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Main Authors: Dean, Sarah, Curmei, Mihaela, Ratliff, Lillian J., Morgenstern, Jamie, Fazel, Maryam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02667
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author Dean, Sarah
Curmei, Mihaela
Ratliff, Lillian J.
Morgenstern, Jamie
Fazel, Maryam
author_facet Dean, Sarah
Curmei, Mihaela
Ratliff, Lillian J.
Morgenstern, Jamie
Fazel, Maryam
contents Numerous online services are data-driven: the behavior of users affects the system's parameters, and the system's parameters affect the users' experience of the service, which in turn affects the way users may interact with the system. For example, people may choose to use a service only for tasks that already works well, or they may choose to switch to a different service. These adaptations influence the ability of a system to learn about a population of users and tasks in order to improve its performance broadly. In this work, we analyze a class of such dynamics -- where users allocate their participation amongst services to reduce the individual risk they experience, and services update their model parameters to reduce the service's risk on their current user population. We refer to these dynamics as \emph{risk-reducing}, which cover a broad class of common model updates including gradient descent and multiplicative weights. For this general class of dynamics, we show that asymptotically stable equilibria are always segmented, with sub-populations allocated to a single learner. Under mild assumptions, the utilitarian social optimum is a stable equilibrium. In contrast to previous work, which shows that repeated risk minimization can result in (Hashimoto et al., 2018; Miller et al., 2021), we find that repeated myopic updates with multiple learners lead to better outcomes. We illustrate the phenomena via a simulated example initialized from real data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_02667
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Emergent specialization from participation dynamics and multi-learner retraining
Dean, Sarah
Curmei, Mihaela
Ratliff, Lillian J.
Morgenstern, Jamie
Fazel, Maryam
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
Numerous online services are data-driven: the behavior of users affects the system's parameters, and the system's parameters affect the users' experience of the service, which in turn affects the way users may interact with the system. For example, people may choose to use a service only for tasks that already works well, or they may choose to switch to a different service. These adaptations influence the ability of a system to learn about a population of users and tasks in order to improve its performance broadly. In this work, we analyze a class of such dynamics -- where users allocate their participation amongst services to reduce the individual risk they experience, and services update their model parameters to reduce the service's risk on their current user population. We refer to these dynamics as \emph{risk-reducing}, which cover a broad class of common model updates including gradient descent and multiplicative weights. For this general class of dynamics, we show that asymptotically stable equilibria are always segmented, with sub-populations allocated to a single learner. Under mild assumptions, the utilitarian social optimum is a stable equilibrium. In contrast to previous work, which shows that repeated risk minimization can result in (Hashimoto et al., 2018; Miller et al., 2021), we find that repeated myopic updates with multiple learners lead to better outcomes. We illustrate the phenomena via a simulated example initialized from real data.
title Emergent specialization from participation dynamics and multi-learner retraining
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02667