mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Data Poisoning Attacks on Factorization-Based Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Bo Li, Yining Wang, Aarti Singh, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Recommendation and collaborative filtering systems are important in modern information and e-commerce applications.  As these systems are becoming increasingly popular in industry, their outputs could affect business decision making, introducing incentives for an adversarial party to compromise the availability or integrity of such systems. We introduce a data poisoning attack on collaborative filtering systems.  We demonstrate how a powerful attacker with full knowledge of the learner can generate malicious data so as to maximize his/her malicious objectives, while at the same time mimicking normal user behaviors to avoid being detected. While the complete knowledge assumption seems extreme, it enables a robust assessment of the vulnerability of collaborative filtering schemes to highly motivated attacks. We present efficient solutions for two popular factorization-based collaborative filtering algorithms: the alternative minimization formulation and the nuclear norm minimization method. Finally, we test the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms on real-world data and discuss potential defensive strategies.
PAC-Bayesian Theory Meets Bayesian Inference
Authors: Pascal Germain, Francis Bach, Alexandre Lacoste, Simon Lacoste-Julien
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We exhibit a strong link between frequentist PAC-Bayesian bounds and the Bayesian marginal likelihood. That is, for the negative log-likelihood loss function, we show that the minimization of PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds maximizes the Bayesian marginal likelihood. This provides an alternative explanation to the Bayesian Occam's razor criteria, under the assumption that the data is generated by an i.i.d. distribution. Moreover, as the negative log-likelihood is an unbounded loss function, we motivate and propose a PAC-Bayesian theorem tailored for the sub-gamma loss family, and we show that our approach is sound on classical Bayesian linear regression tasks.
Fast Mixing Markov Chains for Strongly Rayleigh Measures, DPPs, and Constrained Sampling
Authors: Chengtao Li, Suvrit Sra, Stefanie Jegelka
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We study probability measures induced by set functions with constraints. Such measures arise in a variety of real-world settings, where prior knowledge, resource limitations, or other pragmatic considerations impose constraints. We consider the task of rapidly sampling from such constrained measures, and develop fast Markov chain samplers for them. Our first main result is for MCMC sampling from Strongly Rayleigh (SR) measures, for which we present sharp polynomial bounds on the mixing time. As a corollary, this result yields a fast mixing sampler for Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs), yielding (to our knowledge) the first provably fast MCMC sampler for DPPs since their inception over four decades ago. Beyond SR measures, we develop MCMC samplers for probabilistic models with hard constraints and identify sufficient conditions under which their chains mix rapidly. We illustrate our claims by empirically verifying the dependence of mixing times on the key factors governing our theoretical bounds.
Temporal Regularized Matrix Factorization for High-dimensional Time Series Prediction
Authors: Hsiang-Fu Yu, Nikhil Rao, Inderjit S Dhillon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Time series prediction problems are becoming increasingly high-dimensional in modern applications, such as climatology and demand forecasting. For example, in the latter problem, the number of items for which demand needs to be forecast might be as large as 50,000. In addition, the data is generally noisy and full of missing values. Thus, modern applications require methods that are  highly scalable, and can deal with noisy data in terms of corruptions or missing values. However, classical time series methods usually fall short of handling these issues.  In this paper, we present a temporal regularized matrix factorization  (TRMF) framework which supports data-driven temporal learning and  forecasting. We develop novel regularization schemes and use scalable matrix factorization methods that are eminently suited for high-dimensional time series data that has many missing values.  Our proposed TRMF is highly general, and subsumes many existing approaches for time series analysis.  We make interesting connections to graph regularization methods in the context of learning the dependencies in an autoregressive framework. Experimental results show the superiority of TRMF in terms of scalability and prediction quality. In particular,  TRMF is two orders of magnitude  faster than other methods on a problem of dimension 50,000, and generates better forecasts on real-world datasets such as Wal-mart E-commerce datasets.
FPNN: Field Probing Neural Networks for 3D Data
Authors: Yangyan Li, Soeren Pirk, Hao Su, Charles R Qi, Leonidas Guibas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Building discriminative representations for 3D data has been an important task in computer graphics and computer vision research. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown to operate on 2D images with great success for a variety of tasks. Lifting convolution operators to 3D (3DCNNs) seems like a plausible and promising next step. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of 3D CNNs grows cubically with respect to voxel resolution. Moreover, since most 3D geometry representations are boundary based, occupied regions do not increase proportionately with the size of the discretization, resulting in wasted computation. In this work, we represent 3D spaces as volumetric fields, and propose a novel design that employs field probing filters to efficiently extract features from them. Each field probing filter is a set of probing points -- sensors that perceive the space. Our learning algorithm optimizes not only the weights associated with the probing points, but also their locations, which deforms the shape of the probing filters and adaptively distributes them in 3D space. The optimized probing points sense the 3D space "intelligently", rather than operating blindly over the entire domain. We show that field probing is significantly more efficient than 3DCNNs, while providing state-of-the-art performance, on classification tasks for 3D object recognition benchmark datasets.
Object based Scene Representations using Fisher Scores of Local Subspace Projections
Authors: Mandar D Dixit, Nuno Vasconcelos
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Several works have shown that deep CNN classifiers can be easily transferred across datasets, e.g. the transfer of a CNN trained to recognize objects on ImageNET to an object detector on Pascal VOC. Less clear, however, is the ability of CNNs to transfer knowledge across tasks. A common example of such transfer is the problem of scene classification that should leverage localized object detections to recognize holistic visual concepts. While this problem is currently addressed with Fisher vector representations, these are now shown ineffective for the high-dimensional and highly non-linear features extracted by modern CNNs. It is argued that this is mostly due to the reliance on a model, the Gaussian mixture of diagonal covariances, which has a very limited ability to capture the second order statistics of CNN features. This problem is addressed by the adoption of a better model, the mixture of factor analyzers (MFA), which approximates the non-linear data manifold by a collection of local subspaces. The Fisher score with respect to the MFA (MFA-FS) is derived and proposed as an image representation for holistic image classifiers. Extensive experiments show that the MFA-FS has state of the art performance for object-to-scene transfer and this transfer actually  outperforms the training of a scene CNN from a large scene dataset. The two representations are also shown to be complementary, in the sense that their combination outperforms each of the representations by itself. When combined, they produce a state of the art scene classifier.
Architectural Complexity Measures of Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Saizheng Zhang, Yuhuai Wu, Tong Che, Zhouhan Lin, Roland Memisevic, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yoshua Bengio
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper, we systematically analyze the connecting architectures of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our main contribution is twofold: first, we present a rigorous graph-theoretic framework describing the connecting architectures of RNNs in general. Second, we propose three architecture complexity measures of RNNs: (a) the recurrent depth, which captures the RNN’s over-time nonlinear complexity, (b) the feedforward depth, which captures the local input-output nonlinearity (similar to the “depth” in feedforward neural networks (FNNs)), and (c) the recurrent skip coefficient which captures how rapidly the information propagates over time. We rigorously prove each measure’s existence and computability. Our experimental results show that RNNs might benefit from larger recurrent depth and feedforward depth. We further demonstrate that increasing recurrent skip coefficient offers performance boosts on long term dependency problems.
Interaction Screening: Efficient and Sample-Optimal Learning of Ising Models
Authors: Marc Vuffray, Sidhant Misra, Andrey Lokhov, Michael Chertkov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We consider the problem of learning the underlying graph of an unknown Ising model on p spins from a collection of i.i.d. samples generated from the model. We suggest a new estimator that is computationally efficient and requires a number of samples that is near-optimal with respect to previously established information theoretic lower-bound. Our statistical estimator has a physical interpretation in terms of "interaction screening". The estimator is consistent and is efficiently implemented using convex optimization. We prove that with appropriate regularization, the estimator recovers the underlying graph using a number of samples that is logarithmic in the system size p and exponential in the maximum coupling-intensity and maximum node-degree.
Community Detection on Evolving Graphs
Authors: Aris Anagnostopoulos, Jakub Łącki, Silvio Lattanzi, Stefano Leonardi, Mohammad Mahdian
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental step in many information-retrieval and data-mining applications. Detecting clusters in graphs is also a key tool for finding the community structure in social and behavioral networks. In many of these applications, the input graph evolves over time in a continual and decentralized manner, and, to maintain a good clustering, the clustering algorithm needs to repeatedly probe the graph. Furthermore, there are often limitations on the frequency of such probes, either imposed explicitly by the online platform (e.g., in the case of crawling proprietary social networks like twitter) or implicitly because of resource limitations (e.g., in the case of crawling the web).  In this paper, we study a model of clustering on evolving graphs that captures this aspect of the problem. Our model is based on the classical stochastic block model, which has been used to assess rigorously the quality of various static clustering methods. In our model, the algorithm is supposed to reconstruct the planted clustering, given the ability to query for small pieces of local information about the graph, at a limited rate. We design and analyze clustering algorithms that work in this model, and show asymptotically tight upper and lower bounds on their accuracy. Finally, we perform simulations, which demonstrate that our main asymptotic results hold true also in practice.
Preference Completion from Partial Rankings
Authors: Suriya Gunasekar, Oluwasanmi O Koyejo, Joydeep Ghosh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We propose a novel and efficient algorithm for the collaborative preference completion problem, which involves jointly estimating individualized rankings for a set of entities over a shared set of items, based on a limited number of observed affinity values. Our approach exploits the observation that while preferences are often recorded as numerical scores, the predictive quantity of interest is the underlying rankings. Thus, attempts to closely match the recorded scores may lead to overfitting and impair generalization performance. Instead, we propose an estimator that directly fits the underlying preference order, combined with nuclear norm constraints to encourage low--rank parameters.  Besides (approximate) correctness of the ranking order, the proposed estimator makes no generative assumption on the numerical scores of the observations. One consequence is that  the proposed estimator can fit any consistent partial ranking over a subset of the items represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), generalizing standard techniques that can only fit preference scores. Despite this generality, for supervision representing total or blockwise total orders, the computational complexity of our algorithm is within a $\log$ factor of the standard algorithms for nuclear norm regularization based estimates for matrix completion. We further show promising empirical results for a novel and challenging application of collaboratively ranking of the associations between brain--regions and cognitive neuroscience terms.
“Congruent” and “Opposite” Neurons: Sisters for Multisensory Integration and Segregation
Authors: Wen-Hao Zhang, He Wang, K. Y. Michael Wong, Si Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Experiments reveal that in the dorsal medial superior temporal (MSTd) and the ventral intraparietal (VIP) areas, where visual and vestibular cues are integrated to infer heading direction, there are two types of neurons with roughly the same number. One is “congruent” cells, whose preferred heading directions are similar in response to visual and vestibular cues; and the other is “opposite” cells, whose preferred heading directions are nearly “opposite” (with an offset of 180 degree) in response to visual vs. vestibular cues. Congruent neurons are known to be responsible for cue integration, but the computational role of opposite neurons remains largely unknown. Here, we propose that opposite neurons may serve to encode the disparity information between cues necessary for multisensory segregation. We build a computational model composed of two reciprocally coupled modules, MSTd and VIP, and each module consists of groups of congruent and opposite neurons. In the model, congruent neurons in two modules are reciprocally connected with each other in the congruent manner, whereas opposite neurons are reciprocally connected in the opposite manner. Mimicking the experimental protocol, our model reproduces the characteristics of congruent and opposite neurons, and demonstrates that in each module, the sisters of congruent and opposite neurons can jointly achieve optimal multisensory information integration and segregation. This study sheds light on our understanding of how the brain implements optimal multisensory integration and segregation concurrently in a distributed manner.
A Consistent Regularization Approach for Structured Prediction
Authors: Carlo Ciliberto, Lorenzo Rosasco, Alessandro Rudi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We propose and analyze a regularization approach for structured prediction problems. We characterize a large class of loss functions that allows to naturally embed structured outputs in a linear space.  We exploit this fact to  design learning  algorithms using a surrogate loss approach and regularization techniques.   We prove universal consistency and finite sample bounds characterizing the generalization properties of the proposed method. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed approach.
Fast recovery from a union of subspaces
Authors: Chinmay Hegde, Piotr Indyk, Ludwig Schmidt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We address the problem of recovering a high-dimensional but structured vector from linear observations in a general setting where the vector can come from an arbitrary union of subspaces. This setup includes well-studied problems such as compressive sensing and low-rank matrix recovery. We show how to design more efficient algorithms for the union-of subspace recovery problem by using approximate projections. Instantiating our general framework for the low-rank matrix recovery problem gives the fastest provable running time for an algorithm with optimal sample complexity. Moreover, we give fast approximate projections for 2D histograms, another well-studied low-dimensional model of data. We complement our theoretical results with experiments demonstrating that our framework also leads to improved time and sample complexity empirically.
Improved Techniques for Training GANs
Authors: Tim Salimans, Ian Goodfellow, Wojciech Zaremba, Vicki Cheung, Alec Radford, Xi Chen, Xi Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: Our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3%. We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes.
Coordinate-wise Power Method
Authors: Qi Lei, Kai Zhong, Inderjit S Dhillon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a coordinate-wise version of the power method from an optimization viewpoint. The vanilla power method simultaneously updates all the coordinates of the iterate, which is essential for its convergence analysis. However, different coordinates converge to the optimal value at different speeds. Our proposed algorithm, which we call coordinate-wise power method, is able to select and update the most important k coordinates in O(kn) time at each iteration, where n is the dimension of the matrix and k <= n is the size of the active set. Inspired by the ''greedy'' nature of our method, we further propose a greedy coordinate descent algorithm applied on a non-convex objective function specialized for symmetric matrices. We provide convergence analyses for both methods. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data show that our methods achieve up to 20 times speedup over the basic power method. Meanwhile, due to their coordinate-wise nature, our methods are very suitable for the important case when data cannot fit into memory. Finally, we introduce how the coordinate-wise mechanism could be applied to other iterative methods that are used in machine learning.
On Mixtures of Markov Chains
Authors: Rishi Gupta, Ravi Kumar, Sergei Vassilvitskii
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We study the problem of reconstructing a mixture of Markov chains from the trajectories generated by random walks through the state space.  Under mild non-degeneracy conditions, we show that we can uniquely reconstruct the underlying chains by only considering trajectories of length three, which represent triples of states. Our algorithm is spectral in nature, and is easy to implement.
Near-Optimal Smoothing of Structured Conditional Probability Matrices
Authors: Moein Falahatgar, Mesrob I Ohannessian, Alon Orlitsky
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Utilizing the structure of a probabilistic model can significantly increase its learning speed. Motivated by several recent applications, in particular bigram models in language processing, we consider learning low-rank conditional probability matrices under expected KL-risk. This choice makes smoothing, that is the careful handling of low-probability elements, paramount. We derive an iterative algorithm that extends classical non-negative matrix factorization to naturally incorporate additive smoothing and prove that it converges to the stationary points of a penalized empirical risk. We then derive sample-complexity bounds for the global minimizer of the penalized risk and show that it is within a small factor of the optimal sample complexity. This framework generalizes to more sophisticated smoothing techniques, including absolute-discounting.
Dynamic Filter Networks
Authors: Xu Jia, Bert De Brabandere, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc V. Gool
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In a traditional convolutional layer, the learned filters stay fixed after training. In contrast, we introduce a new framework, the Dynamic Filter Network, where filters are generated dynamically conditioned on an input. We show that this architecture is a powerful one, with increased flexibility thanks to its adaptive nature, yet without an excessive increase in the number of model parameters. A wide variety of filtering operation can be learned this way, including local spatial transformations, but also others like selective (de)blurring or adaptive feature extraction. Moreover, multiple such layers can be combined, e.g. in a recurrent architecture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the dynamic filter network on the tasks of video and stereo prediction, and reach state-of-the-art performance on the moving MNIST dataset with a much smaller model. By visualizing the learned filters, we illustrate that the network has picked up flow information by only looking at unlabelled training data. This suggests that the network can be used to pretrain networks for various supervised tasks in an unsupervised way, like optical flow and depth estimation.
Estimating the Size of a Large Network and its Communities from a Random Sample
Authors: Lin Chen, Amin Karbasi, Forrest W. Crawford
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Most real-world networks are too large to be measured or studied directly and there is substantial interest in estimating global network properties from smaller sub-samples. One of the most important global properties is the number of vertices/nodes in the network. Estimating the number of vertices in a large network is a major challenge in computer science, epidemiology, demography, and intelligence analysis. In this paper we consider a population random graph G = (V;E) from the stochastic block model (SBM) with K communities/blocks. A sample is obtained by randomly choosing a subset W and letting G(W) be the induced subgraph in G of the vertices in W. In addition to G(W), we observe the total degree of each sampled vertex and its block membership. Given this partial information, we propose an efficient PopULation Size Estimation algorithm, called PULSE, that accurately estimates the size of the whole population as well as the size of each community. To support our theoretical analysis, we perform an exhaustive set of experiments to study the effects of sample size, K, and SBM model parameters on the accuracy of the estimates. The experimental results also demonstrate that PULSE significantly outperforms a widely-used method called the network scale-up estimator in a wide variety of scenarios.
Nested Mini-Batch K-Means
Authors: James Newling, François Fleuret
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: A new algorithm is proposed which accelerates the mini-batch k-means algorithm of Sculley (2010) by using the distance bounding approach of Elkan (2003). We argue that, when incorporating distance bounds into a mini-batch algorithm, already used data should preferentially be reused. To this end we propose using nested mini-batches, whereby data in a mini-batch at iteration t is automatically reused at iteration t+1.   Using nested mini-batches presents two difficulties. The first is that unbalanced use of data can bias estimates, which we resolve by ensuring that each data sample contributes exactly once to centroids. The second is in choosing mini-batch sizes, which we address by balancing premature fine-tuning of centroids with redundancy induced slow-down. Experiments show that the resulting nmbatch algorithm is very effective, often arriving within 1\% of the empirical minimum 100 times earlier than the standard mini-batch algorithm.
Infinite Hidden Semi-Markov Modulated Interaction Point Process
Authors: matt zhang, Peng Lin, Peng Lin, Ting Guo, Yang Wang, Yang Wang, Fang Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The correlation between events is ubiquitous and important for temporal events modelling. In many cases, the correlation exists between not only events' emitted observations, but also their arrival times. State space models (e.g., hidden Markov model) and stochastic interaction point process models (e.g., Hawkes process) have been studied extensively yet separately for the two types of correlations in the past. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach that considers both types of correlations via unifying and generalizing hidden semi-Markov model and interaction point process model. The proposed approach can simultaneously model both the observations and arrival times of temporal events, and determine the number of latent states from data. A Metropolis-within-particle-Gibbs sampler with ancestor resampling is developed for efficient posterior inference. The approach is tested on both synthetic and real-world data with promising outcomes.
A Credit Assignment Compiler for Joint Prediction
Authors: Kai-Wei Chang, He He, Stephane Ross, Hal Daume III, John Langford
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Many machine learning applications involve jointly predicting multiple mutually dependent output variables. Learning to search is a family of methods where the complex decision problem is cast into a sequence of decisions via a search space. Although these methods have shown promise both in theory and in practice, implementing them has been burdensomely awkward. In this paper, we show the search space can be defined by an arbitrary imperative program, turning learning to search into a credit assignment compiler. Altogether with the algorithmic improvements for the compiler, we radically reduce the complexity of programming and the running time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on multiple joint prediction tasks. In all cases, we obtain accuracies as high as alternative approaches, at drastically reduced execution and programming time.
Deep Exploration via Bootstrapped DQN
Authors: Ian Osband, Charles Blundell, Alexander Pritzel, Benjamin Van Roy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Common dithering strategies for exploration, such as epsilon-greedy, do not carry out temporally-extended (or deep) exploration; this can lead to exponentially larger data requirements. However, most algorithms for statistically efficient RL are not computationally tractable in complex environments. Randomized value functions offer a promising approach to efficient exploration with generalization, but existing algorithms are not compatible with nonlinearly parameterized value functions. As a first step towards addressing such contexts we develop bootstrapped DQN. We demonstrate that bootstrapped DQN can combine deep exploration with deep neural networks for exponentially faster learning than any dithering strategy. In the Arcade Learning Environment bootstrapped DQN substantially improves learning speed and cumulative performance across most games.
Estimating Nonlinear Neural Response Functions using GP Priors and Kronecker Methods
Authors: Cristina Savin, Gasper Tkacik
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Jointly characterizing neural responses in terms of several external variables promises novel insights into circuit function, but remains computationally prohibitive in practice. Here we use gaussian process (GP) priors and exploit recent advances in fast GP inference and learning based on Kronecker methods, to efficiently estimate multidimensional nonlinear tuning functions. Our estimator require considerably less data than traditional methods and further provides principled uncertainty estimates. We apply these tools to hippocampal recordings during open field exploration and use them to characterize the joint dependence of CA1 responses on the position of the animal and several other variables, including the animal's speed, direction of motion, and network oscillations.Our results provide an unprecedentedly detailed quantification of the tuning of hippocampal neurons. The model's generality suggests that our approach can be used to estimate neural response properties in other brain regions.
Structured Sparse Regression via Greedy Hard Thresholding
Authors: Prateek Jain, Nikhil Rao, Inderjit S Dhillon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Several learning applications require solving high-dimensional regression problems where the relevant features belong to a small number of (overlapping) groups. For very large datasets and under standard sparsity constraints, hard thresholding methods have proven to be extremely efficient, but such methods require NP hard projections when dealing with overlapping groups. In this paper, we show that such NP-hard projections can not only be avoided by appealing to submodular optimization, but such methods come with strong theoretical guarantees even in the presence of poorly conditioned data (i.e. say when two features have correlation  $\geq 0.99$), which existing analyses cannot handle. These methods exhibit an interesting computation-accuracy trade-off and can be extended to significantly harder problems such as sparse overlapping groups. Experiments on both real and synthetic data validate our claims and demonstrate that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster than other greedy and convex relaxation techniques for learning with group-structured sparsity.
A Multi-Batch L-BFGS Method for Machine Learning
Authors: Albert S Berahas, Jorge Nocedal, Martin Takac
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The question of how to parallelize the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus instead on batch methods that use a sizeable fraction of the training set at each iteration to facilitate parallelism, and that employ second-order information. In order to improve the learning process, we follow a multi-batch approach in which the batch changes at each iteration. This can cause difficulties because L-BFGS employs gradient differences to update the Hessian approximations, and when these gradients are computed using different data points the process can be unstable. This paper shows how to perform stable quasi-Newton updating in the multi-batch setting, illustrates the behavior of the algorithm in a distributed computing platform, and studies its convergence properties for both the convex and nonconvex cases.
Cooperative Graphical Models
Authors: Josip Djolonga, Stefanie Jegelka, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Andreas Krause
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We study a rich family of distributions that capture variable interactions significantly more expressive than those representable with low-treewidth or pairwise graphical models, or log-supermodular models. We call these cooperative graphical models. Yet, this family retains structure, which we carefully exploit for efficient inference techniques. Our algorithms combine the polyhedral structure of submodular functions in new ways with variational inference methods to obtain both lower and upper bounds on the partition function. While our fully convex upper bound is minimized as an SDP or via tree-reweighted belief propagation, our lower bound is tightened via belief propagation or mean-field algorithms. The resulting algorithms are easy to implement and, as our experiments show, effectively obtain good bounds and marginals for synthetic and real-world examples.
What Makes Objects Similar: A Unified Multi-Metric Learning Approach
Authors: Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Xue-Min Si, Yuan Jiang, Zhi-Hua Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Linkages are essentially determined by similarity measures that may be derived from multiple perspectives. For example, spatial linkages are usually generated based on localities of heterogeneous data, whereas semantic linkages can come from various properties, such as different physical meanings behind social relations. Many existing metric learning models focus on spatial linkages, but leave the rich semantic factors unconsidered. Similarities based on these models are usually overdetermined on linkages. We propose a Unified Multi-Metric Learning (UM2L) framework to exploit multiple types of metrics. In UM2L, a type of combination operator is introduced for distance characterization from multiple perspectives, and thus can introduce flexibilities for representing and utilizing both spatial and semantic linkages. Besides, we propose a uniform solver for UM2L which is guaranteed to converge. Extensive experiments on diverse applications exhibit the superior classification performance and comprehensibility of UM2L. Visualization results also validate its ability on physical meanings discovery.
Matching Networks for One Shot Learning
Authors: Oriol Vinyals, Charles Blundell, Timothy Lillicrap, koray kavukcuoglu, Daan Wierstra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 82.2% to 87.8% and from 88% accuracy to 95% accuracy on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.
Accelerating Stochastic Composition Optimization
Authors: Mengdi Wang, Ji Liu, Ethan Fang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Consider the stochastic composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We propose a new stochastic first-order method, namely the accelerated stochastic compositional proximal gradient (ASC-PG) method, which updates based on queries to the sampling oracle using two different timescales. The ASC-PG is the first proximal gradient method for the stochastic composition problem that can deal with nonsmooth regularization penalty. We show that the ASC-PG exhibits faster convergence than the best known algorithms, and that it achieves the optimal sample-error complexity in several important special cases. We further demonstrate the application of ASC-PG to reinforcement learning  and conduct numerical experiments.
Variational Inference in Mixed Probabilistic Submodular Models
Authors: Josip Djolonga, Sebastian Tschiatschek, Andreas Krause
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We consider the problem of variational inference in probabilistic models with both log-submodular and log-supermodular higher-order potentials. These models can represent arbitrary distributions over binary variables, and thus generalize the commonly used pairwise Markov random fields and models with log-supermodular potentials only, for which efficient approximate inference algorithms are known. While inference in the considered models is #P-hard in general, we present efficient approximate algorithms exploiting recent advances in the field of discrete optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a large set of experiments, where our model allows reasoning about preferences over sets of items with complements and substitutes.
The Limits of Learning with Missing Data
Authors: Brian Bullins, Elad Hazan, Tomer Koren
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We study regression and classification in a setting where the learning algorithm is allowed to access only a limited number of attributes per example, known as the limited attribute observation model. In this well-studied model, we provide the first lower bounds giving a limit on the precision attainable by any algorithm for several variants of regression, notably linear regression with the absolute loss and the squared loss, as well as for classification with the hinge loss. We complement these lower bounds with a general purpose algorithm that gives an upper bound on the achievable precision limit in the setting of learning with missing data.
Clustering with Same-Cluster Queries
Authors: Hassan Ashtiani, Shrinu Kushagra, Shai Ben-David
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We propose a framework for Semi-Supervised Active Clustering framework (SSAC), where the learner is allowed to interact with a domain expert, asking whether two given instances belong to the same cluster or not. We study the query and computational complexity of clustering in this framework. We consider a setting where the expert conforms to a center-based clustering with a notion of margin.  We show that there is a trade off between computational complexity and query complexity; We prove that for the case of $k$-means clustering (i.e., when the expert conforms to a solution of $k$-means), having access to relatively few such queries allows efficient solutions to otherwise NP hard problems.  In particular, we provide a probabilistic polynomial-time (BPP) algorithm  for clustering in this setting that asks $O\big(k^2\log k + k\log n)$ same-cluster queries and runs with time complexity $O\big(kn\log n)$ (where $k$ is the number of clusters and $n$ is the number of instances). The success of the algorithm is guaranteed for data satisfying the margin condition under which, without queries, we show that the problem is NP hard. We also prove a lower bound on the number of queries needed to have a computationally efficient clustering algorithm in this setting.
Deconvolving Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems
Authors: Ayan Sinha, David F Gleich, Karthik Ramani
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Collaborative filtering is a popular technique to infer users' preferences on new content based on the collective information of all users preferences. Recommender systems then use this information to make personalized suggestions to users. When users accept these recommendations it creates a feedback loop in the recommender system, and these loops iteratively influence the collaborative filtering algorithm's predictions over time. We investigate whether it is possible to identify items affected by these feedback loops. We state sufficient assumptions to deconvolve the feedback loops while keeping the inverse solution tractable. We furthermore develop a metric to unravel the recommender system's influence on the entire user-item rating matrix. We use this metric on synthetic and real-world datasets to (1) identify the extent to which the recommender system affects the final rating matrix, (2) rank frequently recommended items, and (3) distinguish whether a user's rated item was recommended or an intrinsic preference. Our results indicate that it is possible to recover the ratings matrix of intrinsic user preferences using a single snapshot of the ratings matrix without any temporal information.
Recovery Guarantee of Non-negative Matrix Factorization  via Alternating Updates
Authors: Yuanzhi Li, Yingyu Liang, Andrej Risteski
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Non-negative matrix factorization is a popular tool for  decomposing data into feature and weight matrices under non-negativity constraints. It enjoys practical success but is poorly understood theoretically. This paper proposes an algorithm that alternates between decoding the weights and updating the features, and shows that assuming a generative model of the data, it provably recovers the ground-truth under fairly mild conditions. In particular, its only essential requirement on features is linear independence. Furthermore, the algorithm uses ReLU to exploit the non-negativity for decoding the weights, and thus can tolerate adversarial noise that can potentially be as large as the signal, and can tolerate unbiased noise much larger than the signal. The analysis relies on a carefully designed coupling between two potential functions, which we believe is of independent interest.
Joint M-Best-Diverse Labelings as a Parametric Submodular Minimization
Authors: Alexander Kirillov, Alexander Shekhovtsov, Carsten Rother, Bogdan Savchynskyy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We consider the problem of jointly inferring the $M$-best diverse labelings for a binary (high-order) submodular energy of a graphical model. Recently, it was shown that this problem can be solved to a global optimum, for many practically interesting diversity measures. It was noted that the labelings are, so-called, nested.  This nestedness property also holds for labelings of a class of parametric submodular minimization problems, where different values of the global parameter $\gamma$ give rise to different solutions. The popular example of the parametric submodular minimization is the monotonic parametric max-flow problem, which is also widely used for computing multiple labelings.  As the main contribution of this work we establish a close relationship between diversity with submodular energies and the parametric submodular minimization. In particular, the joint $M$-best diverse labelings can be obtained by running a non-parametric submodular minimization (in the special case - max-flow) solver for $M$ different values of $\gamma$ in parallel, for certain diversity measures. Importantly, the values for~$\gamma$ can be computed in a closed form in advance, prior to any optimization. These theoretical results suggest two simple yet efficient algorithms for the joint $M$-best diverse problem, which outperform competitors in terms of runtime and quality of results. In particular, as we show in the paper, the new methods compute the exact $M$-best diverse labelings faster than a popular method of Batra et al., which in some sense only obtains approximate solutions.
Confusions over Time: An Interpretable Bayesian Model to Characterize Trends in Decision Making
Authors: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We propose Confusions over Time (CoT), a novel generative framework which facilitates a multi-granular analysis of the decision making process. The CoT not only models the confusions or error properties of individual decision makers and their evolution over time, but also allows us to obtain diagnostic insights into the collective decision making process in an interpretable manner. To this end, the CoT models the confusions of the decision makers and their evolution over time via time-dependent confusion matrices. Interpretable insights are obtained by grouping similar decision makers (and items being judged) into clusters and representing each such cluster with an appropriate prototype and identifying the most important features characterizing the cluster via a subspace feature indicator vector. Experimentation with real world data on bail decisions, asthma treatments, and insurance policy approval decisions demonstrates that CoT can accurately model and explain the confusions of decision makers and their evolution over time.
Measuring Neural Net Robustness with Constraints
Authors: Osbert Bastani, Yani Ioannou, Leonidas Lampropoulos, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Aditya Nori, Antonio Criminisi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29  (NIPS 2016) (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Despite having high accuracy, neural nets have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial examples, where a small perturbation to an input can cause it to become mislabeled. We propose metrics for measuring the robustness of a neural net and devise a novel algorithm for approximating these metrics based on an encoding of robustness as a linear program. We show how our metrics can be used to evaluate the robustness of deep neural nets with experiments on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Our algorithm generates more informative estimates of robustness metrics compared to estimates based on existing algorithms. Furthermore, we show how existing approaches to improving robustness “overfit” to adversarial examples generated using a specific algorithm. Finally, we show that our techniques can be used to additionally improve neural net robustness both according to the metrics that we propose, but also according to previously proposed metrics.