We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

加速的近端算法（APPA），也称为“催化剂”，是从凸优化到近似近端计算（即正则最小化）的确定还原。这种减少在概念上是优雅的，可以保证强大的收敛速度。但是，这些速率具有多余的对数项，因此需要计算每个近端点至高精度。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个新颖的放松误差标准，用于加速近端点（recapp），以消除对高精度子问题解决方案的需求。我们将recapp应用于两个规范问题：有限的和最大结构的最小化。对于有限和问题，我们匹配了以前通过精心设计的问题特异性算法获得的最著名的复杂性。为了最大程度地减少$ \ max_y f（x，y）$，其中$ f $以$ x $为$ x $，而在$ y $中强烈concave，我们改进了受对数因素限制的最著名的（基于催化剂）。

我们提供了新的基于梯度的方法，以便有效解决广泛的病态化优化问题。我们考虑最小化函数$ f：\ mathbb {r} ^ d \ lightarrow \ mathbb {r} $的问题，它是隐含的可分解的，作为$ m $未知的非交互方式的总和，强烈的凸起功能并提供方法这解决了这个问题，这些问题是缩放（最快的对数因子）作为组件的条件数量的平方根的乘积。这种复杂性绑定（我们证明几乎是最佳的）可以几乎指出的是加速梯度方法的几乎是指数的，这将作为$ F $的条件数量的平方根。此外，我们提供了求解该多尺度优化问题的随机异标变体的有效方法。而不是学习$ F $的分解（这将是过度昂贵的），而是我们的方法应用一个清洁递归“大步小步”交错标准方法。由此产生的算法使用$ \ tilde {\ mathcal {o}}（d m）$空间，在数字上稳定，并打开门以更细粒度的了解凸优化超出条件号的复杂性。

求解线性系统的迭代方法的收敛速率$ \ mathbf {a} x = b $通常取决于矩阵$ \ mathbf {a} $的条件号。预处理是通过以计算廉价的方式减少该条件号来加速这些方法的常用方式。在本文中，我们通过左或右对角线重构重新审视如何最好地提高$ \ mathbf {a}条件号的数十年。我们在几个方向上取得了这个问题。首先，我们为缩放$ \ mathbf {a} $的经典启发式提供了新的界限（a.k.a.jacobi预处理）。我们证明了这种方法将$ \ MATHBF {a} $的条件号减少到最佳可能缩放的二次因素中。其次，我们为结构化混合包装和覆盖了Semidefinite程序（MPC SDP）提供了一个求解器，它计算$ \ mathbf {a} $ in $ \ widetilde {o}（\ text {nnz}（\ mathbf {a}）\ cdot \ text {poly}（\ kappa ^ \ star））$ time;这与在缩放到$ \ widetilde {o}（\ text {poly}（\ kappa ^ \ star））$ factors之后求解线性系统的成本匹配。第三，我们证明了足够一般的宽度无关的MPC SDP求解器将暗示我们考虑的缩放问题的近乎最佳的运行时间，以及与平均调理措施有关的自然变体。最后，我们突出了我们的预处理技术与半随机噪声模型的连接，以及在几种统计回归模型中降低风险的应用。

Despite the recent progress in language generation models, their outputs may not always meet user expectations. In this work, we study whether informational feedback in natural language can be leveraged to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. To this end, we consider factual consistency in summarization, the quality that the summary should only contain information supported by the input documents, for user preference alignment. We collect a high-quality dataset, DeFacto, containing human demonstrations and informational feedback in natural language consisting of corrective instructions, edited summaries, and explanations with respect to the factual consistency of the summary. Using our dataset, we study two natural language generation tasks: 1) editing a summary using the human feedback, and 2) generating human feedback from the original summary. Using the two tasks, we further evaluate if models can automatically correct factual inconsistencies in generated summaries. We show that the human-edited summaries we collected are more factually consistent, and pre-trained language models can leverage our dataset to improve the factual consistency of original system-generated summaries in our proposed generation tasks. We make the DeFacto dataset publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/DeFacto.

Complex and contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those that involve multi-fingered hands and underactuated object manipulation, present a significant challenge to any control method. Methods based on reinforcement learning offer an appealing choice for such settings, as they can enable robots to learn to delicately balance contact forces and dexterously reposition objects without strong modeling assumptions. However, running reinforcement learning on real-world dexterous manipulation systems often requires significant manual engineering. This negates the benefits of autonomous data collection and ease of use that reinforcement learning should in principle provide. In this paper, we describe a system for vision-based dexterous manipulation that provides a "programming-free" approach for users to define new tasks and enable robots with complex multi-fingered hands to learn to perform them through interaction. The core principle underlying our system is that, in a vision-based setting, users should be able to provide high-level intermediate supervision that circumvents challenges in teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching which allow a robot to not only learn a task efficiently but also to autonomously practice. Our system includes a framework for users to define a final task and intermediate sub-tasks with image examples, a reinforcement learning procedure that learns the task autonomously without interventions, and experimental results with a four-finger robotic hand learning multi-stage object manipulation tasks directly in the real world, without simulation, manual modeling, or reward engineering.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

As information extraction (IE) systems have grown more capable at whole-document extraction, the classic task of \emph{template filling} has seen renewed interest as a benchmark for evaluating them. In this position paper, we call into question the suitability of template filling for this purpose. We argue that the task demands definitive answers to thorny questions of \emph{event individuation} -- the problem of distinguishing distinct events -- about which even human experts disagree. We show through annotation studies and error analysis that this raises concerns about the usefulness of template filling evaluation metrics, the quality of datasets for the task, and the ability of models to learn it. Finally, we consider possible solutions.

Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these judgements with just a single context-free sentence as input. This does not match language models' training regime, in which input sentences are always highly contextualized by the surrounding corpus. This mismatch raises an important question: how robust are models' syntactic judgements in different contexts? In this paper, we investigate the stability of language models' performance on targeted syntactic evaluations as we vary properties of the input context: the length of the context, the types of syntactic phenomena it contains, and whether or not there are violations of grammaticality. We find that model judgements are generally robust when placed in randomly sampled linguistic contexts. However, they are substantially unstable for contexts containing syntactic structures matching those in the critical test content. Among all tested models (GPT-2 and five variants of OPT), we significantly improve models' judgements by providing contexts with matching syntactic structures, and conversely significantly worsen them using unacceptable contexts with matching but violated syntactic structures. This effect is amplified by the length of the context, except for unrelated inputs. We show that these changes in model performance are not explainable by simple features matching the context and the test inputs, such as lexical overlap and dependency overlap. This sensitivity to highly specific syntactic features of the context can only be explained by the models' implicit in-context learning abilities.

Autonomous vehicles are suited for continuous area patrolling problems. However, finding an optimal patrolling strategy can be challenging for many reasons. Firstly, patrolling environments are often complex and can include unknown and evolving environmental factors. Secondly, autonomous vehicles can have failures or hardware constraints such as limited battery lives. Importantly, patrolling large areas often requires multiple agents that need to collectively coordinate their actions. In this work, we consider these limitations and propose an approach based on a distributed, model-free deep reinforcement learning based multi-agent patrolling strategy. In this approach, agents make decisions locally based on their own environmental observations and on shared information. In addition, agents are trained to automatically recharge themselves when required to support continuous collective patrolling. A homogeneous multi-agent architecture is proposed, where all patrolling agents have an identical policy. This architecture provides a robust patrolling system that can tolerate agent failures and allow supplementary agents to be added to replace failed agents or to increase the overall patrol performance. This performance is validated through experiments from multiple perspectives, including the overall patrol performance, the efficiency of the battery recharging strategy, the overall robustness of the system, and the agents' ability to adapt to environment dynamics.