arXiv subjects

Kfir Y. Levy

Publications and source records attributed to Kfir Y. Levy.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

No-Regret Dynamics in the Fenchel Game: A Unified Framework for Algorithmic Convex Optimization

We develop an algorithmic framework for solving convex optimization problems using no-regret game dynamics. By converting the problem of minimizing a convex function into an auxiliary problem of solving a min-max game in a sequential fashion, we can consider a range of strategies for each of the two-players who must select their actions one after the other. A common choice for these strategies are so-called no-regret learning algorithms, and we describe a number of such and prove bounds on their regret. We then show that many classical first-order methods for convex optimization -- including average-iterate gradient descent, the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, Nesterov's acceleration methods, and the accelerated proximal method -- can be interpreted as special cases of our framework as long as each player makes the correct choice of no-regret strategy. Proving convergence rates in this framework becomes very straightforward, as they follow from plugging in the appropriate known regret bounds. Our framework also gives rise to a number of new first-order methods for special cases of convex optimization that were not previously known.

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arXiv2022

Online Meta-Learning in Adversarial Multi-Armed Bandits

We study meta-learning for adversarial multi-armed bandits. We consider the online-within-online setup, in which a player (learner) encounters a sequence of multi-armed bandit episodes. The player's performance is measured as regret against the best arm in each episode, according to the losses generated by an adversary. The difficulty of the problem depends on the empirical distribution of the per-episode best arm chosen by the adversary. We present an algorithm that can leverage the non-uniformity in this empirical distribution, and derive problem-dependent regret bounds. This solution comprises an inner learner that plays each episode separately, and an outer learner that updates the hyper-parameters of the inner algorithm between the episodes. In the case where the best arm distribution is far from uniform, it improves upon the best bound that can be achieved by any online algorithm executed on each episode individually without meta-learning.

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arXiv2022

A universal black-box optimization method with almost dimension-free convergence rate guarantees

Universal methods for optimization are designed to achieve theoretically optimal convergence rates without any prior knowledge of the problem's regularity parameters or the accurarcy of the gradient oracle employed by the optimizer. In this regard, existing state-of-the-art algorithms achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/T^2)$ value convergence rate in Lipschitz smooth problems with a perfect gradient oracle, and an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate when the underlying problem is non-smooth and/or the gradient oracle is stochastic. On the downside, these methods do not take into account the problem's dimensionality, and this can have a catastrophic impact on the achieved convergence rate, in both theory and practice. Our paper aims to bridge this gap by providing a scalable universal gradient method - dubbed UnderGrad - whose oracle complexity is almost dimension-free in problems with a favorable geometry (like the simplex, linearly constrained semidefinite programs and combinatorial bandits), while retaining the order-optimal dependence on $T$ described above. These "best-of-both-worlds" results are achieved via a primal-dual update scheme inspired by the dual exploration method for variational inequalities.

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arXiv2022

Robust Linear Regression for General Feature Distribution

We investigate robust linear regression where data may be contaminated by an oblivious adversary, i.e., an adversary than may know the data distribution but is otherwise oblivious to the realizations of the data samples. This model has been previously analyzed under strong assumptions. Concretely, $\textbf{(i)}$ all previous works assume that the covariance matrix of the features is positive definite; and $\textbf{(ii)}$ most of them assume that the features are centered (i.e. zero mean). Additionally, all previous works make additional restrictive assumption, e.g., assuming that the features are Gaussian or that the corruptions are symmetrically distributed. In this work we go beyond these assumptions and investigate robust regression under a more general set of assumptions: $\textbf{(i)}$ we allow the covariance matrix to be either positive definite or positive semi definite, $\textbf{(ii)}$ we do not necessarily assume that the features are centered, $\textbf{(iii)}$ we make no further assumption beyond boundedness (sub-Gaussianity) of features and measurement noise. Under these assumption we analyze a natural SGD variant for this problem and show that it enjoys a fast convergence rate when the covariance matrix is positive definite. In the positive semi definite case we show that there are two regimes: if the features are centered we can obtain a standard convergence rate; otherwise the adversary can cause any learner to fail arbitrarily.

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arXiv2021

STORM+: Fully Adaptive SGD with Momentum for Nonconvex Optimization

In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such problems is variance reduction techniques, which are also known to obtain tight convergence rates, matching the lower bounds in this case. Nevertheless, these techniques require a careful maintenance of anchor points in conjunction with appropriately selected "mega-batchsizes". This leads to a challenging hyperparameter tuning problem, that weakens their practicality. Recently, [Cutkosky and Orabona, 2019] have shown that one can employ recursive momentum in order to avoid the use of anchor points and large batchsizes, and still obtain the optimal rate for this setting. Yet, their method called STORM crucially relies on the knowledge of the smoothness, as well a bound on the gradient norms. In this work we propose STORM+, a new method that is completely parameter-free, does not require large batch-sizes, and obtains the optimal $O(1/T^{1/3})$ rate for finding an approximate stationary point. Our work builds on the STORM algorithm, in conjunction with a novel approach to adaptively set the learning rate and momentum parameters.

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arXiv2021

Faster Neural Network Training with Approximate Tensor Operations

We propose a novel technique for faster deep neural network training which systematically applies sample-based approximation to the constituent tensor operations, i.e., matrix multiplications and convolutions. We introduce new sampling techniques, study their theoretical properties, and prove that they provide the same convergence guarantees when applied to SGD training. We apply approximate tensor operations to single and multi-node training of MLP and CNN networks on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. We demonstrate up to 66% reduction in the amount of computations and communication, and up to 1.37x faster training time while maintaining negligible or no impact on the final test accuracy.

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arXiv2021

Learning Under Delayed Feedback: Implicitly Adapting to Gradient Delays

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems, where several machines act asynchronously in parallel while sharing a common memory. We propose a robust training method for the constrained setting and derive non asymptotic convergence guarantees that do not depend on prior knowledge of update delays, objective smoothness, and gradient variance. Conversely, existing methods for this setting crucially rely on this prior knowledge, which render them unsuitable for essentially all shared-resources computational environments, such as clouds and data centers. Concretely, existing approaches are unable to accommodate changes in the delays which result from dynamic allocation of the machines, while our method implicitly adapts to such changes.

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arXiv2021

Generative Minimization Networks: Training GANs Without Competition

Many applications in machine learning can be framed as minimization problems and solved efficiently using gradient-based techniques. However, recent applications of generative models, particularly GANs, have triggered interest in solving min-max games for which standard optimization techniques are often not suitable. Among known problems experienced by practitioners is the lack of convergence guarantees or convergence to a non-optimum cycle. At the heart of these problems is the min-max structure of the GAN objective which creates non-trivial dependencies between the players. We propose to address this problem by optimizing a different objective that circumvents the min-max structure using the notion of duality gap from game theory. We provide novel convergence guarantees on this objective and demonstrate why the obtained limit point solves the problem better than known techniques.

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arXiv2019

UniXGrad: A Universal, Adaptive Algorithm with Optimal Guarantees for Constrained Optimization

We propose a novel adaptive, accelerated algorithm for the stochastic constrained convex optimization setting. Our method, which is inspired by the Mirror-Prox method, \emph{simultaneously} achieves the optimal rates for smooth/non-smooth problems with either deterministic/stochastic first-order oracles. This is done without any prior knowledge of the smoothness nor the noise properties of the problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first adaptive, unified algorithm that achieves the optimal rates in the constrained setting. We demonstrate the practical performance of our framework through extensive numerical experiments.

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arXiv2019

Adaptive Input Estimation in Linear Dynamical Systems with Applications to Learning-from-Observations

We address the problem of estimating the inputs of a dynamical system from measurements of the system's outputs. To this end, we introduce a novel estimation algorithm that explicitly trades off bias and variance to optimally reduce the overall estimation error. This optimal trade-off is done efficiently and adaptively in every time step. Experimentally, we show that our method often produces estimates with substantially lower error compared to the state-of-the-art. Finally, we consider the more complex \emph{Learning-from-Observations} framework, where an agent should learn a controller from the outputs of an expert's demonstration. We incorporate our estimation algorithm as a building block inside this framework and show that it enables learning controllers successfully.

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arXiv2019

Continuous DR-submodular Maximization: Structure and Algorithms

DR-submodular continuous functions are important objectives with wide real-world applications spanning MAP inference in determinantal point processes (DPPs), and mean-field inference for probabilistic submodular models, amongst others. DR-submodularity captures a subclass of non-convex functions that enables both exact minimization and approximate maximization in polynomial time. In this work we study the problem of maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular continuous functions under general down-closed convex constraints. We start by investigating geometric properties that underlie such objectives, e.g., a strong relation between (approximately) stationary points and global optimum is proved. These properties are then used to devise two optimization algorithms with provable guarantees. Concretely, we first devise a "two-phase" algorithm with $1/4$ approximation guarantee. This algorithm allows the use of existing methods for finding (approximately) stationary points as a subroutine, thus, harnessing recent progress in non-convex optimization. Then we present a non-monotone Frank-Wolfe variant with $1/e$ approximation guarantee and sublinear convergence rate. Finally, we extend our approach to a broader class of generalized DR-submodular continuous functions, which captures a wider spectrum of applications. Our theoretical findings are validated on synthetic and real-world problem instances.

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arXiv2019

Online Variance Reduction with Mixtures

Adaptive importance sampling for stochastic optimization is a promising approach that offers improved convergence through variance reduction. In this work, we propose a new framework for variance reduction that enables the use of mixtures over predefined sampling distributions, which can naturally encode prior knowledge about the data. While these sampling distributions are fixed, the mixture weights are adapted during the optimization process. We propose VRM, a novel and efficient adaptive scheme that asymptotically recovers the best mixture weights in hindsight and can also accommodate sampling distributions over sets of points. We empirically demonstrate the versatility of VRM in a range of applications.

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arXiv2019

Multi-Player Bandits: The Adversarial Case

We consider a setting where multiple players sequentially choose among a common set of actions (arms). Motivated by a cognitive radio networks application, we assume that players incur a loss upon colliding, and that communication between players is not possible. Existing approaches assume that the system is stationary. Yet this assumption is often violated in practice, e.g., due to signal strength fluctuations. In this work, we design the first Multi-player Bandit algorithm that provably works in arbitrarily changing environments, where the losses of the arms may even be chosen by an adversary. This resolves an open problem posed by Rosenski, Shamir, and Szlak (2016).

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arXiv2019

A Universal Algorithm for Variational Inequalities Adaptive to Smoothness and Noise

We consider variational inequalities coming from monotone operators, a setting that includes convex minimization and convex-concave saddle-point problems. We assume an access to potentially noisy unbiased values of the monotone operators and assess convergence through a compatible gap function which corresponds to the standard optimality criteria in the aforementioned subcases. We present a universal algorithm for these inequalities based on the Mirror-Prox algorithm. Concretely, our algorithm simultaneously achieves the optimal rates for the smooth/non-smooth, and noisy/noiseless settings. This is done without any prior knowledge of these properties, and in the general set-up of arbitrary norms and compatible Bregman divergences. For convex minimization and convex-concave saddle-point problems, this leads to new adaptive algorithms. Our method relies on a novel yet simple adaptive choice of the step-size, which can be seen as the appropriate extension of AdaGrad to handle constrained problems.

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arXiv2018

Online Adaptive Methods, Universality and Acceleration

We present a novel method for convex unconstrained optimization that, without any modifications, ensures: (i) accelerated convergence rate for smooth objectives, (ii) standard convergence rate in the general (non-smooth) setting, and (iii) standard convergence rate in the stochastic optimization setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that simultaneously applies to all of the above settings. At the heart of our method is an adaptive learning rate rule that employs importance weights, in the spirit of adaptive online learning algorithms (Duchi et al., 2011; Levy, 2017), combined with an update that linearly couples two sequences, in the spirit of (Allen-Zhu and Orecchia, 2017). An empirical examination of our method demonstrates its applicability to the above mentioned scenarios and corroborates our theoretical findings.

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arXiv2018

Online Variance Reduction for Stochastic Optimization

Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible remedy is to employ non-uniform importance sampling techniques, which take the structure of the dataset into account. In this work, we investigate a recently proposed setting which poses variance reduction as an online optimization problem with bandit feedback. We devise a novel and efficient algorithm for this setting that finds a sequence of importance sampling distributions competitive with the best fixed distribution in hindsight, the first result of this kind. While we present our method for sampling datapoints, it naturally extends to selecting coordinates or even blocks of thereof. Empirical validations underline the benefits of our method in several settings.

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arXiv2018

Faster Rates for Convex-Concave Games

We consider the use of no-regret algorithms to compute equilibria for particular classes of convex-concave games. While standard regret bounds would lead to convergence rates on the order of $O(T^{-1/2})$, recent work \citep{RS13,SALS15} has established $O(1/T)$ rates by taking advantage of a particular class of optimistic prediction algorithms. In this work we go further, showing that for a particular class of games one achieves a $O(1/T^2)$ rate, and we show how this applies to the Frank-Wolfe method and recovers a similar bound \citep{D15}. We also show that such no-regret techniques can even achieve a linear rate, $O(\exp(-T))$, for equilibrium computation under additional curvature assumptions.

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arXiv2017

An Online Learning Approach to Generative Adversarial Networks

We consider the problem of training generative models with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Although GANs can accurately model complex distributions, they are known to be difficult to train due to instabilities caused by a difficult minimax optimization problem. In this paper, we view the problem of training GANs as finding a mixed strategy in a zero-sum game. Building on ideas from online learning we propose a novel training method named Chekhov GAN 1 . On the theory side, we show that our method provably converges to an equilibrium for semi-shallow GAN architectures, i.e. architectures where the discriminator is a one layer network and the generator is arbitrary. On the practical side, we develop an efficient heuristic guided by our theoretical results, which we apply to commonly used deep GAN architectures. On several real world tasks our approach exhibits improved stability and performance compared to standard GAN training.

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