categories
string
doi
string
id
string
year
float64
venue
string
link
string
updated
string
published
string
title
string
abstract
string
authors
list
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.00357
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00357v2
2017-04-10T22:54:01Z
2016-02-01T01:47:00Z
DeepCare: A Deep Dynamic Memory Model for Predictive Medicine
Personalized predictive medicine necessitates the modeling of patient illness and care processes, which inherently have long-term temporal dependencies. Healthcare observations, recorded in electronic medical records, are episodic and irregular in time. We introduce DeepCare, an end-to-end deep dynamic neural network that reads medical records, stores previous illness history, infers current illness states and predicts future medical outcomes. At the data level, DeepCare represents care episodes as vectors in space, models patient health state trajectories through explicit memory of historical records. Built on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), DeepCare introduces time parameterizations to handle irregular timed events by moderating the forgetting and consolidation of memory cells. DeepCare also incorporates medical interventions that change the course of illness and shape future medical risk. Moving up to the health state level, historical and present health states are then aggregated through multiscale temporal pooling, before passing through a neural network that estimates future outcomes. We demonstrate the efficacy of DeepCare for disease progression modeling, intervention recommendation, and future risk prediction. On two important cohorts with heavy social and economic burden -- diabetes and mental health -- the results show improved modeling and risk prediction accuracy.
[ "['Trang Pham' 'Truyen Tran' 'Dinh Phung' 'Svetha Venkatesh']", "Trang Pham, Truyen Tran, Dinh Phung and Svetha Venkatesh" ]
cs.LG cs.HC
10.1145/2872427.2883041
1602.00370
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00370v2
2016-04-05T03:59:57Z
2016-02-01T03:01:33Z
Visualizing Large-scale and High-dimensional Data
We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two steps suffer from considerable computational costs, preventing the state-of-the-art methods such as the t-SNE from scaling to large-scale and high-dimensional data (e.g., millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions). We propose the LargeVis, a technique that first constructs an accurately approximated K-nearest neighbor graph from the data and then layouts the graph in the low-dimensional space. Comparing to t-SNE, LargeVis significantly reduces the computational cost of the graph construction step and employs a principled probabilistic model for the visualization step, the objective of which can be effectively optimized through asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a linear time complexity. The whole procedure thus easily scales to millions of high-dimensional data points. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate that the LargeVis outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. The hyper-parameters of LargeVis are also much more stable over different data sets.
[ "Jian Tang, Jingzhou Liu, Ming Zhang and Qiaozhu Mei", "['Jian Tang' 'Jingzhou Liu' 'Ming Zhang' 'Qiaozhu Mei']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.00374
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00374v1
2016-02-01T03:21:46Z
2016-02-01T03:21:46Z
ConfidentCare: A Clinical Decision Support System for Personalized Breast Cancer Screening
Breast cancer screening policies attempt to achieve timely diagnosis by the regular screening of apparently healthy women. Various clinical decisions are needed to manage the screening process; those include: selecting the screening tests for a woman to take, interpreting the test outcomes, and deciding whether or not a woman should be referred to a diagnostic test. Such decisions are currently guided by clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), which represent a one-size-fits-all approach that are designed to work well on average for a population, without guaranteeing that it will work well uniformly over that population. Since the risks and benefits of screening are functions of each patients features, personalized screening policies that are tailored to the features of individuals are needed in order to ensure that the right tests are recommended to the right woman. In order to address this issue, we present ConfidentCare: a computer-aided clinical decision support system that learns a personalized screening policy from the electronic health record (EHR) data. ConfidentCare operates by recognizing clusters of similar patients, and learning the best screening policy to adopt for each cluster. A cluster of patients is a set of patients with similar features (e.g. age, breast density, family history, etc.), and the screening policy is a set of guidelines on what actions to recommend for a woman given her features and screening test scores. ConfidentCare algorithm ensures that the policy adopted for every cluster of patients satisfies a predefined accuracy requirement with a high level of confidence. We show that our algorithm outperforms the current CPGs in terms of cost-efficiency and false positive rates.
[ "Ahmed M. Alaa, Kyeong H. Moon, William Hsu, and Mihaela van der Schaar", "['Ahmed M. Alaa' 'Kyeong H. Moon' 'William Hsu' 'Mihaela van der Schaar']" ]
cs.CL cs.LG
null
1602.00426
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00426v1
2016-02-01T08:37:56Z
2016-02-01T08:37:56Z
An Iterative Deep Learning Framework for Unsupervised Discovery of Speech Features and Linguistic Units with Applications on Spoken Term Detection
In this work we aim to discover high quality speech features and linguistic units directly from unlabeled speech data in a zero resource scenario. The results are evaluated using the metrics and corpora proposed in the Zero Resource Speech Challenge organized at Interspeech 2015. A Multi-layered Acoustic Tokenizer (MAT) was proposed for automatic discovery of multiple sets of acoustic tokens from the given corpus. Each acoustic token set is specified by a set of hyperparameters that describe the model configuration. These sets of acoustic tokens carry different characteristics fof the given corpus and the language behind, thus can be mutually reinforced. The multiple sets of token labels are then used as the targets of a Multi-target Deep Neural Network (MDNN) trained on low-level acoustic features. Bottleneck features extracted from the MDNN are then used as the feedback input to the MAT and the MDNN itself in the next iteration. We call this iterative deep learning framework the Multi-layered Acoustic Tokenizing Deep Neural Network (MAT-DNN), which generates both high quality speech features for the Track 1 of the Challenge and acoustic tokens for the Track 2 of the Challenge. In addition, we performed extra experiments on the same corpora on the application of query-by-example spoken term detection. The experimental results showed the iterative deep learning framework of MAT-DNN improved the detection performance due to better underlying speech features and acoustic tokens.
[ "Cheng-Tao Chung, Cheng-Yu Tsai, Hsiang-Hung Lu, Chia-Hsiang Liu,\n Hung-yi Lee and Lin-shan Lee", "['Cheng-Tao Chung' 'Cheng-Yu Tsai' 'Hsiang-Hung Lu' 'Chia-Hsiang Liu'\n 'Hung-yi Lee' 'Lin-shan Lee']" ]
cs.MM cs.CR cs.LG cs.NI
null
1602.00489
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00489v2
2016-02-19T15:23:02Z
2016-02-01T12:12:17Z
Real Time Video Quality Representation Classification of Encrypted HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming - the Case of Safari
The increasing popularity of HTTP adaptive video streaming services has dramatically increased bandwidth requirements on operator networks, which attempt to shape their traffic through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). However, Google and certain content providers have started to encrypt their video services. As a result, operators often encounter difficulties in shaping their encrypted video traffic via DPI. This highlights the need for new traffic classification methods for encrypted HTTP adaptive video streaming to enable smart traffic shaping. These new methods will have to effectively estimate the quality representation layer and playout buffer. We present a new method and show for the first time that video quality representation classification for (YouTube) encrypted HTTP adaptive streaming is possible. We analyze the performance of this classification method with Safari over HTTPS. Based on a large number of offline and online traffic classification experiments, we demonstrate that it can independently classify, in real time, every video segment into one of the quality representation layers with 97.18% average accuracy.
[ "Ran Dubin, Amit Dvir, Ofir Pele, Ofer Hadar, Itay Richman and Ofir\n Trabelsi", "['Ran Dubin' 'Amit Dvir' 'Ofir Pele' 'Ofer Hadar' 'Itay Richman'\n 'Ofir Trabelsi']" ]
cs.MM cs.LG cs.NI
10.1109/TIFS.2017.2730819
1602.00490
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00490v2
2016-07-21T06:42:01Z
2016-02-01T12:15:27Z
I Know What You Saw Last Minute - Encrypted HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming Title Classification
Desktops and laptops can be maliciously exploited to violate privacy. There are two main types of attack scenarios: active and passive. In this paper, we consider the passive scenario where the adversary does not interact actively with the device, but he is able to eavesdrop on the network traffic of the device from the network side. Most of the Internet traffic is encrypted and thus passive attacks are challenging. Previous research has shown that information can be extracted from encrypted multimedia streams. This includes video title classification of non HTTP adaptive streams (non-HAS). This paper presents an algorithm for encrypted HTTP adaptive video streaming title classification. We show that an external attacker can identify the video title from video HTTP adaptive streams (HAS) sites such as YouTube. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that shows this. We provide a large data set of 10000 YouTube video streams of 100 popular video titles (each title downloaded 100 times) as examples for this task. The dataset was collected under real-world network conditions. We present several machine algorithms for the task and run a through set of experiments, which shows that our classification accuracy is more than 95%. We also show that our algorithms are able to classify video titles that are not in the training set as unknown and some of the algorithms are also able to eliminate false prediction of video titles and instead report unknown. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms robustness to delays and packet losses at test time and show that a solution that uses SVM is the most robust against these changes given enough training data. We provide the dataset and the crawler for future research.
[ "Ran Dubin, Amit Dvir, Ofir Pele, Ofer Hadar", "['Ran Dubin' 'Amit Dvir' 'Ofir Pele' 'Ofer Hadar']" ]
cs.LG
10.1007/s10994-017-5632-x
1602.00554
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00554v2
2017-05-11T12:41:25Z
2016-02-01T15:11:48Z
Graph-based Predictable Feature Analysis
We propose graph-based predictable feature analysis (GPFA), a new method for unsupervised learning of predictable features from high-dimensional time series, where high predictability is understood very generically as low variance in the distribution of the next data point given the previous ones. We show how this measure of predictability can be understood in terms of graph embedding as well as how it relates to the information-theoretic measure of predictive information in special cases. We confirm the effectiveness of GPFA on different datasets, comparing it to three existing algorithms with similar objectives---namely slow feature analysis, forecastable component analysis, and predictable feature analysis---to which GPFA shows very competitive results.
[ "['Björn Weghenkel' 'Asja Fischer' 'Laurenz Wiskott']", "Bj\\\"orn Weghenkel and Asja Fischer and Laurenz Wiskott" ]
cs.LG
10.1109/TSP.2016.2630038
1602.00575
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00575v2
2016-06-10T21:02:10Z
2016-02-01T16:00:47Z
Multi-object Classification via Crowdsourcing with a Reject Option
Consider designing an effective crowdsourcing system for an $M$-ary classification task. Crowd workers complete simple binary microtasks whose results are aggregated to give the final result. We consider the novel scenario where workers have a reject option so they may skip microtasks when they are unable or choose not to respond. For example, in mismatched speech transcription, workers who do not know the language may not be able to respond to microtasks focused on phonological dimensions outside their categorical perception. We present an aggregation approach using a weighted majority voting rule, where each worker's response is assigned an optimized weight to maximize the crowd's classification performance. We evaluate system performance in both exact and asymptotic forms. Further, we consider the setting where there may be a set of greedy workers that complete microtasks even when they are unable to perform it reliably. We consider an oblivious and an expurgation strategy to deal with greedy workers, developing an algorithm to adaptively switch between the two based on the estimated fraction of greedy workers in the anonymous crowd. Simulation results show improved performance compared with conventional majority voting.
[ "Qunwei Li, Aditya Vempaty, Lav R. Varshney, and Pramod K. Varshney", "['Qunwei Li' 'Aditya Vempaty' 'Lav R. Varshney' 'Pramod K. Varshney']" ]
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT stat.ML
null
1602.00734
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00734v1
2016-02-01T22:43:55Z
2016-02-01T22:43:55Z
Learning Data Triage: Linear Decoding Works for Compressive MRI
The standard approach to compressive sampling considers recovering an unknown deterministic signal with certain known structure, and designing the sub-sampling pattern and recovery algorithm based on the known structure. This approach requires looking for a good representation that reveals the signal structure, and solving a non-smooth convex minimization problem (e.g., basis pursuit). In this paper, another approach is considered: We learn a good sub-sampling pattern based on available training signals, without knowing the signal structure in advance, and reconstruct an accordingly sub-sampled signal by computationally much cheaper linear reconstruction. We provide a theoretical guarantee on the recovery error, and show via experiments on real-world MRI data the effectiveness of the proposed compressive MRI scheme.
[ "['Yen-Huan Li' 'Volkan Cevher']", "Yen-Huan Li and Volkan Cevher" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV cs.NE cs.RO
null
1602.00991
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.00991v2
2016-03-08T22:09:05Z
2016-02-02T16:10:16Z
Deep Tracking: Seeing Beyond Seeing Using Recurrent Neural Networks
This paper presents to the best of our knowledge the first end-to-end object tracking approach which directly maps from raw sensor input to object tracks in sensor space without requiring any feature engineering or system identification in the form of plant or sensor models. Specifically, our system accepts a stream of raw sensor data at one end and, in real-time, produces an estimate of the entire environment state at the output including even occluded objects. We achieve this by framing the problem as a deep learning task and exploit sequence models in the form of recurrent neural networks to learn a mapping from sensor measurements to object tracks. In particular, we propose a learning method based on a form of input dropout which allows learning in an unsupervised manner, only based on raw, occluded sensor data without access to ground-truth annotations. We demonstrate our approach using a synthetic dataset designed to mimic the task of tracking objects in 2D laser data -- as commonly encountered in robotics applications -- and show that it learns to track many dynamic objects despite occlusions and the presence of sensor noise.
[ "Peter Ondruska and Ingmar Posner", "['Peter Ondruska' 'Ingmar Posner']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01024
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01024v1
2016-02-02T17:51:43Z
2016-02-02T17:51:43Z
On Deep Multi-View Representation Learning: Objectives and Optimization
We consider learning representations (features) in the setting in which we have access to multiple unlabeled views of the data for learning while only one view is available for downstream tasks. Previous work on this problem has proposed several techniques based on deep neural networks, typically involving either autoencoder-like networks with a reconstruction objective or paired feedforward networks with a batch-style correlation-based objective. We analyze several techniques based on prior work, as well as new variants, and compare them empirically on image, speech, and text tasks. We find an advantage for correlation-based representation learning, while the best results on most tasks are obtained with our new variant, deep canonically correlated autoencoders (DCCAE). We also explore a stochastic optimization procedure for minibatch correlation-based objectives and discuss the time/performance trade-offs for kernel-based and neural network-based implementations.
[ "Weiran Wang, Raman Arora, Karen Livescu, Jeff Bilmes", "['Weiran Wang' 'Raman Arora' 'Karen Livescu' 'Jeff Bilmes']" ]
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
null
1602.01042
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01042v1
2016-02-02T18:54:04Z
2016-02-02T18:54:04Z
Improved Achievability and Converse Bounds for Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi Graph Matching
We consider the problem of perfectly recovering the vertex correspondence between two correlated Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi (ER) graphs. For a pair of correlated graphs on the same vertex set, the correspondence between the vertices can be obscured by randomly permuting the vertex labels of one of the graphs. In some cases, the structural information in the graphs allow this correspondence to be recovered. We investigate the information-theoretic threshold for exact recovery, i.e. the conditions under which the entire vertex correspondence can be correctly recovered given unbounded computational resources. Pedarsani and Grossglauser provided an achievability result of this type. Their result establishes the scaling dependence of the threshold on the number of vertices. We improve on their achievability bound. We also provide a converse bound, establishing conditions under which exact recovery is impossible. Together, these establish the scaling dependence of the threshold on the level of correlation between the two graphs. The converse and achievability bounds differ by a factor of two for sparse, significantly correlated graphs.
[ "Daniel Cullina, Negar Kiyavash", "['Daniel Cullina' 'Negar Kiyavash']" ]
stat.AP cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.01052
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01052v2
2016-05-14T15:42:05Z
2016-02-02T19:27:54Z
Better safe than sorry: Risky function exploitation through safe optimization
Exploration-exploitation of functions, that is learning and optimizing a mapping between inputs and expected outputs, is ubiquitous to many real world situations. These situations sometimes require us to avoid certain outcomes at all cost, for example because they are poisonous, harmful, or otherwise dangerous. We test participants' behavior in scenarios in which they have to find the optimum of a function while at the same time avoid outputs below a certain threshold. In two experiments, we find that Safe-Optimization, a Gaussian Process-based exploration-exploitation algorithm, describes participants' behavior well and that participants seem to care firstly whether a point is safe and then try to pick the optimal point from all such safe points. This means that their trade-off between exploration and exploitation can be seen as an intelligent, approximate, and homeostasis-driven strategy.
[ "['Eric Schulz' 'Quentin J. M. Huys' 'Dominik R. Bach'\n 'Maarten Speekenbrink' 'Andreas Krause']", "Eric Schulz, Quentin J. M. Huys, Dominik R. Bach, Maarten\n Speekenbrink, Andreas Krause" ]
stat.ML cs.IT cs.LG cs.RO math.IT
null
1602.01064
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01064v3
2016-05-24T06:57:30Z
2016-02-02T19:58:11Z
Minimum Regret Search for Single- and Multi-Task Optimization
We propose minimum regret search (MRS), a novel acquisition function for Bayesian optimization. MRS bears similarities with information-theoretic approaches such as entropy search (ES). However, while ES aims in each query at maximizing the information gain with respect to the global maximum, MRS aims at minimizing the expected simple regret of its ultimate recommendation for the optimum. While empirically ES and MRS perform similar in most of the cases, MRS produces fewer outliers with high simple regret than ES. We provide empirical results both for a synthetic single-task optimization problem as well as for a simulated multi-task robotic control problem.
[ "['Jan Hendrik Metzen']", "Jan Hendrik Metzen" ]
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
null
1602.01132
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01132v3
2016-06-16T13:40:06Z
2016-02-02T22:06:02Z
Interactive algorithms: from pool to stream
We consider interactive algorithms in the pool-based setting, and in the stream-based setting. Interactive algorithms observe suggested elements (representing actions or queries), and interactively select some of them and receive responses. Pool-based algorithms can select elements at any order, while stream-based algorithms observe elements in sequence, and can only select elements immediately after observing them. We assume that the suggested elements are generated independently from some source distribution, and ask what is the stream size required for emulating a pool algorithm with a given pool size. We provide algorithms and matching lower bounds for general pool algorithms, and for utility-based pool algorithms. We further show that a maximal gap between the two settings exists also in the special case of active learning for binary classification.
[ "Sivan Sabato and Tom Hess", "['Sivan Sabato' 'Tom Hess']" ]
cs.LG cs.NE stat.ML
null
1602.01164
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01164v1
2016-02-03T01:32:01Z
2016-02-03T01:32:01Z
Single-Solution Hypervolume Maximization and its use for Improving Generalization of Neural Networks
This paper introduces the hypervolume maximization with a single solution as an alternative to the mean loss minimization. The relationship between the two problems is proved through bounds on the cost function when an optimal solution to one of the problems is evaluated on the other, with a hyperparameter to control the similarity between the two problems. This same hyperparameter allows higher weight to be placed on samples with higher loss when computing the hypervolume's gradient, whose normalized version can range from the mean loss to the max loss. An experiment on MNIST with a neural network is used to validate the theory developed, showing that the hypervolume maximization can behave similarly to the mean loss minimization and can also provide better performance, resulting on a 20% reduction of the classification error on the test set.
[ "['Conrado S. Miranda' 'Fernando J. Von Zuben']", "Conrado S. Miranda and Fernando J. Von Zuben" ]
cs.CV cs.LG cs.MM cs.NE stat.ML
null
1602.01168
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01168v2
2016-06-05T02:45:35Z
2016-02-03T02:41:33Z
Learning Discriminative Features via Label Consistent Neural Network
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) enforces supervised information only at the output layer, and hidden layers are trained by back propagating the prediction error from the output layer without explicit supervision. We propose a supervised feature learning approach, Label Consistent Neural Network, which enforces direct supervision in late hidden layers. We associate each neuron in a hidden layer with a particular class label and encourage it to be activated for input signals from the same class. More specifically, we introduce a label consistency regularization called "discriminative representation error" loss for late hidden layers and combine it with classification error loss to build our overall objective function. This label consistency constraint alleviates the common problem of gradient vanishing and tends to faster convergence; it also makes the features derived from late hidden layers discriminative enough for classification even using a simple $k$-NN classifier, since input signals from the same class will have very similar representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on several public benchmarks for action and object category recognition.
[ "['Zhuolin Jiang' 'Yaming Wang' 'Larry Davis' 'Walt Andrews'\n 'Viktor Rozgic']", "Zhuolin Jiang, Yaming Wang, Larry Davis, Walt Andrews, Viktor Rozgic" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01198
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01198v2
2016-02-13T00:36:41Z
2016-02-03T06:31:09Z
k-variates++: more pluses in the k-means++
k-means++ seeding has become a de facto standard for hard clustering algorithms. In this paper, our first contribution is a two-way generalisation of this seeding, k-variates++, that includes the sampling of general densities rather than just a discrete set of Dirac densities anchored at the point locations, and a generalisation of the well known Arthur-Vassilvitskii (AV) approximation guarantee, in the form of a bias+variance approximation bound of the global optimum. This approximation exhibits a reduced dependency on the "noise" component with respect to the optimal potential --- actually approaching the statistical lower bound. We show that k-variates++ reduces to efficient (biased seeding) clustering algorithms tailored to specific frameworks; these include distributed, streaming and on-line clustering, with direct approximation results for these algorithms. Finally, we present a novel application of k-variates++ to differential privacy. For either the specific frameworks considered here, or for the differential privacy setting, there is little to no prior results on the direct application of k-means++ and its approximation bounds --- state of the art contenders appear to be significantly more complex and / or display less favorable (approximation) properties. We stress that our algorithms can still be run in cases where there is \textit{no} closed form solution for the population minimizer. We demonstrate the applicability of our analysis via experimental evaluation on several domains and settings, displaying competitive performances vs state of the art.
[ "Richard Nock, Rapha\\\"el Canyasse, Roksana Boreli and Frank Nielsen", "['Richard Nock' 'Raphaël Canyasse' 'Roksana Boreli' 'Frank Nielsen']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01323
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01323v1
2016-02-03T14:54:05Z
2016-02-03T14:54:05Z
Biclustering Readings and Manuscripts via Non-negative Matrix Factorization, with Application to the Text of Jude
The text-critical practice of grouping witnesses into families or texttypes often faces two obstacles: Contamination in the manuscript tradition, and co-dependence in identifying characteristic readings and manuscripts. We introduce non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as a simple, unsupervised, and efficient way to cluster large numbers of manuscripts and readings simultaneously while summarizing contamination using an easy-to-interpret mixture model. We apply this method to an extensive collation of the New Testament epistle of Jude and show that the resulting clusters correspond to human-identified textual families from existing research.
[ "Joey McCollum and Stephen Brown", "['Joey McCollum' 'Stephen Brown']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.01407
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01407v2
2016-05-23T22:44:56Z
2016-02-03T18:45:07Z
A Kronecker-factored approximate Fisher matrix for convolution layers
Second-order optimization methods such as natural gradient descent have the potential to speed up training of neural networks by correcting for the curvature of the loss function. Unfortunately, the exact natural gradient is impractical to compute for large models, and most approximations either require an expensive iterative procedure or make crude approximations to the curvature. We present Kronecker Factors for Convolution (KFC), a tractable approximation to the Fisher matrix for convolutional networks based on a structured probabilistic model for the distribution over backpropagated derivatives. Similarly to the recently proposed Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC), each block of the approximate Fisher matrix decomposes as the Kronecker product of small matrices, allowing for efficient inversion. KFC captures important curvature information while still yielding comparably efficient updates to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We show that the updates are invariant to commonly used reparameterizations, such as centering of the activations. In our experiments, approximate natural gradient descent with KFC was able to train convolutional networks several times faster than carefully tuned SGD. Furthermore, it was able to train the networks in 10-20 times fewer iterations than SGD, suggesting its potential applicability in a distributed setting.
[ "['Roger Grosse' 'James Martens']", "Roger Grosse and James Martens" ]
cs.LG cs.CV math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.01557
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01557v1
2016-02-04T04:59:54Z
2016-02-04T04:59:54Z
An ensemble diversity approach to supervised binary hashing
Binary hashing is a well-known approach for fast approximate nearest-neighbor search in information retrieval. Much work has focused on affinity-based objective functions involving the hash functions or binary codes. These objective functions encode neighborhood information between data points and are often inspired by manifold learning algorithms. They ensure that the hash functions differ from each other through constraints or penalty terms that encourage codes to be orthogonal or dissimilar across bits, but this couples the binary variables and complicates the already difficult optimization. We propose a much simpler approach: we train each hash function (or bit) independently from each other, but introduce diversity among them using techniques from classifier ensembles. Surprisingly, we find that not only is this faster and trivially parallelizable, but it also improves over the more complex, coupled objective function, and achieves state-of-the-art precision and recall in experiments with image retrieval.
[ "['Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán' 'Ramin Raziperchikolaei']", "Miguel \\'A. Carreira-Perpi\\~n\\'an and Ramin Raziperchikolaei" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01580
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01580v1
2016-02-04T08:06:59Z
2016-02-04T08:06:59Z
Long-term Planning by Short-term Prediction
We consider planning problems, that often arise in autonomous driving applications, in which an agent should decide on immediate actions so as to optimize a long term objective. For example, when a car tries to merge in a roundabout it should decide on an immediate acceleration/braking command, while the long term effect of the command is the success/failure of the merge. Such problems are characterized by continuous state and action spaces, and by interaction with multiple agents, whose behavior can be adversarial. We argue that dual versions of the MDP framework (that depend on the value function and the $Q$ function) are problematic for autonomous driving applications due to the non Markovian of the natural state space representation, and due to the continuous state and action spaces. We propose to tackle the planning task by decomposing the problem into two phases: First, we apply supervised learning for predicting the near future based on the present. We require that the predictor will be differentiable with respect to the representation of the present. Second, we model a full trajectory of the agent using a recurrent neural network, where unexplained factors are modeled as (additive) input nodes. This allows us to solve the long-term planning problem using supervised learning techniques and direct optimization over the recurrent neural network. Our approach enables us to learn robust policies by incorporating adversarial elements to the environment.
[ "Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Nir Ben-Zrihem and Aviad Cohen and Amnon\n Shashua", "['Shai Shalev-Shwartz' 'Nir Ben-Zrihem' 'Aviad Cohen' 'Amnon Shashua']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01582
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01582v2
2016-05-21T12:33:05Z
2016-02-04T08:14:06Z
SDCA without Duality, Regularization, and Individual Convexity
Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent is a popular method for solving regularized loss minimization for the case of convex losses. We describe variants of SDCA that do not require explicit regularization and do not rely on duality. We prove linear convergence rates even if individual loss functions are non-convex, as long as the expected loss is strongly convex.
[ "Shai Shalev-Shwartz", "['Shai Shalev-Shwartz']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01690
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01690v2
2016-05-22T15:13:56Z
2016-02-04T14:32:23Z
Minimizing the Maximal Loss: How and Why?
A commonly used learning rule is to approximately minimize the \emph{average} loss over the training set. Other learning algorithms, such as AdaBoost and hard-SVM, aim at minimizing the \emph{maximal} loss over the training set. The average loss is more popular, particularly in deep learning, due to three main reasons. First, it can be conveniently minimized using online algorithms, that process few examples at each iteration. Second, it is often argued that there is no sense to minimize the loss on the training set too much, as it will not be reflected in the generalization loss. Last, the maximal loss is not robust to outliers. In this paper we describe and analyze an algorithm that can convert any online algorithm to a minimizer of the maximal loss. We prove that in some situations better accuracy on the training set is crucial to obtain good performance on unseen examples. Last, we propose robust versions of the approach that can handle outliers.
[ "Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Yonatan Wexler", "['Shai Shalev-Shwartz' 'Yonatan Wexler']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01711
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01711v1
2016-02-04T15:24:22Z
2016-02-04T15:24:22Z
The Great Time Series Classification Bake Off: An Experimental Evaluation of Recently Proposed Algorithms. Extended Version
In the last five years there have been a large number of new time series classification algorithms proposed in the literature. These algorithms have been evaluated on subsets of the 47 data sets in the University of California, Riverside time series classification archive. The archive has recently been expanded to 85 data sets, over half of which have been donated by researchers at the University of East Anglia. Aspects of previous evaluations have made comparisons between algorithms difficult. For example, several different programming languages have been used, experiments involved a single train/test split and some used normalised data whilst others did not. The relaunch of the archive provides a timely opportunity to thoroughly evaluate algorithms on a larger number of datasets. We have implemented 18 recently proposed algorithms in a common Java framework and compared them against two standard benchmark classifiers (and each other) by performing 100 resampling experiments on each of the 85 datasets. We use these results to test several hypotheses relating to whether the algorithms are significantly more accurate than the benchmarks and each other. Our results indicate that only 9 of these algorithms are significantly more accurate than both benchmarks and that one classifier, the Collective of Transformation Ensembles, is significantly more accurate than all of the others. All of our experiments and results are reproducible: we release all of our code, results and experimental details and we hope these experiments form the basis for more rigorous testing of new algorithms in the future.
[ "Anthony Bagnall, Aaron Bostrom, James Large and Jason Lines", "['Anthony Bagnall' 'Aaron Bostrom' 'James Large' 'Jason Lines']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01783
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01783v2
2016-06-16T16:38:45Z
2016-02-04T18:38:41Z
Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
We propose a conceptually simple and lightweight framework for deep reinforcement learning that uses asynchronous gradient descent for optimization of deep neural network controllers. We present asynchronous variants of four standard reinforcement learning algorithms and show that parallel actor-learners have a stabilizing effect on training allowing all four methods to successfully train neural network controllers. The best performing method, an asynchronous variant of actor-critic, surpasses the current state-of-the-art on the Atari domain while training for half the time on a single multi-core CPU instead of a GPU. Furthermore, we show that asynchronous actor-critic succeeds on a wide variety of continuous motor control problems as well as on a new task of navigating random 3D mazes using a visual input.
[ "['Volodymyr Mnih' 'Adrià Puigdomènech Badia' 'Mehdi Mirza' 'Alex Graves'\n 'Timothy P. Lillicrap' 'Tim Harley' 'David Silver' 'Koray Kavukcuoglu']", "Volodymyr Mnih, Adri\\`a Puigdom\\`enech Badia, Mehdi Mirza, Alex\n Graves, Timothy P. Lillicrap, Tim Harley, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu" ]
cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.01818
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01818v1
2016-02-04T20:31:44Z
2016-02-04T20:31:44Z
Random Feature Maps via a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) Framework for Object Classification
The approximation of nonlinear kernels via linear feature maps has recently gained interest due to their applications in reducing the training and testing time of kernel-based learning algorithms. Current random projection methods avoid the curse of dimensionality by embedding the nonlinear feature space into a low dimensional Euclidean space to create nonlinear kernels. We introduce a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) framework, where we model the linear kernels and nonlinearity separately for increased training efficiency. The proposed LaRP framework was assessed using the MNIST hand-written digits database and the COIL-100 object database, and showed notable improvement in object classification performance relative to other state-of-the-art random projection methods.
[ "['A. G. Chung' 'M. J. Shafiee' 'A. Wong']", "A. G. Chung, M. J. Shafiee, and A. Wong" ]
cs.CV cs.CL cs.LG
null
1602.01895
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01895v1
2016-02-05T00:17:18Z
2016-02-05T00:17:18Z
Generate Image Descriptions based on Deep RNN and Memory Cells for Images Features
Generating natural language descriptions for images is a challenging task. The traditional way is to use the convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract image features, followed by recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate sentences. In this paper, we present a new model that added memory cells to gate the feeding of image features to the deep neural network. The intuition is enabling our model to memorize how much information from images should be fed at each stage of the RNN. Experiments on Flickr8K and Flickr30K datasets showed that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art models with higher BLEU scores.
[ "Shijian Tang, Song Han", "['Shijian Tang' 'Song Han']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.01910
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01910v1
2016-02-05T02:08:57Z
2016-02-05T02:08:57Z
Fast Multiplier Methods to Optimize Non-exhaustive, Overlapping Clustering
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and important tasks in data mining. Traditional clustering algorithms, such as K-means, assign every data point to exactly one cluster. However, in real-world datasets, the clusters may overlap with each other. Furthermore, often, there are outliers that should not belong to any cluster. We recently proposed the NEO-K-Means (Non-Exhaustive, Overlapping K-Means) objective as a way to address both issues in an integrated fashion. Optimizing this discrete objective is NP-hard, and even though there is a convex relaxation of the objective, straightforward convex optimization approaches are too expensive for large datasets. A practical alternative is to use a low-rank factorization of the solution matrix in the convex formulation. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex, and we can locally optimize the objective function using an augmented Lagrangian method. In this paper, we consider two fast multiplier methods to accelerate the convergence of an augmented Lagrangian scheme: a proximal method of multipliers and an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). For the proximal augmented Lagrangian or proximal method of multipliers, we show a convergence result for the non-convex case with bound-constrained subproblems. These methods are up to 13 times faster---with no change in quality---compared with a standard augmented Lagrangian method on problems with over 10,000 variables and bring runtimes down from over an hour to around 5 minutes.
[ "['Yangyang Hou' 'Joyce Jiyoung Whang' 'David F. Gleich'\n 'Inderjit S. Dhillon']", "Yangyang Hou, Joyce Jiyoung Whang, David F. Gleich, Inderjit S.\n Dhillon" ]
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
null
1602.01921
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01921v3
2017-02-22T16:33:49Z
2016-02-05T04:00:16Z
Recognition of Visually Perceived Compositional Human Actions by Multiple Spatio-Temporal Scales Recurrent Neural Networks
The current paper proposes a novel neural network model for recognizing visually perceived human actions. The proposed multiple spatio-temporal scales recurrent neural network (MSTRNN) model is derived by introducing multiple timescale recurrent dynamics to the conventional convolutional neural network model. One of the essential characteristics of the MSTRNN is that its architecture imposes both spatial and temporal constraints simultaneously on the neural activity which vary in multiple scales among different layers. As suggested by the principle of the upward and downward causation, it is assumed that the network can develop meaningful structures such as functional hierarchy by taking advantage of such constraints during the course of learning. To evaluate the characteristics of the model, the current study uses three types of human action video dataset consisting of different types of primitive actions and different levels of compositionality on them. The performance of the MSTRNN in testing with these dataset is compared with the ones by other representative deep learning models used in the field. The analysis of the internal representation obtained through the learning with the dataset clarifies what sorts of functional hierarchy can be developed by extracting the essential compositionality underlying the dataset.
[ "['Haanvid Lee' 'Minju Jung' 'Jun Tani']", "Haanvid Lee, Minju Jung, and Jun Tani" ]
cs.DS cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02018
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02018v2
2016-05-23T13:21:56Z
2016-02-05T13:42:27Z
Compressive Spectral Clustering
Spectral clustering has become a popular technique due to its high performance in many contexts. It comprises three main steps: create a similarity graph between N objects to cluster, compute the first k eigenvectors of its Laplacian matrix to define a feature vector for each object, and run k-means on these features to separate objects into k classes. Each of these three steps becomes computationally intensive for large N and/or k. We propose to speed up the last two steps based on recent results in the emerging field of graph signal processing: graph filtering of random signals, and random sampling of bandlimited graph signals. We prove that our method, with a gain in computation time that can reach several orders of magnitude, is in fact an approximation of spectral clustering, for which we are able to control the error. We test the performance of our method on artificial and real-world network data.
[ "['Nicolas Tremblay' 'Gilles Puy' 'Remi Gribonval' 'Pierre Vandergheynst']", "Nicolas Tremblay, Gilles Puy, Remi Gribonval, Pierre Vandergheynst" ]
cs.CL cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02068
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02068v2
2016-02-08T09:41:36Z
2016-02-05T15:49:02Z
From Softmax to Sparsemax: A Sparse Model of Attention and Multi-Label Classification
We propose sparsemax, a new activation function similar to the traditional softmax, but able to output sparse probabilities. After deriving its properties, we show how its Jacobian can be efficiently computed, enabling its use in a network trained with backpropagation. Then, we propose a new smooth and convex loss function which is the sparsemax analogue of the logistic loss. We reveal an unexpected connection between this new loss and the Huber classification loss. We obtain promising empirical results in multi-label classification problems and in attention-based neural networks for natural language inference. For the latter, we achieve a similar performance as the traditional softmax, but with a selective, more compact, attention focus.
[ "['André F. T. Martins' 'Ramón Fernandez Astudillo']", "Andr\\'e F. T. Martins and Ram\\'on Fernandez Astudillo" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02070
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02070v4
2016-10-04T08:35:35Z
2016-02-05T15:51:34Z
Compressive PCA for Low-Rank Matrices on Graphs
We introduce a novel framework for an approxi- mate recovery of data matrices which are low-rank on graphs, from sampled measurements. The rows and columns of such matrices belong to the span of the first few eigenvectors of the graphs constructed between their rows and columns. We leverage this property to recover the non-linear low-rank structures efficiently from sampled data measurements, with a low cost (linear in n). First, a Resrtricted Isometry Property (RIP) condition is introduced for efficient uniform sampling of the rows and columns of such matrices based on the cumulative coherence of graph eigenvectors. Secondly, a state-of-the-art fast low-rank recovery method is suggested for the sampled data. Finally, several efficient, parallel and parameter-free decoders are presented along with their theoretical analysis for decoding the low-rank and cluster indicators for the full data matrix. Thus, we overcome the computational limitations of the standard linear low-rank recovery methods for big datasets. Our method can also be seen as a major step towards efficient recovery of non- linear low-rank structures. For a matrix of size n X p, on a single core machine, our method gains a speed up of $p^2/k$ over Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), where k << p is the subspace dimension. Numerically, we can recover a low-rank matrix of size 10304 X 1000, 100 times faster than Robust PCA.
[ "Nauman Shahid, Nathanael Perraudin, Gilles Puy, Pierre Vandergheynst", "['Nauman Shahid' 'Nathanael Perraudin' 'Gilles Puy' 'Pierre Vandergheynst']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02101
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02101v2
2017-09-14T00:03:37Z
2016-02-05T17:14:59Z
Variance-Reduced and Projection-Free Stochastic Optimization
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it is still relatively understudied compared to the gradient descent counterpart. In this work, leveraging a recent variance reduction technique, we propose two stochastic Frank-Wolfe variants which substantially improve previous results in terms of the number of stochastic gradient evaluations needed to achieve $1-\epsilon$ accuracy. For example, we improve from $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ to $O(\ln\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ if the objective function is smooth and strongly convex, and from $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon^2})$ to $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon^{1.5}})$ if the objective function is smooth and Lipschitz. The theoretical improvement is also observed in experiments on real-world datasets for a multiclass classification application.
[ "['Elad Hazan' 'Haipeng Luo']", "Elad Hazan and Haipeng Luo" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02123
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02123v1
2016-02-05T19:19:46Z
2016-02-05T19:19:46Z
Sequence Classification with Neural Conditional Random Fields
The proliferation of sensor devices monitoring human activity generates voluminous amount of temporal sequences needing to be interpreted and categorized. Moreover, complex behavior detection requires the personalization of multi-sensor fusion algorithms. Conditional random fields (CRFs) are commonly used in structured prediction tasks such as part-of-speech tagging in natural language processing. Conditional probabilities guide the choice of each tag/label in the sequence conflating the structured prediction task with the sequence classification task where different models provide different categorization of the same sequence. The claim of this paper is that CRF models also provide discriminative models to distinguish between types of sequence regardless of the accuracy of the labels obtained if we calibrate the class membership estimate of the sequence. We introduce and compare different neural network based linear-chain CRFs and we present experiments on two complex sequence classification and structured prediction tasks to support this claim.
[ "['Myriam Abramson']", "Myriam Abramson" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02136
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02136v1
2016-02-05T19:46:23Z
2016-02-05T19:46:23Z
Reducing Runtime by Recycling Samples
Contrary to the situation with stochastic gradient descent, we argue that when using stochastic methods with variance reduction, such as SDCA, SAG or SVRG, as well as their variants, it could be beneficial to reuse previously used samples instead of fresh samples, even when fresh samples are available. We demonstrate this empirically for SDCA, SAG and SVRG, studying the optimal sample size one should use, and also uncover be-havior that suggests running SDCA for an integer number of epochs could be wasteful.
[ "Jialei Wang, Hai Wang, Nathan Srebro", "['Jialei Wang' 'Hai Wang' 'Nathan Srebro']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02151
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02151v2
2016-11-04T17:10:04Z
2016-02-05T20:58:18Z
Exploiting the Structure: Stochastic Gradient Methods Using Raw Clusters
The amount of data available in the world is growing faster than our ability to deal with it. However, if we take advantage of the internal \emph{structure}, data may become much smaller for machine learning purposes. In this paper we focus on one of the fundamental machine learning tasks, empirical risk minimization (ERM), and provide faster algorithms with the help from the clustering structure of the data. We introduce a simple notion of raw clustering that can be efficiently computed from the data, and propose two algorithms based on clustering information. Our accelerated algorithm ClusterACDM is built on a novel Haar transformation applied to the dual space of the ERM problem, and our variance-reduction based algorithm ClusterSVRG introduces a new gradient estimator using clustering. Our algorithms outperform their classical counterparts ACDM and SVRG respectively.
[ "['Zeyuan Allen-Zhu' 'Yang Yuan' 'Karthik Sridharan']", "Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, Yang Yuan, Karthik Sridharan" ]
cs.DC cs.LG cs.PF
10.1109/NOMS.2016.7502858
1602.02159
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02159v1
2016-02-05T21:00:02Z
2016-02-05T21:00:02Z
Daleel: Simplifying Cloud Instance Selection Using Machine Learning
Decision making in cloud environments is quite challenging due to the diversity in service offerings and pricing models, especially considering that the cloud market is an incredibly fast moving one. In addition, there are no hard and fast rules, each customer has a specific set of constraints (e.g. budget) and application requirements (e.g. minimum computational resources). Machine learning can help address some of the complicated decisions by carrying out customer-specific analytics to determine the most suitable instance type(s) and the most opportune time for starting or migrating instances. We employ machine learning techniques to develop an adaptive deployment policy, providing an optimal match between the customer demands and the available cloud service offerings. We provide an experimental study based on extensive set of job executions over a major public cloud infrastructure.
[ "['Faiza Samreen' 'Yehia Elkhatib' 'Matthew Rowe' 'Gordon S. Blair']", "Faiza Samreen, Yehia Elkhatib, Matthew Rowe, Gordon S. Blair" ]
stat.ML cs.LG cs.NA
10.1109/LSP.2016.2576979
1602.02164
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02164v1
2016-02-05T21:07:16Z
2016-02-05T21:07:16Z
A Note on Alternating Minimization Algorithm for the Matrix Completion Problem
We consider the problem of reconstructing a low rank matrix from a subset of its entries and analyze two variants of the so-called Alternating Minimization algorithm, which has been proposed in the past. We establish that when the underlying matrix has rank $r=1$, has positive bounded entries, and the graph $\mathcal{G}$ underlying the revealed entries has bounded degree and diameter which is at most logarithmic in the size of the matrix, both algorithms succeed in reconstructing the matrix approximately in polynomial time starting from an arbitrary initialization. We further provide simulation results which suggest that the second algorithm which is based on the message passing type updates, performs significantly better.
[ "David Gamarnik and Sidhant Misra", "['David Gamarnik' 'Sidhant Misra']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02172
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02172v1
2016-02-05T21:51:41Z
2016-02-05T21:51:41Z
On Column Selection in Approximate Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis
We study the problem of column selection in large-scale kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA) using the Nystr\"om approximation, where one approximates two positive semi-definite kernel matrices using "landmark" points from the training set. When building low-rank kernel approximations in KCCA, previous work mostly samples the landmarks uniformly at random from the training set. We propose novel strategies for sampling the landmarks non-uniformly based on a version of statistical leverage scores recently developed for kernel ridge regression. We study the approximation accuracy of the proposed non-uniform sampling strategy, develop an incremental algorithm that explores the path of approximation ranks and facilitates efficient model selection, and derive the kernel stability of out-of-sample mapping for our method. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the promise of our method.
[ "Weiran Wang", "['Weiran Wang']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02181
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02181v1
2016-02-05T22:32:50Z
2016-02-05T22:32:50Z
Active Information Acquisition
We propose a general framework for sequential and dynamic acquisition of useful information in order to solve a particular task. While our goal could in principle be tackled by general reinforcement learning, our particular setting is constrained enough to allow more efficient algorithms. In this paper, we work under the Learning to Search framework and show how to formulate the goal of finding a dynamic information acquisition policy in that framework. We apply our formulation on two tasks, sentiment analysis and image recognition, and show that the learned policies exhibit good statistical performance. As an emergent byproduct, the learned policies show a tendency to focus on the most prominent parts of each instance and give harder instances more attention without explicitly being trained to do so.
[ "['He He' 'Paul Mineiro' 'Nikos Karampatziakis']", "He He, Paul Mineiro, Nikos Karampatziakis" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02191
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02191v3
2016-03-03T20:09:26Z
2016-02-05T23:23:32Z
Convex Relaxation Regression: Black-Box Optimization of Smooth Functions by Learning Their Convex Envelopes
Finding efficient and provable methods to solve non-convex optimization problems is an outstanding challenge in machine learning and optimization theory. A popular approach used to tackle non-convex problems is to use convex relaxation techniques to find a convex surrogate for the problem. Unfortunately, convex relaxations typically must be found on a problem-by-problem basis. Thus, providing a general-purpose strategy to estimate a convex relaxation would have a wide reaching impact. Here, we introduce Convex Relaxation Regression (CoRR), an approach for learning convex relaxations for a class of smooth functions. The main idea behind our approach is to estimate the convex envelope of a function $f$ by evaluating $f$ at a set of $T$ random points and then fitting a convex function to these function evaluations. We prove that with probability greater than $1-\delta$, the solution of our algorithm converges to the global optimizer of $f$ with error $\mathcal{O} \Big( \big(\frac{\log(1/\delta) }{T} \big)^{\alpha} \Big)$ for some $\alpha> 0$. Our approach enables the use of convex optimization tools to solve a class of non-convex optimization problems.
[ "Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar, Eva Dyer, Konrad Kording", "['Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar' 'Eva Dyer' 'Konrad Kording']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02196
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02196v1
2016-02-06T00:34:59Z
2016-02-06T00:34:59Z
BISTRO: An Efficient Relaxation-Based Method for Contextual Bandits
We present efficient algorithms for the problem of contextual bandits with i.i.d. covariates, an arbitrary sequence of rewards, and an arbitrary class of policies. Our algorithm BISTRO requires d calls to the empirical risk minimization (ERM) oracle per round, where d is the number of actions. The method uses unlabeled data to make the problem computationally simple. When the ERM problem itself is computationally hard, we extend the approach by employing multiplicative approximation algorithms for the ERM. The integrality gap of the relaxation only enters in the regret bound rather than the benchmark. Finally, we show that the adversarial version of the contextual bandit problem is learnable (and efficient) whenever the full-information supervised online learning problem has a non-trivial regret guarantee (and efficient).
[ "['Alexander Rakhlin' 'Karthik Sridharan']", "Alexander Rakhlin and Karthik Sridharan" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02202
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02202v4
2017-10-17T05:01:59Z
2016-02-06T02:33:53Z
Efficient Second Order Online Learning by Sketching
We propose Sketched Online Newton (SON), an online second order learning algorithm that enjoys substantially improved regret guarantees for ill-conditioned data. SON is an enhanced version of the Online Newton Step, which, via sketching techniques enjoys a running time linear in the dimension and sketch size. We further develop sparse forms of the sketching methods (such as Oja's rule), making the computation linear in the sparsity of features. Together, the algorithm eliminates all computational obstacles in previous second order online learning approaches.
[ "['Haipeng Luo' 'Alekh Agarwal' 'Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi' 'John Langford']", "Haipeng Luo, Alekh Agarwal, Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, John Langford" ]
cs.LG cs.AI math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
null
1602.02210
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02210v4
2020-02-17T17:56:24Z
2016-02-06T03:48:04Z
Classification accuracy as a proxy for two sample testing
When data analysts train a classifier and check if its accuracy is significantly different from chance, they are implicitly performing a two-sample test. We investigate the statistical properties of this flexible approach in the high-dimensional setting. We prove two results that hold for all classifiers in any dimensions: if its true error remains $\epsilon$-better than chance for some $\epsilon>0$ as $d,n \to \infty$, then (a) the permutation-based test is consistent (has power approaching to one), (b) a computationally efficient test based on a Gaussian approximation of the null distribution is also consistent. To get a finer understanding of the rates of consistency, we study a specialized setting of distinguishing Gaussians with mean-difference $\delta$ and common (known or unknown) covariance $\Sigma$, when $d/n \to c \in (0,\infty)$. We study variants of Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) such as "naive Bayes" in a nontrivial regime when $\epsilon \to 0$ (the Bayes classifier has true accuracy approaching 1/2), and contrast their power with corresponding variants of Hotelling's test. Surprisingly, the expressions for their power match exactly in terms of $n,d,\delta,\Sigma$, and the LDA approach is only worse by a constant factor, achieving an asymptotic relative efficiency (ARE) of $1/\sqrt{\pi}$ for balanced samples. We also extend our results to high-dimensional elliptical distributions with finite kurtosis. Other results of independent interest include minimax lower bounds, and the optimality of Hotelling's test when $d=o(n)$. Simulation results validate our theory, and we present practical takeaway messages along with natural open problems.
[ "['Ilmun Kim' 'Aaditya Ramdas' 'Aarti Singh' 'Larry Wasserman']", "Ilmun Kim, Aaditya Ramdas, Aarti Singh, Larry Wasserman" ]
cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.02218
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02218v2
2016-05-24T21:35:23Z
2016-02-06T05:34:03Z
Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks
Recurrent neural networks are increasing popular models for sequential learning. Unfortunately, although the most effective RNN architectures are perhaps excessively complicated, extensive searches have not found simpler alternatives. This paper imports ideas from physics and functional programming into RNN design to provide guiding principles. From physics, we introduce type constraints, analogous to the constraints that forbids adding meters to seconds. From functional programming, we require that strongly-typed architectures factorize into stateless learnware and state-dependent firmware, reducing the impact of side-effects. The features learned by strongly-typed nets have a simple semantic interpretation via dynamic average-pooling on one-dimensional convolutions. We also show that strongly-typed gradients are better behaved than in classical architectures, and characterize the representational power of strongly-typed nets. Finally, experiments show that, despite being more constrained, strongly-typed architectures achieve lower training and comparable generalization error to classical architectures.
[ "['David Balduzzi' 'Muhammad Ghifary']", "David Balduzzi, Muhammad Ghifary" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02220
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02220v2
2016-12-04T05:31:19Z
2016-02-06T05:41:57Z
Improved Dropout for Shallow and Deep Learning
Dropout has been witnessed with great success in training deep neural networks by independently zeroing out the outputs of neurons at random. It has also received a surge of interest for shallow learning, e.g., logistic regression. However, the independent sampling for dropout could be suboptimal for the sake of convergence. In this paper, we propose to use multinomial sampling for dropout, i.e., sampling features or neurons according to a multinomial distribution with different probabilities for different features/neurons. To exhibit the optimal dropout probabilities, we analyze the shallow learning with multinomial dropout and establish the risk bound for stochastic optimization. By minimizing a sampling dependent factor in the risk bound, we obtain a distribution-dependent dropout with sampling probabilities dependent on the second order statistics of the data distribution. To tackle the issue of evolving distribution of neurons in deep learning, we propose an efficient adaptive dropout (named \textbf{evolutional dropout}) that computes the sampling probabilities on-the-fly from a mini-batch of examples. Empirical studies on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed dropouts achieve not only much faster convergence and but also a smaller testing error than the standard dropout. For example, on the CIFAR-100 data, the evolutional dropout achieves relative improvements over 10\% on the prediction performance and over 50\% on the convergence speed compared to the standard dropout.
[ "['Zhe Li' 'Boqing Gong' 'Tianbao Yang']", "Zhe Li, Boqing Gong, Tianbao Yang" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02256
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02256v1
2016-02-06T13:47:34Z
2016-02-06T13:47:34Z
A Tractable Fully Bayesian Method for the Stochastic Block Model
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a generative model revealing macroscopic structures in graphs. Bayesian methods are used for (i) cluster assignment inference and (ii) model selection for the number of clusters. In this paper, we study the behavior of Bayesian inference in the SBM in the large sample limit. Combining variational approximation and Laplace's method, a consistent criterion of the fully marginalized log-likelihood is established. Based on that, we derive a tractable algorithm that solves tasks (i) and (ii) concurrently, obviating the need for an outer loop to check all model candidates. Our empirical and theoretical results demonstrate that our method is scalable in computation, accurate in approximation, and concise in model selection.
[ "Kohei Hayashi, Takuya Konishi, Tatsuro Kawamoto", "['Kohei Hayashi' 'Takuya Konishi' 'Tatsuro Kawamoto']" ]
cs.LG cs.DS stat.ML
null
1602.02262
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02262v2
2016-12-08T17:05:41Z
2016-02-06T14:55:12Z
Recovery guarantee of weighted low-rank approximation via alternating minimization
Many applications require recovering a ground truth low-rank matrix from noisy observations of the entries, which in practice is typically formulated as a weighted low-rank approximation problem and solved by non-convex optimization heuristics such as alternating minimization. In this paper, we provide provable recovery guarantee of weighted low-rank via a simple alternating minimization algorithm. In particular, for a natural class of matrices and weights and without any assumption on the noise, we bound the spectral norm of the difference between the recovered matrix and the ground truth, by the spectral norm of the weighted noise plus an additive error that decreases exponentially with the number of rounds of alternating minimization, from either initialization by SVD or, more importantly, random initialization. These provide the first theoretical results for weighted low-rank via alternating minimization with non-binary deterministic weights, significantly generalizing those for matrix completion, the special case with binary weights, since our assumptions are similar or weaker than those made in existing works. Furthermore, this is achieved by a very simple algorithm that improves the vanilla alternating minimization with a simple clipping step. The key technical challenge is that under non-binary deterministic weights, na\"ive alternating steps will destroy the incoherence and spectral properties of the intermediate solutions, which are needed for making progress towards the ground truth. We show that the properties only need to hold in an average sense and can be achieved by the clipping step. We further provide an alternating algorithm that uses a whitening step that keeps the properties via SDP and Rademacher rounding and thus requires weaker assumptions. This technique can potentially be applied in some other applications and is of independent interest.
[ "Yuanzhi Li, Yingyu Liang, Andrej Risteski", "['Yuanzhi Li' 'Yingyu Liang' 'Andrej Risteski']" ]
math.OC cs.IT cs.LG math.IT stat.ML
10.1109/TSP.2016.2607180
1602.02263
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02263v2
2016-08-03T09:53:47Z
2016-02-06T15:03:26Z
DOLPHIn - Dictionary Learning for Phase Retrieval
We propose a new algorithm to learn a dictionary for reconstructing and sparsely encoding signals from measurements without phase. Specifically, we consider the task of estimating a two-dimensional image from squared-magnitude measurements of a complex-valued linear transformation of the original image. Several recent phase retrieval algorithms exploit underlying sparsity of the unknown signal in order to improve recovery performance. In this work, we consider such a sparse signal prior in the context of phase retrieval, when the sparsifying dictionary is not known in advance. Our algorithm jointly reconstructs the unknown signal - possibly corrupted by noise - and learns a dictionary such that each patch of the estimated image can be sparsely represented. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach can obtain significantly better reconstructions for phase retrieval problems with noise than methods that cannot exploit such "hidden" sparsity. Moreover, on the theoretical side, we provide a convergence result for our method.
[ "Andreas M. Tillmann, Yonina C. Eldar, Julien Mairal", "['Andreas M. Tillmann' 'Yonina C. Eldar' 'Julien Mairal']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02282
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02282v3
2016-05-27T09:05:10Z
2016-02-06T17:32:48Z
Ladder Variational Autoencoders
Variational Autoencoders are powerful models for unsupervised learning. However deep models with several layers of dependent stochastic variables are difficult to train which limits the improvements obtained using these highly expressive models. We propose a new inference model, the Ladder Variational Autoencoder, that recursively corrects the generative distribution by a data dependent approximate likelihood in a process resembling the recently proposed Ladder Network. We show that this model provides state of the art predictive log-likelihood and tighter log-likelihood lower bound compared to the purely bottom-up inference in layered Variational Autoencoders and other generative models. We provide a detailed analysis of the learned hierarchical latent representation and show that our new inference model is qualitatively different and utilizes a deeper more distributed hierarchy of latent variables. Finally, we observe that batch normalization and deterministic warm-up (gradually turning on the KL-term) are crucial for training variational models with many stochastic layers.
[ "Casper Kaae S{\\o}nderby, Tapani Raiko, Lars Maal{\\o}e, S{\\o}ren Kaae\n S{\\o}nderby, Ole Winther", "['Casper Kaae Sønderby' 'Tapani Raiko' 'Lars Maaløe' 'Søren Kaae Sønderby'\n 'Ole Winther']" ]
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.02283
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02283v1
2016-02-06T17:35:53Z
2016-02-06T17:35:53Z
Importance Sampling for Minibatches
Minibatching is a very well studied and highly popular technique in supervised learning, used by practitioners due to its ability to accelerate training through better utilization of parallel processing power and reduction of stochastic variance. Another popular technique is importance sampling -- a strategy for preferential sampling of more important examples also capable of accelerating the training process. However, despite considerable effort by the community in these areas, and due to the inherent technical difficulty of the problem, there is no existing work combining the power of importance sampling with the strength of minibatching. In this paper we propose the first {\em importance sampling for minibatches} and give simple and rigorous complexity analysis of its performance. We illustrate on synthetic problems that for training data of certain properties, our sampling can lead to several orders of magnitude improvement in training time. We then test the new sampling on several popular datasets, and show that the improvement can reach an order of magnitude.
[ "['Dominik Csiba' 'Peter Richtárik']", "Dominik Csiba and Peter Richt\\'arik" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02285
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02285v1
2016-02-06T17:56:59Z
2016-02-06T17:56:59Z
A Deep Learning Approach to Unsupervised Ensemble Learning
We show how deep learning methods can be applied in the context of crowdsourcing and unsupervised ensemble learning. First, we prove that the popular model of Dawid and Skene, which assumes that all classifiers are conditionally independent, is {\em equivalent} to a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) with a single hidden node. Hence, under this model, the posterior probabilities of the true labels can be instead estimated via a trained RBM. Next, to address the more general case, where classifiers may strongly violate the conditional independence assumption, we propose to apply RBM-based Deep Neural Net (DNN). Experimental results on various simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed DNN approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, in particular when the data violates the conditional independence assumption.
[ "Uri Shaham, Xiuyuan Cheng, Omer Dror, Ariel Jaffe, Boaz Nadler, Joseph\n Chang, Yuval Kluger", "['Uri Shaham' 'Xiuyuan Cheng' 'Omer Dror' 'Ariel Jaffe' 'Boaz Nadler'\n 'Joseph Chang' 'Yuval Kluger']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02311
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02311v3
2016-10-28T18:16:29Z
2016-02-06T21:35:23Z
R\'enyi Divergence Variational Inference
This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth interpolation from the evidence lower-bound to the log (marginal) likelihood that is controlled by the value of alpha that parametrises the divergence. The reparameterization trick, Monte Carlo approximation and stochastic optimisation methods are deployed to obtain a tractable and unified framework for optimisation. We further consider negative alpha values and propose a novel variational inference method as a new special case in the proposed framework. Experiments on Bayesian neural networks and variational auto-encoders demonstrate the wide applicability of the VR bound.
[ "['Yingzhen Li' 'Richard E. Turner']", "Yingzhen Li, Richard E. Turner" ]
null
null
1602.02334
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02334v3
2017-01-18T17:43:43Z
2016-02-07T03:06:40Z
ERBlox: Combining Matching Dependencies with Machine Learning for Entity Resolution
Entity resolution (ER), an important and common data cleaning problem, is about detecting data duplicate representations for the same external entities, and merging them into single representations. Relatively recently, declarative rules called "matching dependencies" (MDs) have been proposed for specifying similarity conditions under which attribute values in database records are merged. In this work we show the process and the benefits of integrating four components of ER: (a) Building a classifier for duplicate/non-duplicate record pairs built using machine learning (ML) techniques; (b) Use of MDs for supporting the blocking phase of ML; (c) Record merging on the basis of the classifier results; and (d) The use of the declarative language "LogiQL" -an extended form of Datalog supported by the "LogicBlox" platform- for all activities related to data processing, and the specification and enforcement of MDs.
[ "['Zeinab Bahmani' 'Leopoldo Bertossi' 'Nikolaos Vasiloglou']" ]
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.02338
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02338v2
2016-02-20T10:08:18Z
2016-02-07T03:53:16Z
Stratified Bayesian Optimization
We consider derivative-free black-box global optimization of expensive noisy functions, when most of the randomness in the objective is produced by a few influential scalar random inputs. We present a new Bayesian global optimization algorithm, called Stratified Bayesian Optimization (SBO), which uses this strong dependence to improve performance. Our algorithm is similar in spirit to stratification, a technique from simulation, which uses strong dependence on a categorical representation of the random input to reduce variance. We demonstrate in numerical experiments that SBO outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization benchmarks that do not leverage this dependence.
[ "Saul Toscano-Palmerin and Peter I. Frazier", "['Saul Toscano-Palmerin' 'Peter I. Frazier']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02350
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02350v2
2016-05-26T07:42:58Z
2016-02-07T08:37:18Z
Solving Ridge Regression using Sketched Preconditioned SVRG
We develop a novel preconditioning method for ridge regression, based on recent linear sketching methods. By equipping Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) with this preconditioning process, we obtain a significant speed-up relative to fast stochastic methods such as SVRG, SDCA and SAG.
[ "['Alon Gonen' 'Francesco Orabona' 'Shai Shalev-Shwartz']", "Alon Gonen, Francesco Orabona, Shai Shalev-Shwartz" ]
stat.ML cs.LG math.OC
null
1602.02355
null
null
null
null
null
Hyperparameter optimization with approximate gradient
Most models in machine learning contain at least one hyperparameter to control for model complexity. Choosing an appropriate set of hyperparameters is both crucial in terms of model accuracy and computationally challenging. In this work we propose an algorithm for the optimization of continuous hyperparameters using inexact gradient information. An advantage of this method is that hyperparameters can be updated before model parameters have fully converged. We also give sufficient conditions for the global convergence of this method, based on regularity conditions of the involved functions and summability of errors. Finally, we validate the empirical performance of this method on the estimation of regularization constants of L2-regularized logistic regression and kernel Ridge regression. Empirical benchmarks indicate that our approach is highly competitive with respect to state of the art methods.
[ "Fabian Pedregosa" ]
cs.DB cs.LG cs.SI
null
1602.02358
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02358v3
2016-02-16T04:24:07Z
2016-02-07T11:00:03Z
NED: An Inter-Graph Node Metric Based On Edit Distance
Node similarity is a fundamental problem in graph analytics. However, node similarity between nodes in different graphs (inter-graph nodes) has not received a lot of attention yet. The inter-graph node similarity is important in learning a new graph based on the knowledge of an existing graph (transfer learning on graphs) and has applications in biological, communication, and social networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distance function for measuring inter-graph node similarity with edit distance, called NED. In NED, two nodes are compared according to their local neighborhood structures which are represented as unordered k-adjacent trees, without relying on labels or other assumptions. Since the computation problem of tree edit distance on unordered trees is NP-Complete, we propose a modified tree edit distance, called TED*, for comparing neighborhood trees. TED* is a metric distance, as the original tree edit distance, but more importantly, TED* is polynomially computable. As a metric distance, NED admits efficient indexing, provides interpretable results, and shows to perform better than existing approaches on a number of data analysis tasks, including graph de-anonymization. Finally, the efficiency and effectiveness of NED are empirically demonstrated using real-world graphs.
[ "['Haohan Zhu' 'Xianrui Meng' 'George Kollios']", "Haohan Zhu, Xianrui Meng and George Kollios" ]
stat.ML cs.CL cs.LG
null
1602.02373
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02373v2
2016-05-26T15:26:34Z
2016-02-07T14:05:58Z
Supervised and Semi-Supervised Text Categorization using LSTM for Region Embeddings
One-hot CNN (convolutional neural network) has been shown to be effective for text categorization (Johnson & Zhang, 2015). We view it as a special case of a general framework which jointly trains a linear model with a non-linear feature generator consisting of `text region embedding + pooling'. Under this framework, we explore a more sophisticated region embedding method using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). LSTM can embed text regions of variable (and possibly large) sizes, whereas the region size needs to be fixed in a CNN. We seek effective and efficient use of LSTM for this purpose in the supervised and semi-supervised settings. The best results were obtained by combining region embeddings in the form of LSTM and convolution layers trained on unlabeled data. The results indicate that on this task, embeddings of text regions, which can convey complex concepts, are more useful than embeddings of single words in isolation. We report performances exceeding the previous best results on four benchmark datasets.
[ "['Rie Johnson' 'Tong Zhang']", "Rie Johnson, Tong Zhang" ]
cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.02383
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02383v1
2016-02-07T15:32:30Z
2016-02-07T15:32:30Z
Disentangled Representations in Neural Models
Representation learning is the foundation for the recent success of neural network models. However, the distributed representations generated by neural networks are far from ideal. Due to their highly entangled nature, they are di cult to reuse and interpret, and they do a poor job of capturing the sparsity which is present in real- world transformations. In this paper, I describe methods for learning disentangled representations in the two domains of graphics and computation. These methods allow neural methods to learn representations which are easy to interpret and reuse, yet they incur little or no penalty to performance. In the Graphics section, I demonstrate the ability of these methods to infer the generating parameters of images and rerender those images under novel conditions. In the Computation section, I describe a model which is able to factorize a multitask learning problem into subtasks and which experiences no catastrophic forgetting. Together these techniques provide the tools to design a wide range of models that learn disentangled representations and better model the factors of variation in the real world.
[ "William Whitney", "['William Whitney']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02386
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02386v1
2016-02-07T16:11:18Z
2016-02-07T16:11:18Z
Network Inference by Learned Node-Specific Degree Prior
We propose a novel method for network inference from partially observed edges using a node-specific degree prior. The degree prior is derived from observed edges in the network to be inferred, and its hyper-parameters are determined by cross validation. Then we formulate network inference as a matrix completion problem regularized by our degree prior. Our theoretical analysis indicates that this prior favors a network following the learned degree distribution, and may lead to improved network recovery error bound than previous work. Experimental results on both simulated and real biological networks demonstrate the superior performance of our method in various settings.
[ "Qingming Tang, Lifu Tu, Weiran Wang and Jinbo Xu", "['Qingming Tang' 'Lifu Tu' 'Weiran Wang' 'Jinbo Xu']" ]
cs.LG cs.CV stat.ML
null
1602.02389
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02389v4
2017-11-05T12:18:24Z
2016-02-07T16:50:14Z
Ensemble Robustness and Generalization of Stochastic Deep Learning Algorithms
The question why deep learning algorithms generalize so well has attracted increasing research interest. However, most of the well-established approaches, such as hypothesis capacity, stability or sparseness, have not provided complete explanations (Zhang et al., 2016; Kawaguchi et al., 2017). In this work, we focus on the robustness approach (Xu & Mannor, 2012), i.e., if the error of a hypothesis will not change much due to perturbations of its training examples, then it will also generalize well. As most deep learning algorithms are stochastic (e.g., Stochastic Gradient Descent, Dropout, and Bayes-by-backprop), we revisit the robustness arguments of Xu & Mannor, and introduce a new approach, ensemble robustness, that concerns the robustness of a population of hypotheses. Through the lens of ensemble robustness, we reveal that a stochastic learning algorithm can generalize well as long as its sensitiveness to adversarial perturbations is bounded in average over training examples. Moreover, an algorithm may be sensitive to some adversarial examples (Goodfellow et al., 2015) but still generalize well. To support our claims, we provide extensive simulations for different deep learning algorithms and different network architectures exhibiting a strong correlation between ensemble robustness and the ability to generalize.
[ "['Tom Zahavy' 'Bingyi Kang' 'Alex Sivak' 'Jiashi Feng' 'Huan Xu'\n 'Shie Mannor']", "Tom Zahavy, Bingyi Kang, Alex Sivak, Jiashi Feng, Huan Xu, Shie Mannor" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02442
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02442v2
2016-10-27T23:18:05Z
2016-02-08T00:24:01Z
A Simple Practical Accelerated Method for Finite Sums
We describe a novel optimization method for finite sums (such as empirical risk minimization problems) building on the recently introduced SAGA method. Our method achieves an accelerated convergence rate on strongly convex smooth problems. Our method has only one parameter (a step size), and is radically simpler than other accelerated methods for finite sums. Additionally it can be applied when the terms are non-smooth, yielding a method applicable in many areas where operator splitting methods would traditionally be applied.
[ "Aaron Defazio", "['Aaron Defazio']" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02450
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02450v2
2016-02-09T23:10:23Z
2016-02-08T01:50:43Z
Loss factorization, weakly supervised learning and label noise robustness
We prove that the empirical risk of most well-known loss functions factors into a linear term aggregating all labels with a term that is label free, and can further be expressed by sums of the loss. This holds true even for non-smooth, non-convex losses and in any RKHS. The first term is a (kernel) mean operator --the focal quantity of this work-- which we characterize as the sufficient statistic for the labels. The result tightens known generalization bounds and sheds new light on their interpretation. Factorization has a direct application on weakly supervised learning. In particular, we demonstrate that algorithms like SGD and proximal methods can be adapted with minimal effort to handle weak supervision, once the mean operator has been estimated. We apply this idea to learning with asymmetric noisy labels, connecting and extending prior work. Furthermore, we show that most losses enjoy a data-dependent (by the mean operator) form of noise robustness, in contrast with known negative results.
[ "['Giorgio Patrini' 'Frank Nielsen' 'Richard Nock' 'Marcello Carioni']", "Giorgio Patrini, Frank Nielsen, Richard Nock, Marcello Carioni" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02454
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02454v1
2016-02-08T03:11:39Z
2016-02-08T03:11:39Z
Efficient Algorithms for Adversarial Contextual Learning
We provide the first oracle efficient sublinear regret algorithms for adversarial versions of the contextual bandit problem. In this problem, the learner repeatedly makes an action on the basis of a context and receives reward for the chosen action, with the goal of achieving reward competitive with a large class of policies. We analyze two settings: i) in the transductive setting the learner knows the set of contexts a priori, ii) in the small separator setting, there exists a small set of contexts such that any two policies behave differently in one of the contexts in the set. Our algorithms fall into the follow the perturbed leader family \cite{Kalai2005} and achieve regret $O(T^{3/4}\sqrt{K\log(N)})$ in the transductive setting and $O(T^{2/3} d^{3/4} K\sqrt{\log(N)})$ in the separator setting, where $K$ is the number of actions, $N$ is the number of baseline policies, and $d$ is the size of the separator. We actually solve the more general adversarial contextual semi-bandit linear optimization problem, whilst in the full information setting we address the even more general contextual combinatorial optimization. We provide several extensions and implications of our algorithms, such as switching regret and efficient learning with predictable sequences.
[ "Vasilis Syrgkanis, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Robert E. Schapire", "['Vasilis Syrgkanis' 'Akshay Krishnamurthy' 'Robert E. Schapire']" ]
cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.02505
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02505v3
2016-03-10T12:37:44Z
2016-02-08T09:37:46Z
Binarized Neural Networks
We introduce a method to train Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) - neural networks with binary weights and activations at run-time and when computing the parameters' gradient at train-time. We conduct two sets of experiments, each based on a different framework, namely Torch7 and Theano, where we train BNNs on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN, and achieve nearly state-of-the-art results. During the forward pass, BNNs drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and replace most arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations, which might lead to a great increase in power-efficiency. Last but not least, we wrote a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST BNN 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The code for training and running our BNNs is available.
[ "['Itay Hubara' 'Daniel Soudry' 'Ran El Yaniv']", "Itay Hubara, Daniel Soudry, Ran El Yaniv" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02514
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02514v6
2016-09-11T14:57:29Z
2016-02-08T10:19:09Z
Fast K-Means with Accurate Bounds
We propose a novel accelerated exact k-means algorithm, which performs better than the current state-of-the-art low-dimensional algorithm in 18 of 22 experiments, running up to 3 times faster. We also propose a general improvement of existing state-of-the-art accelerated exact k-means algorithms through better estimates of the distance bounds used to reduce the number of distance calculations, and get a speedup in 36 of 44 experiments, up to 1.8 times faster. We have conducted experiments with our own implementations of existing methods to ensure homogeneous evaluation of performance, and we show that our implementations perform as well or better than existing available implementations. Finally, we propose simplified variants of standard approaches and show that they are faster than their fully-fledged counterparts in 59 of 62 experiments.
[ "['James Newling' 'François Fleuret']", "James Newling and Fran\\c{c}ois Fleuret" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02518
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02518v1
2016-02-08T10:29:13Z
2016-02-08T10:29:13Z
Multi-view Kernel Completion
In this paper, we introduce the first method that (1) can complete kernel matrices with completely missing rows and columns as opposed to individual missing kernel values, (2) does not require any of the kernels to be complete a priori, and (3) can tackle non-linear kernels. These aspects are necessary in practical applications such as integrating legacy data sets, learning under sensor failures and learning when measurements are costly for some of the views. The proposed approach predicts missing rows by modelling both within-view and between-view relationships among kernel values. We show, both on simulated data and real world data, that the proposed method outperforms existing techniques in the restricted settings where they are available, and extends applicability to new settings.
[ "Sahely Bhadra, Samuel Kaski and Juho Rousu", "['Sahely Bhadra' 'Samuel Kaski' 'Juho Rousu']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG cs.SY
null
1602.02523
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02523v1
2016-02-08T11:08:49Z
2016-02-08T11:08:49Z
Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Continuous-State POMDPs
We present a data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm resistant to observation noise. Our method extends the highly data-efficient PILCO algorithm (Deisenroth & Rasmussen, 2011) into partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) by considering the filtering process during policy evaluation. PILCO conducts policy search, evaluating each policy by first predicting an analytic distribution of possible system trajectories. We additionally predict trajectories w.r.t. a filtering process, achieving significantly higher performance than combining a filter with a policy optimised by the original (unfiltered) framework. Our test setup is the cartpole swing-up task with sensor noise, which involves nonlinear dynamics and requires nonlinear control.
[ "Rowan McAllister, Carl Edward Rasmussen", "['Rowan McAllister' 'Carl Edward Rasmussen']" ]
cs.LG cs.CV
null
1602.02543
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02543v1
2016-02-08T12:28:57Z
2016-02-08T12:28:57Z
Homogeneity of Cluster Ensembles
The expectation and the mean of partitions generated by a cluster ensemble are not unique in general. This issue poses challenges in statistical inference and cluster stability. In this contribution, we state sufficient conditions for uniqueness of expectation and mean. The proposed conditions show that a unique mean is neither exceptional nor generic. To cope with this issue, we introduce homogeneity as a measure of how likely is a unique mean for a sample of partitions. We show that homogeneity is related to cluster stability. This result points to a possible conflict between cluster stability and diversity in consensus clustering. To assess homogeneity in a practical setting, we propose an efficient way to compute a lower bound of homogeneity. Empirical results using the k-means algorithm suggest that uniqueness of the mean partition is not exceptional for real-world data. Moreover, for samples of high homogeneity, uniqueness can be enforced by increasing the number of data points or by removing outlier partitions. In a broader context, this contribution can be placed as a further step towards a statistical theory of partitions.
[ "['Brijnesh J. Jain']", "Brijnesh J. Jain" ]
cs.LG cs.CV cs.NE
null
1602.02644
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02644v2
2016-02-09T09:36:36Z
2016-02-08T16:50:28Z
Generating Images with Perceptual Similarity Metrics based on Deep Networks
Image-generating machine learning models are typically trained with loss functions based on distance in the image space. This often leads to over-smoothed results. We propose a class of loss functions, which we call deep perceptual similarity metrics (DeePSiM), that mitigate this problem. Instead of computing distances in the image space, we compute distances between image features extracted by deep neural networks. This metric better reflects perceptually similarity of images and thus leads to better results. We show three applications: autoencoder training, a modification of a variational autoencoder, and inversion of deep convolutional networks. In all cases, the generated images look sharp and resemble natural images.
[ "['Alexey Dosovitskiy' 'Thomas Brox']", "Alexey Dosovitskiy and Thomas Brox" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE
null
1602.02658
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02658v4
2017-04-24T09:57:21Z
2016-02-08T17:27:31Z
Graying the black box: Understanding DQNs
In recent years there is a growing interest in using deep representations for reinforcement learning. In this paper, we present a methodology and tools to analyze Deep Q-networks (DQNs) in a non-blind matter. Moreover, we propose a new model, the Semi Aggregated Markov Decision Process (SAMDP), and an algorithm that learns it automatically. The SAMDP model allows us to identify spatio-temporal abstractions directly from features and may be used as a sub-goal detector in future work. Using our tools we reveal that the features learned by DQNs aggregate the state space in a hierarchical fashion, explaining its success. Moreover, we are able to understand and describe the policies learned by DQNs for three different Atari2600 games and suggest ways to interpret, debug and optimize deep neural networks in reinforcement learning.
[ "['Tom Zahavy' 'Nir Ben Zrihem' 'Shie Mannor']", "Tom Zahavy, Nir Ben Zrihem, Shie Mannor" ]
cs.LG cs.CV cs.NE
null
1602.02660
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02660v2
2016-05-26T11:47:18Z
2016-02-08T17:37:16Z
Exploiting Cyclic Symmetry in Convolutional Neural Networks
Many classes of images exhibit rotational symmetry. Convolutional neural networks are sometimes trained using data augmentation to exploit this, but they are still required to learn the rotation equivariance properties from the data. Encoding these properties into the network architecture, as we are already used to doing for translation equivariance by using convolutional layers, could result in a more efficient use of the parameter budget by relieving the model from learning them. We introduce four operations which can be inserted into neural network models as layers, and which can be combined to make these models partially equivariant to rotations. They also enable parameter sharing across different orientations. We evaluate the effect of these architectural modifications on three datasets which exhibit rotational symmetry and demonstrate improved performance with smaller models.
[ "Sander Dieleman, Jeffrey De Fauw, Koray Kavukcuoglu", "['Sander Dieleman' 'Jeffrey De Fauw' 'Koray Kavukcuoglu']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02666
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02666v1
2016-02-08T17:46:18Z
2016-02-08T17:46:18Z
A Variational Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Algorithms
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show that SGD with constant rates can be effectively used as an approximate posterior inference algorithm for probabilistic modeling. Specifically, we show how to adjust the tuning parameters of SGD such as to match the resulting stationary distribution to the posterior. This analysis rests on interpreting SGD as a continuous-time stochastic process and then minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between its stationary distribution and the target posterior. (This is in the spirit of variational inference.) In more detail, we model SGD as a multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process and then use properties of this process to derive the optimal parameters. This theoretical framework also connects SGD to modern scalable inference algorithms; we analyze the recently proposed stochastic gradient Fisher scoring under this perspective. We demonstrate that SGD with properly chosen constant rates gives a new way to optimize hyperparameters in probabilistic models.
[ "Stephan Mandt, Matthew D. Hoffman, and David M. Blei", "['Stephan Mandt' 'Matthew D. Hoffman' 'David M. Blei']" ]
cs.AI cs.LG
null
1602.02672
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02672v1
2016-02-08T18:01:35Z
2016-02-08T18:01:35Z
Learning to Communicate to Solve Riddles with Deep Distributed Recurrent Q-Networks
We propose deep distributed recurrent Q-networks (DDRQN), which enable teams of agents to learn to solve communication-based coordination tasks. In these tasks, the agents are not given any pre-designed communication protocol. Therefore, in order to successfully communicate, they must first automatically develop and agree upon their own communication protocol. We present empirical results on two multi-agent learning problems based on well-known riddles, demonstrating that DDRQN can successfully solve such tasks and discover elegant communication protocols to do so. To our knowledge, this is the first time deep reinforcement learning has succeeded in learning communication protocols. In addition, we present ablation experiments that confirm that each of the main components of the DDRQN architecture are critical to its success.
[ "Jakob N. Foerster, Yannis M. Assael, Nando de Freitas, Shimon Whiteson", "['Jakob N. Foerster' 'Yannis M. Assael' 'Nando de Freitas'\n 'Shimon Whiteson']" ]
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE
null
1602.02685
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02685v2
2016-11-17T11:52:19Z
2016-02-08T18:30:58Z
Predicting Clinical Events by Combining Static and Dynamic Information Using Recurrent Neural Networks
In clinical data sets we often find static information (e.g. patient gender, blood type, etc.) combined with sequences of data that are recorded during multiple hospital visits (e.g. medications prescribed, tests performed, etc.). Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have proven to be very successful for modelling sequences of data in many areas of Machine Learning. In this work we present an approach based on RNNs, specifically designed for the clinical domain, that combines static and dynamic information in order to predict future events. We work with a database collected in the Charit\'{e} Hospital in Berlin that contains complete information concerning patients that underwent a kidney transplantation. After the transplantation three main endpoints can occur: rejection of the kidney, loss of the kidney and death of the patient. Our goal is to predict, based on information recorded in the Electronic Health Record of each patient, whether any of those endpoints will occur within the next six or twelve months after each visit to the clinic. We compared different types of RNNs that we developed for this work, with a model based on a Feedforward Neural Network and a Logistic Regression model. We found that the RNN that we developed based on Gated Recurrent Units provides the best performance for this task. We also used the same models for a second task, i.e., next event prediction, and found that here the model based on a Feedforward Neural Network outperformed the other models. Our hypothesis is that long-term dependencies are not as relevant in this task.
[ "Crist\\'obal Esteban, Oliver Staeck, Yinchong Yang and Volker Tresp", "['Cristóbal Esteban' 'Oliver Staeck' 'Yinchong Yang' 'Volker Tresp']" ]
cs.CR cs.LG
null
1602.02697
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02697v4
2017-03-19T14:50:18Z
2016-02-08T19:12:25Z
Practical Black-Box Attacks against Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) models, e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs), are vulnerable to adversarial examples: malicious inputs modified to yield erroneous model outputs, while appearing unmodified to human observers. Potential attacks include having malicious content like malware identified as legitimate or controlling vehicle behavior. Yet, all existing adversarial example attacks require knowledge of either the model internals or its training data. We introduce the first practical demonstration of an attacker controlling a remotely hosted DNN with no such knowledge. Indeed, the only capability of our black-box adversary is to observe labels given by the DNN to chosen inputs. Our attack strategy consists in training a local model to substitute for the target DNN, using inputs synthetically generated by an adversary and labeled by the target DNN. We use the local substitute to craft adversarial examples, and find that they are misclassified by the targeted DNN. To perform a real-world and properly-blinded evaluation, we attack a DNN hosted by MetaMind, an online deep learning API. We find that their DNN misclassifies 84.24% of the adversarial examples crafted with our substitute. We demonstrate the general applicability of our strategy to many ML techniques by conducting the same attack against models hosted by Amazon and Google, using logistic regression substitutes. They yield adversarial examples misclassified by Amazon and Google at rates of 96.19% and 88.94%. We also find that this black-box attack strategy is capable of evading defense strategies previously found to make adversarial example crafting harder.
[ "Nicolas Papernot and Patrick McDaniel and Ian Goodfellow and Somesh\n Jha and Z. Berkay Celik and Ananthram Swami", "['Nicolas Papernot' 'Patrick McDaniel' 'Ian Goodfellow' 'Somesh Jha'\n 'Z. Berkay Celik' 'Ananthram Swami']" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
10.1109/ISBI.2016.7493501
1602.02701
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02701v1
2016-02-08T19:19:08Z
2016-02-08T19:19:08Z
Compressed Online Dictionary Learning for Fast fMRI Decomposition
We present a method for fast resting-state fMRI spatial decomposi-tions of very large datasets, based on the reduction of the temporal dimension before applying dictionary learning on concatenated individual records from groups of subjects. Introducing a measure of correspondence between spatial decompositions of rest fMRI, we demonstrates that time-reduced dictionary learning produces result as reliable as non-reduced decompositions. We also show that this reduction significantly improves computational scalability.
[ "Arthur Mensch (PARIETAL), Ga\\\"el Varoquaux (PARIETAL), Bertrand\n Thirion (PARIETAL)", "['Arthur Mensch' 'Gaël Varoquaux' 'Bertrand Thirion']" ]
cs.LG cs.AI
null
1602.02706
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02706v2
2016-06-09T06:57:28Z
2016-02-08T19:32:18Z
Decoy Bandits Dueling on a Poset
We adress the problem of dueling bandits defined on partially ordered sets, or posets. In this setting, arms may not be comparable, and there may be several (incomparable) optimal arms. We propose an algorithm, UnchainedBandits, that efficiently finds the set of optimal arms of any poset even when pairs of comparable arms cannot be distinguished from pairs of incomparable arms, with a set of minimal assumptions. This algorithm relies on the concept of decoys, which stems from social psychology. For the easier case where the incomparability information may be accessible, we propose a second algorithm, SlicingBandits, which takes advantage of this information and achieves a very significant gain of performance compared to UnchainedBandits. We provide theoretical guarantees and experimental evaluation for both algorithms.
[ "['Julien Audiffren' 'Ralaivola Liva']", "Julien Audiffren (CMLA), Ralaivola Liva (LIF)" ]
cs.LG stat.ML
null
1602.02722
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02722v4
2016-10-28T15:37:17Z
2016-02-08T20:12:50Z
PAC Reinforcement Learning with Rich Observations
We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal of achieving long-term performance competitive with a large set of policies. To avoid barriers to sample-efficient learning associated with large observation spaces and general POMDPs, we focus on problems that can be summarized by a small number of hidden states and have long-term rewards that are predictable by a reactive function class. In this setting, we design and analyze a new reinforcement learning algorithm, Least Squares Value Elimination by Exploration. We prove that the algorithm learns near optimal behavior after a number of episodes that is polynomial in all relevant parameters, logarithmic in the number of policies, and independent of the size of the observation space. Our result provides theoretical justification for reinforcement learning with function approximation.
[ "Akshay Krishnamurthy, Alekh Agarwal, John Langford", "['Akshay Krishnamurthy' 'Alekh Agarwal' 'John Langford']" ]
math.OC cs.LG math.NA
10.1007/s10589-017-9896-7
1602.02726
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02726v1
2016-02-08T20:27:19Z
2016-02-08T20:27:19Z
Local and Global Convergence of a General Inertial Proximal Splitting Scheme
This paper is concerned with convex composite minimization problems in a Hilbert space. In these problems, the objective is the sum of two closed, proper, and convex functions where one is smooth and the other admits a computationally inexpensive proximal operator. We analyze a general family of inertial proximal splitting algorithms (GIPSA) for solving such problems. We establish finiteness of the sum of squared increments of the iterates and optimality of the accumulation points. Weak convergence of the entire sequence then follows if the minimum is attained. Our analysis unifies and extends several previous results. We then focus on $\ell_1$-regularized optimization, which is the ubiquitous special case where the nonsmooth term is the $\ell_1$-norm. For certain parameter choices, GIPSA is amenable to a local analysis for this problem. For these choices we show that GIPSA achieves finite "active manifold identification", i.e. convergence in a finite number of iterations to the optimal support and sign, after which GIPSA reduces to minimizing a local smooth function. Local linear convergence then holds under certain conditions. We determine the rate in terms of the inertia, stepsize, and local curvature. Our local analysis is applicable to certain recent variants of the Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (FISTA), for which we establish active manifold identification and local linear convergence. Our analysis motivates the use of a momentum restart scheme in these FISTA variants to obtain the optimal local linear convergence rate.
[ "['Patrick R. Johnstone' 'Pierre Moulin']", "Patrick R. Johnstone and Pierre Moulin" ]
cs.LG cs.NE math.OC stat.ML
null
1602.02823
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02823v1
2016-02-09T00:14:03Z
2016-02-09T00:14:03Z
Poor starting points in machine learning
Poor (even random) starting points for learning/training/optimization are common in machine learning. In many settings, the method of Robbins and Monro (online stochastic gradient descent) is known to be optimal for good starting points, but may not be optimal for poor starting points -- indeed, for poor starting points Nesterov acceleration can help during the initial iterations, even though Nesterov methods not designed for stochastic approximation could hurt during later iterations. The common practice of training with nontrivial minibatches enhances the advantage of Nesterov acceleration.
[ "Mark Tygert", "['Mark Tygert']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02830
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02830v3
2016-03-17T14:54:25Z
2016-02-09T01:01:59Z
Binarized Neural Networks: Training Deep Neural Networks with Weights and Activations Constrained to +1 or -1
We introduce a method to train Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) - neural networks with binary weights and activations at run-time. At training-time the binary weights and activations are used for computing the parameters gradients. During the forward pass, BNNs drastically reduce memory size and accesses, and replace most arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations, which is expected to substantially improve power-efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of BNNs we conduct two sets of experiments on the Torch7 and Theano frameworks. On both, BNNs achieved nearly state-of-the-art results over the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets. Last but not least, we wrote a binary matrix multiplication GPU kernel with which it is possible to run our MNIST BNN 7 times faster than with an unoptimized GPU kernel, without suffering any loss in classification accuracy. The code for training and running our BNNs is available on-line.
[ "Matthieu Courbariaux, Itay Hubara, Daniel Soudry, Ran El-Yaniv and\n Yoshua Bengio", "['Matthieu Courbariaux' 'Itay Hubara' 'Daniel Soudry' 'Ran El-Yaniv'\n 'Yoshua Bengio']" ]
stat.ML cs.IR cs.LG
null
1602.02842
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02842v1
2016-02-09T02:30:27Z
2016-02-09T02:30:27Z
Collaborative filtering via sparse Markov random fields
Recommender systems play a central role in providing individualized access to information and services. This paper focuses on collaborative filtering, an approach that exploits the shared structure among mind-liked users and similar items. In particular, we focus on a formal probabilistic framework known as Markov random fields (MRF). We address the open problem of structure learning and introduce a sparsity-inducing algorithm to automatically estimate the interaction structures between users and between items. Item-item and user-user correlation networks are obtained as a by-product. Large-scale experiments on movie recommendation and date matching datasets demonstrate the power of the proposed method.
[ "['Truyen Tran' 'Dinh Phung' 'Svetha Venkatesh']", "Truyen Tran, Dinh Phung and Svetha Venkatesh" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02845
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02845v4
2016-12-21T13:36:50Z
2016-02-09T02:51:12Z
Online Active Linear Regression via Thresholding
We consider the problem of online active learning to collect data for regression modeling. Specifically, we consider a decision maker with a limited experimentation budget who must efficiently learn an underlying linear population model. Our main contribution is a novel threshold-based algorithm for selection of most informative observations; we characterize its performance and fundamental lower bounds. We extend the algorithm and its guarantees to sparse linear regression in high-dimensional settings. Simulations suggest the algorithm is remarkably robust: it provides significant benefits over passive random sampling in real-world datasets that exhibit high nonlinearity and high dimensionality --- significantly reducing both the mean and variance of the squared error.
[ "Carlos Riquelme, Ramesh Johari, Baosen Zhang", "['Carlos Riquelme' 'Ramesh Johari' 'Baosen Zhang']" ]
stat.ML cs.CL cs.IR cs.LG
10.1109/TKDE.2016.2563436
1602.02850
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02850v1
2016-02-09T03:43:21Z
2016-02-09T03:43:21Z
Toward Optimal Feature Selection in Naive Bayes for Text Categorization
Automated feature selection is important for text categorization to reduce the feature size and to speed up the learning process of classifiers. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient feature selection framework based on the Information Theory, which aims to rank the features with their discriminative capacity for classification. We first revisit two information measures: Kullback-Leibler divergence and Jeffreys divergence for binary hypothesis testing, and analyze their asymptotic properties relating to type I and type II errors of a Bayesian classifier. We then introduce a new divergence measure, called Jeffreys-Multi-Hypothesis (JMH) divergence, to measure multi-distribution divergence for multi-class classification. Based on the JMH-divergence, we develop two efficient feature selection methods, termed maximum discrimination ($MD$) and $MD-\chi^2$ methods, for text categorization. The promising results of extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
[ "['Bo Tang' 'Steven Kay' 'Haibo He']", "Bo Tang, Steven Kay, and Haibo He" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02852
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02852v1
2016-02-09T04:00:32Z
2016-02-09T04:00:32Z
Compliance-Aware Bandits
Motivated by clinical trials, we study bandits with observable non-compliance. At each step, the learner chooses an arm, after, instead of observing only the reward, it also observes the action that took place. We show that such noncompliance can be helpful or hurtful to the learner in general. Unfortunately, naively incorporating compliance information into bandit algorithms loses guarantees on sublinear regret. We present hybrid algorithms that maintain regret bounds up to a multiplicative factor and can incorporate compliance information. Simulations based on real data from the International Stoke Trial show the practical potential of these algorithms.
[ "['Nicolás Della Penna' 'Mark D. Reid' 'David Balduzzi']", "Nicol\\'as Della Penna, Mark D. Reid, David Balduzzi" ]
cs.CV cs.LG cs.NE
null
1602.02865
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02865v1
2016-02-09T05:30:33Z
2016-02-09T05:30:33Z
The Role of Typicality in Object Classification: Improving The Generalization Capacity of Convolutional Neural Networks
Deep artificial neural networks have made remarkable progress in different tasks in the field of computer vision. However, the empirical analysis of these models and investigation of their failure cases has received attention recently. In this work, we show that deep learning models cannot generalize to atypical images that are substantially different from training images. This is in contrast to the superior generalization ability of the visual system in the human brain. We focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as the state-of-the-art models in object recognition and classification; investigate this problem in more detail, and hypothesize that training CNN models suffer from unstructured loss minimization. We propose computational models to improve the generalization capacity of CNNs by considering how typical a training image looks like. By conducting an extensive set of experiments we show that involving a typicality measure can improve the classification results on a new set of images by a large margin. More importantly, this significant improvement is achieved without fine-tuning the CNN model on the target image set.
[ "Babak Saleh and Ahmed Elgammal and Jacob Feldman", "['Babak Saleh' 'Ahmed Elgammal' 'Jacob Feldman']" ]
cs.AI cs.LG cs.NE stat.ML
null
1602.02867
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02867v4
2017-03-20T21:41:51Z
2016-02-09T05:44:36Z
Value Iteration Networks
We introduce the value iteration network (VIN): a fully differentiable neural network with a `planning module' embedded within. VINs can learn to plan, and are suitable for predicting outcomes that involve planning-based reasoning, such as policies for reinforcement learning. Key to our approach is a novel differentiable approximation of the value-iteration algorithm, which can be represented as a convolutional neural network, and trained end-to-end using standard backpropagation. We evaluate VIN based policies on discrete and continuous path-planning domains, and on a natural-language based search task. We show that by learning an explicit planning computation, VIN policies generalize better to new, unseen domains.
[ "Aviv Tamar, Yi Wu, Garrett Thomas, Sergey Levine, Pieter Abbeel", "['Aviv Tamar' 'Yi Wu' 'Garrett Thomas' 'Sergey Levine' 'Pieter Abbeel']" ]
cs.LG
10.1007/s00500-015-1938-4
1602.02887
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02887v1
2016-02-09T08:09:26Z
2016-02-09T08:09:26Z
Classification with Boosting of Extreme Learning Machine Over Arbitrarily Partitioned Data
Machine learning based computational intelligence methods are widely used to analyze large scale data sets in this age of big data. Extracting useful predictive modeling from these types of data sets is a challenging problem due to their high complexity. Analyzing large amount of streaming data that can be leveraged to derive business value is another complex problem to solve. With high levels of data availability (\textit{i.e. Big Data}) automatic classification of them has become an important and complex task. Hence, we explore the power of applying MapReduce based Distributed AdaBoosting of Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) to build a predictive bag of classification models. Accordingly, (i) data set ensembles are created; (ii) ELM algorithm is used to build weak learners (classifier functions); and (iii) builds a strong learner from a set of weak learners. We applied this training model to the benchmark knowledge discovery and data mining data sets.
[ "['Ferhat Özgür Çatak']", "Ferhat \\\"Ozg\\\"ur \\c{C}atak" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.02888
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02888v1
2016-02-09T08:14:29Z
2016-02-09T08:14:29Z
Robust Ensemble Classifier Combination Based on Noise Removal with One-Class SVM
In machine learning area, as the number of labeled input samples becomes very large, it is very difficult to build a classification model because of input data set is not fit in a memory in training phase of the algorithm, therefore, it is necessary to utilize data partitioning to handle overall data set. Bagging and boosting based data partitioning methods have been broadly used in data mining and pattern recognition area. Both of these methods have shown a great possibility for improving classification model performance. This study is concerned with the analysis of data set partitioning with noise removal and its impact on the performance of multiple classifier models. In this study, we propose noise filtering preprocessing at each data set partition to increment classifier model performance. We applied Gini impurity approach to find the best split percentage of noise filter ratio. The filtered sub data set is then used to train individual ensemble models.
[ "['Ferhat Özgür Çatak']", "Ferhat \\\"Ozg\\\"ur \\c{C}atak" ]
cs.CR cs.LG
10.1007/978-3-319-26535-3_39
1602.02899
null
null
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02899v1
2016-02-09T08:37:26Z
2016-02-09T08:37:26Z
Secure Multi-Party Computation Based Privacy Preserving Extreme Learning Machine Algorithm Over Vertically Distributed Data
Especially in the Big Data era, the usage of different classification methods is increasing day by day. The success of these classification methods depends on the effectiveness of learning methods. Extreme learning machine (ELM) classification algorithm is a relatively new learning method built on feed-forward neural-network. ELM classification algorithm is a simple and fast method that can create a model from high-dimensional data sets. Traditional ELM learning algorithm implicitly assumes complete access to whole data set. This is a major privacy concern in most of cases. Sharing of private data (i.e. medical records) is prevented because of security concerns. In this research, we propose an efficient and secure privacy-preserving learning algorithm for ELM classification over data that is vertically partitioned among several parties. The new learning method preserves the privacy on numerical attributes, builds a classification model without sharing private data without disclosing the data of each party to others.
[ "['Ferhat Özgür Çatak']", "Ferhat \\\"Ozg\\\"ur \\c{C}atak" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.02934
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02934v5
2016-09-12T22:25:20Z
2016-02-09T11:05:42Z
Nested Mini-Batch K-Means
A new algorithm is proposed which accelerates the mini-batch k-means algorithm of Sculley (2010) by using the distance bounding approach of Elkan (2003). We argue that, when incorporating distance bounds into a mini-batch algorithm, already used data should preferentially be reused. To this end we propose using nested mini-batches, whereby data in a mini-batch at iteration t is automatically reused at iteration t+1. Using nested mini-batches presents two difficulties. The first is that unbalanced use of data can bias estimates, which we resolve by ensuring that each data sample contributes exactly once to centroids. The second is in choosing mini-batch sizes, which we address by balancing premature fine-tuning of centroids with redundancy induced slow-down. Experiments show that the resulting nmbatch algorithm is very effective, often arriving within 1% of the empirical minimum 100 times earlier than the standard mini-batch algorithm.
[ "['James Newling' 'François Fleuret']", "James Newling and Fran\\c{c}ois Fleuret" ]
cs.LG cs.SD
null
1602.02950
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02950v1
2016-02-09T12:00:56Z
2016-02-09T12:00:56Z
Spoofing detection under noisy conditions: a preliminary investigation and an initial database
Spoofing detection for automatic speaker verification (ASV), which is to discriminate between live speech and attacks, has received increasing attentions recently. However, all the previous studies have been done on the clean data without significant additive noise. To simulate the real-life scenarios, we perform a preliminary investigation of spoofing detection under additive noisy conditions, and also describe an initial database for this task. The noisy database is based on the ASVspoof challenge 2015 database and generated by artificially adding background noises at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Five different additive noises are included. Our preliminary results show that using the model trained from clean data, the system performance degrades significantly in noisy conditions. Phase-based feature is more noise robust than magnitude-based features. And the systems perform significantly differ under different noise scenarios.
[ "Xiaohai Tian, Zhizheng Wu, Xiong Xiao, Eng Siong Chng, Haizhou Li", "['Xiaohai Tian' 'Zhizheng Wu' 'Xiong Xiao' 'Eng Siong Chng' 'Haizhou Li']" ]
cs.RO cs.LG cs.SY
null
1602.02990
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02990v2
2016-06-15T12:37:19Z
2016-02-09T14:16:26Z
Self-organized control for musculoskeletal robots
With the accelerated development of robot technologies, optimal control becomes one of the central themes of research. In traditional approaches, the controller, by its internal functionality, finds appropriate actions on the basis of the history of sensor values, guided by the goals, intentions, objectives, learning schemes, and so on planted into it. The idea is that the controller controls the world---the body plus its environment---as reliably as possible. However, in elastically actuated robots this approach faces severe difficulties. This paper advocates for a new paradigm of self-organized control. The paper presents a solution with a controller that is devoid of any functionalities of its own, given by a fixed, explicit and context-free function of the recent history of the sensor values. When applying this controller to a muscle-tendon driven arm-shoulder system from the Myorobotics toolkit, we observe a vast variety of self-organized behavior patterns: when left alone, the arm realizes pseudo-random sequences of different poses but one can also manipulate the system into definite motion patterns. But most interestingly, after attaching an object, the controller gets in a functional resonance with the object's internal dynamics: when given a half-filled bottle, the system spontaneously starts shaking the bottle so that maximum response from the dynamics of the water is being generated. After attaching a pendulum to the arm, the controller drives the pendulum into a circular mode. In this way, the robot discovers dynamical affordances of objects its body is interacting with. We also discuss perspectives for using this controller paradigm for intention driven behavior generation.
[ "Ralf Der and Georg Martius", "['Ralf Der' 'Georg Martius']" ]
cs.LG cs.CL cs.SE
null
1602.03001
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03001v2
2016-05-25T12:18:28Z
2016-02-09T14:36:49Z
A Convolutional Attention Network for Extreme Summarization of Source Code
Attention mechanisms in neural networks have proved useful for problems in which the input and output do not have fixed dimension. Often there exist features that are locally translation invariant and would be valuable for directing the model's attention, but previous attentional architectures are not constructed to learn such features specifically. We introduce an attentional neural network that employs convolution on the input tokens to detect local time-invariant and long-range topical attention features in a context-dependent way. We apply this architecture to the problem of extreme summarization of source code snippets into short, descriptive function name-like summaries. Using those features, the model sequentially generates a summary by marginalizing over two attention mechanisms: one that predicts the next summary token based on the attention weights of the input tokens and another that is able to copy a code token as-is directly into the summary. We demonstrate our convolutional attention neural network's performance on 10 popular Java projects showing that it achieves better performance compared to previous attentional mechanisms.
[ "['Miltiadis Allamanis' 'Hao Peng' 'Charles Sutton']", "Miltiadis Allamanis, Hao Peng, Charles Sutton" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.03014
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03014v2
2016-03-01T09:37:28Z
2016-02-09T14:59:45Z
Herding as a Learning System with Edge-of-Chaos Dynamics
Herding defines a deterministic dynamical system at the edge of chaos. It generates a sequence of model states and parameters by alternating parameter perturbations with state maximizations, where the sequence of states can be interpreted as "samples" from an associated MRF model. Herding differs from maximum likelihood estimation in that the sequence of parameters does not converge to a fixed point and differs from an MCMC posterior sampling approach in that the sequence of states is generated deterministically. Herding may be interpreted as a"perturb and map" method where the parameter perturbations are generated using a deterministic nonlinear dynamical system rather than randomly from a Gumbel distribution. This chapter studies the distinct statistical characteristics of the herding algorithm and shows that the fast convergence rate of the controlled moments may be attributed to edge of chaos dynamics. The herding algorithm can also be generalized to models with latent variables and to a discriminative learning setting. The perceptron cycling theorem ensures that the fast moment matching property is preserved in the more general framework.
[ "['Yutian Chen' 'Max Welling']", "Yutian Chen and Max Welling" ]
stat.ML cs.LG
null
1602.03027
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03027v1
2016-02-09T15:17:24Z
2016-02-09T15:17:24Z
Minimax Lower Bounds for Realizable Transductive Classification
Transductive learning considers a training set of $m$ labeled samples and a test set of $u$ unlabeled samples, with the goal of best labeling that particular test set. Conversely, inductive learning considers a training set of $m$ labeled samples drawn iid from $P(X,Y)$, with the goal of best labeling any future samples drawn iid from $P(X)$. This comparison suggests that transduction is a much easier type of inference than induction, but is this really the case? This paper provides a negative answer to this question, by proving the first known minimax lower bounds for transductive, realizable, binary classification. Our lower bounds show that $m$ should be at least $\Omega(d/\epsilon + \log(1/\delta)/\epsilon)$ when $\epsilon$-learning a concept class $\mathcal{H}$ of finite VC-dimension $d<\infty$ with confidence $1-\delta$, for all $m \leq u$. This result draws three important conclusions. First, general transduction is as hard as general induction, since both problems have $\Omega(d/m)$ minimax values. Second, the use of unlabeled data does not help general transduction, since supervised learning algorithms such as ERM and (Hanneke, 2015) match our transductive lower bounds while ignoring the unlabeled test set. Third, our transductive lower bounds imply lower bounds for semi-supervised learning, which add to the important discussion about the role of unlabeled data in machine learning.
[ "Ilya Tolstikhin and David Lopez-Paz", "['Ilya Tolstikhin' 'David Lopez-Paz']" ]
cs.LG
null
1602.03040
null
null
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03040v3
2016-09-14T07:24:10Z
2016-02-09T15:51:19Z
The Structured Weighted Violations Perceptron Algorithm
We present the Structured Weighted Violations Perceptron (SWVP) algorithm, a new structured prediction algorithm that generalizes the Collins Structured Perceptron (CSP). Unlike CSP, the update rule of SWVP explicitly exploits the internal structure of the predicted labels. We prove the convergence of SWVP for linearly separable training sets, provide mistake and generalization bounds, and show that in the general case these bounds are tighter than those of the CSP special case. In synthetic data experiments with data drawn from an HMM, various variants of SWVP substantially outperform its CSP special case. SWVP also provides encouraging initial dependency parsing results.
[ "['Rotem Dror' 'Roi Reichart']", "Rotem Dror, Roi Reichart" ]