Preprints
Learning Minimax Estimators via Online Learning

Kartik Gupta*, Arun Sai Suggala*, Adarsh Prasad, Praneeth Netrapalli, Pradeep Ravikumar.
Under Review at Annals of Stat.

[Abstract] [PDF]

We consider the problem of designing minimax estimators for estimating the parameters of a probability distribution. Unlike classical approaches such as the MLE and minimum distance estimators, we consider an algorithmic approach for constructing such estimators. We view the problem of designing minimax estimators as finding a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium of a zero-sum game. By leveraging recent results in online learning with non-convex losses, we provide a general algorithm for finding a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium of general non-convex non-concave zero-sum games. Our algorithm requires access to two subroutines: (a) one which outputs a Bayes estimator corresponding to a given prior probability distribution, and (b) one which computes the worst-case risk of any given estimator. Given access to these two subroutines, we show that our algorithm outputs both a minimax estimator and a least favorable prior. To demonstrate the power of this approach, we use it to construct provably minimax estimators for classical problems such as estimation in the finite Gaussian sequence model, and linear regression.

Efficient Bandit Convex Optimization: Beyond Linear Losses

Arun Sai Suggala, Pradeep Ravikumar, Praneeth Netrapalli.
Under Review at Conference on Learning Theory.

[Abstract]

We study the problem of online learning with bandit feedback, where a learner aims to minimize a sequence of adversarially generated loss functions, while only observing the value of each function at a single point. When the loss functions chosen by the adversary are convex and quadratic, we develop a new algorithm which achieves the optimal regret rate of T^{1/2}. Furthermore, our algorithm satisfies three important desiderata: (a) it is practical and can be efficiently implemented for high dimensional problems, (b) the regret bound holds with high probability even against adaptive adversaries whose decisions can depend on the learner's previous actions, and (c) it is robust to model mis-specification; that is, the regret bound degrades gracefully when the loss functions deviate from convex quadratics. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first algorithm for bandit convex optimization with quadratic losses which is efficiently implementable and achieves optimal regret guarantees. Existing algorithms for this problem either have sub-optimal regret guarantees or are computationally expensive and do not scale well to high-dimensional problems.

Publications
Generalized Boosting

Arun Sai Suggala, Bingbin Liu, Pradeep Ravikumar.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020 (to appear).

[Abstract] [PDF]

Boosting is a widely used learning technique in machine learning for solving classification problems. In boosting, one predicts the label of an example using an ensemble of weak classifiers. While boosting has shown tremendous success on many classification problems involving tabular data, it performs poorly on complex classification tasks involving low-level features such as image classification tasks. This drawback stems from the fact that boosting builds an additive model of weak classifiers, each of which has very little predictive power. Often, the resulting additive models are not powerful enough to approximate the complex decision boundaries of real-world classification problems. In this work, we present a general framework for boosting where, similar to traditional boosting, we aim to boost the performance of a weak learner and transform it into a strong learner. However, unlike traditional boosting, our framework allows for more complex forms of aggregation of weak learners. In this work, we specifically focus on one form of aggregation - function composition. We show that many popular greedy algorithms for learning deep neural networks (DNNs) can be derived from our framework using function compositions for aggregation. Moreover, we identify the drawbacks of these greedy algorithms and propose new algorithms that fix these issues. Using thorough empirical evaluation, we show that our learning algorithms have superior performance over traditional additive boosting algorithms, as well as existing greedy learning techniques for DNNs. An important feature of our algorithms is that they come with strong theoretical guarantees.

Follow the Perturbed Leader: Optimism and Fast Parallel Algorithms for Smooth Minimax Games

Arun Sai Suggala, Praneeth Netrapalli.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020 (to appear).

[Abstract] [PDF]

We consider the problem of online learning and its application to solving minimax games. For the online learning problem, Follow the Perturbed Leader (FTPL) is a widely studied algorithm which enjoys the optimal O(T^1/2) worst-case regret guarantee for both convex and nonconvex losses. In this work, we show that when the sequence of loss functions is predictable, a simple modification of FTPL which incorporates optimism can achieve better regret guarantees, while retaining the optimal worst-case regret guarantee for unpredictable sequences. A key challenge in obtaining these tighter regret bounds is the stochasticity and optimism in the algorithm, which requires different analysis techniques than those commonly used in the analysis of FTPL. The key ingredient we utilize in our analysis is the dual view of perturbation as regularization. While our algorithm has several applications, we consider the specific application of minimax games. For solving smooth convex-concave games, our algorithm only requires access to a linear optimization oracle. For Lipschitz and smooth nonconvex-nonconcave games, our algorithm requires access to an optimization oracle which computes the perturbed best response. In both these settings, our algorithm solves the game up to an accuracy of O(T^{−1/2}) using T calls to the optimization oracle. An important feature of our algorithm is that it is highly parallelizable and requires only O(T^1/2) iterations, with each iteration making O(T^1/2) parallel calls to the optimization oracle.

Robust Estimation via Robust Gradient Estimation

Adarsh Prasad, Arun Sai Suggala, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Pradeep Ravikumar.
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B (JRSSB) 2020.

[Abstract] [PDF]

We provide a new computationally efficient class of estimators for risk minimization. We show that these estimators are robust for general statistical models, under varied robustness settings, including in the classical Huber ε‐contamination model, and in heavy‐tailed settings. Our workhorse is a novel robust variant of gradient descent, and we provide conditions under which our gradient descent variant provides accurate estimators in a general convex risk minimization problem. We provide specific consequences of our theory for linear regression and logistic regression and for canonical parameter estimation in an exponential family. These results provide some of the first computationally tractable and provably robust estimators for these canonical statistical models. Finally, we study the empirical performance of our proposed methods on synthetic and real data sets, and we find that our methods convincingly outperform a variety of baselines.

Online Non-Convex Learning: Following the Perturbed Leader is Optimal

Arun Sai Suggala, Praneeth Netrapalli.
International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT) 2020 (Best Student Paper Award).

[Abstract] [PDF] [Slides]

We study the problem of online learning with non-convex losses, where the learner has access to an offline optimization oracle. We show that the classical Follow the Perturbed Leader (FTPL) algorithm achieves optimal regret rate of O(T^{−1/2}) in this setting. This improves upon the previous best-known regret rate of O(T^{−1/3}) for FTPL. We further show that an optimistic variant of FTPL achieves better regret bounds when the sequence of losses encountered by the learner is `predictable'.

Adaptive Hard Thresholding for Near-optimal Consistent Robust Regression

Arun Sai Suggala, Kush Bhatia, Pradeep Ravikumar, Prateek Jain.
Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2019.

[Abstract] [PDF]

We study the problem of robust linear regression with response variable corruptions. We consider the oblivious adversary model, where the adversary corrupts a fraction of the responses in complete ignorance of the data. We provide a nearly linear time estimator which consistently estimates the true regression vector, even with 1−o(1) fraction of corruptions. Existing results in this setting either don't guarantee consistent estimates or can only handle a small fraction of corruptions. We also extend our estimator to robust sparse linear regression and show that similar guarantees hold in this setting. Finally, we apply our estimator to the problem of linear regression with heavy-tailed noise and show that our estimator consistently estimates the regression vector even when the noise has unbounded variance (e.g., Cauchy distribution), for which most existing results don't even apply. Our estimator is based on a novel variant of outlier removal via hard thresholding in which the threshold is chosen adaptively and crucially relies on randomness to escape bad fixed points of the non-convex hard thresholding operation.

Revisiting Adversarial Risk

Arun Sai Suggala, Adarsh Prasad, Vaishnavh Nagarajan, Pradeep Ravikumar.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2019.

[Abstract] [PDF] [Poster]

Recent works on adversarial perturbations show that there is an inherent trade-off between standard test accuracy and adversarial accuracy. Specifically, they show that no classifier can simultaneously be robust to adversarial perturbations and achieve high standard test accuracy. However, this is contrary to the standard notion that on tasks such as image classification, humans are robust classifiers with low error rate. In this work, we show that the main reason behind this confusion is the inexact definition of adversarial perturbation that is used in the literature. To fix this issue, we propose a slight, yet important modification to the existing definition of adversarial perturbation. Based on the modified definition, we show that there is no trade-off between adversarial and standard accuracies; there exist classifiers that are robust and achieve high standard accuracy. We further study several properties of this new definition of adversarial risk and its relation to the existing definition.

Connecting Optimization and Regularization Paths

Arun Sai Suggala, Adarsh Prasad, Pradeep Ravikumar.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2018.

[Abstract] [PDF] [Poster]

We study the implicit regularization properties of optimization techniques by explicitly connecting their optimization paths to the regularization paths of corresponding'' regularized problems. This surprising connection shows that iterates of optimization techniques such as gradient descent and mirror descent are \emph{pointwise} close to solutions of appropriately regularized objectives. While such a tight connection between optimization and regularization is of independent intellectual interest, it also has important implications for machine learning: we can port results from regularized estimators to optimization, and vice versa. We investigate one key consequence, that borrows from the well-studied analysis of regularized estimators, to then obtain tight excess risk bounds of the iterates generated by optimization techniques.

The Expxorcist: Nonparametric Graphical Models Via Conditional Exponential Densities

Arun Sai Suggala, Mladen Kolar, Pradeep Ravikumar.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2017.

[Abstract] [PDF] [Slides]

Non-parametric multivariate density estimation faces strong statistical and computational bottlenecks, and the more practical approaches impose near-parametric assumptions on the form of the density functions. In this paper, we leverage recent developments to propose a class of non-parametric models which have very attractive computational and statistical properties. Our approach relies on the simple function space assumption that the conditional distribution of each variable conditioned on the other variables has a non-parametric exponential family form.

Ordinal Graphical Models: A Tale of Two Approaches

Arun Sai Suggala, Eunho Yang, Pradeep Ravikumar.
International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) 2017.

[Abstract] [PDF] [Slides] [Code]

Undirected graphical models or Markov random fields (MRFs) are widely used for modeling multivariate probability distributions. Much of the work on MRFs has focused on continuous variables, and nominal variables (that is, unordered categorical variables). However, data from many real world applications involve ordered categorical variables also known as ordinal variables, e.g., movie ratings on Netflix which can be ordered from 1 to 5 stars. With respect to univariate ordinal distributions, as we detail in the paper, there are two main categories of distributions; while there have been efforts to extend these to multivariate ordinal distributions, the resulting distributions are typically very complex, with either a large number of parameters, or with non-convex likelihoods. While there have been some work on tractable approximations, these do not come with strong statistical guarantees, and moreover are relatively computationally expensive. In this paper, we theoretically investigate two classes of graphical models for ordinal data, corresponding to the two main categories of univariate ordinal distributions. In contrast to previous work, our theoretical developments allow us to provide correspondingly two classes of estimators that are not only computationally efficient but also have strong statistical guarantees.

ProtoNN: Compressed and Accurate kNN for Resource-scarce Devices

Chirag Gupta, Arun Sai Suggala, Ankit Goyal, Harsha Vardhan Simhadri, Bhargavi Paranjape, Ashish Kumar, Saurabh Goyal, Raghavendra Udupa, Manik Varma, Prateek Jain.
International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) 2017.

[Abstract] [PDF] [Slides] [Poster] [Code]

Several real-world applications require real-time prediction on resource-scarce devices such as an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor. Such applications demand prediction models with small storage and computational complexity that do not compromise significantly on accuracy. In this work, we propose ProtoNN, a novel algorithm that addresses the problem of real-time and accurate prediction on resource-scarce devices. ProtoNN is inspired by k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) but has several orders lower storage and prediction complexity. ProtoNN models can be deployed even on devices with puny storage and computational power (e.g. an Arduino UNO with 2kB RAM) to get excellent prediction accuracy. ProtoNN derives its strength from three key ideas: a) learning a small number of prototypes to represent the entire training set, b) sparse low dimensional projection of data, c) joint discriminative learning of the projection and prototypes with explicit model size constraint. We conduct systematic empirical evaluation of ProtoNN on a variety of supervised learning tasks (binary, multi-class, multi-label classification) and show that it gives nearly state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on resource-scarce devices while consuming several orders lower storage, and using minimal working memory.

Latent Feature Lasso

Ian En-Hsu Yen, Wei-Cheng Lee, Sung-En Chang, Arun Sai Suggala, Shou-De Lin, Pradeep Ravikumar.
International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) 2017.

[Abstract] [PDF]

The latent feature model (LFM), proposed in (Griffiths \& Ghahramani, 2005), but possibly with earlier origins, is a generalization of a mixture model, where each instance is generated not from a single latent class but from a combination of latent features. Thus, each instance has an associated latent binary feature incidence vector indicating the presence or absence of a feature. Due to its combinatorial nature, inference of LFMs is considerably intractable, and accordingly, most of the attention has focused on nonparametric LFMs, with priors such as the Indian Buffet Process (IBP) on infinite binary matrices. Recent efforts to tackle this complexity either still have computational complexity that is exponential, or sample complexity that is high-order polynomial w.r.t. the number of latent features. In this paper, we address this outstanding problem of tractable estimation of LFMs via a novel atomic-norm regularization, which gives an algorithm with polynomial run-time and sample complexity without impractical assumptions on the data distribution.

Vector-Space Markov Random Fields via Exponential Families

Wesley Tansey, Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla, Arun Sai Suggala, Pradeep Ravikumar.
International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) 2015.

[Abstract] [PDF]

We present Vector-Space Markov Random Fields (VS-MRFs), a novel class of undirected graphical models where each variable can belong to an arbitrary vector space. VS-MRFs generalize a recent line of work on scalar-valued, uni-parameter exponential family and mixed graphical models, thereby greatly broadening the class of exponential families available (e.g., allowing multinomial and Dirichlet distributions). Specifically, VS-MRFs are the joint graphical model distributions where the node-conditional distributions belong to generic exponential families with general vector space domains. We also present a sparsistent M-estimator for learning our class of MRFs that recovers the correct set of edges with high probability. We validate our approach via a set of synthetic data experiments as well as a real-world case study of over four million foods from the popular diet tracking app MyFitnessPal. Our results demonstrate that our algorithm performs well empirically and that VS-MRFs are capable of capturing and highlighting interesting structure in complex, real-world data. All code for our algorithm is open source and publicly available.