Generative Adversarial Bayesian Optimization for Surrogate Objectives

Offline model-based policy optimization seeks to optimize a learned surrogate objective function without querying the true oracle objective during optimization. However, inaccurate surrogate model predictions are frequently encountered along the optimization trajectory. To address this limitation, we propose generative adversarial Bayesian optimization (GABO) using adaptive source critic regularization, a task-agnostic framework for Bayesian optimization that employs a Lipschitz-bounded source critic model to constrain the optimization trajectory to regions where the surrogate function is reliable. We show that under certain assumptions for the continuous input space prior, our algorithm dynamically adjusts the strength of the source critic regularization. GABO outperforms existing baselines on a number of different offline optimization tasks across a variety of scientific domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/michael-s-yao/gabo

Rethinking Fairness for Human-AI Collaboration

Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable outcome in human-AI collaboration. Yet, recent studies have shown that selective compliance with fair algorithms can amplify discrimination relative to the prior human policy. As a consequence, ensuring equitable outcomes requires fundamentally different algorithmic design principles that ensure robustness to the decision-maker's (a priori unknown) compliance pattern. We define the notion of compliance-robustly fair algorithmic recommendations that are guaranteed to (weakly) improve fairness in decisions, regardless of the human's compliance pattern. We propose a simple optimization strategy to identify the best performance-improving compliance-robustly fair policy. However, we show that it may be infeasible to design algorithmic recommendations that are simultaneously fair in isolation, compliance-robustly fair, and more accurate than the human policy; thus, if our goal is to improve the equity and accuracy of human-AI collaboration, it may not be desirable to enforce traditional fairness constraints.

Optimal Heterogeneous Collaborative Linear Regression and Contextual Bandits

Large and complex datasets are often collected from several, possibly heterogeneous sources. Collaborative learning methods improve efficiency by leveraging commonalities across datasets while accounting for possible differences among them. Here we study collaborative linear regression and contextual bandits, where each instance's associated parameters are equal to a global parameter plus a sparse instance-specific term. We propose a novel two-stage estimator called MOLAR that leverages this structure by first constructing an entry-wise median of the instances' linear regression estimates, and then shrinking the instance-specific estimates towards the median. MOLAR improves the dependence of the estimation error on the data dimension, compared to independent least squares estimates. We then apply MOLAR to develop methods for sparsely heterogeneous collaborative contextual bandits, which lead to improved regret guarantees compared to independent bandit methods. We further show that our methods are minimax optimal by providing a number of lower bounds. Finally, we support the efficiency of our methods by performing experiments on both synthetic data and the PISA dataset on student educational outcomes from heterogeneous countries.

Decision-Aware Learning for Optimizing Health Supply Chains

We study the problem of allocating limited supply of medical resources in developing countries, in particular, Sierra Leone. We address this problem by combining machine learning (to predict demand) with optimization (to optimize allocations). A key challenge is the need to align the loss function used to train the machine learning model with the decision loss associated with the downstream optimization problem. Traditional solutions have limited flexibility in the model architecture and scale poorly to large datasets. We propose a decision-aware learning algorithm that uses a novel Taylor expansion of the optimal decision loss to derive the machine learning loss. Importantly, our approach only requires a simple re-weighting of the training data, ensuring it is both flexible and scalable, e.g., we incorporate it into a random forest trained using a multitask learning framework. We apply our framework to optimize the distribution of essential medicines in collaboration with policymakers in Sierra Leone; highly uncertain demand and limited budgets currently result in excessive unmet demand. Out-of-sample results demonstrate that our end-to-end approach can significantly reduce unmet demand across 1040 health facilities throughout Sierra Leone.

Bandits for Online Calibration: An Application to Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms

We describe the current content moderation strategy employed by Meta to remove policy-violating content from its platforms. Meta relies on both handcrafted and learned risk models to flag potentially violating content for human review. Our approach aggregates these risk models into a single ranking score, calibrating them to prioritize more reliable risk models. A key challenge is that violation trends change over time, affecting which risk models are most reliable. Our system additionally handles production challenges such as changing risk models and novel risk models. We use a contextual bandit to update the calibration in response to such trends. Our approach increases Meta's top-line metric for measuring the effectiveness of its content moderation strategy by 13%.

Learning Across Bandits in High Dimension via Robust Statistics

Decision-makers often face the "many bandits" problem, where one must simultaneously learn across related but heterogeneous contextual bandit instances. For instance, a large retailer may wish to dynamically learn product demand across many stores to solve pricing or inventory problems, making it desirable to learn jointly for stores serving similar customers; alternatively, a hospital network may wish to dynamically learn patient risk across many providers to allocate personalized interventions, making it desirable to learn jointly for hospitals serving similar patient populations. We study the setting where the unknown parameter in each bandit instance can be decomposed into a global parameter plus a sparse instance-specific term. Then, we propose a novel two-stage estimator that exploits this structure in a sample-efficient way by using a combination of robust statistics (to learn across similar instances) and LASSO regression (to debias the results). We embed this estimator within a bandit algorithm, and prove that it improves asymptotic regret bounds in the context dimension $d$; this improvement is exponential for data-poor instances. We further demonstrate how our results depend on the underlying network structure of bandit instances.

Safely Bridging Offline and Online Reinforcement Learning

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is exploring safely. We propose a natural safety property -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy (adaptively estimated from all data observed thus far), up to a per-episode exploration budget. We then design an algorithm that uses a UCB reinforcement learning policy for exploration, but overrides it as needed to ensure safety with high probability. We experimentally validate our results on a sepsis treatment task, demonstrating that our algorithm can learn while ensuring good performance compared to the baseline policy for every patient.

Robust Generalization of Quadratic Neural Networks via Function Identification

A key challenge facing deep learning is that neural networks are often not robust to shifts in the underlying data distribution. We study this problem from the perspective of the statistical concept of parameter identification. Generalization bounds from learning theory often assume that the test distribution is close to the training distribution. In contrast, if we can identify the "true" parameters, then the model generalizes to arbitrary distribution shifts. However, neural networks are typically overparameterized, making parameter identification impossible. We show that for quadratic neural networks, we can identify the function represented by the model even though we cannot identify its parameters. Thus, we can obtain robust generalization bounds even in the overparameterized setting. We leverage this result to obtain new bounds for contextual bandits and transfer learning with quadratic neural networks. Overall, our results suggest that we can improve robustness of neural networks by designing models that can represent the true data generating process. In practice, the true data generating process is often very complex; thus, we study how our framework might connect to neural module networks, which are designed to break down complex tasks into compositions of simpler ones. We prove robust generalization bounds when individual neural modules are identifiable.

Improving Human Decision-Making with Machine Learning

A key aspect of human intelligence is their ability to convey their knowledge to others in succinct forms. However, despite their predictive power, current machine learning models are largely blackboxes, making it difficult for humans to extract useful insights. Focusing on sequential decision-making, we design a novel machine learning algorithm that conveys its insights to humans in the form of interpretable "tips". Our algorithm selects the tip that best bridges the gap in performance between human users and the optimal policy. We evaluate our approach through a series of randomized controlled user studies where participants manage a virtual kitchen. Our experiments show that the tips generated by our algorithm can significantly improve human performance relative to intuitive baselines. In addition, we discuss a number of empirical insights that can help inform the design of algorithms intended for human-AI interfaces. For instance, we find evidence that participants do not simply blindly follow our tips; instead, they combine them with their own experience to discover additional strategies for improving performance.