On the Optimal Regret of Locally Private Linear Contextual Bandit

Contextual bandit with linear reward functions is among one of the most extensively studied models in bandit and online learning research. Recently, there has been increasing interest in designing \emph{locally private} linear contextual bandit algorithms, where sensitive information contained in contexts and rewards is protected against leakage to the general public. While the classical linear contextual bandit algorithm admits cumulative regret upper bounds of $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ via multiple alternative methods, it has remained open whether such regret bounds are attainable in the presence of local privacy constraints, with the state-of-the-art result being $\tilde O(T^{3/4})$. In this paper, we show that it is indeed possible to achieve an $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret upper bound for locally private linear contextual bandit. Our solution relies on several new algorithmic and analytical ideas, such as the analysis of mean absolute deviation errors and layered principal component regression in order to achieve small mean absolute deviation errors.

Demand Balancing in Primal-Dual Optimization for Blind Network Revenue Management

This paper proposes a practically efficient algorithm with optimal theoretical regret which solves the classical network revenue management (NRM) problem with unknown, nonparametric demand. Over a time horizon of length $T$, in each time period the retailer needs to decide prices of $N$ types of products which are produced based on $M$ types of resources with unreplenishable initial inventory. When demand is nonparametric with some mild assumptions, Miao and Wang (2021) is the first paper which proposes an algorithm with $O(\text{poly}(N,M,\ln(T))\sqrt{T})$ type of regret (in particular, $\tilde O(N^{3.5}\sqrt{T})$ plus additional high-order terms that are $o(\sqrt{T})$ with sufficiently large $T\gg N$). In this paper, we improve the previous result by proposing a primal-dual optimization algorithm which is not only more practical, but also with an improved regret of $\tilde O(N^{3.25}\sqrt{T})$ free from additional high-order terms. A key technical contribution of the proposed algorithm is the so-called demand balancing, which pairs the primal solution (i.e., the price) in each time period with another price to offset the violation of complementary slackness on resource inventory constraints. Numerical experiments compared with several benchmark algorithms further illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Gender Bias in Large Language Models across Multiple Languages

With the growing deployment of large language models (LLMs) across various applications, assessing the influence of gender biases embedded in LLMs becomes crucial. The topic of gender bias within the realm of natural language processing (NLP) has gained considerable focus, particularly in the context of English. Nonetheless, the investigation of gender bias in languages other than English is still relatively under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. In this work, We examine gender bias in LLMs-generated outputs for different languages. We use three measurements: 1) gender bias in selecting descriptive words given the gender-related context. 2) gender bias in selecting gender-related pronouns (she/he) given the descriptive words. 3) gender bias in the topics of LLM-generated dialogues. We investigate the outputs of the GPT series of LLMs in various languages using our three measurement methods. Our findings revealed significant gender biases across all the languages we examined.

The Da Vinci Code of Large Pre-trained Language Models: Deciphering Degenerate Knowledge Neurons

This study explores the mechanism of factual knowledge storage in pre-trained language models (PLMs). Previous research suggests that factual knowledge is stored within multi-layer perceptron weights, and some storage units exhibit degeneracy, referred to as Degenerate Knowledge Neurons (DKNs). This paper provides a comprehensive definition of DKNs that covers both structural and functional aspects, pioneering the study of structures in PLMs' factual knowledge storage units. Based on this, we introduce the Neurological Topology Clustering method, which allows the formation of DKNs in any numbers and structures, leading to a more accurate DKN acquisition. Furthermore, we introduce the Neuro-Degeneracy Analytic Analysis Framework, which uniquely integrates model robustness, evolvability, and complexity for a holistic assessment of PLMs. Within this framework, our execution of 34 experiments across 2 PLMs, 4 datasets, and 6 settings highlights the critical role of DKNs. The code will be available soon.

Utility Fairness in Contextual Dynamic Pricing with Demand Learning

This paper introduces a novel contextual bandit algorithm for personalized pricing under utility fairness constraints in scenarios with uncertain demand, achieving an optimal regret upper bound. Our approach, which incorporates dynamic pricing and demand learning, addresses the critical challenge of fairness in pricing strategies. We first delve into the static full-information setting to formulate an optimal pricing policy as a constrained optimization problem. Here, we propose an approximation algorithm for efficiently and approximately computing the ideal policy. We also use mathematical analysis and computational studies to characterize the structures of optimal contextual pricing policies subject to fairness constraints, deriving simplified policies which lays the foundations of more in-depth research and extensions. Further, we extend our study to dynamic pricing problems with demand learning, establishing a non-standard regret lower bound that highlights the complexity added by fairness constraints. Our research offers a comprehensive analysis of the cost of fairness and its impact on the balance between utility and revenue maximization. This work represents a step towards integrating ethical considerations into algorithmic efficiency in data-driven dynamic pricing.

Automatic Coronary Artery Plaque Quantification and CAD-RADS Prediction using Mesh Priors

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Patients with suspected CAD undergo coronary CT angiography (CCTA) to evaluate the risk of cardiovascular events and determine the treatment. Clinical analysis of coronary arteries in CCTA comprises the identification of atherosclerotic plaque, as well as the grading of any coronary artery stenosis typically obtained through the CAD-Reporting and Data System (CAD-RADS). This requires analysis of the coronary lumen and plaque. While voxel-wise segmentation is a commonly used approach in various segmentation tasks, it does not guarantee topologically plausible shapes. To address this, in this work, we propose to directly infer surface meshes for coronary artery lumen and plaque based on a centerline prior and use it in the downstream task of CAD-RADS scoring. The method is developed and evaluated using a total of 2407 CCTA scans. Our method achieved lesion-wise volume intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.98, 0.79, and 0.85 for calcified, non-calcified, and total plaque volume respectively. Patient-level CAD-RADS categorization was evaluated on a representative hold-out test set of 300 scans, for which the achieved linearly weighted kappa ($\kappa$) was 0.75. CAD-RADS categorization on the set of 658 scans from another hospital and scanner led to a $\kappa$ of 0.71. The results demonstrate that direct inference of coronary artery meshes for lumen and plaque is feasible, and allows for the automated prediction of routinely performed CAD-RADS categorization.

Sample Complexity for Quadratic Bandits: Hessian Dependent Bounds and Optimal Algorithms

In stochastic zeroth-order optimization, a problem of practical relevance is understanding how to fully exploit the local geometry of the underlying objective function. We consider a fundamental setting in which the objective function is quadratic, and provide the first tight characterization of the optimal Hessian-dependent sample complexity. Our contribution is twofold. First, from an information-theoretic point of view, we prove tight lower bounds on Hessian-dependent complexities by introducing a concept called energy allocation, which captures the interaction between the searching algorithm and the geometry of objective functions. A matching upper bound is obtained by solving the optimal energy spectrum. Then, algorithmically, we show the existence of a Hessian-independent algorithm that universally achieves the asymptotic optimal sample complexities for all Hessian instances. The optimal sample complexities achieved by our algorithm remain valid for heavy-tailed noise distributions, which are enabled by a truncation method.

Contextual Dictionary Lookup for Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to solve the incompleteness of knowledge graphs (KGs) by predicting missing links from known triples, numbers of knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models have been proposed to perform KGC by learning embeddings. Nevertheless, most existing embedding models map each relation into a unique vector, overlooking the specific fine-grained semantics of them under different entities. Additionally, the few available fine-grained semantic models rely on clustering algorithms, resulting in limited performance and applicability due to the cumbersome two-stage training process. In this paper, we present a novel method utilizing contextual dictionary lookup, enabling conventional embedding models to learn fine-grained semantics of relations in an end-to-end manner. More specifically, we represent each relation using a dictionary that contains multiple latent semantics. The composition of a given entity and the dictionary's central semantics serves as the context for generating a lookup, thus determining the fine-grained semantics of the relation adaptively. The proposed loss function optimizes both the central and fine-grained semantics simultaneously to ensure their semantic consistency. Besides, we introduce two metrics to assess the validity and accuracy of the dictionary lookup operation. We extend several KGE models with the method, resulting in substantial performance improvements on widely-used benchmark datasets.

Leveraging Auxiliary Domain Parallel Data in Intermediate Task Fine-tuning for Low-resource Translation

NMT systems trained on Pre-trained Multilingual Sequence-Sequence (PMSS) models flounder when sufficient amounts of parallel data is not available for fine-tuning. This specifically holds for languages missing/under-represented in these models. The problem gets aggravated when the data comes from different domains. In this paper, we show that intermediate-task fine-tuning (ITFT) of PMSS models is extremely beneficial for domain-specific NMT, especially when target domain data is limited/unavailable and the considered languages are missing or under-represented in the PMSS model. We quantify the domain-specific results variations using a domain-divergence test, and show that ITFT can mitigate the impact of domain divergence to some extent.