research

Randomized trials are considered the gold standard for making informed decisions in medicine, yet they often lack generalizability to the patient populations in clinical practice. Observational studies, on the other hand, cover a broader patient population but are prone to various biases. Thus, before using an observational study for decision-making, it is crucial to benchmark its treatment effect estimates against those derived from a randomized trial. We propose a novel strategy to benchmark observational studies beyond the average treatment effect. First, we design a statistical test for the null hypothesis that the treatment effects, conditioned on a set of relevant features, differ up to some tolerance. We then estimate an asymptotically valid lower bound on the maximum bias strength for any subgroup in the observational study. Finally, we validate our benchmarking strategy in a real-world setting and show that it leads to conclusions that align with established medical knowledge.

In the era of fast-paced precision medicine, observational studies play a major role in properly evaluating new drugs in clinical practice. Yet, unobserved confounding can significantly compromise causal conclusions from observational data. We propose a novel strategy to quantify unobserved confounding by leveraging randomized trials. First, we design a statistical test to detect unobserved confounding with strength above a given threshold. Then, we use the test to estimate an asymptotically valid lower bound on the unobserved confounding strength. We evaluate the power and validity of our statistical test on several synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets. Further, we show how our lower bound can correctly identify the absence and presence of unobserved confounding in a real-world setting.

Convex Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a recently introduced framework that generalizes the standard RL objective to any convex (or concave) function of the state distribution induced by the agent’s policy. This framework subsumes several applications of practical interest, such as pure exploration, imitation learning, and risk-averse RL, among others. However, the previous convex RL literature implicitly evaluates the agent’s performance over infinite realizations (or trials), while most of the applications require excellent performance over a handful, or even just one, trials. To meet this practical demand, we formulate convex RL in finite trials, where the objective is any convex function of the empirical state distribution computed over a finite number of realizations. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical study of the setting, which includes an analysis of the importance of non-Markovian policies to achieve optimality, as well as a characterization of the computational and statistical complexity of the problem in various configurations.

The classic Reinforcement Learning (RL) formulation concerns the maximization of a scalar reward function. More recently, convex RL has been introduced to extend the RL formulation to all the objectives that are convex functions of the state distribution induced by a policy. Notably, convex RL covers several relevant applications that do not fall into the scalar formulation, including imitation learning, risk-averse RL, and pure exploration. In classic RL, it is common to optimize an infinite trials objective, which accounts for the state distribution instead of the empirical state visitation frequencies, even though the actual number of trajectories is always finite in practice. This is theoretically sound since the infinite trials and finite trials objectives are equivalent and thus lead to the same optimal policy. In this paper, we show that this hidden assumption does not hold in convex RL. In particular, we prove that erroneously optimizing the infinite trials objective in place of the actual finite trials one, as it is usually done, can lead to a significant approximation error. Since the finite trials setting is the default in both simulated and real-world RL, we believe shedding light on this issue will lead to better approaches and methodologies for convex RL, impacting relevant research areas such as imitation learning, risk-averse RL, and pure exploration among others.

Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to deploying state-of-the-art classifiers in safety-critical applications. Two classes of methods have emerged to address this issue: empirical defences and certified defences. Although certified defences come with robustness guarantees, empirical defences such as adversarial training enjoy much higher popularity among practitioners. In this paper, we systematically compare the standard and robust error of these two robust training paradigms across multiple computer vision tasks. We show that in most tasks and for both \(\ell_∞\)-ball and \(\ell_2\)-ball threat models, certified training with convex relaxations suffers from worse standard and robust error than adversarial training. We further explore how the error gap between certified and adversarial training depends on the threat model and the data distribution. In particular, besides the perturbation budget, we identify as important factors the shape of the perturbation set and the implicit margin of the data distribution. We support our arguments with extensive ablations on both synthetic and image datasets.

Recently, Aubin et al. (2021) proposed a set of linear low-dimensional problems to precisely evaluate different types of out-of-distribution generalization. In this paper, we show that one of these problems can already be solved by established algorithms, simply by better hyper-parameter tuning. We then propose an enhanced version of the linear unit-tests. To the best of our hyperparameter search and within the set of algorithms evaluated, AND-mask is the best performing algorithm on this new suite of tests. Our findings on synthetic data are further reinforced by experiments on an image classification task where we introduce spurious correlations.