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Title: Smoothing the Geometry of Probabilistic Box Embeddings

Paper content:
There is growing interest in geometrically-inspired embeddings for learning hierarchies, partial orders, and lattice structures, with natural applications to transitive relational data such as entailment graphs.
Recent work has extended these ideas beyond deterministic hierarchies to probabilistically calibrated models, which enable learning from uncertain supervision and inferring soft-inclusions among concepts, while maintaining the geometric inductive bias of hierarchical embedding models.
We build on the Box Lattice model of Vilnis et al. (2018), which showed promising results in modeling soft-inclusions through an overlapping hierarchy of sets, parameterized as high-dimensional hyperrectangles (boxes).
However, the hard edges of the boxes present difficulties for standard gradient based optimization; that work employed a special surrogate function for the disjoint case, but we find this method to be fragile.
In this work, we present a novel hierarchical embedding model, inspired by a relaxation of box embeddings into parameterized density functions using Gaussian convolutions over the boxes.
Our approach provides an alternative surrogate to the original lattice measure that improves the robustness of optimization in the disjoint case, while also preserving the desirable properties with respect to the original lattice.
We demonstrate increased or matching performance on WordNet hypernymy prediction, Flickr caption entailment, and a MovieLens-based market basket dataset.
We show especially marked improvements in the case of sparse data, where many conditional probabilities should be low, and thus boxes should be nearly disjoint.
Embedding methods have long been a key technique in machine learning, providing a natural way to convert semantic problems into geometric problems.
Early examples include the vector space BID17 and latent semantic indexing BID4 ) models for information retrieval.
Embeddings experienced a renaissance after the publication of Word2Vec BID12 , a neural word embedding method BID2 BID13 ) that could run at massive scale.Recent years have seen an interest in structured or geometric representations.
Instead of representing e.g. images, words, sentences, or knowledge base concepts with points, these methods instead associate them with more complex geometric structures.
These objects can be density functions, as in Gaussian embeddings BID21 BID0 , convex cones, as in order embeddings BID20 BID9 , or axis-aligned hyperrectangles, as in box embeddings BID22 BID18 .
These geometric objects more naturally express ideas of asymmetry, entailment, ordering, and transitive relations than simple points in a vector space, and provide a strong inductive bias for these tasks.In this work, we focus on the probabilistic Box Lattice model of BID22 , because of its strong empirical performance in modeling transitive relations, probabilistic interpretation (edges in a relational DAG are replaced with conditional probabilities), and ability to model complex joint probability distributions including negative correlations.
Box embeddings (BE) are a generalization of order embeddings (OE) BID20 and probabilistic order embeddings (POE) BID9 that replace the vector lattice ordering (notions of overlapping and enclosing convex cones) in OE and POE with a more general notion of overlapping boxes (products of intervals).While
intuitively appealing, the "hard edges" of boxes and their ability to become easily disjoint, present difficulties for gradient-based optimization: when two boxes are disjoint in the model, but have overlap in the ground truth, no gradient can flow to the model to correct the problem. This
is of special concern for (pseudo-)sparse data, where many boxes should have nearly zero overlap, while others should have very high overlap. This
is especially pronounced in the case of e.g. market basket models for recommendation, where most items should not be recommended, and entailment tasks, most of which are currently artificially resampled into a 1:1 ratio of positive to negative examples. To address
the disjoint case, BID22 introduce an ad-hoc surrogate function. In contrast
, we look at this problem as inspiration for a new model, based on the intuition of relaxing the hard edges of the boxes into smoothed density functions, using a Gaussian convolution with the original boxes.We demonstrate the superiority of our approach to modeling transitive relations on WordNet, Flickr caption entailment, and a MovieLens-based market basket dataset. We match or
beat existing state of the art results, while showing substantial improvements in the pseudosparse regime.
We presented an approach to smoothing the energy and optimization landscape of probabilistic box embeddings and provided a theoretical justification for the smoothing.
Due to a decreased number of hyper-parameters this model is easier to train, and, furthermore, met or surpassed current state-ofthe-art results on several interesting datasets.
We further demonstrated that this model is particularly effective in the case of sparse data and more robust to poor initialization.Tackling the learning problems presented by rich, geometrically-inspired embedding models is an open and challenging area of research, which this work is far from the last word on.
This task will become even more pressing as the embedding structures become more complex, such as unions of boxes or other non-convex objects.
To this end, we will continue to explore both function lattices, and constraint-based approaches to learning.

assistant: text: Improve hierarchical embedding models using kernel smoothing