A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
In importance sampling (IS)-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), IS weights are typically clipped to avoid large variance in learning. However, policy update from clipped statistics induces large bias in tasks with high action dimensions, and bias from clipping makes it di…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often du…
We propose Additive Powers-of-Two~(APoT) quantization, an efficient non-uniform quantization scheme for the bell-shaped and long-tailed distribution of weights and activations in neural networks. By constraining all quantization levels as the sum of Powers-of-Two terms, APoT quantization enjoys high computational effic…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely being adopted for safety-critical applications, e.g., healthcare and autonomous driving. Inherently, they are considered to be highly error-tolerant. However, recent studies have shown that hardware faults that impact the parameters of a DNN (e.g., weights) can have drastic impact…
Many applications require recovering a ground truth low-rank matrix from noisy observations of the entries, which in practice is typically formulated as a weighted low-rank approximation problem and solved by non-convex optimization heuristics such as alternating minimization. In this paper, we provide provable recover…
This paper improves analysis of clipping algorithms for non-convex optimization.
problem Improving convergence analysis of clipping algorithms for non-convex optimization.
method Develops a general framework to study clipping algorithms, including momentum methods, and provides convergence analysis in deterministic and stochastic settings.
result Demonstrates that clipping methods can maintain efficiency even in highly non-smooth regions.
We propose a new framework for designing estimators for off-policy evaluation in contextual bandits. Our approach is based on the asymptotically optimal doubly robust estimator, but we shrink the importance weights to minimize a bound on the mean squared error, which results in a better bias-variance tradeoff in finite…
Existing approaches for training neural networks with user-level differential privacy (e.g., DP Federated Averaging) in federated learning (FL) settings involve bounding the contribution of each user's model update by clipping it to some constant value. However there is no good a priori setting of the clipping norm acr…
Clip21 improves convergence of gradient-clipped methods in DP settings.
problem Gradient clipping introduces bias in distributed training, causing convergence issues.
method Clip21 designs an error feedback mechanism to mitigate bias in gradient-clipped methods.
result Clip21 converges at the same rate as distributed gradient descent, improving from previous $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}}
ight)$ to $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{K}
ight)$.
Paper proves convergence for private FL on non-Lipschitz convex objectives using normalization instead of clipping.
problem Lack of convergence results for differentially private federated learning with non-Lipschitz objectives.
method Developed a convergence result for private FL on smooth convex objectives without assuming Lipschitzness, using normalization instead of clipping.
result Normalization-based private FL algorithm converges better than clipping-based counterpart on smooth convex functions.
Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not clipped. We propose a policy gradient estimator that exploits the knowledge of action…
We consider the problem of minimizing a sum of clipped convex functions; applications include clipped empirical risk minimization and clipped control. While the problem of minimizing the sum of clipped convex functions is NP-hard, we present some heuristics for approximately solving instances of these problems. These h…
Quantization can improve the execution latency and energy efficiency of neural networks on both commodity GPUs and specialized accelerators. The majority of existing literature focuses on training quantized DNNs, while this work examines the less-studied topic of quantizing a floating-point model without (re)training. …
We consider the problem of recovering a low-rank matrix from its clipped observations. Clipping is conceivable in many scientific areas that obstructs statistical analyses. On the other hand, matrix completion (MC) methods can recover a low-rank matrix from various information deficits by using the principle of low-ran…