arXiv subjects

Yin Tat Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Yin Tat Lee.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Strong Self-Concordance and Sampling

Motivated by the Dikin walk, we develop aspects of an interior-point theory for sampling in high dimension. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric parameter and the notion of strong self-concordance. These properties imply that the corresponding Dikin walk mixes in $\tilde{O}(n\barν)$ steps from a warm start in a convex body in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ using a strongly self-concordant barrier with symmetric self-concordance parameter $\barν$. For many natural barriers, $\barν$ is roughly bounded by $ν$, the standard self-concordance parameter. We show that this property and strong self-concordance hold for the Lee-Sidford barrier. As a consequence, we obtain the first walk to mix in $\tilde{O}(n^{2})$ steps for an arbitrary polytope in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$. Strong self-concordance for other barriers leads to an interesting (and unexpected) connection -- for the universal and entropic barriers, it is implied by the KLS conjecture.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Logsmooth Gradient Concentration and Tighter Runtimes for Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

We show that the gradient norm $\|\nabla f(x)\|$ for $x \sim \exp(-f(x))$, where $f$ is strongly convex and smooth, concentrates tightly around its mean. This removes a barrier in the prior state-of-the-art analysis for the well-studied Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm for sampling from a strongly logconcave distribution. We correspondingly demonstrate that Metropolized HMC mixes in $\tilde{O}(κd)$ iterations, improving upon the $\tilde{O}(κ^{1.5}\sqrt{d} + κd)$ runtime of (Dwivedi et. al. '18, Chen et. al. '19) by a factor $(κ/d)^{1/2}$ when the condition number $κ$ is large. Our mixing time analysis introduces several techniques which to our knowledge have not appeared in the literature and may be of independent interest, including restrictions to a nonconvex set with good conductance behavior, and a new reduction technique for boosting a constant-accuracy total variation guarantee under weak warmness assumptions. This is the first high-accuracy mixing time result for logconcave distributions using only first-order function information which achieves linear dependence on $κ$; we also give evidence that this dependence is likely to be necessary for standard Metropolized first-order methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Composite Logconcave Sampling with a Restricted Gaussian Oracle

We consider sampling from composite densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ of the form $dπ(x) \propto \exp(-f(x) - g(x))dx$ for well-conditioned $f$ and convex (but possibly non-smooth) $g$, a family generalizing restrictions to a convex set, through the abstraction of a restricted Gaussian oracle. For $f$ with condition number $κ$, our algorithm runs in $O \left(κ^2 d \log^2\tfrac{κd}ε\right)$ iterations, each querying a gradient of $f$ and a restricted Gaussian oracle, to achieve total variation distance $ε$. The restricted Gaussian oracle, which draws samples from a distribution whose negative log-likelihood sums a quadratic and $g$, has been previously studied and is a natural extension of the proximal oracle used in composite optimization. Our algorithm is conceptually simple and obtains stronger provable guarantees and greater generality than existing methods for composite sampling. We conduct experiments showing our algorithm vastly improves upon the hit-and-run algorithm for sampling the restriction of a (non-diagonal) Gaussian to the positive orthant.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

An Improved Cutting Plane Method for Convex Optimization, Convex-Concave Games and its Applications

Given a separation oracle for a convex set $K \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ that is contained in a box of radius $R$, the goal is to either compute a point in $K$ or prove that $K$ does not contain a ball of radius $ε$. We propose a new cutting plane algorithm that uses an optimal $O(n \log (κ))$ evaluations of the oracle and an additional $O(n^2)$ time per evaluation, where $κ= nR/ε$. $\bullet$ This improves upon Vaidya's $O( \text{SO} \cdot n \log (κ) + n^{ω+1} \log (κ))$ time algorithm [Vaidya, FOCS 1989a] in terms of polynomial dependence on $n$, where $ω< 2.373$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication and $\text{SO}$ is the time for oracle evaluation. $\bullet$ This improves upon Lee-Sidford-Wong's $O( \text{SO} \cdot n \log (κ) + n^3 \log^{O(1)} (κ))$ time algorithm [Lee, Sidford and Wong, FOCS 2015] in terms of dependence on $κ$. For many important applications in economics, $κ= Ω(\exp(n))$ and this leads to a significant difference between $\log(κ)$ and $\mathrm{poly}(\log (κ))$. We also provide evidence that the $n^2$ time per evaluation cannot be improved and thus our running time is optimal. A bottleneck of previous cutting plane methods is to compute leverage scores, a measure of the relative importance of past constraints. Our result is achieved by a novel multi-layered data structure for leverage score maintenance, which is a sophisticated combination of diverse techniques such as random projection, batched low-rank update, inverse maintenance, polynomial interpolation, and fast rectangular matrix multiplication. Interestingly, our method requires a combination of different fast rectangular matrix multiplication algorithms.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Acceleration with a Ball Optimization Oracle

Consider an oracle which takes a point $x$ and returns the minimizer of a convex function $f$ in an $\ell_2$ ball of radius $r$ around $x$. It is straightforward to show that roughly $r^{-1}\log\frac{1}ε$ calls to the oracle suffice to find an $ε$-approximate minimizer of $f$ in an $\ell_2$ unit ball. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not optimal: we design an accelerated algorithm which attains an $ε$-approximate minimizer with roughly $r^{-2/3} \log \frac{1}ε$ oracle queries, and give a matching lower bound. Further, we implement ball optimization oracles for functions with locally stable Hessians using a variant of Newton's method. The resulting algorithm applies to a number of problems of practical and theoretical import, improving upon previous results for logistic and $\ell_\infty$ regression and achieving guarantees comparable to the state-of-the-art for $\ell_p$ regression.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

A near-optimal algorithm for approximating the John Ellipsoid

We develop a simple and efficient algorithm for approximating the John Ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope. Our algorithm is near optimal in the sense that our time complexity matches the current best verification algorithm. We also provide the MATLAB code for further research.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Faster Matroid Intersection

In this paper we consider the classic matroid intersection problem: given two matroids $\M_{1}=(V,\I_{1})$ and $\M_{2}=(V,\I_{2})$ defined over a common ground set $V$, compute a set $S\in\I_{1}\cap\I_{2}$ of largest possible cardinality, denoted by $r$. We consider this problem both in the setting where each $\M_{i}$ is accessed through an independence oracle, i.e. a routine which returns whether or not a set $S\in\I_{i}$ in $\indep$ time, and the setting where each $\M_{i}$ is accessed through a rank oracle, i.e. a routine which returns the size of the largest independent subset of $S$ in $\M_{i}$ in $\rank$ time. In each setting we provide faster exact and approximate algorithms. Given an independence oracle, we provide an exact $O(nr\log r \indep)$ time algorithm. This improves upon the running time of $O(nr^{1.5} \indep)$ due to Cunningham in 1986 and $\tilde{O}(n^{2} \indep+n^{3})$ due to Lee, Sidford, and Wong in 2015. We also provide two algorithms which compute a $(1-ε)$-approximate solution to matroid intersection running in times $\tilde{O}(n^{1.5}/\eps^{1.5} \indep)$ and $\tilde{O}((n^{2}r^{-1}ε^{-2}+r^{1.5}ε^{-4.5}) \indep)$, respectively. These results improve upon the $O(nr/\eps \indep)$-time algorithm of Cunningham as noted recently by Chekuri and Quanrud. Given a rank oracle, we provide algorithms with even better dependence on $n$ and $r$. We provide an $O(n\sqrt{r}\log n \rank)$-time exact algorithm and an $O(nε^{-1}\log n \rank)$-time algorithm which obtains a $(1-\eps)$-approximation to the matroid intersection problem. The former result improves over the $\tilde{O}(nr \rankt+n^{3})$-time algorithm by Lee, Sidford, and Wong. The rank oracle is of particular interest as the matroid intersection problem with this oracle is a special case of the submodular function minimization problem with an evaluation oracle.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Computing Circle Packing Representations of Planar Graphs

The Circle Packing Theorem states that every planar graph can be represented as the tangency graph of a family of internally-disjoint circles. A well-known generalization is the Primal-Dual Circle Packing Theorem for 3-connected planar graphs. The existence of these representations has widespread applications in theoretical computer science and mathematics; however, the algorithmic aspect has received relatively little attention. In this work, we present an algorithm based on convex optimization for computing a primal-dual circle packing representation of maximal planar graphs, i.e. triangulations. This in turn gives an algorithm for computing a circle packing representation of any planar graph. Both take $\widetilde{O}(n \log(R/\varepsilon))$ expected run-time to produce a solution that is $\varepsilon$ close to a true representation, where $R$ is the ratio between the maximum and minimum circle radius in the true representation.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

A Generalized Central Limit Conjecture for Convex Bodies

The central limit theorem for convex bodies says that with high probability the marginal of an isotropic log-concave distribution along a random direction is close to a Gaussian, with the quantitative difference determined asymptotically by the Cheeger/Poincare/KLS constant. Here we propose a generalized CLT for marginals along random directions drawn from any isotropic log-concave distribution; namely, for $x,y$ drawn independently from isotropic log-concave densities $p,q$, the random variable $\langle x,y\rangle$ is close to Gaussian. Our main result is that this generalized CLT is quantitatively equivalent (up to a small factor) to the KLS conjecture. Any polynomial improvement in the current KLS bound of $n^{1/4}$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$ implies the generalized CLT, and vice versa. This tight connection suggests that the generalized CLT might provide insight into basic open questions in asymptotic convex geometry.

math.FA↗

arXiv2019

The Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling

Sampling from log-concave distributions is a well researched problem that has many applications in statistics and machine learning. We study the distributions of the form $p^{*}\propto\exp(-f(x))$, where $f:\mathbb{R}^{d}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ has an $L$-Lipschitz gradient and is $m$-strongly convex. In our paper, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on the underdamped Langevin diffusion (ULD). It can achieve $ε\cdot D$ error (in 2-Wasserstein distance) in $\tilde{O}\left(κ^{7/6}/ε^{1/3}+κ/ε^{2/3}\right)$ steps, where $D\overset{\mathrm{def}}{=}\sqrt{\frac{d}{m}}$ is the effective diameter of the problem and $κ\overset{\mathrm{def}}{=}\frac{L}{m}$ is the condition number. Our algorithm performs significantly faster than the previously best known algorithm for solving this problem, which requires $\tilde{O}\left(κ^{1.5}/ε\right)$ steps. Moreover, our algorithm can be easily parallelized to require only $O(κ\log\frac{1}ε)$ parallel steps. To solve the sampling problem, we propose a new framework to discretize stochastic differential equations. We apply this framework to discretize and simulate ULD, which converges to the target distribution $p^{*}$. The framework can be used to solve not only the log-concave sampling problem, but any problem that involves simulating (stochastic) differential equations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Near-optimal method for highly smooth convex optimization

We propose a near-optimal method for highly smooth convex optimization. More precisely, in the oracle model where one obtains the $p^{th}$ order Taylor expansion of a function at the query point, we propose a method with rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(1/k^{\frac{ 3p +1}{2}})$ after $k$ queries to the oracle for any convex function whose $p^{th}$ order derivative is Lipschitz.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Solving Empirical Risk Minimization in the Current Matrix Multiplication Time

Many convex problems in machine learning and computer science share the same form: \begin{align*} \min_{x} \sum_{i} f_i( A_i x + b_i), \end{align*} where $f_i$ are convex functions on $\mathbb{R}^{n_i}$ with constant $n_i$, $A_i \in \mathbb{R}^{n_i \times d}$, $b_i \in \mathbb{R}^{n_i}$ and $\sum_i n_i = n$. This problem generalizes linear programming and includes many problems in empirical risk minimization. In this paper, we give an algorithm that runs in time \begin{align*} O^* ( ( n^ω + n^{2.5 - α/2} + n^{2+ 1/6} ) \log (n / δ) ) \end{align*} where $ω$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication, $α$ is the dual exponent of matrix multiplication, and $δ$ is the relative accuracy. Note that the runtime has only a log dependence on the condition numbers or other data dependent parameters and these are captured in $δ$. For the current bound $ω\sim 2.38$ [Vassilevska Williams'12, Le Gall'14] and $α\sim 0.31$ [Le Gall, Urrutia'18], our runtime $O^* ( n^ω \log (n / δ))$ matches the current best for solving a dense least squares regression problem, a special case of the problem we consider. Very recently, [Alman'18] proved that all the current known techniques can not give a better $ω$ below $2.168$ which is larger than our $2+1/6$. Our result generalizes the very recent result of solving linear programs in the current matrix multiplication time [Cohen, Lee, Song'19] to a more broad class of problems. Our algorithm proposes two concepts which are different from [Cohen, Lee, Song'19] : $\bullet$ We give a robust deterministic central path method, whereas the previous one is a stochastic central path which updates weights by a random sparse vector. $\bullet$ We propose an efficient data-structure to maintain the central path of interior point methods even when the weights update vector is dense.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Eldan's Stochastic Localization and the KLS Conjecture: Isoperimetry, Concentration and Mixing

We show that the Cheeger constant for $n$-dimensional isotropic logconcave measures is $O(n^{1/4})$, improving on the previous best bound of $O(n^{1/3}\sqrt{\log n}).$ As corollaries we obtain the same improved bound on the thin-shell estimate, Poincaré constant and Lipschitz concentration constant and an alternative proof of this bound for the isotropic (slicing) constant; it also follows that the ball walk for sampling from an isotropic logconcave density in ${\bf R}^{n}$ converges in $O^{*}(n^{2.5})$ steps from a warm start. The proof is based on gradually transforming any logconcave density to one that has a significant Gaussian factor via a Martingale process. Extending this proof technique, we prove that the log-Sobolev constant of any isotropic logconcave density in ${\bf R}^{n}$ with support of diameter $D$ is $Ω(1/D)$, resolving a question posed by Frieze and Kannan in 1997. This is asymptotically the best possible estimate and improves on the previous bound of $Ω(1/D^{2})$ by Kannan-Lovász-Montenegro. It follows that for any isotropic logconcave density, the ball walk with step size $δ=Θ(1/\sqrt{n})$ mixes in $O\left(n^{2}D\right)$ proper steps from \emph{any }starting point. This improves on the previous best bound of $O(n^{2}D^{2})$ and is also asymptotically tight. The new bound leads to the following large deviation inequality for an $L$-Lipschitz function $g$ over an isotropic logconcave density $p$: for any $t>0$, \[ Pr_{x\sim p}\left(\left|g(x)-\bar{g}\right|\geq L\cdot t\right)\leq\exp(-\frac{c\cdot t^{2}}{t+\sqrt{n}}) \] where $\bar{g}$ is the median or mean of $g$ for $x\sim p$; this generalizes and improves on previous bounds by Paouris and by Guedon-Milman. The technique also bounds the ``small ball'' probability in terms of the Cheeger constant, and recovers the current best bound.

math.FA↗

arXiv2018

Algorithmic Theory of ODEs and Sampling from Well-conditioned Logconcave Densities

Sampling logconcave functions arising in statistics and machine learning has been a subject of intensive study. Recent developments include analyses for Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). While both approaches have dimension-independent bounds for the underlying $\mathit{continuous}$ processes under sufficiently strong smoothness conditions, the resulting discrete algorithms have complexity and number of function evaluations growing with the dimension. Motivated by this problem, in this paper, we give a general algorithm for solving multivariate ordinary differential equations whose solution is close to the span of a known basis of functions (e.g., polynomials or piecewise polynomials). The resulting algorithm has polylogarithmic depth and essentially tight runtime - it is nearly linear in the size of the representation of the solution. We apply this to the sampling problem to obtain a nearly linear implementation of HMC for a broad class of smooth, strongly logconcave densities, with the number of iterations (parallel depth) and gradient evaluations being $\mathit{polylogarithmic}$ in the dimension (rather than polynomial as in previous work). This class includes the widely-used loss function for logistic regression with incoherent weight matrices and has been subject of much study recently. We also give a faster algorithm with $ \mathit{polylogarithmic~depth}$ for the more general and standard class of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz gradient. These results are based on (1) an improved contraction bound for the exact HMC process and (2) logarithmic bounds on the degree of polynomials that approximate solutions of the differential equations arising in implementing HMC.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

A Nearly-Linear Bound for Chasing Nested Convex Bodies

Friedman and Linial introduced the convex body chasing problem to explore the interplay between geometry and competitive ratio in metrical task systems. In convex body chasing, at each time step $t \in \mathbb{N}$, the online algorithm receives a request in the form of a convex body $K_t \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ and must output a point $x_t \in K_t$. The goal is to minimize the total movement between consecutive output points, where the distance is measured in some given norm. This problem is still far from being understood, and recently Bansal et al. gave an algorithm for the nested version, where each convex body is contained within the previous one. We propose a different strategy which is $O(d \log d)$-competitive algorithm for this nested convex body chasing problem, improving substantially over previous work. Our algorithm works for any norm. This result is almost tight, given an $Ω(d)$ lower bound for the $\ell_{\infty}$.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

Adversarial Examples from Cryptographic Pseudo-Random Generators

In our recent work (Bubeck, Price, Razenshteyn, arXiv:1805.10204) we argued that adversarial examples in machine learning might be due to an inherent computational hardness of the problem. More precisely, we constructed a binary classification task for which (i) a robust classifier exists; yet no non-trivial accuracy can be obtained with an efficient algorithm in (ii) the statistical query model. In the present paper we significantly strengthen both (i) and (ii): we now construct a task which admits (i') a maximally robust classifier (that is it can tolerate perturbations of size comparable to the size of the examples themselves); and moreover we prove computational hardness of learning this task under (ii') a standard cryptographic assumption.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Competitively Chasing Convex Bodies

Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of sets in some metric space. In the $\mathcal{F}$-chasing problem, an online algorithm observes a request sequence of sets in $\mathcal{F}$ and responds (online) by giving a sequence of points in these sets. The movement cost is the distance between consecutive such points. The competitive ratio is the worst case ratio (over request sequences) between the total movement of the online algorithm and the smallest movement one could have achieved by knowing in advance the request sequence. The family $\mathcal{F}$ is said to be chaseable if there exists an online algorithm with finite competitive ratio. In 1991, Linial and Friedman conjectured that the family of convex sets in Euclidean space is chaseable. We prove this conjecture.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

The Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits Conjecture

The Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits conjecture says that the Cheeger constant of any logconcave density is achieved to within a universal, dimension-independent constant factor by a hyperplane-induced subset. Here we survey the origin and consequences of the conjecture (in geometry, probability, information theory and algorithms) as well as recent progress resulting in the current best bounds. The conjecture has lead to several techniques of general interest.

math.PR↗