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Federated Learning (FL) applied to real world data may suffer from several idiosyncrasies. One such idiosyncrasy is the data distribution across devices. Data across devices could be distributed such that there are some “heavy devices” with large amounts of data while there are many “light users” with only a handful of data points. There also exists heterogeneity of data across devices. In this study, we

This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if given access to a context variable that is a representation of the past trajectory. Second, a multi-task objective to maximize the average reward across the training

A critical need for industrial recommender systems is the ability to evaluate recommendation policies offline, before deploying them to production. Unfortunately, widely used off-policy evaluation methods either make strong assumptions about how users behave that can lead to excessive bias, or they make fewer assumptions and suffer from large variance. We tackle this problem by developing a new estimator

In the context of personalized federated learning (FL), the critical challenge is to balance local model improvement and global model tuning when the personal and global objectives may not be exactly aligned. Inspired by Bayesian hierarchical models, we develop ActPerFL, a self-aware personalized FL method where each client can automatically balance the training of its local personal model and the global

Data-driven program translation has been recently the focus of sev- eral lines of research. A common and robust strategy is supervised learning. However, there is typically a lack of parallel training data, i.e., pairs of code snippets in source and target language. While many data augmentation techniques exist in the domain of natural language processing, they cannot be easily adapted to tackle code translation

Federated Learning (FL) is a popular algorithm to train ma-chine learning models on user data constrained to edge devices (for example, mobile phones) due to privacy concerns. Typically, FL is trained with the assumption that no part of the user data can be egressed from the edge. However, in many production settings, specific data-modalities/meta-data are limited to be on device while others are not. For

Pool-based active learning techniques have had success producing multi-class classifiers that achieve high accuracy with fewer labels compared to random labeling. However, in an industrial setting where we often have class-level business targets to achieve (e.g., 95% recall at 95% precision for each class), active learning techniques continue to acquire labels for classes that have already met their targets

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) enable end-to-end learning on graph structured data. However, many works assume a given graph structure. When the input graph is noisy or unavailable, one approach is to construct or learn a latent graph structure. These methods typically fix the choice of node degree for the entire graph, which is suboptimal. Instead, we propose a novel end-to-end differentiable graph

In recent years, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant advancements due to the success of large language models. The common strategy for aligning vision and language models involves a two-step process: an alignment (or pretraining) stage and an instruction tuning stage. During the alignment stage, a projection module is trained to map image embeddings into the language space using a paired

This paper introduces an algorithm inspired from the work of Franceschi et al. (2017) for automatically tuning the learning rate while training neural networks. We formalize this problem as minimizing a given performance metric (e.g. validation error) at a future epoch using its “hyper-gradient” with respect to the learning rate at the current iteration. Such a hyper-gradient is difficult to estimate and

Accurate credit ratings are an essential ingredient in the decision-making process for investors, rating agencies, bond portfolio managers, bankers, and policy makers, as well as an important input for risk management and regulation. Credit ratings are traditionally generated from models that use financial statement data and market data, which are tabular (numeric and categorical). Using machine learning

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a model-based approach for gradient-free black-box function optimization, such as hyperparameter optimization. Typically, BO relies on conventional Gaussian process (GP) regression, whose algorithmic complexity is cubic in the number of evaluations. As a result, GP-based BO cannot leverage large numbers of past function evaluations, for example, to warm-start related BO runs

Over the past few years, Federated Learning (FL) has become an emerging machine learning technique to tackle data privacy challenges through collaborative training. In the Federated Learning algorithm, the clients submit a locally trained model, and the server aggregates these parameters until convergence. Despite significant efforts that have been made to FL in fields like computer vision, audio, and natural

Counterfactual evaluation plays a crucial role in learning-to-rank problems, as it addresses the discrepancy between the data logging policy and the policy being evaluated, due to the presence of presentation bias. Existing counterfactual methods, which are based on the empirical risk minimization framework, aim to evaluate the ability of a ranking policy to produce optimal results for a single query using

We study the problem of batch learning from bandit feedback in the setting of extremely large action spaces. Learning from extreme bandit feedback is ubiquitous in recommendation systems, in which billions of decisions are made over sets consisting of millions of choices in a single day, yielding massive observational data. In these large-scale real-world applications, supervised learning frameworks such

Deep learning methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in most modeling tasks involving images, text and audio, however, they typically underperform tree-based methods on tabular data. In this paper, we hypothesize that a significant contributor to this performance gap is the interaction between irregular target functions resulting from the heterogeneous nature of tabular feature spaces, and the

Unsupervised clustering aims at discovering the semantic categories of data according to some distance measured in the representation space. However, different categories often overlap with each other in the representation space at the beginning of the learning process, which poses a significant challenge for distance-based clustering in achieving good separation between different categories. To this end

We propose SCVRL, a novel contrastive-based framework for self-supervised learning for videos. Differently from previous contrast learning based methods that mostly focus on learning visual semantics (e.g., CVRL), SCVRL is capable of learning both semantic and motion patterns. For that, we reformulate the popular shuffling pretext task within a modern contrastive learning paradigm. We show that our transformer-based

The ability to jointly learn from multiple modalities, such as text, audio, and visual data, is a defining feature of intelligent systems. While there have been promising advances in designing neural networks to harness multimodal data, the enormous success of data augmentation currently remains limited to single-modality tasks like image classification. Indeed, it is particularly difficult to augment each

We revisit the problem of fair principal component analysis (PCA), where the goal is to learn the best low-rank linear approximation of the data that obfuscates demographic information. We propose a conceptually simple approach that allows for an analytic solution similar to standard PCA and can be kernelized. Our methods have the same complexity as standard PCA, or kernel PCA, and run much faster than