bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Context Attentive Bandits: Contextual Bandit with Restricted Context
Authors: Bouneffouf Djallel , Rish Irina , Cecchi Guillermo , Féraud Raphaël
Published: July 2017

We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation is motivated by different online problems arising in clinical trials, recommender systems and attention modeling.Herein, we adapt the standard multi-armed bandit algorithm known as Thompson Sampling to take advantage of our restricted context setting, and propose two novel algorithms, called the Thompson Sampling with Restricted Context (TSRC) and the Windows Thompson Sampling with Restricted Context (WTSRC), for handling stationary and nonstationary environments, respectively. Our empirical results demonstrate advantages of the proposed approaches on several real-life datasets.
SPMC: Socially-Aware Personalized Markov Chains for Sparse Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Cai Chenwei , He Ruining , McAuley Julian
Published: July 2017

Dealing with sparse, long-tailed datasets, and cold-start problems is always a challenge for recommender systems. These issues can partly be dealt with by making predictions not in isolation, but by leveraging information from related events; such information could include signals from social relationships or from the sequence of recent activities. Both types of additional information can be used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art matrix factorization-based techniques. In this paper, we propose new methods to combine both social and sequential information simultaneously, in order to further improve recommendation performance. We show these techniques to be particularly effective when dealing with sparsity and cold-start issues in several large, real-world datasets.
Encoding and Recall of Spatio-Temporal Episodic Memory in Real Time
Authors: Chang Poo-Hee , Tan Ah-Hwee
Published: July 2017

Episodic memory enables a cognitive system to improve its performance by reflecting upon past events. In this paper, we propose a computational model called STEM for encoding and recall of episodic events together with the associated contextual information in real time. Based on a class of self-organizing neural networks, STEM is designed to learn memory chunks or cognitive nodes, each encoding a set of co-occurring multi-modal activity patterns across multiple pattern channels. We present algorithms for recall of events based on partial and inexact input patterns. Our empirical results based on a public domain data set show that STEM displays a high level of efficiency and robustness in encoding and retrieval with both partial and noisy search cues when compared with a state-of-the-art associative memory model.
Data-driven Random Fourier Features using Stein Effect
Authors: Chang Wei-Cheng , Li Chun-Liang , Yang Yiming , Póczos Barnabás
Published: July 2017

Large-scale kernel approximation is an important problem in machine learning research. Approaches using random Fourier features have become increasingly popular \cite{Rahimi_NIPS_07}, where kernel approximation is treated as empirical mean estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) or Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration \cite{Yang_ICML_14}. A limitation of the current approaches is that all the features receive an equal weight summing to 1. In this paper, we propose a novel shrinkage estimator from "Stein effect", which provides a data-driven weighting strategy for random features and enjoys theoretical justifications in terms of lowering the empirical risk. We further present an efficient randomized algorithm for large-scale applications of the proposed method. Our empirical results on six benchmark data sets demonstrate the advantageous performance of this approach over representative baselines in both kernel approximation and supervised learning tasks.
Scalable Normalized Cut with Improved Spectral Rotation
Authors: Chen Xiaojun , Nie Feiping , Huang Joshua Zhexue , Yang Min
Published: July 2017

Many spectral clustering algorithms have been proposed and successfully applied to many high-dimensional applications. However, there are still two problems that need to be solved: 1) existing methods for obtaining the final clustering assignments may deviate from the true discrete solution, and 2) most of these methods usually have very high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a Scalable Normalized Cut method for clustering of large scale data. In the new method, an efficient method is used to construct a small representation matrix and then clustering is performed on the representation matrix. In the clustering process, an improved spectral rotation method is proposed to obtain the solution of the final clustering assignments. A series of experimental were conducted on 14 benchmark data sets and the experimental results show the superior performance of the new method.
Projection Free Rank-Drop Steps
Authors: Cheung Edward , Li Yuying
Published: July 2017

The Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm has been widely used in solving nuclear norm constrained problems, since it does not require projections. However, FW often yields high rank intermediate iterates, which can be very expensive in time and space costs for large problems. To address this issue, we propose a rank-drop method for nuclear norm constrained problems. The goal is to generate descent steps that lead to rank decreases, maintaining low-rank solutions throughout the algorithm. Moreover, the optimization problems are constrained to ensure that the rank-drop step is also feasible and can be readily incorporated into a projection-free minimization method, e.g., Frank-Wolfe. We demonstrate that by incorporating rank-drop steps into the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, the rank of the solution is greatly reduced compared to the original Frank-Wolfe or its common variants.
Further Results on Predicting Cognitive Abilities for Adaptive Visualizations
Authors: Conati Cristina , Lallé Sébastien , Rahman Md. Abed , Toker Dereck
Published: July 2017

Previous work has shown that some user cognitive abilities relevant for processing information visualizations can be predicted from eye tracking data. Performing this type of user modeling is important for devising user-adaptive visualizations that can adapt to a user’s abilities as needed during the interaction. In this paper, we contribute to previous work by extending the type of visualizations considered and the set of cognitive abilities that can be predicted from gaze data, thus providing evidence on the generality of these findings. We also evaluate how quality of gaze data impacts prediction.
Learning a Ground Truth Ranking Using Noisy Approval Votes
Authors: Caragiannis Ioannis , Micha Evi
Published: July 2017

We consider a voting scenario where agents have opinions that are estimates of an underlying common ground truth ranking of the available alternatives, and each agent is asked to approve a set with her most preferred alternatives. We assume that estimates are implicitly formed using the well-known Mallows model for generating random rankings. We show that k-approval voting --- where all agents are asked to approve the same number k of alternatives and the outcome is obtained by sorting the alternatives in terms of their number of approvals --- has exponential sample complexity for all values of k. This negative result suggests that an exponential (in terms of the number of alternatives m) number of agents is always necessary in order to recover the ground truth ranking with high probability. In contrast, by just asking each agent to approve a random number of alternatives, the sample complexity improves dramatically: it now depends only polynomially on m. Our results may have implications on the effectiveness of crowdsourcing applications that ask workers to provide their input by approving sets of available alternatives.
Logic Tensor Networks for Semantic Image Interpretation
Authors: Donadello Ivan , Serafini Luciano , d'Avila Garcez Artur
Published: July 2017

Semantic Image Interpretation (SII) is the task of extracting structured semantic descriptions from images. It is widely agreed that the combined use of visual data and background knowledge is of great importance for SII. Recently, Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) approaches have been developed for reasoning under uncertainty and learning in the presence of data and rich knowledge. Logic Tensor Networks (LTNs) are a SRL framework which integrates neural networks with first-order fuzzy logic to allow (i) efficient learning from noisy data in the presence of logical constraints, and (ii) reasoning with logical formulas describing general properties of the data. In this paper, we develop and apply LTNs to two of the main tasks of SII, namely, the classification of an image's bounding boxes and the detection of the relevant part-of relations between objects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful application of SRL to such SII tasks. The proposed approach is evaluated on a standard image processing benchmark. Experiments show that background knowledge in the form of logical constraints can improve the performance of purely data-driven approaches, including the state-of-the-art Fast Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (Fast R-CNN). Moreover, we show that the use of logical background knowledge adds robustness to the learning system when errors are present in the labels of the training data.
Autoencoder Regularized Network For Driving Style Representation Learning
Authors: Dong Weishan , Yuan Ting , Yang Kai , Li Changsheng , Zhang Shilei
Published: July 2017

In this paper, we study learning generalized driving style representations from automobile GPS trip data. We propose a novel Autoencoder Regularized deep neural Network (ARNet) and a trip encoding framework trip2vec to learn drivers' driving styles directly from GPS records, by combining supervised and unsupervised feature learning in a unified architecture. Experiments on a challenging driver number estimation problem and the driver identification problem show that ARNet can learn a good generalized driving style representation: It significantly outperforms existing methods and alternative architectures by reaching the least estimation error on average (0.68, less than one driver) and the highest identification accuracy (by at least 3% improvement) compared with traditional supervised learning methods.
Clustering-Based Relational Unsupervised Representation Learning with an Explicit Distributed Representation
Authors: Dumancic Sebastijan , Blockeel Hendrik
Published: July 2017

The goal of unsupervised representation learning is to extract a new representation of data, such that solving many different tasks becomes easier. Existing methods typically focus on vectorized data and offer little support for relational data, which additionally describes relationships among instances. In this work we introduce an approach for relational unsupervised representation learning. Viewing a relational dataset as a hypergraph, new features are obtained by clustering vertices and hyperedges. To find a representation suited for many relational learning tasks, a wide range of similarities between relational objects is considered, e.g. feature and structural similarities. We experimentally evaluate the proposed approach and show that models learned on such latent representations perform better, have lower complexity, and outperform the existing approaches on classification tasks.
Neurogenesis-Inspired Dictionary Learning: Online Model Adaption in a Changing World
Authors: Garg Sahil , Rish Irina , Cecchi Guillermo , Lozano Aurelie
Published: July 2017

We address the problem of online model adaptation when learning representations from non-stationary data streams. Specifically, we focus here on online dictionary learning (i.e. sparse linear autoencoder), and propose a simple but effective online model selection approach involving “birth” (addition) and “death” (removal) of hidden units representing dictionary

elements, in response to changing inputs; we draw inspiration from the adult neurogenesis phenomenon in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, known to be associated with better adaptation to new environments. Empirical evaluation on real-life datasets (images and text), as well as on synthetic data, demonstrates that the proposed approach can considerably outperform the state-of-art non-adaptive online sparse coding of [Mairal et al., 2009] in the presence of non-stationary data. Moreover, we identify certain data- and model properties

associated with such improvements.
Sample Efficient Policy Search for Optimal Stopping Domains
Authors: Goel Karan , Dann Christoph , Brunskill Emma
Published: July 2017

Optimal stopping problems consider the question of deciding when to stop an observation-generating process in order to maximize a return. We examine the problem of simultaneously learning and planning in such domains, when data is collected directly from the environment. We propose GFSE, a simple and flexible model-free policy search method that reuses data for sample efficiency by leveraging problem structure. We bound the sample complexity of our approach to guarantee uniform convergence of policy value estimates, tightening existing PAC bounds to achieve logarithmic dependence on horizon length for our setting. We also examine the benefit of our method against prevalent model-based and model-free approaches on 3 domains taken from diverse fields.
Extracting Visual Knowledge from the Web with Multimodal Learning
Authors: Gong Dihong , Wang Daisy Zhe
Published: July 2017

We consider the problem of automatically extracting visual objects from web images. Despite the extraordinary advancement in deep learning, visual object detection remains a challenging task. To overcome the deficiency of pure visual techniques, we propose to make use of meta text surrounding images on the Web for enhanced detection accuracy. In this paper we present a multimodal learning algorithm to integrate text information into visual knowledge extraction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a system that takes raw webpages as input, and automatically extracts visual knowledge (e.g. object bounding boxes) from tens of millions of images crawled from the Web. Experimental results based on 46 object categories show that the extraction precision is improved significantly from 73% (with state-of-the-art deep learning programs) to 81%, which is equivalent to a 31% reduction in error rates.
ROUTE: Robust Outlier Estimation for Low Rank Matrix Recovery
Authors: Guo Xiaojie , Lin Zhouchen
Published: July 2017

In practice, even very high-dimensional data are typically sampled from low-dimensional subspaces but with intrusion of outliers and/or noises. Recovering the underlying structure and the pollution from the observations is key to understanding and processing such data. Besides properly modeling the low-rank structure of subspace, how to handle the pollution, is core regarding the performance of recovery. Often, the observed data is posed as a superimposition of the clean data and residual, while the residual can be roughly divided into two groups, including small dense noises and gross sparse outliers. Compared with small noises, outliers more likely ruin the recovery, as they can be arbitrarily large. By considering the above, this paper designs a method for recovering the low rank matrix with robust outlier estimation, termed as ROUTE, in a unified manner. Theoretical analysis on convergence and optimality, and experimental results on both synthetic and real data are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method and show its superiority over other state-of-the-arts.
SitNet: Discrete Similarity Transfer Network for Zero-shot Hashing
Authors: Guo Yuchen , Ding Guiguang , Han Jungong , Gao Yue
Published: July 2017

Hashing has been widely utilized for fast image retrieval recently. With semantic information as supervision, hashing approaches perform much better, especially when combined with deep convolution neural network(CNN). However, in practice, new concepts emerge every day, making collecting supervised information for re-training hashing model infeasible. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot hashing approach, called Discrete Similarity Transfer Network (SitNet), to preserve the semantic similarity between images from both ``seen'' concepts and new ``unseen'' concepts. Motivated by zero-shot learning, the semantic vectors of concepts are adopted to capture the similarity structures among classes, making the model trained with seen concepts generalize well for unseen ones benefiting from the transferability of the semantic vector space. We adopt a multi-task architecture to exploit the supervised information for seen concepts and the semantic vectors simultaneously. Moreover, a discrete hashing layer is integrated into the network for hashcode generating to avoid the information loss caused by real-value relaxation in training phase, which is a critical problem in existing works. Experiments on three benchmarks validate the superiority of SitNet to the state-of-the-arts.
Understanding Users' Budgets for Recommendation with Hierarchical Poisson Factorization
Authors: Guo Yunhui , Xu Congfu , Song Hanzhang , Wang Xin
Published: July 2017

People consume and rate products in online shopping websites. The historical purchases of customers reflect their personal consumption habits and indicate their future shopping behaviors. Traditional preference-based recommender systems try to provide recommendations by analyzing users' feedback such as ratings and clicks. But unfortunately, most of the existing recommendation algorithms ignore the budget of the users. So they cannot avoid recommending users with products that will exceed their budgets. And they also cannot understand how the users will assign their budgets to different products. In this paper, we develop a generative model named collaborative budget-aware Poisson factorization (CBPF) to connect users' ratings and budgets. The CBPF model is intuitive and highly interpretable. We compare the proposed model with several state-of-the-art budget-unaware recommendation methods on several real-world datasets. The results show the advantage of uncovering users' budgets for recommendation.
Pessimistic Leader-Follower Equilibria with Multiple Followers
Authors: Coniglio Stefano , Gatti Nicola , Marchesi Alberto
Published: July 2017

The problem of computing the strategy to commit to has been widely investigated in the scientific literature for the case where a single-follower is present. In the multi-follower setting though, results are only sporadic. In this paper, we address the multi-follower case for normal-form games, assuming that, after observing the leader’s commitment, the followers play pure strategies and reach a Nash equilibrium. We focus on the pessimistic case where, among many equilibria, one minimizing the leader’s utility is chosen (the opposite case is computationally trivial). We show that the problem is NP-hard even with only two followers, and propose an exact exponential-time algorithm which, for any number of followers, either finds an equilibrium when the game admits a finite one or, if not, an α-approximation of the supremum of the leader’ utility, for any α > 0.
Self-paced Mixture of Regressions
Authors: Han Longfei , Zhang Dingwen , Huang Dong , Chang Xiaojun , Ren Jun , Luo Senlin , Han Junwei
Published: July 2017

Mixture of regressions (MoR) is the well-established and effective approach to model discontinuous and heterogeneous data in regression problems. Existing MoR approaches assume smooth joint distribution for its good anlaytic properties. However, such assumption makes existing MoR very sensitive to intra-component outliers (the noisy training data residing in certain components) and the inter-component imbalance (the different amounts of training data in different components). In this paper, we make the earliest effort on Self-paced Learning (SPL) in MoR, i.e., Self-paced mixture of regressions (SPMoR) model. We propose a novel self-paced regularizer based on the Exclusive LASSO, which improves inter-component balance of training data. As a robust learning regime, SPL pursues confidence sample reasoning. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SPMoR, we conducted experiments on both the sythetic examples and real-world applications to age estimation and glucose estimation. The results show that SPMoR outperforms the state-of-the-arts methods.
Fast Recursive Low-rank Tensor Learning for Regression
Authors: Hou Ming , Chaib-draa Brahim
Published: July 2017

In this work, we develop a fast sequential low-rank tensor regression framework, namely recursive higher-order partial least squares (RHOPLS). It addresses the great challenges posed by the limited storage space and fast processing time required by dynamic environments when dealing with large-scale high-speed general tensor sequences. Smartly integrating a low-rank modification strategy of Tucker into a PLS-based framework, we efficiently update the regression coefficients by effectively merging the new data into the previous low-rank approximation of the model at a small-scale factor (feature) level instead of the large raw data (observation) level. Unlike batch models, which require accessing the entire data, RHOPLS conducts a blockwise recursive calculation scheme and thus only a small set of factors is needed to be stored. Our approach is orders of magnitude faster than all other methods while maintaining a highly comparable predictability with the cutting-edge batch methods, as verified on challenging real-life tasks.
Mention Recommendation for Twitter with End-to-end Memory Network
Authors: Huang Haoran , Zhang Qi , Huang Xuanjing
Published: July 2017

In this study, we investigated the problem of recommending usernames when people attempt to use the ``@'' sign to mention other people in twitter-like social media. With the extremely rapid development of social networking services, this problem has received considerable attention in recent years. Previous methods have studied the problem from different aspects. Because most of Twitter-like microblogging services limit the length of posts, statistical learning methods may be affected by the problems of word sparseness and synonyms. Although recent progress in neural word embedding methods have advanced the state-of-the-art in many natural language processing tasks, the benefits of word embedding have not been taken into consideration for this problem. In this work, we proposed a novel end-to-end memory network architecture to perform this task. We incorporated the interests of users with external memory. A hierarchical attention mechanism was also applied to better consider the interests of users. The experimental results on a dataset we collected from Twitter demonstrated that the proposed method could outperform state-of-the-art approaches.
Enhancing the Unified Features to Locate Buggy Files by Exploiting the Sequential Nature of Source Code
Authors: Huo Xuan , Li Ming
Published: July 2017

Bug reports provide an effective way for end-users to disclose potential bugs hidden in a software system, while automatically locating the potential buggy source files according to a bug report remains a great challenge in software maintenance. Many previous approaches represent bug reports and source code from lexical and structural information correlated their relevance by measuring their similarity, and recently a CNN-based model is proposed to learn the unified features for bug localization, which overcomes the difficulty in modeling natural and programming languages with different structural semantics. However, previous studies fail to capture the sequential nature of source code, which carries additional semantics beyond the lexical and structural terms and such information is vital in modeling program functionalities and behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel model LS-CNN, which enhances the unified features by exploiting the sequential nature of source code. LS-CNN combines CNN and LSTM to extract semantic features for automatically identifying potential buggy source code according to a bug report. Experimental results on widely-used software projects indicate that LS-CNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in locating buggy files.
Adaptive Learning Rate via Covariance Matrix Based Preconditioning for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Ida Yasutoshi , Fujiwara Yasuhiro , Iwamura Sotetsu
Published: July 2017

Adaptive learning rate algorithms such as RMSProp are widely used for training deep neural networks.

RMSProp offers efficient training since it uses first order gradients to approximate Hessian-based preconditioning.

However, since the first order gradients include noise caused by stochastic optimization, the approximation may be inaccurate.

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive learning rate algorithm called SDProp.

Its key idea is effective handling of the noise by preconditioning based on covariance matrix.

For various neural networks, our approach is more efficient and effective than RMSProp and its variant.
Semi-supervised Learning over Heterogeneous Information Networks by Ensemble of Meta-graph Guided Random Walks
Authors: Jiang He , Song Yangqiu , Wang Chenguang , Zhang Ming , Sun Yizhou
Published: July 2017

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) is a general representation of many real world applications. The difference between HIN and traditional homogeneous graphs is that the nodes and edges in HIN are with types. Then in the many applications, we need to consider the types to make the approach more semantically meaningful. For the applications that annotation is expensive, on natural way is to consider semi-supervised learning over HIN. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised learning algorithm constrained by the types of HINs. We first decompose the original HIN into several semantically meaningful sub-graphs based the meta-graphs composed of entity and relation types. Then we perform random walk over the sub-graphs to propagate the labels from labeled data to unlabeled data. After we obtain all the labels propagated by different trials of random walk guided by meta-graphs, we use an ensemble algorithm to vote for the final labeling results. We use two public available datasets, 20-newsgroups and RCV1 datasets to test our algorithm. Experimental results show that our algorithm is better than the traditional semi-supervised learning algorithms for HINs. One particular by-product of this work is that we show that previous random walk approach guided by meta-paths can be non-stationary, which is the major reason we propose a meta-graph guide random walk for semi-supervised learning over HINs.
Variational Deep Embedding: An Unsupervised and Generative Approach to Clustering
Authors: Jiang Zhuxi , Zheng Yin , Tan Huachun , Tang Bangsheng , Zhou Hanning
Published: July 2017

Clustering is among the most fundamental tasks in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we propose Variational Deep Embedding (VaDE), a novel unsupervised generative clustering approach within the framework of Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). Specifically, VaDE models the data generative procedure with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and a deep neural network (DNN): 1) the GMM picks a cluster; 2) from which a latent embedding is generated; 3) then the DNN decodes the latent embedding into an observable. Inference in VaDE is done in a variational way: a different DNN is used to encode observables to latent embeddings, so that the evidence lower bound (ELBO) can be optimized using the Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes (SGVB) estimator and the reparameterization trick. Quantitative comparisons with strong baselines are included in this paper, and experimental results show that VaDE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art clustering methods on 5 benchmarks from various modalities. Moreover, by VaDE's generative nature, we show its capability of generating highly realistic samples for any specified cluster, without using supervised information during training.
Improving Classification Accuracy of Feedforward Neural Networks for Spiking Neuromorphic Chips
Authors: Jimeno Yepes Antonio , Tang Jianbin , Mashford Benjamin Scott
Published: July 2017

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) achieve human level performance in many image analytics tasks but DNNs are mostly deployed to GPU platforms that consume a considerable amount of power. New hardware platforms using lower precision arithmetic achieve drastic reductions in power consumption. More recently, brain-inspired spiking neuromorphic chips have achieved even lower power consumption, on the order of milliwatts, while still offering real-time processing.

However, for deploying DNNs to energy efficient neuromorphic chips the incompatibility between continuous neurons and synaptic weights of traditional DNNs, discrete spiking neurons and synapses of neuromorphic chips need to be overcome. Previous work has achieved this by training a network to learn continuous probabilities, before it is deployed to a neuromorphic architecture, such as IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System, by random sampling these probabilities.

The main contribution of this paper is a new learning algorithm that learns a TrueNorth configuration ready for deployment. We achieve this by training directly a binary hardware crossbar that accommodates the TrueNorth axon configuration constrains and we propose a different neuron model.

Results of our approach trained on electroencephalogram (EEG) data show a significant improvement with previous work (76% vs 86% accuracy) while maintaining state of the art performance on the MNIST handwritten data set.
A Functional Dynamic Boltzmann Machine
Authors: Kajino Hiroshi
Published: July 2017

Dynamic Boltzmann machines (DyBMs) are recently developed generative models of a time series. They are designed to learn a time series by efficient online learning algorithms, whilst taking long-term dependencies into account with help of eligibility traces, recursively updatable memory units storing descriptive statistics of all the past data. The current DyBMs assume a finite-dimensional time series and cannot be applied to a functional time series, in which the dimension goes to infinity (e.g., spatiotemporal data on a continuous space). In this paper, we present a functional dynamic Boltzmann machine (F-DyBM) as a generative model of a functional time series. A technical challenge is to devise an online learning algorithm with which F-DyBM, consisting of functions and integrals, can learn a functional time series using only finite observations of it. We rise to the above challenge by combining a kernel-based function approximation method along with a statistical interpolation method and finally derive closed-form update rules. We design numerical experiments to empirically confirm the effectiveness of our solutions. The experimental results demonstrate consistent error reductions as compared to baseline methods, from which we conclude the effectiveness of F-DyBM for functional time series prediction.
Learning deep structured network for weakly supervised change detection
Authors: Khan Salman , He Xuming , Porikli Fatih , Bennamoun Mohammed , Sohel Ferdous , Togneri Roberto
Published: July 2017

Conventional change detection methods require a large number of images to learn background models or depend on tedious pixel-level labeling by humans. In this paper, we present a weakly supervised approach that needs only image-level labels to simultaneously detect and localize changes in a pair of images. To this end, we employ a deep neural network with DAG topology to learn patterns of change from image-level labeled training data. On top of the initial CNN activations, we define a CRF model to incorporate the local differences and context with the dense connections between individual pixels. We apply a constrained mean-field algorithm to estimate the pixel-level labels, and use the estimated labels to update the parameters of the CNN in an iterative EM framework. This enables imposing global constraints on the observed foreground probability mass function. Our evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate superior detection and localization performance.
Efficiency Through Procrastination: Approximately Optimal Algorithm Configuration with Runtime Guarantees
Authors: Kleinberg Robert , Leyton-Brown Kevin , Lucier Brendan
Published: July 2017

Algorithm configuration methods have achieved much practical success, but to date have not been backed by meaningful performance guarantees. We address this gap with a new algorithm configuration framework, Structured Procrastination. With high probability and nearly as quickly as possible in the worst case, our framework finds an algorithm configuration that provably achieves near optimal performance. Moreover, its running time requirements asymptotically dominate those of existing methods.
Decreasing Uncertainty in Planning with State Prediction
Authors: Krivic Senka , Cashmore Michael , Magazzeni Daniele , Ridder Bram , Szedmak Sandor , Piater Justus
Published: July 2017

In real world environments the state is almost never completely known. Exploration is often expensive. The application of planning in these environments is consequently more difficult and less robust. In this paper we present an approach for predicting new information about a partially-known state. The state is translated into a partially-known multigraph, which can then be extended using machine-learning techniques. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that it enhances the scalability of our planners, and leads to less time spent on sensing actions.
Learning Sparse Representations in Reinforcement Learning with Sparse Coding
Authors: Le Lei , Kumaraswamy Raksha , White Martha
Published: July 2017

A variety of representation learning approaches have been investigated for reinforcement learning; much less attention, however, has been given to investigating the utility of sparse coding. Outside of reinforcement learning, sparse coding representations have been widely used, with non-convex objectives that result in discriminative representations. In this work, we develop a supervised sparse coding objective for policy evaluation. Despite the non-convexity of this objective, we prove that all local minima are global minima, making the approach amenable to simple optimization strategies. We empirically show that it is key to use a supervised objective, rather than the more straightforward unsupervised sparse coding approach. We then compare the learned representations to a canonical fixed sparse representation, called tile-coding, demonstrating that the sparse coding representation outperforms a wide variety of tile-coding representations.
Constrained Bayesian Reinforcement Learning via Approximate Linear Programming
Authors: Lee Jongmin , Jang Youngsoo , Poupart Pascal , Kim Kee-Eung
Published: July 2017

In this paper, we consider the safe learning scenario where we need to restrict the exploratory behavior of a reinforcement learning agent. Specifically, we treat the problem as a form of Bayesian reinforcement learning in an environment that is modeled as a constrained MDP (CMDP) where the cost function penalizes undesirable situations. We propose a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) algorithm for such an environment, eliciting risk-sensitive exploration in a principled way. Our algorithm efficiently solves the constrained BRL problem by approximate linear programming, and generates a finite state controller in an off-line manner. We provide theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirically that our approach outperforms the state of the art.
Learning User's Intrinsic and Extrinsic Interests for Point-of-Interest Recommendation: A Unified Approach
Authors: Li Huayu , Ge Yong , Lian Defu , Liu Hao
Published: July 2017

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has been an important service on location-based social networks. However, it is very challenging to generate accurate recommendations due to the complex nature of user's interest in POI and the data sparseness. In this paper, we propose a novel unified approach that could effectively learn fine-grained and interpretable user's interest, and adaptively model the missing data. Specifically, a user's general interest in POI is modeled as a mixture of her intrinsic and extrinsic interests, upon which we formulate the ranking constraints in our unified recommendation approach. Furthermore, a self-adaptive location-oriented method is proposed to capture the inherent property of missing data, which is formulated as squared error based loss in our unified optimization objective. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of our approach.
Efficient Kernel Selection via Spectral Analysis
Authors: Li Jian , Liu Yong , Lin Hailun , Yue Yinliang , Wang Weiping
Published: July 2017

Kernel selection is a fundamental problem of kernel methods. Existing measures for kernel selection either provide less theoretical guarantee or have high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel kernel selection criterion based on a newly defined spectral measure of a kernel matrix, with sound theoretical foundation and high computational efficiency. We first show that the spectral measure can be used to derive generalization bounds for some kernel-based algorithms. By minimizing the derived generalization bounds, we propose the kernel selection criterion with spectral measure. Moreover, we demonstrate that the popular minimum graph cut and maximum mean discrepancy are two special cases of the proposed criterion. Experimental results on lots of data sets show that our proposed criterion can not only give the comparable results as the state-of-the-art criterion, but also significantly improve the efficiency.
Projective Low-rank Subspace Clustering via Learning Deep Encoder
Authors: Li Jun , Hongfu Liu , Zhao Handong , Fu Yun
Published: July 2017

Low-rank subspace clustering (LRSC) has been considered as the state-of-the-art method on small datasets. LRSC constructs a desired similarity graph by low-rank representation (LRR), and employs a spectral clustering to segment the data samples. However, effectively applying LRSC into clustering big data becomes a challenge because both LRR and spectral clustering suffer from high computational cost. To address this challenge, we create a projective low-rank subspace clustering (PLrSC) scheme for large scale clustering problem. First, a small dataset is randomly sampled from big dataset. Second, our proposed predictive low-rank decomposition (PLD) is applied to train a deep encoder by using the small dataset, and the deep encoder is used to fast compute the low-rank representations of all data samples. Third, fast spectral clustering is employed to segment the representations. As a non-trivial contribution, we theoretically prove the deep encoder can universally approximate to the exact (or bounded) recovery of the row space. Experiments verify that our scheme outperforms the related methods on large scale datasets in a small amount of time. We achieve the state-of-art clustering accuracy by 95.8% on MNIST using scattering convolution features.
A Novel Symbolic Approach to Verifying Epistemic Properties of Programs
Authors: Gorogiannis Nikos , Raimondi Franco , Boureanu Ioana
Published: July 2017

We introduce a framework for the symbolic verification of epistemic properties of programs expressed in a class of general-purpose programming languages. To this end, we reduce the verification problem to that of satisfiability of first-order formulae in appropriate theories. We prove the correctness of our reduction and we validate our proposal by applying it to two examples: the dining cryptographers problem and the ThreeBallot voting protocol. We put forward an implementation using existing solvers, and report experimental results showing that the approach can perform better than state-of-the-art symbolic model checkers for temporal-epistemic logic.
Online Robust Low-Rank Tensor Learning
Authors: Li Ping , Feng Jiashi , Jin Xiaojie , Zhang Luming , Xu Xianghua , Yan Shuicheng
Published: July 2017

The rapid increase of multidimensional data (a.k.a. tensor) like videos brings new challenges for low-rank data modeling approaches such as dynamic data size, complex high-order relations, and multiplicity of low-rank structures. Resolving these challenges require a new tensor analysis method that can perform tensor data analysis online, which however is still absent. In this paper, we propose an Online Robust Low-rank Tensor Modeling (ORLTM) approach to address these challenges. ORLTM dynamically explores the high-order correlations across all tensor modes for low-rank structure modeling. To analyze mixture data from multiple subspaces, ORLTM introduces a new dictionary learning component. ORLTM processes data streamingly and thus requires quite low memory cost that is independent of data size. This makes ORLTM quite suitable for processing large-scale tensor data. Empirical studies have validated the effectiveness of the proposed method on both synthetic data and one practical task, i.e., video background subtraction. In addition, we provide theoretical analysis regarding computational complexity and memory cost, demonstrating the efficiency of ORLTM rigorously.
Person Re-Identification by Deep Joint Learning of Multi-Loss Classification
Authors: Li Wei , Zhu Xiatian , Gong Shaogang
Published: July 2017

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods rely mostly on either localised or global feature representation. This ignores their joint benefit and mutual complementary effects. In this work, we show the advantages of jointly learning local and global features in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) by aiming to discover correlated local and global features in different context. Specifically, we formulate a method for joint learning of local and global feature selection losses designed to optimise person re-id when using generic matching metrics such as the L2 distance. We design a novel CNN architecture for Jointly Learning Multi-Loss (JLML) of local and global discriminative feature optimisation subject concurrently to the same re-id labelled information. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the advantages of this new JLML model for person re-id over a wide range of state-of-the-art re-id methods on five benchmarks (VIPeR, GRID, CUHK01, CUHK03, Market-1501).
CFNN: Correlation Filter Neural Network for Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Li Yang , Xu Zhan , Zhu Jianke
Published: July 2017

Albeit convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown promising capacity in many computer vision tasks, applying it to visual tracking is yet far from solved. Existing methods either employ a large external dataset to undertake exhaustive pre-training or suffer from less satisfactory results in terms of accuracy and robustness. To track single target in a wide range of videos, we present a novel Correlation Filter Neural Network architecture, as well as a complete visual tracking pipeline, The proposed approach is a special case of CNN, whose initialization does not need any pre-training on the external dataset. The initialization of network enjoys the merits of cyclic sampling to achieve the appealing discriminative capability, while the network updating scheme adopts advantages from back-propagation in order to capture new appearance variations. The tracking pipeline integrates both aspects well by making them complementary to each other. We validate our tracker on OTB-2013 benchmark. The proposed tracker obtains the promising results compared to most of existing representative trackers.
Integrating Specialized Classifiers Based on Continuous Time Markov Chain
Authors: Li Zhizhong , Lin Dahua
Published: July 2017

Specialized classifiers, namely those dedicated to a subset of classes, are often adopted in real-world recognition systems. However, integrating such classifiers is nontrivial. Existing methods, e.g. weighted average, usually implicitly assume that all constituents of an ensemble cover the same set of classes. Such methods can produce misleading predictions when used to combine specialized classifiers. This work explores a novel approach. Instead of combining predictions from individual classifiers directly, it first decomposes the predictions into sets of pairwise preferences, treating them as transition channels between classes, and thereon constructs a continuous-time Markov chain, and use the equilibrium distribution of this chain as the final prediction. This way allows us to form a coherent picture over all specialized predictions. On large public datasets, the proposed method obtains considerable improvement compared to mainstream ensemble methods, especially when the classifier coverage is highly unbalanced.
Regional Concept Drift Detection and Density Synchronized Drift Adaptation
Authors: Liu Anjin , Song Yiliao , Zhang Guangquan , Lu Jie
Published: July 2017

In data stream mining, the emergence of new patterns or a pattern ceasing to exist is called concept drift. Concept drift makes the learning process complicated because of the inconsistency between existing data and upcoming data. Since concept drift was first proposed, numerous articles have been published to address this issue in terms of distribution analysis. However, most distribution-based drift detection methods assume that a drift happens at an exact time point, and the data arrived before that time point is considered not important. Thus, if a drift only occurs in a small region of the entire feature space, the other non-drifted regions may also be suspended, thereby reducing the learning efficiency of models. To retrieve non-drifted information from suspended historical data, we propose a local drift degree (LDD) measurement that can continuously monitor regional density changes. Instead of suspending all historical data after a drift, we synchronize the regional density discrepancies according to LDD. Experimental evaluations on three public data sets show that our concept drift adaptation algorithm improves accuracy compared to other methods.
Modeling Hebb Learning Rule for Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Liu Jia , Gong Maoguo , Miao Qiguang
Published: July 2017

This paper presents to model the Hebb learning rule and proposes a neuron learning machine (NLM). Hebb learning rule describes the plasticity of the connection between presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons and it is unsupervised itself. It formulates the updating gradient of the connecting weight in artificial neural networks. In this paper, we construct an objective function via modeling the Hebb rule. We make a hypothesis to simplify the model and introduce a correlation based constraint according to the hypothesis and stability of solutions. By analysis from the perspectives of maintaining abstract information and increasing the energy based probability of observed data, we find that this biologically inspired model has the capability of learning useful features. NLM can also be stacked to learn hierarchical features and reformulated into convolutional version to extract features from 2-dimensional data. Experiments on single-layer and deep networks demonstrate the effectiveness of NLM in unsupervised feature learning.
Improving Learning-from-Crowds through Expert Validation
Authors: Liu Mengchen , Jiang Liu , Liu Junlin , Wang Xiting , Zhu Jun , Liu Shixia
Published: July 2017

Although several effective learning-from-crowd methods have been developed to infer correct labels from noisy crowdsourced labels, a method for post-processed expert validation is still needed. This paper introduces a semi-supervised learning algorithm that is capable of selecting the most informative instances and maximizing the influence of expert labels. Specifically, we have developed a complete uncertainty assessment to facilitate the selection of the most informative instances. The expert labels are then propagated to similar instances via regularized Bayesian inference. Experiments on both real-world and simulated datasets indicate that given a specific accuracy goal (e.g., 95%) our method reduces expert effort from 39% to 60% compared with the state-of-the-art method.