Related papers: When Does MAML Objective Have Benign Landscape?
A significant challenge in nature-inspired algorithmics is the identification of specific characteristics of problems that make them harder (or easier) to solve using specific methods. The hope is that, by identifying these characteristics,…
We consider Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems, where the goal is to find a policy using data from several tasks represented by Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can be updated by one…
We study the effects of mild over-parameterization on the optimization landscape of a simple ReLU neural network of the form $\mathbf{x}\mapsto\sum_{i=1}^k\max\{0,\mathbf{w}_i^{\top}\mathbf{x}\}$, in a well-studied teacher-student setting…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown clear effectiveness in coordinating multiple agents across simulated benchmarks and constrained scenarios. However, its deployment in real-world multi-agent systems (MAS) remains limited,…
Managing quality (such as service availability or process adherence) during the development, operation, and maintenance of software(-intensive) systems and services is a challenging task. Although many organizations need to define, control,…
A major challenge in training large-scale machine learning models is configuring the training process to maximize model performance, i.e., finding the best training setup from a vast design space. In this work, we unlock a gradient-based…
Generative models have been successfully used for generating realistic signals. Because the likelihood function is typically intractable in most of these models, the common practice is to use "implicit" models that avoid likelihood…
In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…
Many real-world applications require decision-makers to assess the quality of solutions while considering multiple conflicting objectives. Obtaining good approximation sets for highly constrained many-objective problems is often a difficult…
The optimization of deep neural networks can be more challenging than traditional convex optimization problems due to the highly non-convex nature of the loss function, e.g. it can involve pathological landscapes such as saddle-surfaces…
The goal of optimization-based meta-learning is to find a single initialization shared across a distribution of tasks to speed up the process of learning new tasks. Conditional meta-learning seeks task-specific initialization to better…
Continual learning is the problem of integrating new information in a model while retaining the knowledge acquired in the past. Despite the tangible improvements achieved in recent years, the problem of continual learning is still an open…
We consider a class of a nested optimization problems involving inner and outer objectives. We observe that by taking into explicit account the optimization dynamics for the inner objective it is possible to derive a general framework that…
LLMs are increasingly used to support qualitative research, yet existing systems produce outputs that vary widely--from trace-faithful summaries to theory-mediated explanations and system models. To make these differences explicit, we…
The continual learning problem involves training models with limited capacity to perform well on a set of an unknown number of sequentially arriving tasks. While meta-learning shows great potential for reducing interference between old and…
Several planners have been proposed to compute robot paths that reach desired goal regions while avoiding obstacles. However, these methods fail when all pathways to the goal are blocked. In such cases, the robot must reason about how to…
The Continual Learning (CL) problem involves performing well on a sequence of tasks under limited compute. Current algorithms in the domain are either slow, offline or sensitive to hyper-parameters. La-MAML, an optimization-based…
We analyze the optimization landscapes of deep learning with wide networks. We highlight the importance of constraints for such networks and show that constraint -- as well as unconstraint -- empirical-risk minimization over such networks…
Achieving weighted throughput maximization (WTM) through power control has been a long standing open problem in interference-limited wireless networks. The complicated coupling between the mutual interferences of links gives rise to a…
This paper investigates how the compositional structure of neural networks shapes their optimization landscape and training dynamics. We analyze the gradient flow associated with overparameterized optimization problems, which can be…