Bilevel programming has recently received attention in the literature, due to a wide range of applications, including reinforcement learning and hyper-parameter optimization. However, it is widely assumed that the underlying bilevel optimization problem is solved either by a single machine or in the case of multiple machines connected in a star-shaped network, i.e., federated learning setting. The latter approach suffers from a high communication cost on the central node (e.g., parameter server) and exhibits privacy vulnerabilities. Hence, it is of interest to develop methods that solve bilevel optimization problems in a communication-efficient decentralized manner. To that end, this paper introduces a penalty function based decentralized algorithm with theoretical guarantees for this class of optimization problems. Specifically, a distributed alternating gradient-type algorithm for solving consensus bilevel programming over a decentralized network is developed. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is to estimate the hyper-gradient of the penalty function via decentralized computation of matrix-vector products and few vector communications, which is then integrated within our alternating algorithm to give the finite-time convergence analysis under different convexity assumptions. Owing to the generality of this complexity analysis, our result yields convergence rates for a wide variety of consensus problems including minimax and compositional optimization. Empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method works well in practice.

现有的可解释AI和可解释的ML的方法无法解释统计单元的输出变量值的变化，以说明输入值的变化以及“机制”的变化（将输入转换为输出的函数）的变化。我们提出了两种基于反事实的方法，用于使用游戏理论中的沙普利值的概念来解释各种输入粒度的单位级变化。这些方法满足了对任何单位级别更改归因方法所需的两个关键公理。通过模拟，我们研究了所提出方法的可靠性和可扩展性。我们从案例研究中获得了明智的结果，该案例研究确定了美国个人收入变化的驱动力。

网络数据通常在各种应用程序中收集，代表感兴趣的功能之间直接测量或统计上推断的连接。在越来越多的域中，这些网络会随着时间的流逝而收集，例如不同日子或多个主题之间的社交媒体平台用户之间的交互，例如在大脑连接性的多主体研究中。在分析多个大型网络时，降低降低技术通常用于将网络嵌入更易于处理的低维空间中。为此，我们通过专门的张量分解来开发用于网络集合的主组件分析（PCA）的框架，我们将半对称性张量PCA或SS-TPCA术语。我们得出计算有效的算法来计算我们提出的SS-TPCA分解，并在标准的低级别信号加噪声模型下建立方法的统计效率。值得注意的是，我们表明SS-TPCA具有与经典矩阵PCA相同的估计精度，并且与网络中顶点数的平方根成正比，而不是预期的边缘数。我们的框架继承了古典PCA的许多优势，适用于广泛的无监督学习任务，包括识别主要网络，隔离有意义的更改点或外出观察，以及表征最不同边缘的“可变性网络”。最后，我们证明了我们的提案对模拟数据的有效性以及经验法律研究的示例。用于建立我们主要一致性结果的技术令人惊讶地简单明了，可能会在其他各种网络分析问题中找到使用。

学习线性时间不变动态系统（LTID）的参数是当前兴趣的问题。在许多应用程序中，人们有兴趣联合学习多个相关LTID的参数，这仍然是未探究的日期。为此，我们开发一个联合估计器，用于学习共享常见基矩阵的LTID的过渡矩阵。此外，我们建立有限时间误差界限，取决于底层的样本大小，维度，任务数和转换矩阵的光谱属性。结果是在轻度规律假设下获得的，并在单独学习每个系统的比较中，展示从LTID的汇集信息汇总信息。我们还研究了错过过渡矩阵的联合结构的影响，并显示成立的结果在适度误操作的存在下是强大的。

Existing automated techniques for software documentation typically attempt to reason between two main sources of information: code and natural language. However, this reasoning process is often complicated by the lexical gap between more abstract natural language and more structured programming languages. One potential bridge for this gap is the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as GUIs inherently encode salient information about underlying program functionality into rich, pixel-based data representations. This paper offers one of the first comprehensive empirical investigations into the connection between GUIs and functional, natural language descriptions of software. First, we collect, analyze, and open source a large dataset of functional GUI descriptions consisting of 45,998 descriptions for 10,204 screenshots from popular Android applications. The descriptions were obtained from human labelers and underwent several quality control mechanisms. To gain insight into the representational potential of GUIs, we investigate the ability of four Neural Image Captioning models to predict natural language descriptions of varying granularity when provided a screenshot as input. We evaluate these models quantitatively, using common machine translation metrics, and qualitatively through a large-scale user study. Finally, we offer learned lessons and a discussion of the potential shown by multimodal models to enhance future techniques for automated software documentation.

View-dependent effects such as reflections pose a substantial challenge for image-based and neural rendering algorithms. Above all, curved reflectors are particularly hard, as they lead to highly non-linear reflection flows as the camera moves. We introduce a new point-based representation to compute Neural Point Catacaustics allowing novel-view synthesis of scenes with curved reflectors, from a set of casually-captured input photos. At the core of our method is a neural warp field that models catacaustic trajectories of reflections, so complex specular effects can be rendered using efficient point splatting in conjunction with a neural renderer. One of our key contributions is the explicit representation of reflections with a reflection point cloud which is displaced by the neural warp field, and a primary point cloud which is optimized to represent the rest of the scene. After a short manual annotation step, our approach allows interactive high-quality renderings of novel views with accurate reflection flow. Additionally, the explicit representation of reflection flow supports several forms of scene manipulation in captured scenes, such as reflection editing, cloning of specular objects, reflection tracking across views, and comfortable stereo viewing. We provide the source code and other supplemental material on https://repo-sam.inria.fr/ fungraph/neural_catacaustics/

In large-scale machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization in order to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in large-scale, multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations? In this paper, we investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our main technical contribution is to show that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. We then extend our results significantly to nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms and multi-agent settings. In particular, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups in the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per agent at each time step. Our work is the first to provide finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our analysis hinges on studying the drift of a novel Lyapunov function that captures the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error feedback.

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on discounted MDPs, robust average-reward MDPs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on robust average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case average reward over an uncertainty set. We first take an approach that approximates average-reward MDPs using discounted MDPs. We prove that the robust discounted value function converges to the robust average-reward as the discount factor $\gamma$ goes to $1$, and moreover, when $\gamma$ is large, any optimal policy of the robust discounted MDP is also an optimal policy of the robust average-reward. We further design a robust dynamic programming approach, and theoretically characterize its convergence to the optimum. Then, we investigate robust average-reward MDPs directly without using discounted MDPs as an intermediate step. We derive the robust Bellman equation for robust average-reward MDPs, prove that the optimal policy can be derived from its solution, and further design a robust relative value iteration algorithm that provably finds its solution, or equivalently, the optimal robust policy.

The automated segmentation and tracking of macrophages during their migration are challenging tasks due to their dynamically changing shapes and motions. This paper proposes a new algorithm to achieve automatic cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy macrophage data. First, we design a segmentation method employing space-time filtering, local Otsu's thresholding, and the SUBSURF (subjective surface segmentation) method. Next, the partial trajectories for cells overlapping in the temporal direction are extracted in the segmented images. Finally, the extracted trajectories are linked by considering their direction of movement. The segmented images and the obtained trajectories from the proposed method are compared with those of the semi-automatic segmentation and manual tracking. The proposed tracking achieved 97.4% of accuracy for macrophage data under challenging situations, feeble fluorescent intensity, irregular shapes, and motion of macrophages. We expect that the automatically extracted trajectories of macrophages can provide pieces of evidence of how macrophages migrate depending on their polarization modes in the situation, such as during wound healing.

Advances in reinforcement learning have led to its successful application in complex tasks with continuous state and action spaces. Despite these advances in practice, most theoretical work pertains to finite state and action spaces. We propose building a theoretical understanding of continuous state and action spaces by employing a geometric lens. Central to our work is the idea that the transition dynamics induce a low dimensional manifold of reachable states embedded in the high-dimensional nominal state space. We prove that, under certain conditions, the dimensionality of this manifold is at most the dimensionality of the action space plus one. This is the first result of its kind, linking the geometry of the state space to the dimensionality of the action space. We empirically corroborate this upper bound for four MuJoCo environments. We further demonstrate the applicability of our result by learning a policy in this low dimensional representation. To do so we introduce an algorithm that learns a mapping to a low dimensional representation, as a narrow hidden layer of a deep neural network, in tandem with the policy using DDPG. Our experiments show that a policy learnt this way perform on par or better for four MuJoCo control suite tasks.