bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cause-Effect Knowledge Acquisition and Neural Association Model for Solving A Set of Winograd Schema Problems
Authors: Liu Quan , Jiang Hui , Evdokimov Andrew , Ling Zhen-Hua , Zhu Xiaodan , Wei Si , Hu Yu
Published: July 2017

This paper focuses on the investigations in Winograd Schema (WS), a challenging problem which has been proposed for measuring progress in commonsense reasoning.Due to the lack of commonsense knowledge and training data, very little work has been found on the WS problems in recent years.Actually, there is no shortcut to solve this problem except to collect more commonsense knowledge and design suitable models.Therefore, this paper addresses a set of WS problems by proposing a knowledge acquisition method and a general neural association model.To avoid the sparseness issue, the knowledge we aim to collect is the cause-effect relationships between thousands of commonly used words.The knowledge acquisition method supports us to extract hundreds of thousands of cause-effect pairs from large text corpus automatically.Meanwhile, a neural association model (NAM) is proposed to encode the association relationships between any two discrete events.Based on the extracted knowledge and the NAM models, in this paper, we successfully build a system for solving WS problems from scratch and achieve 70.0% accuracy.Most importantly, this paper provides a flexible framework to solve WS problems based on event association and neural network methods.
Adaptive Group Sparse Multi-task Learning via Trace Lasso
Authors: Liu Sulin , Pan Sinno Jialin
Published: July 2017

In multi-task learning (MTL), tasks are learned jointly so that information among related tasks is shared and utilized to help improve generalization for each individual task. A major challenge in MTL is how to selectively choose what to share among tasks. Ideally, only related tasks should share information with each other. In this paper, we propose a new MTL method that can adaptively group correlated tasks into clusters and share information among the correlated tasks only. Our method is based on the assumption that each task parameter is a linear combination of other tasks' and the coefficients of the linear combination are active only if there is relatedness between the two tasks. Through introducing trace Lasso penalty on these coefficients, our method is able to adaptively select the subset of coefficients with respect to the tasks that are correlated to the task. Our model frees the process of determining task clustering structure as used in the literature. Efficient optimization methods based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is developed to solve the problem. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of clustering related tasks and generalization performance.
Understanding How Feature Structure Transfers in Transfer Learning
Authors: Liu Tongliang , Yang Qiang , Tao Dacheng
Published: July 2017

Transfer learning transfers knowledge across domains to improve the learning performance. Since feature structures generally represent the common knowledge across different domains, they can be transferred successfully even though the labeling functions across domains differ arbitrarily. However, theoretical justification for this success has remained elusive. In this paper, motivated by self-taught learning, we regard a set of bases as a feature structure of a domain if the bases can (approximately) reconstruct any observation in this domain. We propose a general analysis scheme to theoretically justify that if the source and target domains share similar feature structures, the source domain feature structure is transferable to the target domain, regardless of the change of the labeling functions across domains. The transferred structure is interpreted to function as a regularization matrix which benefits the learning process of the target domain task. We prove that such transfer enables the corresponding learning algorithms to be uniformly stable. Specifically, we illustrate the existence of feature structure transfer in two well-known transfer learning settings: domain adaptation and learning to learn.
Deep Ordinal Regression Based on Data Relationship for Small Datasets
Authors: Liu Yanzhu , Kong Adams Wai Kin , Goh Chi Keong
Published: July 2017

Ordinal regression aims to classify instances into ordinal categories. As with other supervised learning problems, learning an effective deep ordinal model from a small dataset is challenging. This paper proposes a new approach which transforms the ordinal regression problem to binary classification problems and uses triplets with instances from different categories to train deep neural networks such that high-level features describing their ordinal relationship can be extracted automatically. In the testing phase, triplets are formed by a testing instance and other instances with known ranks. A decoder is designed to estimate the rank of the testing instance based on the outputs of the network. Because of the data argumentation by permutation, deep learning can work for ordinal regression even on small datasets. Experimental results on the historical color image benchmark and MSRA image search datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional deep learning approach and is comparable with other state-of-the-art methods, which are highly based on prior knowledge to design effective features.
JM-Net and Cluster-SVM for Aerial Scene Classification
Authors: Lu Xiaoqiang , Yuan Yuan , Fang Jie
Published: July 2017

Aerial scene classification, which is a fundamental problem for remote sensing imagery, can automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category. Although deep learning has achieved competitive performance for aerial scene classification, training the conventional neural networks with aerial datasets will easily stick in overtting and local minimum. Because the aerial datasets only contain a few hundreds or thousands images, meanwhile the conventional networks usually contain millions of parameters to be trained. To address the problem, a novel convolutional neural network named JM-Net is proposed in this paper, which has different size of convolution kernels in same layer and ignores the fully convolytion layer, so it has fewer parameters and can be trained well on aerial datasets. Additionally, Cluster-SVM, a strategy to improve the accuracy and speed up the classification is used in the specific task. Finally, our method suparssed the state-of-art result on the challenging AID dataset while cost shorter time and used smaller storage space.
Image Matching via Loopy RNN
Authors: Luo Donghao , Ni Bingbing , Yan Yichao , Yang Xiaokang
Published: July 2017

Most existing matching algorithms are one-off algorithms, i.e., they usually measure the distance between the two image feature representation vectors for only one time. In contrast, human's vision system achieves this task, i.e., image matching, by recursively looking at specific/related parts of both images and then making the final judgement. Towards this end, we propose a novel loopy recurrent neural network (Loopy RNN), which is capable of aggregating relationship information of two input images in a progressive/iterative manner and outputting the consolidated matching score in the final iteration. A Loopy RNN features two uniqueness. First, built on conventional long short-term memory (LSTM) nodes, it links the output gate of the tail node to the input gate of the head node, thus it brings up symmetry property required for matching. Second, a monotonous loss designed for the proposed network guarantees increasing confidence during the recursive matching process. Extensive experiments on several image matching benchmarks demonstrate the great potential of the proposed method.
Adaptive Semi-Supervised Learning with Discriminative Least Squares Regression
Authors: Luo Minnan , Zhang Lingling , Nie Feiping , Chang Xiaojun , Qian Buyue , Zheng Qinghua
Published: July 2017

Semi-supervised learning plays a significant role in multi-class classification, where a small number of labeled data are more deterministic while substantial unlabeled data might cause large uncertainties and potential threats.

In this paper, we distinguish the label fitting of labeled and unlabeled training data through a probabilistic vector with an adaptive parameter, which always ensures the significant importance of labeled data and characterizes the contribution of unlabeled instance according to its uncertainty. Instead of using traditional least squares regression (LSR) for classification, we develop a new discriminative LSR by equipping each label with an adjustment vector. This strategy avoids incorrect penalization on samples that are far away from the boundary and simultaneously facilitates multi-class classification by enlarging the geometrical distance of instances belonging to different classes. An efficient alternative algorithm is exploited to solve the proposed model with closed form solution for each updating rule. We also analyze the convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm theoretically. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model for multi-class classification tasks.
Symmetric Non-negative Latent Factor Models for Undirected Large Networks
Authors: Luo Xin , Shang Ming-Sheng
Published: July 2017

Undirected, high dimensional and sparse networks are frequently encountered in industrial applications. They contain rich knowledge regarding various useful patterns. Non-negative latent factor (NLF) models have proven to be effective and efficient in acquiring useful knowledge from asymmetric networks. However, they cannot correctly describe the symmetry of an undirected network. For addressing this issue, this work analyzes the NLF extraction processes on asymmetric and symmetric matrices respectively, thereby innovatively achieving the symmetric and non-negative latent factor (SNLF) models for undirected, high dimensional and sparse networks. The proposed SNLF models are equipped with a) high efficiency, b) non-negativity, and c) symmetry. Experimental results on real networks show that they are able to a) represent the symmetry of the target network rigorously; b) maintain the non-negativity of resulting latent factors; and c) achieve high computational efficiency when performing data analysis tasks as missing data estimation.
Exploiting High-Order Information in Heterogeneous Multi-Task Feature Learning
Authors: Luo Yong , Tao Dacheng , Wen Yonggang
Published: July 2017

Multi-task feature learning (MTFL) aims to improve the generalization performance of multiple related learning tasks by sharing features between them. It has been successfully applied to many pattern recognition and biometric prediction problems. Most of current MTFL methods assume that different tasks exploit the same feature representation, and thus are not applicable to the scenarios where data are drawn from heterogeneous domains. Existing heterogeneous transfer learning (including multi-task learning) approaches handle multiple heterogeneous domains by usually learning feature transformations across different domains, but they ignore the high-order statistics (correlation information) which can only be discovered by simultaneously exploring all domains. We therefore develop a tensor based heterogeneous MTFL (THMTFL) framework to exploit such high-order information. Specifically, feature transformations of all domains are learned together, and finally used to derive new representations. A connection between all domains is built by using the transformations to project the pre-learned predictive structures of different domains into a common subspace, and minimizing their divergence in the subspace. By exploring the high-order information, the proposed THMTFL can obtain more reliable feature transformations compared with existing heterogeneous transfer learning approaches. Extensive experiments on both text categorization and social image annotation demonstrate superiority of the proposed method.
Exemplar-centered Supervised Shallow Parametric Data Embedding
Authors: Min Martin Renqiang , Guo Hongyu , Song Dongjin
Published: July 2017

Metric learning methods for dimensionality reduction in combination with k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) have been extensively deployed in many classification, data embedding, and information retrieval applications. However, most of these approaches involve pairwise training data comparisons, and thus have quadratic computational complexity with respect to the size of training set, preventing them from scaling to fairly big datasets. Moreover, during testing, comparing test data against all the training data points is also expensive in terms of both computational cost and resources required. Furthermore, previous metrics are either too constrained or too expressive to be well learned. To effectively solve these issues, we present an exemplar-centered supervised shallow parametric data embedding model, using a Maximally Collapsing Metric Learning (MCML) objective. Our strategy learns a shallow high-order parametric embedding function and compares training/test data only with learned or precomputed exemplars, resulting in a cost function with linear computational complexity for both training and testing. We also empirically demonstrate, using several benchmark datasets, that for classification in two-dimensional embedding space, our approach not only gains speedup of kNN by hundreds of times, but also outperforms state-of-the-art supervised embedding approaches.
Rescale-Invariant SVM for Binary Classification
Authors: Montazery Mojtaba , Wilson Nic
Published: July 2017

Support Vector Machines (SVM) are among the most well-known machine learning methods, with broad use in different scientific areas. However, one necessary pre-processing phase for SVM is normalization (scaling) of features, since SVM is not invariant to the scales of the features’ spaces, i.e., different ways of scaling may lead to different results. We define a more robust decision-making approach for binary classification, in which one sample strongly belongs to a class if it belongs to that class for all possible rescalings of features. We derive a way of characterising the approach for binary SVM that allows determining when an instance strongly belongs to a class and when the classification is invariant to rescaling. The characterisation leads to a computation method to determine whether one sample is strongly positive, strongly negative or neither. Our experimental results back up the intuition that being strongly positive suggests stronger confidence that an instance really is positive.
Thresholding Bandits with Augmented UCB
Authors: Mukherjee Subhojyoti , Kolar Purushothama Naveen , Sudarsanam Nandan , Ravindran Balaraman
Published: July 2017

In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB is that it uses both mean and variance estimates to eliminate arms that have been sufficiently explored; to the best of our knowledge this is the first algorithm to employ such an approach for the considered TBP. Theoretically, we obtain an upper bound on the loss (probability of mis-classification) incurred by AugUCB. Although UCBEV in literature provides a better guarantee, it is important to emphasize that UCBEV has access to problem complexity (whose computation requires arms' mean and variances), and hence is not realistic in practice; this is in contrast to AugUCB whose implementation does not require any such complexity inputs. We conduct extensive simulation experiments to validate the performance of AugUCB. Through our simulation work, we establish that AugUCB, owing to its utilization of variance estimates, performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art APT, CSAR and other non variance-based algorithms.
Self-Paced Multitask Learning with Shared Knowledge
Authors: Murugesan Keerthiram , Carbonell Jaime
Published: July 2017

This paper introduces self-paced task selection to multitask learning, where instances from more closely related tasks are selected in a progression of easier-to-harder tasks, to emulate an effective human education strategy, but applied to multitask machine learning. We develop the mathematical foundation for the approach based on iterative selection of the most appropriate task, learning the task parameters, and updating the shared knowledge, optimizing a new bi-convex loss function. This proposed method applies quite generally, including to multitask feature learning, multitask learning with alternating structure optimization, etc. Results show that in each of the above formulations self-paced (easier-to-harder) task selection outperforms the baseline version of these methods in all the experiments.
Large-scale Online Kernel Learning with Random Feature Reparameterization
Authors: Nguyen Tu Dinh , Le Trung , Bui Hung , Phung Dinh
Published: July 2017

A typical online kernel learning method faces two fundamental issues: the complexity in dealing with a huge number of observed data points (a.k.a the curse of kernelization) and the difficulty in learning kernel parameters, which often assumed to be fixed. Random Fourier feature is a recent and effective approach to address the former by approximating the shift-invariant kernel function via Bocher's theorem, and allows the model to be maintained directly in the random feature space with a fixed dimension, hence the model size remains constant w.r.t. data size. We further introduce in this paper the reparameterized random feature (RRF), a random feature framework for large-scale online kernel learning to address both aforementioned challenges. Our initial intuition comes from the so-called "reparameterization trick" [Kingma et al., 2014] to lift the source of randomness of Fourier components to another space which can be independently sampled, so that stochastic gradient of the kernel parameters can be analytically derived. We develop a well-founded underlying theory for our method, including a general way to reparameterize the kernel, and a new tighter error bound on the approximation quality. This view further inspires a direct application of stochastic gradient descent for updating our model under an online learning setting. We then conducted extensive experiments on several large-scale datasets where we demonstrate that our work achieves state-of-the-art performance in both learning efficacy and efficiency.
Discriminative Bayesian Nonparametric Clustering
Authors: Nguyen Vu , Phung Dinh , Le Trung , Bui Hung
Published: July 2017

We propose a general framework for discriminative Bayesian nonparametric clustering to promote the inter-discrimination among the learned clusters in a fully Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) manner. Our method combines existing BNP clustering and discriminative models by enforcing latent cluster indices to be consistent with the predicted labels resulted from probabilistic discriminative model. This formulation results in a well-defined generative process wherein we can use either logistic regression or SVM for discrimination. Using the proposed framework, we develop two novel discriminative BNP variants: the discriminative Dirichlet process mixtures, and the discriminative-state infinite HMMs for sequential data. We develop efficient data-augmentation Gibbs samplers for posterior inference. Extensive experiments in image clustering and dynamic location clustering demonstrate that by encouraging discrimination between induced clusters, our model enhances the quality of clustering in comparison with the traditional generative BNP models.
Joint Capped Norms Minimization for Robust Matrix Recovery
Authors: Nie Feiping , Huo Zhouyuan , Huang Heng
Published: July 2017

The low-rank matrix recovery is an important machine learning research topic with various scientific applications. Most existing low-rank matrix recovery methods relax the rank minimization problem via the trace norm minimization. However, such a relaxation makes the solution seriously deviate from the original one. Meanwhile, most matrix recovery methods minimize the squared prediction errors on the observed entries, which is sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we propose a new robust matrix recovery model to address the above two challenges. The joint capped trace norm and capped $\ell_1$-norm are used to tightly approximate the rank minimization and enhance the robustness to outliers. The evaluation experiments are performed on both synthetic data and real world applications in collaborative filtering and social network link prediction. All empirical results show our new method outperforms the existing matrix recovery methods.
SEVEN: Deep Semi-supervised Verification Networks
Authors: Noroozi Vahid , Zheng Lei , Bahaadini Sara , Xie Sihong , Yu Philip S.
Published: July 2017

Verification determines whether two samples belong to the same class or not, and has important applications such as face and fingerprint verification, where thousands or millions of categories are present but each category has scarce labeled examples, presenting two major challenges for existing deep learning models. We propose a deep semi-supervised model named SEmi-supervised VErification Network (SEVEN) to address these challenges. The model consists of two complementary components. The generative component addresses the lack of supervision within each category by learning general salient structures from a large amount of data across categories.

The discriminative component exploits the learned general features to mitigate the lack of supervision within categories, and also directs the generative component to find more informative structures of the whole data manifold. The two components are tied together in SEVEN to allow an end-to-end training of the two components. Extensive experiments on four verification tasks demonstrate that SEVEN significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art deep semi-supervised techniques when labeled data are in short supply. Furthermore, SEVEN is competitive with fully supervised baselines trained with a larger amount of labeled data. It indicates the importance of the generative component in SEVEN.
Discovering Relevance-Dependent Bicluster Structure from Relational Data
Authors: Ohama Iku , Kida Takuya , Arimura Hiroki
Published: July 2017

In this paper, we propose a statistical model for relevance-dependent biclustering to analyze relational data. The proposed model factorizes relational data into bicluster structure with two features: (1) each object in a cluster has a relevance value, which indicates how strongly the object relates to the cluster and (2) all clusters are related to at least one dense block. These features simplify the task of understanding the meaning of each cluster because only a few highly relevant objects need to be inspected. We introduced the Relevance-Dependent Bernoulli Distribution (R-BD) as a prior for relevance-dependent binary matrices and proposed the novel Relevance-Dependent Infinite Biclustering (R-IB) model, which automatically estimates the number of clusters. Posterior inference can be performed efficiently using a collapsed Gibbs sampler because the parameters of the R-IB model can be fully marginalized out. Experimental results show that the R-IB extracts more essential bicluster structure with better computational efficiency than conventional models. We further observed that the biclustering results obtained by R-IB facilitate interpretation of the meaning of each cluster.
A Bayesian Approach to Argument-Based Reasoning for Attack Estimation
Authors: Kido Hiroyuki , Okamoto Keishi
Published: July 2017

The web is a source of a large amount of arguments and their acceptability statuses (e.g., votes for and against the arguments). However, relations existing between the fore-mentioned arguments are typically not available. This study investigates the utilisation of acceptability semantics to statistically estimate an attack relation between arguments wherein the acceptability statuses of arguments are provided. A Bayesian network model of argument-based reasoning is defined in which Dung's theory of abstract argumentation gives the substance of Bayesian inference. The model correctness is demonstrated by analysing properties of estimated attack relations and illustrating its applicability to online forums.
Optimizing Ratio of Monotone Set Functions
Authors: Qian Chao , Shi Jing-Cheng , Yu Yang , Tang Ke , Zhou Zhi-Hua
Published: July 2017

This paper considers the problem of minimizing the ratio of two set functions, i.e., $f/g$. Previous work assumed monotone and submodular of the two functions, while we consider a more general situation where $g$ is not necessarily submodular. We derive that the greedy approach GreedRatio, as a fixed time algorithm, achieves a $\frac{|X^*|}{(1+(|X^*| \textendash 1)(1 \textendash \kappa_f))\gamma(g)}$ approximation ratio, which also improves the previous bound for submodular $g$. If more time can be spent, we present the PORM algorithm, an anytime randomized iterative approach minimizing $f$ and $\textendash g$ simultaneously. We show that PORM using reasonable time has the same general approximation guarantee as GreedRatio, but can achieve better solutions in cases and applications.
Improving Stochastic Block Models by Incorporating Power-Law Degree Characteristic
Authors: Qiao Maoying , Yu Jun , Bian Wei , Li Qiang , Tao Dacheng
Published: July 2017

Stochastic block models (SBMs) provide a statistical way modeling network data, especially in representing clusters or community structures. However, most block models do not consider complex characteristics of networks such as scale-free feature, making them incapable of handling degree variation of vertices, which is ubiquitous in real networks. To address this issue, we introduce degree decay variables into SBM, termed power-law degree SBM (PLD-SBM), to model the varying probability of connections between node pairs. The scale-free feature is approximated by a power-law degree characteristic. Such a property allows PLD-SBM to correct the distortion of degree distribution in SBM, and thus improves the performance of cluster prediction. Experiments on both simulated networks and two real-world networks including the Adolescent Health Data and the political blogs network demonstrate the validity of the motivation of PLD-SBM, and its practical superiority.
See without looking: joint visualization of sensitive multi-site datasets
Authors: Saha Debbrata K. , Calhoun Vince D. , Panta Sandeep R. , Plis Sergey M.
Published: July 2017

Visualization of high dimensional large-scale datasets via an embedding into a 2D map is a powerful exploration tool for assessing latent structure in the data and detecting outliers. There are many methods developed for this task but most assume that all pairs of samples are available for common computation. Specifically, the distances between all pairs of points need to be directly computable. In contrast, we work with sensitive neuroimaging data, when local sites cannot share their samples and the distances cannot be easily computed across the sites. Yet, the desire is to let all the local data participate in collaborative computation without leaving their respective sites. In this scenario, a quality control tool that visualizes decentralized dataset in its entirety via global aggregation of local computations is especially important as it would allow screening of samples that cannot be evaluated otherwise. This paper introduces an algorithm to solve this problem: decentralized data stochastic neighbor embedding (dSNE). Based on the MNIST dataset we introduce metrics for measuring the embedding quality and use them to compare dSNE to its centralized counterpart. We also apply dSNE to a multi-site neuroimaging dataset with encouraging results.
LMPP: A Large Margin Point Process Combining Reinforcement and Competition for Modeling Hashtag Popularity
Authors: Samanta Bidisha , De Abir , Chakraborty Abhijnan , Ganguly Niloy
Published: July 2017

Predicting the popularity dynamics of Twitter hashtags has a broad spectrum of applications. Existing works have mainly focused on modeling the popularity of individual tweets rather than the popularity of the underlying hashtags. Hence, they do not consider several realistic factors for hashtag popularity. In this paper, we propose Large Margin Point Process (LMPP), a probabilistic framework that integrates hashtag-tweet influence and hashtag-hashtag competitions, the two factors which play important roles in hashtag propagation. Furthermore, while considering the hashtag competitions, LMPP looks into the variations of popularity rankings of the competing hashtags across time. Extensive experiments on seven real datasets demonstrate that LMPP outperforms existing popularity prediction approaches by a significant margin. Going further, LMPP can accurately predict the relative rankings of competing hashtags, offering additional advantage over the state-of-the-art baselines.
Compressed Nonparametric Language Modelling
Authors: Shareghi Ehsan , Haffari Gholamreza , Cohn Trevor
Published: July 2017

Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Process priors are compelling for learning language models, outperforming point-estimate based methods. However, these models remain unpopular due to computational and statistical inference issues, such as memory and time usage, as well as poor mixing of sampler. In this work we propose a novel framework which represents the HPYP model compactly using compressed suffix trees. Then, we develop an efficient approximate inference scheme in this framework that has a much lower memory footprint compared to full HPYP and is fast in the inference time. The experimental results illustrate that our model can be built on significantly larger datasets compared to previous HPYP models, while being several orders of magnitudes smaller, fast for training and inference, and outperforming the perplexity of the state-of-the-art Modified Kneser-Ney count-based LM smoothing by up to 15%.
Omniscient Debugging for Cognitive Agent Programs
Authors: Koeman Vincent J. , Hindriks Koen V. , Jonker Catholijn M.
Published: July 2017

For real-time programs reproducing a bug by rerunning the system is likely to fail, making fault localization a time-consuming process. Omniscient debugging is a technique that stores each run in such a way that it supports going backwards in time. However, the overhead of existing omniscient debugging implementations for languages like Java is so large that it cannot be effectively used in practice.

In this paper, we show that for agent-oriented programming practical omniscient debugging is possible. We design a tracing mechanism for efficiently storing and exploring agent program runs. We are the first to demonstrate that this mechanism does not affect program runs by empirically establishing that the same tests succeed or fail. Usability is supported by a trace visualization method aimed at more effectively locating faults in agent programs.
Learning Hedonic Games
Authors: Sliwinski Jakub , Zick Yair
Published: July 2017

Coalitional stability in hedonic games has usually been considered in the setting where agent preferences are fully known. We consider the setting where agent preferences are unknown; we lay the theoretical foundations for studying the interplay between coalitional stability and (PAC) learning in hedonic games. We introduce the notion of PAC stability - the equivalent of core stability under uncertainty - and examine the PAC stabilizability and learnability of several popular classes of hedonic games.
Recommendation vs Sentiment Analysis: A Text-Driven Latent Factor Model for Rating Prediction with Cold-Start Awareness
Authors: Song Kaisong , Gao Wei , Feng Shi , Wang Daling , Wong Kam-Fai , Zhang Chengqi
Published: July 2017

Review rating prediction is an important research topic. The problem was approached from either the perspective of recommender systems (RS) or that of sentiment analysis (SA). Recent SA research using deep neural networks (DNNs) has realized the importance of user and product interaction for better interpreting the sentiment of reviews. However, the complexity of DNN models in terms of the scale of parameters is very high, and the performance is not always satisfying especially when user-product interaction is sparse. In this paper, we propose a simple, extensible RS-based model, called Text-driven Latent Factor Model (TLFM), to capture the semantics of reviews, user preferences and product characteristics by jointly optimizing two components, a user-specific LFM and a product-specific LFM, each of which decomposes text into a specific low-dimension representation. Furthermore, we address the cold-start issue by developing a novel Pairwise Rating Comparison strategy (PRC), which utilizes the difference between ratings on common user/product as supplementary information to calibrate parameter estimation. Experiments conducted on IMDB and Yelp datasets validate the advantage of our approach over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Two dimensional Large Margin Nearest Neighbor for Matrix Classification
Authors: Song Kun , Nie Feiping , Han Junwei
Published: July 2017

Matrices are common forms of data that are encountered in a wide range of real applications. How to classify this kind of data is an important research topic. In this paper, we propose a novel distance metric learning method named two dimensional large margin nearest neighbor (2DLMNNN), for improving the performance of k nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier in matrix classification. In the proposed method, left and right projection matrices are employed to define the matrix-based Mahalanobis distance, which is used to construct the objective aimed at separating points in different classes by a large margin. The parameters in those two projection matrices are much less than that in its vector-based counterpart, thus our method reduces the risks of overfitting. We also introduce a framework for solving the proposed 2DLMNN. The convergence behavior, initialization, and parameter determination are also analyzed. Compared with vector-based methods, 2DLMNN performs better for matrix data classification. Promising experimental results on several data sets are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Fast Sparse Gaussian Markov Random Fields Learning Based on Cholesky Factorization
Authors: Stojkovic Ivan , Jelisavcic Vladisav , Milutinovic Veljko , Obradovic Zoran
Published: July 2017

Learning the sparse Gaussian Markov Random Field, or conversely, estimating the sparse inverse covariance matrix is an approach to uncover the underlying dependency structure in data. Most of the current methods solve the problem by optimizing the maximum likelihood objective with a Laplace prior L1 on entries of a precision matrix. We propose a novel objective with a regularization term which penalizes an approximate product of the Cholesky decomposed precision matrix. This new reparametrization of the penalty term allows efficient coordinate descent optimization, which in synergy with an active set approach results in a very fast and efficient method for learning the sparse inverse covariance matrix. We evaluated the speed and solution quality of the newly proposed SCHL method on problems consisting of up to 24,840 variables. Our approach was several times faster than three state-of-the-art approaches. We also demonstrate that SCHL can be used to discover interpretable networks, by applying it to a high impact problem from the health informatics domain.
End-to-end optimization of goal-driven and visually grounded dialogue systems
Authors: Strub Florian , de Vries Harm , Mary Jérémie , Piot Bilal , Courville Aaron , Pietquin Olivier
Published: July 2017

End-to-end design of dialogue systems has recently become a popular research topic thanks to powerful tools such as encoder-decoder architectures for sequence-to-sequence learning. Yet, most current approaches cast human-machine dialogue management as a supervised learning problem, aiming at predicting the next utterance of a participant given the full history of the dialogue. This vision may fail to correctly render the planning problem inherent to dialogue as well as its contextual and grounded nature. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning method to optimize visually grounded task-oriented dialogues, based on the policy gradient algorithm. This approach is tested on the question generation task from the dataset GuessWhat?! containing 120k dialogues and provides encouraging results at solving both the problem of generating natural dialogues and the task of discovering a specific object in a complex picture.
Vertex-Weighted Hypergraph Learning for Multi-View Object Classification
Authors: Su Lifan , Gao Yue , Zhao Xibin , Wan Hai , Gu Ming , Sun Jiaguang
Published: July 2017

3D object classification with multi-view representation has become very popular, thanks to the progress on computer techniques and graphic hardware, and attracted much research attention in recent years. Regarding this task, there are mainly two challenging issues, i.e., the complex correlation among multiple views and the possible imbalance data issue. In this work, we propose to employ the hypergraph structure to formulate the relationship among 3D objects, taking the advantage of hypergraph on high-order correlation modelling. However, traditional hypergraph learning method may suffer from the imbalance data issue. To this end, we propose a vertex-weighted hypergraph learning algorithm for multi-view 3D object classification, introducing an updated hypergraph structure. In our method, the correlation among different objects is formulated in a hypergraph structure and each object (vertex) is associated with a corresponding weight, weighting the importance of each sample in the learning process. The learning process is conducted on the vertex-weighted hypergraph and the estimated object relevance is employed for object classification. The proposed method has been evaluated on two public benchmarks, i.e., the NTU and the PSB datasets. Experimental results and comparison with the state-of-the-art methods and recent deep learning method demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Deep Supervised Hashing with Nonlinear Projections
Authors: Su Sen , Chen Gang , Cheng Xiang , Bi Rong
Published: July 2017

Hashing has attracted broad research interests in large scale image retrieval due to its high search speed and efficient storage. Recently, many deep hashing methods have been proposed to perform simultaneous nonlinear feature learning and hash projection learning, which have shown superior performance compared to hand-crafted feature based hashing methods. Nonlinear projection functions have shown their advantages over the linear ones due to their powerful generalization capabilities. To improve the performance of deep hashing methods by generalizing projection functions, we propose the idea of implementing a pure nonlinear deep hashing network architecture. By consolidating the above idea, this paper presents a Deep Supervised Hashing architecture with Nonlinear Projections (DSHNP). In particular, soft decision trees are adopted as the nonlinear projection functions, since they can generate differentiable nonlinear outputs and can be trained with deep neural networks in an end-to-end way. Moreover, to make the hash codes as independent as possible, we design two regularizers imposed on the parameter matrices of the leaves in the soft decision trees. Extensive evaluations on two benchmark image datasets show that the proposed DSHNP outperforms several state-of-the-art hashing methods.
Convergence and Quality of Iterative Voting Under Non-Scoring Rules
Authors: Koolyk Aaron , Strangway Tyrone , Lev Omer , Rosenschein Jeffrey S.
Published: July 2017

Iterative voting is a social choice mechanism that assumes all voters are strategic, and allows voters to change their stated preferences as the vote progresses until an equilibrium is reached (at which point no player wishes to change their vote). Previous research established that this process converges to an equilibrium for the plurality and veto voting methods and for no other scoring rule.

We consider iterative voting for non-scoring rules, examining the major ones, and show that none of them converge when assuming (as most research has so far) that voters pursue a best response strategy. We investigate other potential voter strategies, with a more heuristic flavor (since for most of these voting rules, calculating the best response is NP-hard); we show that they also do not converge. We then conduct an empirical analysis of the iterative voting winners for these non-scoring rules, and compare the winner quality of various strategies.
Robust Survey Aggregation with Student-t Distribution and Sparse Representation
Authors: Tang Qingtao , Dai Tao , Niu Li , Wang Yisen , Xia Shu-Tao , Cai Jianfei
Published: July 2017

Most existing survey aggregation methods assume that the sample data follow Gaussian distribution. However, these methods are sensitive to outliers, due to the thin-tailed property of the Gaussian distribution. To address this issue, we propose a robust survey aggregation method based on Student-t distribution and sparse representation. Specifically, we assume that the samples follow Student-$t$ distribution, instead of the common Gaussian distribution. Due to the Student-t distribution, our method is robust to outliers, which can be explained from both Bayesian point of view and non-Bayesian point of view. In addition, inspired by James-Stain estimator (JS) and Compressive Averaging (CAvg), we propose to sparsely represent the global mean vector by an adaptive basis comprising both data-specific basis and combined generic bases. Theoretically, we prove that JS and CAvg are special cases of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real datasets.
Retaining Data from Streams of Social Platforms with Minimal Regret
Authors: Thanh Tam Nguyen , Weidlich Matthias , Chi Thang Duong , Yin Hongzhi , Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen
Published: July 2017

Today's social platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, continuously generate massive volumes of data. The resulting data streams exceed any reasonable limit for permanent storage, especially since data is often redundant, overlapping, sparse, and generally of low value. This calls for means to retain solely a small fraction of the data in an online manner. In this paper, we propose techniques to effectively decide which data to retain, such that the induced loss of information, the regret of neglecting certain data, is minimized. These techniques enable not only efficient processing of massive streaming data, but are also adaptive and address the dynamic nature of social media. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets illustrate the feasibility of our approach in terms of both, runtime and information quality.
Disambiguating Energy Disaggregation: A Collective Probabilistic Approach
Authors: Tomkins Sabina , Pujara Jay , Getoor Lise
Published: July 2017

Reducing household energy usage is a priority for improving the resiliency and stability of the power grid and decreasing the negative impact of energy consumption on the environment and public health.Relevant and timely feedback about the power consumption of specific appliances can help household residents to reduce their energy demand. Given only a total energy reading, such as that collected from a residential

meter, energy disaggregation strives to discover the consumption of individual appliances. Existing disaggregation algorithms are computationally inefficient and rely heavily on high-resolution ground truth data. We introduce a probabilistic framework which infers the energy consumption of individual appliances using a hinge-loss Markov random field (HL-MRF), which admits highly scalable inference. To further enhance efficiency, we introduce a temporal representation which leverages state duration. We also explore how contextual information impacts solution quality with low-resolution data. Our framework is flexible in its ability to incorporate additional constraints; by constraining appliance usage with context and duration we can better disambiguate appliances with similar energy consumption profiles. We demonstrate the effectiveness of

our framework on two public real-world datasets, reducing the error relative to a previous state-of-the-art method by as much as 50%.
TransNet: Translation-Based Network Representation Learning for Social Relation Extraction
Authors: Tu Cunchao , Zhang Zhengyan , Liu Zhiyuan , Sun Maosong
Published: July 2017

Conventional network representation learning (NRL) models learn low-dimensional vertex representations by simply regarding each edge as a binary or continuous value. However, there exists rich semantic information on edges and the interactions between vertices usually preserve distinct meanings, which are largely neglected by most existing NRL models. In this work, we present a novel Translation-based NRL model, TransNet, by regarding the interactions between vertices as a translation operation. Moreover, we formalize the task of Social Relation Extraction (SRE) to evaluate the capability of NRL methods on modeling the relations between vertices. Experimental results on SRE demonstrate that TransNet significantly outperforms other baseline methods by 10% to 20% on hits@1. The source code and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/TransNet.
Super-Human AI for Strategic Reasoning: Beating Top Pros in Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em
Authors: Sandholm Tuomas
Published: July 2017

Poker has been a challenge problem in AI and game theory for decades. As a game of imperfect information it involves obstacles not present in games like chess and Go, and requires totally different techniques. No program had been able to beat top players in large poker games. Until now! In January 2017, our AI, Libratus, beat a team of four top specialist professionals in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em, which has 10^161 decision points. This game is the main benchmark challenge for imperfect-information game solving. Libratus is the only AI that has beat top humans at this game. Libratus is powered by new algorithms in each of its three main modules:

1. computing blueprint (approximate Nash equilibrium) strategies before the event,

2. novel nested endgame solving during play, and

3. fixing its own strategy to play even closer to equilibrium based on what holes the opponents have been able to identify and exploit.

These domain-independent algorithms have potential applicability to a variety of real-world imperfect-information games such as negotiation, business strategy, cybersecurity, physical security, military applications, strategic pricing, product portfolio planning, certain areas of finance, auctions, political campaigns, and steering biological adaptation and evolution, for example, for medical treatment planning.
Sifting Common Information from Many Variables
Authors: Ver Steeg Greg , Gao Shuyang , Reing Kyle , Galstyan Aram
Published: July 2017

Measuring the relationship between any pair of variables is a rich and active area of research that is central to scientific practice. In contrast, characterizing the common information among any group of variables is typically a theoretical exercise with few practical methods for high-dimensional data. A promising solution would be a multivariate generalization of the famous Wyner common information, but this approach relies on solving an apparently intractable optimization problem. We leverage the recently introduced information sieve decomposition to formulate an incremental version of the common information problem that admits a simple fixed point solution, fast convergence, and complexity that is linear in the number of variables. This scalable approach allows us to demonstrate the usefulness of common information in high-dimensional learning problems.The sieve outperforms standard methods on dimensionality reduction tasks, solves

a blind source separation problem that cannot be solved with ICA, and accurately recovers structure in brain imaging data.