OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Rank minimization via online learning
Authors: Raghu Meka, Prateek Jain 0002, Constantine Caramanis, Inderjit S. Dhillon
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Minimum rank problems arise frequently in machine learning applications and are notoriously difficult to solve due to the non-convex nature of the rank objective. In this paper, we present the first online learning approach for the problem of rank minimization of matrices over polyhedral sets. In particular, we present two online learning algorithms for rank minimization- our first algorithm is a multiplicative update method based on a generalized experts framework, while our second algorithm is a novel application of the online convex programming framework (Zinkevich, 2003). In the latter, we flip the role of the decision maker by making the decision maker search over the constraint space instead of feasible points, as is usually the case in online convex programming. A salient feature of our online learning approach is that it allows us to give provable approximation guarantees for the rank minimization problem over polyhedral sets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on synthetic examples, and on the real-life application of low-rank kernel learning. 1.
An analysis of reinforcement learning with function approximation
Authors: Francisco S. Melo, Sean P. Meyn, M. Isabel Ribeiro
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

We address the problem of computing the optimal Q-function in Markov decision problems with infinite state-space. We analyze the convergence properties of several variations of Q-learning when combined with function approximation, extending the analysis of TD-learning in (Tsitsiklis & Van Roy, 1996a) to stochastic control settings. We identify conditions under which such approximate methods converge with probability 1. We conclude with a brief discussion on the general applicability of our results and compare them with several related works.
Bayes optimal classification for decision trees
Authors: Siegfried Nijssen
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

We present an algorithm for exact Bayes optimal classification from a hypothesis space of decision trees satisfying leaf constraints. Our contribution is that we reduce this classification problem to the problem of finding a rule-based classifier with appropriate weights. We show that these rules and weights can be computed in linear time from the output of a modified frequent itemset mining algorithm, which means that we can compute the classifier in practice, despite the exponential worst-case complexity. In experiments we compare the Bayes optimal predictions with those of the maximum a posteriori hypothesis.
Estimating labels from label proportions
Authors: Novi Quadrianto, Alexander J. Smola, Tibério S. Caetano, Quoc V. Le
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Consider the following problem: given sets of unlabeled observations, each set with known label proportions, predict the labels of another set of observations, also with known label proportions. This problem appears in areas like e-commerce, spam filtering and improper content detection. We present consistent estimators which can reconstruct the correct labels with high probability in a uniform convergence sense. Experiments show that our method works well in practice.
Semi-supervised learning of compact document representations with deep networks
Authors: Marc&apos, Aurelio Ranzato, Martin Szummer
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Finding good representations of text documents is crucial in information retrieval and classification systems. Today the most popular document representation is based on a vector of word counts in the document. This representation neither captures dependencies between related words, nor handles synonyms or polysemous words. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to learn text document representations based on semi-supervised autoencoders that are stacked to form a deep network. The model can be trained efficiently on partially labeled corpora, producing very compact representations of documents, while retaining as much class information and joint word statistics as possible. We show that it is advantageous to exploit even a few labeled samples during training.
Message-passing for graph-structured linear programs: proximal projections, convergence and rounding schemes
Authors: Pradeep Ravikumar, Alekh Agarwal, Martin J. Wainwright
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

A large body of past work has focused on the first-order tree-based LP relaxation for the MAP problem in Markov random fields. This paper develops a family of super-linearly convergent LP solvers based on proximal minimization schemes using Bregman divergences that exploit the underlying graphical structure, and so scale well to large problems. All of our algorithms have a double-loop character, with the outer loop corresponding to the proximal sequence, and an inner loop of cyclic Bregman divergences used to compute each proximal update. The inner loop updates are distributed and respect the graph structure, and thus can be cast as message-passing algorithms. We establish various convergence guarantees for our algorithms, illustrate their performance, and also present rounding schemes with provable optimality guarantees.
Bayesian multiple instance learning: automatic feature selection and inductive transfer
Authors: Vikas C. Raykar, Balaji Krishnapuram, Jinbo Bi, Murat Dundar, R. Bharat Rao
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

We propose a novel Bayesian multiple instance learning (MIL) algorithm. This algorithm automatically identifies the relevant feature subset, and utilizes inductive transfer when learning multiple (conceptually related) classifiers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed MIL method is more accurate than previous MIL algorithms and selects a much smaller set of useful features. Inductive transfer further improves the accuracy of the classifier as compared to learning each task individually.
Online kernel selection for Bayesian reinforcement learning
Authors: Joseph Reisinger, Peter Stone 0001, Risto Miikkulainen
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Kernel-based Bayesian methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) such as Gaussian Process Temporal Difference (GPTD) are particularly promising because they rigorously treat uncertainty in the value function and make it easy to specify prior knowledge. However, the choice of prior distribution significantly affects the empirical performance of the learning agent, and little work has been done extending existing methods for prior model selection to the online setting. This paper develops Replacing-Kernel RL, an online model selection method for GPTD using sequential Monte-Carlo methods. Replacing-Kernel RL is compared to standard GPTD and tile-coding on several RL domains, and is shown to yield significantly better asymptotic performance for many different kernel families. Furthermore, the resulting kernels capture an intuitively useful notion of prior state covariance that may nevertheless be difficult to capture manually.
The Group-Lasso for generalized linear models: uniqueness of solutions and efficient algorithms
Authors: Volker Roth 0001, Bernd Fischer 0003
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

The Group-Lasso method for finding important explanatory factors suffers from the potential non-uniqueness of solutions and also from high computational costs. We formulate conditions for the uniqueness of Group-Lasso solutions which lead to an easily implementable test procedure that allows us to identify all potentially active groups. These results are used to derive an efficient algorithm that can deal with input dimensions in the millions and can approximate the solution path efficiently. The derived methods are applied to large-scale learning problems where they exhibit excellent performance and where the testing procedure helps to avoid misinterpretations of the solutions.
Robust matching and recognition using context-dependent kernels
Authors: Hichem Sahbi, Jean-Yves Audibert, Jaonary Rabarisoa, Renaud Keriven
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

The success of kernel methods including support vector machines (SVMs) strongly depends on the design of appropriate kernels. While initially kernels were designed in order to handle fixed-length data, their extension to unordered, variable-length data became more than necessary for real pattern recognition problems such as object recognition and bioinformatics.
Fast incremental proximity search in large graphs
Authors: Purnamrita Sarkar, Andrew W. Moore 0001, Amit Prakash
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

In this paper we investigate two aspects of ranking problems on large graphs. First, we augment the deterministic pruning algorithm in Sarkar and Moore (2007) with sampling techniques to compute approximately correct rankings with high probability under random walk based proximity measures at query time. Second, we prove some surprising locality properties of these proximity measures by examining the short term behavior of random walks. The proposed algorithm can answer queries on the fly without caching any information about the entire graph. We present empirical results on a 600, 000 node author-word-citation graph from the Citeseer domain on a single CPU machine where the average query processing time is around 4 seconds. We present quantifiable link prediction tasks. On most of them our techniques outperform Personalized Pagerank, a well-known diffusion based proximity measure.
Inverting the Viterbi algorithm: an abstract framework for structure design
Authors: Michael Schnall-Levin, Leonid Chindelevitch, Bonnie Berger
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Probabilistic grammatical formalisms such as hidden Markov models (HMMs) and stochastic context-free grammars (SCFGs) have been extensively studied and widely applied in a number of fields. Here, we introduce a new algorithmic problem on HMMs and SCFGs that arises naturally from protein and RNA design, and which has not been previously studied. The problem can be viewed as an inverse to the one solved by the Viterbi algorithm on HMMs or by the CKY algorithm on SCFGs. We study this problem theoretically and obtain the first algorithmic results. We prove that the problem is NP-complete, even for a 3-letter emission alphabet, via a reduction from 3-SAT, a result that has implications for the hardness of RNA secondary structure design. We then develop a number of approaches for making the problem tractable. In particular, for HMMs we develop a branch-and-bound algorithm, which can be shown to have fixed-parameter tractable worst-case running time, exponential in the number of states of the HMM but linear in the length of the structure. We also show how to cast the problem as a Mixed Integer Linear Program.
A least squares formulation for canonical correlation analysis
Authors: Liang Sun 0001, Shuiwang Ji, Jieping Ye
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a well-known technique for finding the correlations between two sets of multi-dimensional variables. It projects both sets of variables into a lower-dimensional space in which they are maximally correlated. CCA is commonly applied for supervised dimensionality reduction, in which one of the multi-dimensional variables is derived from the class label. It has been shown that CCA can be formulated as a least squares problem in the binaryclass case. However, their relationship in the more general setting remains unclear. In this paper, we show that, under a mild condition which tends to hold for high-dimensional data, CCA in multi-label classifications can be formulated as a least squares problem. Based on this equivalence relationship, we propose several CCA extensions including sparse CCA using 1-norm regularization. Experiments on multi-label data sets confirm the established equivalence relationship. Results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CCA extensions.
nu-support vector machine as conditional value-at-risk minimization
Authors: Akiko Takeda, Masashi Sugiyama
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

The ν-support vector classification (ν-SVC) algorithm was shown to work well and provide intuitive interpretations, e.g., the parameter ν roughly specifies the fraction of support vectors. Although ν corresponds to a fraction, it cannot take the entire range between 0 and 1 in its original form. This problem was settled by a non-convex extension of ν-SVC and the extended method was experimentally shown to generalize better than original ν-SVC. However, its good generalization performance and convergence properties of the optimization algorithm have not been studied yet. In this paper, we provide new theoretical insights into these issues and propose a novel ν-SVC algorithm that has guaranteed generalization performance and convergence properties. 1.
Listwise approach to learning to rank: theory and algorithm
Authors: Fen Xia, Tie-Yan Liu, Jue Wang 0004, Wensheng Zhang 0002, Hang Li 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

This paper aims to conduct a study on the listwise approach to learning to rank. The listwise approach learns a ranking function by taking individual lists as instances and minimizing a loss function defined on the predicted list and the ground-truth list. Existing work on the approach mainly focused on the development of new algorithms; methods such as RankCosine and ListNet have been proposed and good performances by them have been observed. Unfortunately, the underlying theory was not sufficiently studied so far. To amend the problem, this paper proposes conducting theoretical analysis of learning to rank algorithms through investigations on the properties of the loss functions, including consistency, soundness, continuity, differentiability, convexity, and efficiency. A sufficient condition on consistency for ranking is given, which seems to be the first such result obtained in related research. The paper then conducts analysis on three loss functions: likelihood loss, cosine loss, and cross entropy loss. The latter two were used in RankCosine and ListNet. The use of the likelihood loss leads to the development of a new listwise method called ListMLE, whose loss function offers better properties, and also leads to better experimental results.
Democratic approximation of lexicographic preference models
Authors: Fusun Yaman, Thomas J. Walsh 0001, Michael L. Littman, Marie desJardins
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

Previous algorithms for learning lexicographic preference models (LPMs) produce a "best guess" LPM that is consistent with the observations. Our approach is more democratic: we do not commit to a single LPM. Instead, we approximate the target using the votes of a collection of consistent LPMs. We present two variations of this method---variable voting and model voting---and empirically show that these democratic algorithms outperform the existing methods. We also introduce an intuitive yet powerful learning bias to prune some of the possible LPMs. We demonstrate how this learning bias can be used with variable and model voting and show that the learning bias improves the learning curve significantly, especially when the number of observations is small.
Estimating local optimums in EM algorithm over Gaussian mixture model
Authors: Zhenjie Zhang, Bing Tian Dai, Anthony K. H. Tung
Venue: ICML
Year: 2008

EM algorithm is a very popular iteration-based method to estimate the parameters of Gaussian Mixture Model from a large observation set. However, in most cases, EM algorithm is not guaranteed to converge to the global optimum. Instead, it stops at some local optimums, which can be much worse than the global optimum. Therefore, it is usually required to run multiple procedures of EM algorithm with different initial configurations and return the best solution. To improve the efficiency of this scheme, we propose a new method which can estimate an upper bound on the logarithm likelihood of the local optimum, based on the current configuration after the latest EM iteration. This is accomplished by first deriving some region bounding the possible locations of local optimum, followed by some upper bound estimation on the maximum likelihood. With this estimation, we can terminate an EM algorithm procedure if the estimated local optimum is definitely worse than the best solution seen so far. Extensive experiments show that our method can effectively and efficiently accelerate conventional multiple restart EM algorithm.
Archipelago: nonparametric Bayesian semi-supervised learning
Authors: Ryan Prescott Adams, Zoubin Ghahramani
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

Semi-supervised learning (SSL), is classification where additional unlabeled data can be used to improve accuracy. Generative approaches are appealing in this situation, as a model of the data's probability density can assist in identifying clusters. Nonparametric Bayesian methods, while ideal in theory due to their principled motivations, have been difficult to apply to SSL in practice. We present a nonparametric Bayesian method that uses Gaussian processes for the generative model, avoiding many of the problems associated with Dirichlet process mixture models. Our model is fully generative and we take advantage of recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to provide a practical inference method. Our method compares favorably to competing approaches on synthetic and real-world multi-class data.
Curriculum learning
Authors: Yoshua Bengio, Jérôme Louradour, Ronan Collobert, Jason Weston
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

Humans and animals learn much better when the examples are not randomly presented but organized in a meaningful order which illustrates gradually more concepts, and gradually more complex ones. Here, we formalize such training strategies in the context of machine learning, and call them "curriculum learning". In the context of recent research studying the difficulty of training in the presence of non-convex training criteria (for deep deterministic and stochastic neural networks), we explore curriculum learning in various set-ups. The experiments show that significant improvements in generalization can be achieved. We hypothesize that curriculum learning has both an effect on the speed of convergence of the training process to a minimum and, in the case of non-convex criteria, on the quality of the local minima obtained: curriculum learning can be seen as a particular form of continuation method (a general strategy for global optimization of non-convex functions).
Importance weighted active learning
Authors: Alina Beygelzimer, Sanjoy Dasgupta, John Langford 0001
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

We present a practical and statistically consistent scheme for actively learning binary classifiers under general loss functions. Our algorithm uses importance weighting to correct sampling bias, and by controlling the variance, we are able to give rigorous label complexity bounds for the learning process.
Optimized expected information gain for nonlinear dynamical systems
Authors: Alberto Giovanni Busetto, Cheng Soon Ong, Joachim M. Buhmann
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

This paper addresses the problem of active model selection for nonlinear dynamical systems. We propose a novel learning approach that selects the most informative subset of time-dependent variables for the purpose of Bayesian model inference. The model selection criterion maximizes the expected Kullback-Leibler divergence between the prior and the posterior probabilities over the models. The proposed strategy generalizes the standard D-optimal design, which is obtained from a uniform prior with Gaussian noise. In addition, our approach allows us to determine an information halting criterion for model identification. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by differentiating between 18 published biochemical models of the TOR signaling pathway, a model selection problem in systems biology. By generating pivotal selection experiments, our strategy outperforms the standard Aoptimal, D-optimal and E-optimal sequential design techniques.
Structure learning of Bayesian networks using constraints
Authors: Cassio P. de Campos, Zhi Zeng, Qiang Ji
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

This paper addresses exact learning of Bayesian network structure from data and expert's knowledge based on score functions that are decomposable. First, it describes useful properties that strongly reduce the time and memory costs of many known methods such as hill-climbing, dynamic programming and sampling variable orderings. Secondly, a branch and bound algorithm is presented that integrates parameter and structural constraints with data in a way to guarantee global optimality with respect to the score function. It is an any-time procedure because, if stopped, it provides the best current solution and an estimation about how far it is from the global solution. We show empirically the advantages of the properties and the constraints, and the applicability of the algorithm to large data sets (up to one hundred variables) that cannot be handled by other current methods (limited to around 30 variables).
Robust bounds for classification via selective sampling
Authors: Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Claudio Gentile, Francesco Orabona
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

We introduce a new algorithm for binary classification in the selective sampling protocol. Our algorithm uses Regularized Least Squares (RLS) as base classifier, and for this reason it can be efficiently run in any RKHS. Unlike previous margin-based semi-supervised algorithms, our sampling condition hinges on a simultaneous upper bound on bias and variance of the RLS estimate under a simple linear label noise model. This fact allows us to prove performance bounds that hold for an arbitrary sequence of instances. In particular, we show that our sampling strategy approximates the margin of the Bayes optimal classifier to any desired accuracy ε by asking Õ (d/ε2) queries (in the RKHS case d is replaced by a suitable spectral quantity). While these are the standard rates in the fully supervised i.i.d. case, the best previously known result in our harder setting was Õ (d3/ε4). Preliminary experiments show that some of our algorithms also exhibit a good practical performance.
A convex formulation for learning shared structures from multiple tasks
Authors: Jianhui Chen, Lei Tang 0001, Jun Liu 0003, Jieping Ye
Venue: ICML
Year: 2009

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve generalization performance by learning multiple related tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning shared structures from multiple related tasks. We present an improved formulation (iASO) for multi-task learning based on the non-convex alternating structure optimization (ASO) algorithm, in which all tasks are related by a shared feature representation. We convert iASO, a non-convex formulation, into a relaxed convex one, which is, however, not scalable to large data sets due to its complex constraints. We propose an alternating optimization (cASO) algorithm which solves the convex relaxation efficiently, and further show that cASO converges to a global optimum. In addition, we present a theoretical condition, under which cASO can find a globally optimal solution to iASO. Experiments on several benchmark data sets confirm our theoretical analysis. 1.