|
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_4
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
SUMMARY AND RELATED WORKS
This paper is about
online linear optimization with an unconstrained comparator set (e.g., the
whole R^n space). Instead of trying to be competitive with the best linear
predictor x \in R^n, the aim is typically to be competitive with the best
penalized comparison vector. In this setting, and assuming that the convex
hull of the set of moves of the adversary is a full-rank polytope in R^n,
the authors provide stochastic techniques to derive the value of the game,
as well as the optimal strategies for the player and the adversary. These
abstract results are then applied to the one-dimensional case (a
straightforward extension to arbitrary dimension with
coordinate-decomposable games is also provided, but no thorough
application was worked out). Three 1-dimensional examples are studied in
details: linear optimization with a quadratic regularizer, non-stochastic
betting, and the standard online linear optimization problem on [-1,1]
(where the authors recover known results from their new general
technique).
This paper is a continuation of a series of papers
that addressed adversarial online learning problems from a stochastic
viewpoint (Abernethy et al. COLT 2008, Abernethy et al. COLT 2009, Rakhlin
et al. NIPS 2012). It extends those works to the case of unconstrained
comparator sets. Note however that unconstrained online convex
optimization is definitely not new: papers like Duchi et al. (Composite
Objective Mirror Descent, COLT 2010) already provided regret upper bounds
for unconstrained comparison vectors. The novelty here is that this
setting is studied from an exact minimax viewpoint.
OVERALL
ASSESSMENT
My overall opinion about the paper is quite positive
for the following reasons:
PROS
1) The paper is well
written and pleasant to read (all necessary intuitions are provided when
needed). Mathematics seem correct. 2) Though not ground-breaking, this
paper makes a further step towards the understanding of unconstrained
linear optimization. 3) The application to non-stochastic betting is
really nice, with a tight analysis and a simple algorithm.
CONS
4) There are not sufficiently many applications of the abstract
results: Theorems 7 and 9 are nice for a warm-up, Theorem 8 is
interesting, but I would have also expected a study of other forms of
penalized regret like the ones already encountered with online mirror
descent. In particular, can the techniques of the present paper be adapted
to multi-dimensional games that are not coordinate-decomposable? Most
Bregman-divergence-based regularizations are indeed of this form. 5)
Contrary to what is announced on line 326, it seems that the constraint
that the player cannot bet more than what he owns is not imposed to the
game. I understand that it is possible to make sure that he loses no more
than 1$ at the end of the game, but what can be said on the whole path
from t=1 to t=T?
OTHER COMMENTS 6) Related Work (Page 2):
references about unconstrained regret upper bounds with Online Mirror
Descent are missing. 7) Lines 105-107: the proposed 'alternative' is
not new: actually, the comparison of the loss to the best penalized loss
is known in statistics as an 'oracle inequality' from quite a long time
(see, e.g., the references in "Concentration Inequalities and Model
Selection", Massart, 2007). Parallely, in the machine learning community,
some works like the one of Vovk ("Competitive on-line statistics", 2001)
already began to formalize such ideas in the previous decade. 8) Line
141: hull(G)=hull(G') 9) Line 206: is the Lipschitz assumption really
needed? Is boundedness sufficient? 10) Statement of Theorem 3: I
suggest to move the fact that [we can find a full-rank set of corners
{g_1,...,g_{n+1}} of the polytope hull(G)] before the statement of Theorem
3. This is indeed straightforward in all subsequent applications.
(Furthermore, the term 'distinct' points is too weak, full-rank would be
more precise). 11) Line 262: it is implicitely assumed that V_{t+1} is
Lipschitz (or bounded? -> see above). 12) Line 288: the random
variable B was not defined earlier. 13) Theorem 7: recall that g_t \in
[-1,1]. 14) Title of Section 3.2: what does "all feasible sets" stand
for? 15) Line 341: please explain "bet everything every round ... 2^T"
16) Theorem 7 and the equation on line 683 are actually
straightforward by writing that B is the sum of independent Rademacher
variables. 17) Theorem 8: I think that the first exponential contains
(G_t-\tau)/sqrt{T} (no "-1" term), and that the exponent of the last term
is \tau-1 instead of \tau (the reason is that the authors used V_t instead
of V_{t+1}). 18) Several typos : argmin -> min (line 117), that
that -> that (line 121), Theorems 1 and 2 -> Corollary 2 (line 244),
V_t -> V_{t+1} (line 286), g_{1:T} -> g_{1:t} (lines 288 and 289),
-\partial L -> \partial L (line 292), *2* B sqrt{T} (line 338 + cf
consequences in the following lines), |G| \leq sqrt{T} (line 355), loss
functions -> losses (line 411)
ADDITIONAL COMMENT AFTER THE
AUTHORS' REBUTTAL
I thank the authors for their detailed answer.
It seems that point 5) can be taken care of. However, I regret that the
pratical implications of the abstract results are too narrow in the
submitted version, and that the amount of work needed to address the
(interesting) applications mentioned in the rebuttal is too large. The
proposed modified paper should have clear chances of acceptation in a
later conference. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This paper makes an original further step towards the
understanding of unconstrained linear optimization; intuitions are
well-explained and make the paper pleasant to read. However, the practical
implications of the abstract results are a little too narrow at the
moment, and I fear that the revision outlined in the rebuttal will require
a too large amount of work. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper theoretically examines online linear
optimization games where the optimizing player is minimizing regret with
respect to some benchmark loss. They give a recursive characterization of
the value of the game and use this characterization to derive the minimax
optimal strategies.
This paper is interesting and dense. Very
dense.
I must admit that I'm not an active researcher in this
area, but I am an active follower and "consumer" of such results. To the
paper's credit I was able to follow (although not entirely verify) much of
the paper's derivation, and found much of the analysis novel (to me) and
very clever. The result for the betting game was particularly interesting.
However, I was frequently lost on the main thrust of paper's
contributions. By that I don't mean the theoeretical contributions in
terms of theorems proven, but rather the meaning or implications of the
theoretical contributions. As a community, I think it's important for NIPS
not to fragment; and to avoid this we need to be careful that our papers
aren't only understood by the handful of people working in an area. This
means providing more context to the theoretical results and why they are
important and their implications for the broader machine learning
community. The place for such context in this paper is Section 3, where
the implications are drawn for three different settings, but these
settings are simply too abstract, and now the question is what are the
implications of these results. Maybe this is where a discussion section
could greatly improve the paper. However, the paper abrubtly ends in
Section 3, almost as if there are pages missing (maybe there are).
I think this paper could be a very strong paper (top 5% of
accepted papers strong), but it unfortunately misses that opportunity. It
might miss it so far as to not warrant publication.
Minor
Comments:
066: "We this in mind" => "With this in mind"
076: "via a penalty functions" => "via a penalty function" 305:
"cannot have no a regret" => "cannot have a no
regret" Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
The paper makes some very interesting theoretical
contributions for online linear optimization games. The authors, though,
fail to give context or implication for these
results. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper presents an analysis of the minimax
formulation of a repeated decision-making task as a sequential zero-sum
game. Unlike the usual setup where the players are restricted to choosing
a strategy in the simplex over a predetermined set of choices, the players
in this paper are generally unconstrained. The authors characterize the
game using martingale sequences and show that minimax-optimal values can
be expressed using discrete gradients over the values of the subgames. The
authors then propose minimax-optimal algorithms under alternative notions
of benchmark loss for a subset of games of this form call
"coordinate-decomposable" games.
The paper presents a novel
characterization of repeated unconstrained optimization problems as well
as several new theoretical results for these problems. The first is
formulation of the game value as the supremum of the expected value as a
martingale sequence. The second is that optimal strategies can be
expressed using the discrete gradient of the linear interpolation of pairs
of opponent strategies and values of each subgame at time step t+1. Some
mild assumptions are required, but both of these results are significant
contributions and appear to be novel. Furthermore, the authors define new
regret notions for an unconstrained betting game and derive
minimax-optimal strategies that have a non-conventional form.
The
paper is dense in some parts but overall the presentation is clear given
the content with some minor exceptions. There is no conclusion; the four
bullet points in the introduction should be summarized by a single
sentence each and then the elaborate explanations of each moved to a
conclusion that summarizes the contributions of the paper. The explanation
of the betting game itself and the reasons that the previous benchmarks
are unsatisfactory should be made more clear.
As this is not my
area of expertise, some of the proof steps were difficult to get through.
The paper can be made generally more accessible by more pointers to
existing literature.
Some of the results resemble those from
two-person zero-sum extensive game theory and the connections may be worth
mentioning. For example, some steps of the proof of Theorem 1 seem similar
to those of the simplex algorithm used in solving LP formulations of
zero-sum games. The construction of Theorem 3 and setting f(g_t) =
V_t(...) in equation 8 looks similar to backward induction. Are the
concepts in this paper generalizations of these concepts in the same way
that Sion's Minimax Theorem generalizes von Neumann's minimax theorem?
Some specific comments:
- Eq 3: should argmin be min? And
why the change from inf? Similarly at the top of page 2: L(G) is a value,
so should it be min vs. argmin?
- In Figure 1, why use a circle
over x? This notation is inconsistent with the rest of the text in the
main paper.
- Page 4, provide a citation for Sion's Minimax
theorem.
- Bottom of Page 4 and again several times in the
appendix: the set of pairs {(g^1, -f(g^1), ... } is missing a closing
parenthesis.
Q2: Please summarize your
review in 1-2 sentences
The paper presents several new theoretical results for
minimax formulations of repeated unconstrained optimization problems. The
contributions are significant and the presentation is clear.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper studies minimax algorithms for online
linear optimization settings (in the d-dimensional Euclidean space) where
the linear loss of the comparator x is increased by a penalization term
Psi(x). This allows the regret to be computed against any comparator x,
rather than only comparators belonging to some constrained region. A
(non-constructive) characterization of the minimax value is derived in
terms of a martingale process under the assumption that the loss vectors
belong to a set whose convex hull is a full-rank polytope. Explicit
minimax algorithms are constructed for special setting
(coordinate-decomposable games, 1-dimensional games with quadratic
penalties, betting games).
The paper is well written and
technically solid. However, the significance of the problem is unclear.
The settings considered in the paper are quite specific, and the impact of
results and proof techniques on more general settings remains also
unclear. The scope appears too limited to provide useful insights. I think
the work is potentially promising but too preliminary - I would like to
see applications to more practical settings.
POST-REBUTTAL
ADDENDUM =============================
I thank the authors for
explaining the range of applications of their results. Still, it looks
like the paper needs a substantial amount of
revision. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
A potentially interesting paper but limited in scope
and impact.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We would like to sincerely thank the reviewers for
their careful reading of the paper, and their useful feedback. We were
pleased at the positive feedback provided.
Several reviewers
suggested that our results might be too narrow to be of broad interest,
and would have little useful application. Looking back at the submitted
paper, it’s obvious we should have been more clear in highlighting the
applicability and scope of our contributions. While we leave empirical
evaluation to future work, we believe there is a clear path forward here
that will be very relevant to the NIPS community. Despite appearances, the
setting and results we present are anything but niche: the problem
framework of “unconstrained online optimization” is a fundamental template
for (and strongly motivated by) several online learning settings, and the
results we develop are very applicable to a wide range of commonly studied
algorithmic problems. It is a pity we did not make this significantly
clearer, and it is an error we intend to correct.
Let us give a
sketch of what we shall add to the paper with some motivating examples.
First, the classic algorithm for linear pattern recognition, the
Perceptron, can be seen as an algorithm for unconstrained linear
optimization. Going further, methods for training a linear SVM or a
logistic regression model, such as stochastic gradient descent or the
Pegasos algorithm, are unconstrained optimization algorithms. Finally,
there has been recent work in the pricing of options and other financial
derivatives (see Abernethy et al, and some earlier work by DeMarzo,
Kremer, and Mansour) that can be described exactly in terms of a repeated
game which fits nicely into our framework.
We also wish to
emphasize that the algorithm of Sec 3.2 is both practical and easily
implementable: for a multi-dimensional problem one needs to only track the
sum of gradients for each coordinate (similar to Regularized Dual
Averaging), and compute Eq. (14) for each coordinate to derive the
appropriate strategy (for numerical reasons, computing (14) in log space
and then exponentiating will be necessary). We emphasized this algorithm
as a tool for making a-priori unconstrained bets/investments. However, as
[1] shows, the bounds we give for this minimax-optimal algorithm yield
bounds on standard regret that are superior to those of classic algorithms
(exponentiated gradient descent, online gradient descent and mirror
descent) when the norm of the optimal point is not known in advance. Thus,
we have offered a quite novel algorithm for a fundamental problem that is
demonstrably quite different than standard approaches, and have proved it
can offer much better bounds. It is clear that we need to make this more
visible in the final version.
Reviewer 4: To point 4), the
application to non-decomposable games in higher dimensions is a natural
next step, and one we hope to address in future work. Point 5) is a good
one, we will provide a more clear argument in the revised version. To
sketch the argument, suppose on some round the player bets more than his
current balance. Then, the adversary can play +1 or -1 as required to
ensure the player loses this bet (dropping the player below the allowed
floor on loss). Then, the adversary can play 0 gradients for the remainder
of the game to lock in this loss. Thus, the claims of line 326 must hold
if the algorithm of Thm 8 is followed (with an appropriate scale factor).
We appreciate the reviewer’s careful reading of the paper, and will of
course address the points made under OTHER COMMENTS (including the
additional citations).
Reviewer 5: There is indeed a high-level
connection to extensive-form games. We will consider whether this can be
made more precise. Eq. (3) should indeed be a min; the change from inf to
min is simply to clarify the argmin must exist. We appreciate the other
specific comments, we'll fix these in the final version.
[1]
“No-regret algorithms for unconstrained online convex optimization.” In
NIPS, 2012. Streeter and McMahan.
| |