no code implementations • 12 Feb 2024 • Mengqi Lou, Guy Bresler, Ashwin Pananjady
We study the problem of approximately transforming a sample from a source statistical model to a sample from a target statistical model without knowing the parameters of the source model, and construct several computationally efficient such reductions between statistical experiments.
no code implementations • 2 Feb 2024 • Mengqi Lou, Kabir Aladin Verchand, Ashwin Pananjady
Motivated by the desire to understand stochastic algorithms for nonconvex optimization that are robust to their hyperparameter choices, we analyze a mini-batched prox-linear iterative algorithm for the problem of recovering an unknown rank-1 matrix from rank-1 Gaussian measurements corrupted by noise.
no code implementations • 25 Jul 2023 • Guanyi Wang, Mengqi Lou, Ashwin Pananjady
We study a principal component analysis problem under the spiked Wishart model in which the structure in the signal is captured by a class of union-of-subspace models.
no code implementations • 20 Feb 2023 • Abhishek Dhawan, Cheng Mao, Ashwin Pananjady
We consider a symmetric mixture of linear regressions with random samples from the pairwise comparison design, which can be seen as a noisy version of a type of Euclidean distance geometry problem.
no code implementations • 20 Jul 2022 • Kabir Aladin Chandrasekher, Mengqi Lou, Ashwin Pananjady
Considering two prototypical choices for the nonlinearity, we study the convergence properties of a natural alternating update rule for this nonconvex optimization problem starting from a random initialization.
1 code implementation • 3 May 2022 • Jingyan Wang, Ashwin Pananjady
Motivated by the psychology literature that has studied sequential bias in such settings -- namely, dependencies between the evaluation outcome and the order in which the candidates appear -- we propose a natural model for the evaluator's rating process that captures the lack of calibration inherent to such a task.
no code implementations • 24 Dec 2021 • Tianjiao Li, Guanghui Lan, Ashwin Pananjady
To remedy this issue, we develop an accelerated, variance-reduced fast temporal difference algorithm (VRFTD) that simultaneously matches both lower bounds and attains a strong notion of instance-optimality.
no code implementations • 23 Dec 2021 • Wenlong Mou, Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright, Peter L. Bartlett
We then prove a non-asymptotic instance-dependent bound on a suitably averaged sequence of iterates, with a leading term that matches the local asymptotic minimax limit, including sharp dependence on the parameters $(d, t_{\mathrm{mix}})$ in the higher order terms.
1 code implementation • 20 Sep 2021 • Kabir Aladin Chandrasekher, Ashwin Pananjady, Christos Thrampoulidis
In particular, provided each iteration can be written as the solution to a convex optimization problem satisfying some natural conditions, we leverage Gaussian comparison theorems to derive a deterministic sequence that provides sharp upper and lower bounds on the error of the algorithm with sample-splitting.
1 code implementation • 28 Jun 2021 • Wenshuo Guo, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Aditya Grover, Vidya Muthukumar, Ashwin Pananjady
We introduce the "inverse bandit" problem of estimating the rewards of a multi-armed bandit instance from observing the learning process of a low-regret demonstrator.
no code implementations • NeurIPS 2020 • Kush Bhatia, Ashwin Pananjady, Peter L. Bartlett, Anca D. Dragan, Martin J. Wainwright
Finally, we showcase the practical utility of our framework in a user study on autonomous driving, where we find that the Blackwell winner outperforms the von Neumann winner for the overall preferences.
no code implementations • 9 Dec 2020 • Wenlong Mou, Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright
Linear fixed point equations in Hilbert spaces arise in a variety of settings, including reinforcement learning, and computational methods for solving differential and integral equations.
no code implementations • 5 Sep 2020 • Ashwin Pananjady, Richard J. Samworth
Motivated by models for multiway comparison data, we consider the problem of estimating a coordinate-wise isotonic function on the domain $[0, 1]^d$ from noisy observations collected on a uniform lattice, but where the design points have been permuted along each dimension.
no code implementations • 16 Mar 2020 • Koulik Khamaru, Ashwin Pananjady, Feng Ruan, Martin J. Wainwright, Michael. I. Jordan
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model.
no code implementations • 19 Sep 2019 • Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright
Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks.
no code implementations • 21 Jun 2019 • Avishek Ghosh, Ashwin Pananjady, Adityanand Guntuboyina, Kannan Ramchandran
Max-affine regression refers to a model where the unknown regression function is modeled as a maximum of $k$ unknown affine functions for a fixed $k \geq 1$.
no code implementations • 20 Dec 2018 • Dhruv Malik, Ashwin Pananjady, Kush Bhatia, Koulik Khamaru, Peter L. Bartlett, Martin J. Wainwright
We focus on characterizing the convergence rate of these methods when applied to linear-quadratic systems, and study various settings of driving noise and reward feedback.
no code implementations • 25 Jun 2018 • Cheng Mao, Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright
Many applications, including rank aggregation, crowd-labeling, and graphon estimation, can be modeled in terms of a bivariate isotonic matrix with unknown permutations acting on its rows and/or columns.
no code implementations • 27 Feb 2018 • Cheng Mao, Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright
Many applications, including rank aggregation and crowd-labeling, can be modeled in terms of a bivariate isotonic matrix with unknown permutations acting on its rows and columns.
no code implementations • 19 Jul 2017 • Ashwin Pananjady, Cheng Mao, Vidya Muthukumar, Martin J. Wainwright, Thomas A. Courtade
We show that when the assignment of items to the topology is arbitrary, these permutation-based models, unlike their parametric counterparts, do not admit consistent estimation for most comparison topologies used in practice.
no code implementations • 18 Jun 2017 • Dong Yin, Ashwin Pananjady, Max Lam, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kannan Ramchandran, Peter Bartlett
It has been experimentally observed that distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms exhibit speedup saturation and decaying generalization ability beyond a particular batch-size.
no code implementations • 24 Apr 2017 • Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright, Thomas A. Courtade
The multivariate linear regression model with shuffled data and additive Gaussian noise arises in various correspondence estimation and matching problems.
no code implementations • 9 Aug 2016 • Ashwin Pananjady, Martin J. Wainwright, Thomas A. Courtade
Consider a noisy linear observation model with an unknown permutation, based on observing $y = \Pi^* A x^* + w$, where $x^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ is an unknown vector, $\Pi^*$ is an unknown $n \times n$ permutation matrix, and $w \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is additive Gaussian noise.