Super-Exponential Regret for UCT, AlphaGo and Variants

We improve the proofs of the lower bounds of Coquelin and Munos (2007) that demonstrate that UCT can have $\exp(\dots\exp(1)\dots)$ regret (with $\Omega(D)$ exp terms) on the $D$-chain environment, and that a `polynomial' UCT variant has $\exp_2(\exp_2(D - O(\log D)))$ regret on the same environment -- the original proofs contain an oversight for rewards bounded in $[0, 1]$, which we fix in the present draft. We also adapt the proofs to AlphaGo's MCTS and its descendants (e.g., AlphaZero, Leela Zero) to also show $\exp_2(\exp_2(D - O(\log D)))$ regret.

Learning Universal Predictors

Meta-learning has emerged as a powerful approach to train neural networks to learn new tasks quickly from limited data. Broad exposure to different tasks leads to versatile representations enabling general problem solving. But, what are the limits of meta-learning? In this work, we explore the potential of amortizing the most powerful universal predictor, namely Solomonoff Induction (SI), into neural networks via leveraging meta-learning to its limits. We use Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) to generate training data used to expose networks to a broad range of patterns. We provide theoretical analysis of the UTM data generation processes and meta-training protocols. We conduct comprehensive experiments with neural architectures (e.g. LSTMs, Transformers) and algorithmic data generators of varying complexity and universality. Our results suggest that UTM data is a valuable resource for meta-learning, and that it can be used to train neural networks capable of learning universal prediction strategies.

Finding Increasingly Large Extremal Graphs with AlphaZero and Tabu Search

This work studies a central extremal graph theory problem inspired by a 1975 conjecture of Erd\H{o}s, which aims to find graphs with a given size (number of nodes) that maximize the number of edges without having 3- or 4-cycles. We formulate this problem as a sequential decision-making problem and compare AlphaZero, a neural network-guided tree search, with tabu search, a heuristic local search method. Using either method, by introducing a curriculum -- jump-starting the search for larger graphs using good graphs found at smaller sizes -- we improve the state-of-the-art lower bounds for several sizes. We also propose a flexible graph-generation environment and a permutation-invariant network architecture for learning to search in the space of graphs.

Language Modeling Is Compression

It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and vice versa. Incidentally, in recent years, the machine learning community has focused on training increasingly large and powerful self-supervised (language) models. Since these large language models exhibit impressive predictive capabilities, they are well-positioned to be strong compressors. In this work, we advocate for viewing the prediction problem through the lens of compression and evaluate the compression capabilities of large (foundation) models. We show that large language models are powerful general-purpose predictors and that the compression viewpoint provides novel insights into scaling laws, tokenization, and in-context learning. For example, Chinchilla 70B, while trained primarily on text, compresses ImageNet patches to 43.4% and LibriSpeech samples to 16.4% of their raw size, beating domain-specific compressors like PNG (58.5%) or FLAC (30.3%), respectively. Finally, we show that the prediction-compression equivalence allows us to use any compressor (like gzip) to build a conditional generative model.

Line Search for Convex Minimization

Golden-section search and bisection search are the two main principled algorithms for 1d minimization of quasiconvex (unimodal) functions. The first one only uses function queries, while the second one also uses gradient queries. Other algorithms exist under much stronger assumptions, such as Newton's method. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no principled exact line search algorithm for general convex functions -- including piecewise-linear and max-compositions of convex functions -- that takes advantage of convexity. We propose two such algorithms: $\Delta$-Bisection is a variant of bisection search that uses (sub)gradient information and convexity to speed up convergence, while $\Delta$-Secant is a variant of golden-section search and uses only function queries. While bisection search reduces the $x$ interval by a factor 2 at every iteration, $\Delta$-Bisection reduces the (sometimes much) smaller $x^*$-gap $\Delta^x$ (the $x$ coordinates of $\Delta$) by at least a factor 2 at every iteration. Similarly, $\Delta$-Secant also reduces the $x^*$-gap by at least a factor 2 every second function query. Moreover, the $y^*$-gap $\Delta^y$ (the $y$ coordinates of $\Delta$) also provides a refined stopping criterion, which can also be used with other algorithms. Experiments on a few convex functions confirm that our algorithms are always faster than their quasiconvex counterparts, often by more than a factor 2. We further design a quasi-exact line search algorithm based on $\Delta$-Secant. It can be used with gradient descent as a replacement for backtracking line search, for which some parameters can be finicky to tune -- and we provide examples to this effect, on strongly-convex and smooth functions. We provide convergence guarantees, and confirm the efficiency of quasi-exact line search on a few single- and multivariate convex functions.

Levin Tree Search with Context Models

Levin Tree Search (LTS) is a search algorithm that makes use of a policy (a probability distribution over actions) and comes with a theoretical guarantee on the number of expansions before reaching a goal node, depending on the quality of the policy. This guarantee can be used as a loss function, which we call the LTS loss, to optimize neural networks representing the policy (LTS+NN). In this work we show that the neural network can be substituted with parameterized context models originating from the online compression literature (LTS+CM). We show that the LTS loss is convex under this new model, which allows for using standard convex optimization tools, and obtain convergence guarantees to the optimal parameters in an online setting for a given set of solution trajectories -- guarantees that cannot be provided for neural networks. The new LTS+CM algorithm compares favorably against LTS+NN on several benchmarks: Sokoban (Boxoban), The Witness, and the 24-Sliding Tile puzzle (STP). The difference is particularly large on STP, where LTS+NN fails to solve most of the test instances while LTS+CM solves each test instance in a fraction of a second. Furthermore, we show that LTS+CM is able to learn a policy that solves the Rubik's cube in only a few hundred expansions, which considerably improves upon previous machine learning techniques.

Memory-Based Meta-Learning on Non-Stationary Distributions

Memory-based meta-learning is a technique for approximating Bayes-optimal predictors. Under fairly general conditions, minimizing sequential prediction error, measured by the log loss, leads to implicit meta-learning. The goal of this work is to investigate how far this interpretation can be realized by current sequence prediction models and training regimes. The focus is on piecewise stationary sources with unobserved switching-points, which arguably capture an important characteristic of natural language and action-observation sequences in partially observable environments. We show that various types of memory-based neural models, including Transformers, LSTMs, and RNNs can learn to accurately approximate known Bayes-optimal algorithms and behave as if performing Bayesian inference over the latent switching-points and the latent parameters governing the data distribution within each segment.

Isotuning With Applications To Scale-Free Online Learning

We extend and combine several tools of the literature to design fast, adaptive, anytime and scale-free online learning algorithms. Scale-free regret bounds must scale linearly with the maximum loss, both toward large losses and toward very small losses. Adaptive regret bounds demonstrate that an algorithm can take advantage of easy data and potentially have constant regret. We seek to develop fast algorithms that depend on as few parameters as possible, in particular they should be anytime and thus not depend on the time horizon. Our first and main tool, isotuning, is a generalization of the idea of balancing the trade-off of the regret. We develop a set of tools to design and analyze such learning rates easily and show that they adapts automatically to the rate of the regret (whether constant, $O(\log T)$, $O(\sqrt{T})$, etc.) within a factor 2 of the optimal learning rate in hindsight for the same observed quantities. The second tool is an online correction, which allows us to obtain centered bounds for many algorithms, to prevent the regret bounds from being vacuous when the domain is overly large or only partially constrained. The last tool, null updates, prevents the algorithm from performing overly large updates, which could result in unbounded regret, or even invalid updates. We develop a general theory using these tools and apply it to several standard algorithms. In particular, we (almost entirely) restore the adaptivity to small losses of FTRL for unbounded domains, design and prove scale-free adaptive guarantees for a variant of Mirror Descent (at least when the Bregman divergence is convex in its second argument), extend Adapt-ML-Prod to scale-free guarantees, and provide several other minor contributions about Prod, AdaHedge, BOA and Soft-Bayes.

Proving Theorems using Incremental Learning and Hindsight Experience Replay

Traditional automated theorem provers for first-order logic depend on speed-optimized search and many handcrafted heuristics that are designed to work best over a wide range of domains. Machine learning approaches in literature either depend on these traditional provers to bootstrap themselves or fall short on reaching comparable performance. In this paper, we propose a general incremental learning algorithm for training domain specific provers for first-order logic without equality, based only on a basic given-clause algorithm, but using a learned clause-scoring function. Clauses are represented as graphs and presented to transformer networks with spectral features. To address the sparsity and the initial lack of training data as well as the lack of a natural curriculum, we adapt hindsight experience replay to theorem proving, so as to be able to learn even when no proof can be found. We show that provers trained this way can match and sometimes surpass state-of-the-art traditional provers on the TPTP dataset in terms of both quantity and quality of the proofs.

Policy-Guided Heuristic Search with Guarantees

The use of a policy and a heuristic function for guiding search can be quite effective in adversarial problems, as demonstrated by AlphaGo and its successors, which are based on the PUCT search algorithm. While PUCT can also be used to solve single-agent deterministic problems, it lacks guarantees on its search effort and it can be computationally inefficient in practice. Combining the A* algorithm with a learned heuristic function tends to work better in these domains, but A* and its variants do not use a policy. Moreover, the purpose of using A* is to find solutions of minimum cost, while we seek instead to minimize the search loss (e.g., the number of search steps). LevinTS is guided by a policy and provides guarantees on the number of search steps that relate to the quality of the policy, but it does not make use of a heuristic function. In this work we introduce Policy-guided Heuristic Search (PHS), a novel search algorithm that uses both a heuristic function and a policy and has theoretical guarantees on the search loss that relates to both the quality of the heuristic and of the policy. We show empirically on the sliding-tile puzzle, Sokoban, and a puzzle from the commercial game `The Witness' that PHS enables the rapid learning of both a policy and a heuristic function and compares favorably with A*, Weighted A*, Greedy Best-First Search, LevinTS, and PUCT in terms of number of problems solved and search time in all three domains tested.