computationally intractable, even when there are two players, the game is turn-based, the discount factor is an absolute constant, and the approximation is an absolute constant. Our intractability results stand in sharp contrast to normal-form games where exact CCEs are efficiently computable. A fortiori, our results imply that there are no efficient algorithms for learning stationary Markov CCE policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), even when the interaction is two-player and turn-based, and both the discount factor and the desired approximation of the learned policies is an absolute constant. In turn, these results stand in sharp contrast to single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) where near-optimal stationary Markov policies can be efficiently learned. Complementing our intractability results for stationary Markov CCEs, we provide a decentralized algorithm (assuming shared randomness among players) for learning a nonstationary Markov CCE policy with polynomial time and sample complexity in all problem parameters. Previous work for learning Markov CCE policies all required exponential time and sample complexity in the number of players.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Recommender Systems meet Mechanism Design

Machine learning has developed a variety of tools for learning and representing high-dimensional distributions with structure. Recent years have also seen big advances in designing multi-item mechanisms. Akin to overfitting, however, these mechanisms can be extremely sensitive to the Bayesian prior that they target, which becomes problematic when that prior is only approximately known. At the same time, even if access to the exact Bayesian prior is given, it is known that optimal or even approximately optimal multi-item mechanisms run into sample, computational, representation and communication intractability barriers. We consider a natural class of multi-item mechanism design problems with very large numbers of items, but where the bidders' value distributions can be well-approximated by a topic model akin to those used in recommendation systems with very large numbers of possible recommendations. We propose a mechanism design framework for this setting, building on a recent robustification framework by Brustle et al., which disentangles the statistical challenge of estimating a multi-dimensional prior from the task of designing a good mechanism for it, and robustifies the performance of the latter against the estimation error of the former. We provide an extension of this framework appropriate for our setting, which allows us to exploit the expressive power of topic models to reduce the effective dimensionality of the mechanism design problem and remove the dependence of its computational, communication and representation complexity on the number of items.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2022

How Good are Low-Rank Approximations in Gaussian Process Regression?

We provide guarantees for approximate Gaussian Process (GP) regression resulting from two common low-rank kernel approximations: based on random Fourier features, and based on truncating the kernel's Mercer expansion. In particular, we bound the Kullback-Leibler divergence between an exact GP and one resulting from one of the afore-described low-rank approximations to its kernel, as well as between their corresponding predictive densities, and we also bound the error between predictive mean vectors and between predictive covariance matrices computed using the exact versus using the approximate GP. We provide experiments on both simulated data and standard benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of our theoretical bounds.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

How Good are Low-Rank Approximations in Gaussian Process Regression?

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Statistical Estimation from Dependent Data

We consider a general statistical estimation problem wherein binary labels across different observations are not independent conditioned on their feature vectors, but dependent, capturing settings where e.g. these observations are collected on a spatial domain, a temporal domain, or a social network, which induce dependencies. We model these dependencies in the language of Markov Random Fields and, importantly, allow these dependencies to be substantial, i.e do not assume that the Markov Random Field capturing these dependencies is in high temperature. As our main contribution we provide algorithms and statistically efficient estimation rates for this model, giving several instantiations of our bounds in logistic regression, sparse logistic regression, and neural network settings with dependent data. Our estimation guarantees follow from novel results for estimating the parameters (i.e. external fields and interaction strengths) of Ising models from a {\em single} sample. {We evaluate our estimation approach on real networked data, showing that it outperforms standard regression approaches that ignore dependencies, across three text classification datasets: Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed.}

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A Statistical Taylor Theorem and Extrapolation of Truncated Densities

We show a statistical version of Taylor's theorem and apply this result to non-parametric density estimation from truncated samples, which is a classical challenge in Statistics \cite{woodroofe1985estimating, stute1993almost}. The single-dimensional version of our theorem has the following implication: "For any distribution $P$ on $[0, 1]$ with a smooth log-density function, given samples from the conditional distribution of $P$ on $[a, a + \varepsilon] \subset [0, 1]$, we can efficiently identify an approximation to $P$ over the \emph{whole} interval $[0, 1]$, with quality of approximation that improves with the smoothness of $P$." To the best of knowledge, our result is the first in the area of non-parametric density estimation from truncated samples, which works under the hard truncation model, where the samples outside some survival set $S$ are never observed, and applies to multiple dimensions. In contrast, previous works assume single dimensional data where each sample has a different survival set $S$ so that samples from the whole support will ultimately be collected.

math.ST↗

arXiv2021

Generative Ensemble Regression: Learning Particle Dynamics from Observations of Ensembles with Physics-Informed Deep Generative Models

We propose a new method for inferring the governing stochastic ordinary differential equations (SODEs) by observing particle ensembles at discrete and sparse time instants, i.e., multiple "snapshots". Particle coordinates at a single time instant, possibly noisy or truncated, are recorded in each snapshot but are unpaired across the snapshots. By training a physics-informed generative model that generates "fake" sample paths, we aim to fit the observed particle ensemble distributions with a curve in the probability measure space, which is induced from the inferred particle dynamics. We employ different metrics to quantify the differences between distributions, e.g., the sliced Wasserstein distances and the adversarial losses in generative adversarial networks (GANs). We refer to this method as generative "ensemble-regression" (GER), in analogy to the classic "point-regression", where we infer the dynamics by performing regression in the Euclidean space. We illustrate the GER by learning the drift and diffusion terms of particle ensembles governed by SODEs with Brownian motions and Levy processes up to 100 dimensions. We also discuss how to treat cases with noisy or truncated observations. Apart from systems consisting of independent particles, we also tackle nonlocal interacting particle systems with unknown interaction potential parameters by constructing a physics-informed loss function. Finally, we investigate scenarios of paired observations and discuss how to reduce the dimensionality in such cases by proving a convergence theorem that provides theoretical support.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Methods for Structured Nonconvex-Nonconcave Min-Max Optimization

The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in these applications. Unfortunately, recent results have established that even approximate first-order stationary points of such objectives are intractable, even under smoothness conditions, motivating the study of min-max objectives with additional structure. We introduce a new class of structured nonconvex-nonconcave min-max optimization problems, proposing a generalization of the extragradient algorithm which provably converges to a stationary point. The algorithm applies not only to Euclidean spaces, but also to general $\ell_p$-normed finite-dimensional real vector spaces. We also discuss its stability under stochastic oracles and provide bounds on its sample complexity. Our iteration complexity and sample complexity bounds either match or improve the best known bounds for the same or less general nonconvex-nonconcave settings, such as those that satisfy variational coherence or in which a weak solution to the associated variational inequality problem is assumed to exist.

math.OC↗