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Workshop
Smooth Games Optimization and Machine Learning
Simon Lacoste-Julien · Ioannis Mitliagkas · Gauthier Gidel · Vasilis Syrgkanis · Eva Tardos · Leon Bottou · Sebastian Nowozin

Fri Dec 07 05:00 AM -- 03:30 PM (PST) @ Room 512 ABEF
Event URL: https://sgo-workshop.github.io/ »

Overview

Advances in generative modeling and adversarial learning gave rise to a recent surge of interest in smooth two-players games, specifically in the context of learning generative adversarial networks (GANs). Solving these games raise intrinsically different challenges than the minimization tasks the machine learning community is used to. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the several communities interested in such smooth games, in order to present what is known on the topic and identify current open questions, such as how to handle the non-convexity appearing in GANs.

Background and objectives

A number of problems and applications in machine learning are formulated as games. A special class of games, smooth games, have come into the spotlight recently with the advent of GANs. In a two-players smooth game, each player attempts to minimize their differentiable cost function which depends also on the action of the other player. The dynamics of such games are distinct from the better understood dynamics of optimization problems. For example, the Jacobian of gradient descent on a smooth two-player game, can be non-symmetric and have complex eigenvalues. Recent work by ML researchers has identified these dynamics as a key challenge for efficiently solving similar problems.

A major hurdle for relevant research in the ML community is the lack of interaction with the mathematical programming and game theory communities where similar problems have been tackled in the past, yielding useful tools. While ML researchers are quite familiar with the convex optimization toolbox from mathematical programming, they are less familiar with the tools for solving games. For example, the extragradient algorithm to solve variational inequalities has been known in the mathematical programming literature for decades, however the ML community has until recently mainly appealed to gradient descent to optimize adversarial objectives.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a platform for both theoretical and applied researchers from the ML, mathematical programming and game theory community to discuss the status of our understanding on the interplay between smooth games, their applications in ML, as well existing tools and methods for dealing with them. We also encourage, and will devote time during the workshop, on work that identifies and discusses open, forward-looking problems of interest to the NIPS community.

Examples of topics of interest to the workshop are as follow:

  • Other examples of smooth games in machine learning (e.g. actor-critic models in RL).
  • Standard or novel algorithms to solve smooth games.
  • Empirical test of algorithms on GAN applications.
  • Existence and unicity results of equilibria in smooth games.
  • Can approximate equilibria have better properties than the exact ones ? [Arora 2017, Lipton and Young 1994].
  • Variational inequality algorithms [Harker and Pang 1990, Gidel et al. 2018].
  • Handling stochasticity [Hazan et al. 2017] or non-convexity [Grnarova et al. 2018] in smooth games.
  • Related topics from mathematical programming (e.g. bilevel optimization) [Pfau and Vinyals 2016].

Author Information

Simon Lacoste-Julien (Mila, Université de Montréal)

Simon Lacoste-Julien is an associate professor at Mila and DIRO from Université de Montréal, and Canada CIFAR AI Chair holder. He also heads part time the SAIT AI Lab Montreal from Samsung. His research interests are machine learning and applied math, with applications in related fields like computer vision and natural language processing. He obtained a B.Sc. in math., physics and computer science from McGill, a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley and a post-doc from the University of Cambridge. He spent a few years as a research faculty at INRIA and École normale supérieure in Paris before coming back to his roots in Montreal in 2016 to answer the call from Yoshua Bengio in growing the Montreal AI ecosystem.

Ioannis Mitliagkas (University of Montreal)
Gauthier Gidel (MILA)
Vasilis Syrgkanis (Microsoft Research)
Eva Tardos (Cornell)

Eva Tardos is a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, was Computer Science department chair 2006-2010. She received her BA and PhD from Eotvos University in Budapest. Tardos’s research interest is algorithms and algorithmic game theory. She is most known for her work on network-flow algorithms, approximation algorithms, and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing. Her current interest include the effect of learning behavior in games. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Packard Fellowship, the Goedel Prize, Dantzig Prize, Fulkerson Prize, ETACS prize, and the IEEE Technical Achievement Award. She is editor editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM, and was editor in the past of several other journals including the SIAM Journal of Computing, and Combinatorica, served as problem committee member for many conferences, and was program committee chair for SODA’96, FOCS’05, and EC’13.

Leon Bottou (Facebook AI Research)

Léon Bottou received a Diplôme from l'Ecole Polytechnique, Paris in 1987, a Magistère en Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et Informatiques from Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris in 1988, and a PhD in Computer Science from Université de Paris-Sud in 1991. He joined AT&T Bell Labs from 1991 to 1992 and AT&T Labs from 1995 to 2002. Between 1992 and 1995 he was chairman of Neuristique in Paris, a small company pioneering machine learning for data mining applications. He has been with NEC Labs America in Princeton since 2002. Léon's primary research interest is machine learning. His contributions to this field address theory, algorithms and large scale applications. Léon's secondary research interest is data compression and coding. His best known contribution in this field is the DjVu document compression technology (http://www.djvu.org.) Léon published over 70 papers and is serving on the boards of JMLR and IEEE TPAMI. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of Kxen Inc .

Sebastian Nowozin (Microsoft Research Cambridge)

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