Inception: Efficiently Computable Misinformation Attacks on Markov Games

We study security threats to Markov games due to information asymmetry and misinformation. We consider an attacker player who can spread misinformation about its reward function to influence the robust victim player's behavior. Given a fixed fake reward function, we derive the victim's policy under worst-case rationality and present polynomial-time algorithms to compute the attacker's optimal worst-case policy based on linear programming and backward induction. Then, we provide an efficient inception ("planting an idea in someone's mind") attack algorithm to find the optimal fake reward function within a restricted set of reward functions with dominant strategies. Importantly, our methods exploit the universal assumption of rationality to compute attacks efficiently. Thus, our work exposes a security vulnerability arising from standard game assumptions under misinformation.

When is exponential asymptotic optimality achievable in average-reward restless bandits?

We consider the discrete-time infinite-horizon average-reward restless bandit problem. We propose a novel policy that maintains two dynamic subsets of arms: one subset of arms has a nearly optimal state distribution and takes actions according to an Optimal Local Control routine; the other subset of arms is driven towards the optimal state distribution and gradually merged into the first subset. We show that our policy is asymptotically optimal with an $O(\exp(-C N))$ optimality gap for an $N$-armed problem, under the mild assumptions of aperiodic-unichain, non-degeneracy, and local stability. Our policy is the first to achieve exponential asymptotic optimality under the above set of easy-to-verify assumptions, whereas prior work either requires a strong Global Attractor assumption or only achieves an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. We further discuss the fundamental obstacles in significantly weakening our assumptions. In particular, we prove a lower bound showing that local stability is fundamental for exponential asymptotic optimality.

The Collusion of Memory and Nonlinearity in Stochastic Approximation With Constant Stepsize

In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new perspective and carefully examine the simultaneous presence of Markovian dependency of data and nonlinear update rules, delineating how the interplay between these two structures leads to complications that are not captured by prior techniques. By leveraging the smoothness and recurrence properties of the SA updates, we develop a fine-grained analysis of the correlation between the SA iterates $\theta_k$ and Markovian data $x_k$. This enables us to overcome the obstacles in existing analysis and establish for the first time the weak convergence of the joint process $(x_k, \theta_k)_{k\geq0}$. Furthermore, we present a precise characterization of the asymptotic bias of the SA iterates, given by $\mathbb{E}[\theta_\infty]-\theta^\ast=\alpha(b_\text{m}+b_\text{n}+b_\text{c})+O(\alpha^{3/2})$. Here, $b_\text{m}$ is associated with the Markovian noise, $b_\text{n}$ is tied to the nonlinearity, and notably, $b_\text{c}$ represents a multiplicative interaction between the Markovian noise and nonlinearity, which is absent in previous works. As a by-product of our analysis, we derive finite-time bounds on higher moment $\mathbb{E}[\|\theta_k-\theta^\ast\|^{2p}]$ and present non-asymptotic geometric convergence rates for the iterates, along with a Central Limit Theorem.

Prelimit Coupling and Steady-State Convergence of Constant-stepsize Nonsmooth Contractive SA

Motivated by Q-learning, we study nonsmooth contractive stochastic approximation (SA) with constant stepsize. We focus on two important classes of dynamics: 1) nonsmooth contractive SA with additive noise, and 2) synchronous and asynchronous Q-learning, which features both additive and multiplicative noise. For both dynamics, we establish weak convergence of the iterates to a stationary limit distribution in Wasserstein distance. Furthermore, we propose a prelimit coupling technique for establishing steady-state convergence and characterize the limit of the stationary distribution as the stepsize goes to zero. Using this result, we derive that the asymptotic bias of nonsmooth SA is proportional to the square root of the stepsize, which stands in sharp contrast to smooth SA. This bias characterization allows for the use of Richardson-Romberg extrapolation for bias reduction in nonsmooth SA.

Span-Based Optimal Sample Complexity for Weakly Communicating and General Average Reward MDPs

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in an average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) under a generative model. For weakly communicating MDPs, we establish the complexity bound $\tilde{O}(SA\frac{H}{\epsilon^2})$, where $H$ is the span of the bias function of the optimal policy and $SA$ is the cardinality of the state-action space. Our result is the first that is minimax optimal (up to log factors) in all parameters $S,A,H$ and $\epsilon$, improving on existing work that either assumes uniformly bounded mixing times for all policies or has suboptimal dependence on the parameters. We further investigate sample complexity in general (non-weakly-communicating) average-reward MDPs. We argue a new transient time parameter $B$ is necessary, establish an $\tilde{O}(SA\frac{B+H}{\epsilon^2})$ complexity bound, and prove a matching (up to log factors) minimax lower bound. Both results are based on reducing the average-reward MDP to a discounted MDP, which requires new ideas in the general setting. To establish the optimality of this reduction, we develop improved bounds for $\gamma$-discounted MDPs, showing that $\tilde{\Omega}\left(SA\frac{H}{(1-\gamma)^2\epsilon^2}\right)$ samples suffice to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in weakly communicating MDPs under the regime that $\gamma\geq 1-1/H$, and $\tilde{\Omega}\left(SA\frac{B+H}{(1-\gamma)^2\epsilon^2}\right)$ samples suffice in general MDPs when $\gamma\geq 1-\frac{1}{B+H}$. Both these results circumvent the well-known lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}\left(SA\frac{1}{(1-\gamma)^3\epsilon^2}\right)$ for arbitrary $\gamma$-discounted MDPs. Our analysis develops upper bounds on certain instance-dependent variance parameters in terms of the span and transient time parameters. The weakly communicating bounds are tighter than those based on the mixing time or diameter of the MDP and may be of broader use.

Entry-Specific Bounds for Low-Rank Matrix Completion under Highly Non-Uniform Sampling

Low-rank matrix completion concerns the problem of estimating unobserved entries in a matrix using a sparse set of observed entries. We consider the non-uniform setting where the observed entries are sampled with highly varying probabilities, potentially with different asymptotic scalings. We show that under structured sampling probabilities, it is often better and sometimes optimal to run estimation algorithms on a smaller submatrix rather than the entire matrix. In particular, we prove error upper bounds customized to each entry, which match the minimax lower bounds under certain conditions. Our bounds characterize the hardness of estimating each entry as a function of the localized sampling probabilities. We provide numerical experiments that confirm our theoretical findings.

Unichain and Aperiodicity are Sufficient for Asymptotic Optimality of Average-Reward Restless Bandits

We consider the infinite-horizon, average-reward restless bandit problem in discrete time. We propose a new class of policies that are designed to drive a progressively larger subset of arms toward the optimal distribution. We show that our policies are asymptotically optimal with an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap for an $N$-armed problem, provided that the single-armed relaxed problem is unichain and aperiodic. Our approach departs from most existing work that focuses on index or priority policies, which rely on the Uniform Global Attractor Property (UGAP) to guarantee convergence to the optimum, or a recently developed simulation-based policy, which requires a Synchronization Assumption (SA).

Effectiveness of Constant Stepsize in Markovian LSA and Statistical Inference

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of using a constant stepsize in statistical inference via linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with Markovian data. After establishing a Central Limit Theorem (CLT), we outline an inference procedure that uses averaged LSA iterates to construct confidence intervals (CIs). Our procedure leverages the fast mixing property of constant-stepsize LSA for better covariance estimation and employs Richardson-Romberg (RR) extrapolation to reduce the bias induced by constant stepsize and Markovian data. We develop theoretical results for guiding stepsize selection in RR extrapolation, and identify several important settings where the bias provably vanishes even without extrapolation. We conduct extensive numerical experiments and compare against classical inference approaches. Our results show that using a constant stepsize enjoys easy hyperparameter tuning, fast convergence, and consistently better CI coverage, especially when data is limited.

Span-Based Optimal Sample Complexity for Average Reward MDPs

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in an average-reward Markov decision process (MDP) under a generative model. We establish the complexity bound $\widetilde{O}\left(SA\frac{H}{\varepsilon^2} \right)$, where $H$ is the span of the bias function of the optimal policy and $SA$ is the cardinality of the state-action space. Our result is the first that is minimax optimal (up to log factors) in all parameters $S,A,H$ and $\varepsilon$, improving on existing work that either assumes uniformly bounded mixing times for all policies or has suboptimal dependence on the parameters. Our result is based on reducing the average-reward MDP to a discounted MDP. To establish the optimality of this reduction, we develop improved bounds for $\gamma$-discounted MDPs, showing that $\widetilde{O}\left(SA\frac{H}{(1-\gamma)^2\varepsilon^2} \right)$ samples suffice to learn a $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in weakly communicating MDPs under the regime that $\gamma \geq 1 - \frac{1}{H}$, circumventing the well-known lower bound of $\widetilde{\Omega}\left(SA\frac{1}{(1-\gamma)^3\varepsilon^2} \right)$ for general $\gamma$-discounted MDPs. Our analysis develops upper bounds on certain instance-dependent variance parameters in terms of the span parameter. These bounds are tighter than those based on the mixing time or diameter of the MDP and may be of broader use.

GTP-ViT: Efficient Vision Transformers via Graph-based Token Propagation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have revolutionized the field of computer vision, yet their deployments on resource-constrained devices remain challenging due to high computational demands. To expedite pre-trained ViTs, token pruning and token merging approaches have been developed, which aim at reducing the number of tokens involved in the computation. However, these methods still have some limitations, such as image information loss from pruned tokens and inefficiency in the token-matching process. In this paper, we introduce a novel Graph-based Token Propagation (GTP) method to resolve the challenge of balancing model efficiency and information preservation for efficient ViTs. Inspired by graph summarization algorithms, GTP meticulously propagates less significant tokens' information to spatially and semantically connected tokens that are of greater importance. Consequently, the remaining few tokens serve as a summarization of the entire token graph, allowing the method to reduce computational complexity while preserving essential information of eliminated tokens. Combined with an innovative token selection strategy, GTP can efficiently identify image tokens to be propagated. Extensive experiments have validated GTP's effectiveness, demonstrating both efficiency and performance improvements. Specifically, GTP decreases the computational complexity of both DeiT-S and DeiT-B by up to 26% with only a minimal 0.3% accuracy drop on ImageNet-1K without finetuning, and remarkably surpasses the state-of-the-art token merging method on various backbones at an even faster inference speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ackesnal/GTP-ViT.