Testing with Non-identically Distributed Samples

We examine the extent to which sublinear-sample property testing and estimation applies to settings where samples are independently but not identically distributed. Specifically, we consider the following distributional property testing framework: Suppose there is a set of distributions over a discrete support of size $k$, $\textbf{p}_1, \textbf{p}_2,\ldots,\textbf{p}_T$, and we obtain $c$ independent draws from each distribution. Suppose the goal is to learn or test a property of the average distribution, $\textbf{p}_{\mathrm{avg}}$. This setup models a number of important practical settings where the individual distributions correspond to heterogeneous entities -- either individuals, chronologically distinct time periods, spatially separated data sources, etc. From a learning standpoint, even with $c=1$ samples from each distribution, $\Theta(k/\varepsilon^2)$ samples are necessary and sufficient to learn $\textbf{p}_{\mathrm{avg}}$ to within error $\varepsilon$ in TV distance. To test uniformity or identity -- distinguishing the case that $\textbf{p}_{\mathrm{avg}}$ is equal to some reference distribution, versus has $\ell_1$ distance at least $\varepsilon$ from the reference distribution, we show that a linear number of samples in $k$ is necessary given $c=1$ samples from each distribution. In contrast, for $c \ge 2$, we recover the usual sublinear sample testing of the i.i.d. setting: we show that $O(\sqrt{k}/\varepsilon^2 + 1/\varepsilon^4)$ samples are sufficient, matching the optimal sample complexity in the i.i.d. case in the regime where $\varepsilon \ge k^{-1/4}$. Additionally, we show that in the $c=2$ case, there is a constant $\rho > 0$ such that even in the linear regime with $\rho k$ samples, no tester that considers the multiset of samples (ignoring which samples were drawn from the same $\textbf{p}_i$) can perform uniformity testing.

Harnessing the Power of Choices in Decision Tree Learning

We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best attribute. Our algorithm, Top-$k$, considers the $k$ best attributes as possible splits instead of just the single best attribute. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, the power of this simple generalization. We first prove a {\sl greediness hierarchy theorem} showing that for every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, Top-$(k+1)$ can be dramatically more powerful than Top-$k$: there are data distributions for which the former achieves accuracy $1-\varepsilon$, whereas the latter only achieves accuracy $\frac1{2}+\varepsilon$. We then show, through extensive experiments, that Top-$k$ outperforms the two main approaches to decision tree learning: classic greedy algorithms and more recent "optimal decision tree" algorithms. On one hand, Top-$k$ consistently enjoys significant accuracy gains over greedy algorithms across a wide range of benchmarks. On the other hand, Top-$k$ is markedly more scalable than optimal decision tree algorithms and is able to handle dataset and feature set sizes that remain far beyond the reach of these algorithms.

Multiclass Learnability Does Not Imply Sample Compression

A hypothesis class admits a sample compression scheme, if for every sample labeled by a hypothesis from the class, it is possible to retain only a small subsample, using which the labels on the entire sample can be inferred. The size of the compression scheme is an upper bound on the size of the subsample produced. Every learnable binary hypothesis class (which must necessarily have finite VC dimension) admits a sample compression scheme of size only a finite function of its VC dimension, independent of the sample size. For multiclass hypothesis classes, the analog of VC dimension is the DS dimension. We show that the analogous statement pertaining to sample compression is not true for multiclass hypothesis classes: every learnable multiclass hypothesis class, which must necessarily have finite DS dimension, does not admit a sample compression scheme of size only a finite function of its DS dimension.

Provable benefits of score matching

Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood (ML) for estimating a probability distribution parametrized up to a constant of proportionality. By fitting the ''score'' of the distribution, it sidesteps the need to compute this constant of proportionality (which is often intractable). While score matching and variants thereof are popular in practice, precise theoretical understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs with maximum likelihood -- both computational and statistical -- are not well understood. In this work, we give the first example of a natural exponential family of distributions such that the score matching loss is computationally efficient to optimize, and has a comparable statistical efficiency to ML, while the ML loss is intractable to optimize using a gradient-based method. The family consists of exponentials of polynomials of fixed degree, and our result can be viewed as a continuous analogue of recent developments in the discrete setting. Precisely, we show: (1) Designing a zeroth-order or first-order oracle for optimizing the maximum likelihood loss is NP-hard. (2) Maximum likelihood has a statistical efficiency polynomial in the ambient dimension and the radius of the parameters of the family. (3) Minimizing the score matching loss is both computationally and statistically efficient, with complexity polynomial in the ambient dimension.

A Characterization of List Learnability

A classical result in learning theory shows the equivalence of PAC learnability of binary hypothesis classes and the finiteness of VC dimension. Extending this to the multiclass setting was an open problem, which was settled in a recent breakthrough result characterizing multiclass PAC learnability via the DS dimension introduced earlier by Daniely and Shalev-Shwartz. In this work we consider list PAC learning where the goal is to output a list of $k$ predictions. List learning algorithms have been developed in several settings before and indeed, list learning played an important role in the recent characterization of multiclass learnability. In this work we ask: when is it possible to $k$-list learn a hypothesis class? We completely characterize $k$-list learnability in terms of a generalization of DS dimension that we call the $k$-DS dimension. Generalizing the recent characterization of multiclass learnability, we show that a hypothesis class is $k$-list learnable if and only if the $k$-DS dimension is finite.

Pitfalls of Gaussians as a noise distribution in NCE

Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) is a popular approach for learning probability density functions parameterized up to a constant of proportionality. The main idea is to design a classification problem for distinguishing training data from samples from an easy-to-sample noise distribution $q$, in a manner that avoids having to calculate a partition function. It is well-known that the choice of $q$ can severely impact the computational and statistical efficiency of NCE. In practice, a common choice for $q$ is a Gaussian which matches the mean and covariance of the data. In this paper, we show that such a choice can result in an exponentially bad (in the ambient dimension) conditioning of the Hessian of the loss, even for very simple data distributions. As a consequence, both the statistical and algorithmic complexity for such a choice of $q$ will be problematic in practice, suggesting that more complex noise distributions are essential to the success of NCE.

Universal Approximation for Log-concave Distributions using Well-conditioned Normalizing Flows

Normalizing flows are a widely used class of latent-variable generative models with a tractable likelihood. Affine-coupling (Dinh et al, 2014-16) models are a particularly common type of normalizing flows, for which the Jacobian of the latent-to-observable-variable transformation is triangular, allowing the likelihood to be computed in linear time. Despite the widespread usage of affine couplings, the special structure of the architecture makes understanding their representational power challenging. The question of universal approximation was only recently resolved by three parallel papers (Huang et al.,2020;Zhang et al.,2020;Koehler et al.,2020) -- who showed reasonably regular distributions can be approximated arbitrarily well using affine couplings -- albeit with networks with a nearly-singular Jacobian. As ill-conditioned Jacobians are an obstacle for likelihood-based training, the fundamental question remains: which distributions can be approximated using well-conditioned affine coupling flows? In this paper, we show that any log-concave distribution can be approximated using well-conditioned affine-coupling flows. In terms of proof techniques, we uncover and leverage deep connections between affine coupling architectures, underdamped Langevin dynamics (a stochastic differential equation often used to sample from Gibbs measures) and H\'enon maps (a structured dynamical system that appears in the study of symplectic diffeomorphisms). Our results also inform the practice of training affine couplings: we approximate a padded version of the input distribution with iid Gaussians -- a strategy which Koehler et al.(2020) empirically observed to result in better-conditioned flows, but had hitherto no theoretical grounding. Our proof can thus be seen as providing theoretical evidence for the benefits of Gaussian padding when training normalizing flows.

Efficient semidefinite-programming-based inference for binary and multi-class MRFs

Probabilistic inference in pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs), i.e. computing the partition function or computing a MAP estimate of the variables, is a foundational problem in probabilistic graphical models. Semidefinite programming relaxations have long been a theoretically powerful tool for analyzing properties of probabilistic inference, but have not been practical owing to the high computational cost of typical solvers for solving the resulting SDPs. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for computing the partition function or MAP estimate in a pairwise MRF by instead exploiting a recently proposed coordinate-descent-based fast semidefinite solver. We also extend semidefinite relaxations from the typical binary MRF to the full multi-class setting, and develop a compact semidefinite relaxation that can again be solved efficiently using the solver. We show that the method substantially outperforms (both in terms of solution quality and speed) the existing state of the art in approximate inference, on benchmark problems drawn from previous work. We also show that our approach can scale to large MRF domains such as fully-connected pairwise CRF models used in computer vision.

Learning Functions over Sets via Permutation Adversarial Networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning functions over sets, i.e., functions that are invariant to permutations of input set items. Recent approaches of pooling individual element embeddings can necessitate extremely large embedding sizes for challenging functions. We address this challenge by allowing standard neural networks like LSTMs to succinctly capture the function over the set. However, to ensure invariance with respect to permutations of set elements, we propose a novel architecture called SPAN that simultaneously learns the function as well as adversarial or worst-case permutations for each input set. The learning problem reduces to a min-max optimization problem that is solved via a simple alternating block coordinate descent technique. We conduct extensive experiments on a variety of set-learning tasks and demonstrate that SPAN learns nearly permutation-invariant functions while still ensuring accuracy on test data. On a variety of tasks sampled from the domains of statistics, graph functions and linear algebra, we show that our method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods such as DeepSets and Janossy Pooling. Finally, we present a case study of how learning set-functions can help extract powerful features for recommendation systems, and show that such a method can be as much as 2% more accurate than carefully hand-tuned features on a real-world recommendation system.