mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Efficient Optimization for Sparse Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Yanshuai Cao, Marcus A Brubaker, David J Fleet, Aaron Hertzmann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose an efficient discrete optimization algorithm for selecting a subset of training data to induce sparsity for Gaussian process regression. The algorithm estimates this inducing set and the hyperparameters using a single objective, either the marginal likelihood or a variational free energy. The space and time complexity are linear in the training set size, and the algorithm can be applied to large regression problems on discrete or continuous domains. Empirical evaluation shows state-of-art performance in the discrete case and competitive results in the continuous case.
Robust learning of low-dimensional dynamics from large neural ensembles
Authors: David Pfau, Eftychios A Pnevmatikakis, Liam Paninski
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recordings from large populations of neurons make it possible to search for hypothesized low-dimensional dynamics. Finding these dynamics requires models that take into account biophysical constraints and can be fit efficiently and robustly. Here, we present an approach to dimensionality reduction for neural data that is convex, does not make strong assumptions about dynamics, does not require averaging over many trials and is extensible to more complex statistical models that combine local and global influences. The results can be combined with spectral methods to learn dynamical systems models. The basic method can be seen as an extension of PCA to the exponential family using nuclear norm minimization. We evaluate the effectiveness of this method using an exact decomposition of the Bregman divergence that is analogous to variance explained for PCA. We show on model data that the parameters of latent linear dynamical systems can be recovered, and that even if the dynamics are not stationary we can still recover the true latent subspace. We also demonstrate an extension of nuclear norm minimization that can separate sparse local connections from global latent dynamics. Finally, we demonstrate improved prediction on real neural data from monkey motor cortex compared to fitting linear dynamical models without nuclear norm smoothing.
Causal Inference on Time Series using Restricted Structural Equation Models
Authors: Jonas Peters, Dominik Janzing, Bernhard Schölkopf
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Causal inference uses observational data to infer the causal structure of the data generating system. We study a class of restricted Structural Equation Models for time series that we call Time Series Models with Independent Noise (TiMINo). These models require independent residual time series, whereas traditional methods like Granger causality exploit the variance of residuals. This work contains two main contributions: (1) Theoretical: By restricting the model class (e.g. to additive noise) we provide more general identifiability results than existing ones. The results cover lagged and instantaneous effects that can be nonlinear and unfaithful, and non-instantaneous feedbacks between the time series. (2) Practical: If there are no feedback loops between time series, we propose an algorithm based on non-linear independence tests of time series. When the data are causally insufficient, or the data generating process does not satisfy the model assumptions, this algorithm may still give partial results, but mostly avoids incorrect answers. The Structural Equation Model point of view allows us to extend both the theoretical and the algorithmic part to situations in which the time series have been measured with different time delays (as may happen for fMRI data, for example). TiMINo outperforms existing methods on artificial and real data. Code is provided.
Robust Low Rank Kernel Embeddings of Multivariate Distributions
Authors: Le Song, Bo Dai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Kernel embedding of distributions has led to many recent advances in machine learning. However, latent and low rank structures prevalent in real world distributions have rarely been taken into account in this setting. Furthermore, no prior work in kernel embedding literature has addressed the issue of robust embedding when the latent and low rank information are misspecified. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical low rank decomposition of kernels embeddings which can exploit such low rank structures in data while being robust to model misspecification. We also illustrate with empirical evidence that the estimated low rank embeddings lead to improved performance in density estimation.
Learning the Local Statistics of Optical Flow
Authors: Dan Rosenbaum, Daniel Zoran, Yair Weiss
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Motivated by recent progress in natural image statistics, we use newly available datasets with ground truth optical flow to learn the  local statistics of optical flow and rigorously compare the learned model to prior models assumed by computer vision optical flow algorithms.  We find that a Gaussian mixture model with 64 components provides a significantly better model for local flow statistics when compared to commonly used models. We investigate the source of the GMMs success and show it is related to an explicit representation of flow boundaries. We also learn a model that jointly models the local intensity pattern and the local optical flow. In accordance with the assumptions often made in computer vision, the model learns that flow boundaries are more likely at intensity boundaries. However, when evaluated on a large dataset, this dependency is very weak and the benefit of conditioning flow estimation on the local intensity pattern is marginal.
Fast Algorithms for Gaussian Noise Invariant Independent Component Analysis
Authors: James R Voss, Luis Rademacher, Mikhail Belkin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The performance of standard algorithms for Independent Component Analysis quickly deteriorates under the addition of Gaussian noise. This is partially due to a common first step that typically consists of whitening, i.e., applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and rescaling the components to have identity covariance, which is not invariant under Gaussian noise.   In our paper we develop the first practical algorithm for Independent Component Analysis that is provably invariant under Gaussian noise. The two main contributions of this work are as follows: 1. We develop and implement a more efficient version of a Gaussian noise invariant decorrelation (quasi-orthogonalization) algorithm using Hessians of the cumulant functions. 2. We propose a very simple and efficient fixed-point GI-ICA (Gradient Iteration ICA) algorithm, which is compatible with quasi-orthogonalization, as well as with the usual PCA-based whitening in the noiseless case.  The algorithm is based on a special form of gradient iteration (different from gradient descent).   We provide an analysis of our algorithm demonstrating fast convergence following from the basic properties of cumulants. We also present a number of experimental comparisons with the existing methods, showing superior results on noisy data and very competitive performance in the noiseless case.
Online Learning in Markov Decision Processes with Adversarially Chosen Transition Probability Distributions
Authors: Yasin Abbasi Yadkori, Peter L Bartlett, Varun Kanade, Yevgeny Seldin, Csaba Szepesvari
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study the problem of online learning Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when both the transition distributions and loss functions are chosen by an adversary. We present an algorithm that, under a mixing assumption, achieves $O(\sqrt{T\log|\Pi|}+\log|\Pi|)$ regret with respect to a comparison set of policies $\Pi$.  The regret is independent of the size of the state and action spaces. When expectations over sample paths can be computed efficiently and the comparison set $\Pi$ has polynomial size, this algorithm is efficient.  We also consider the episodic adversarial online shortest path problem.  Here, in each episode an adversary may choose a weighted directed acyclic graph with an identified start and finish node. The goal of the learning algorithm is to choose a path that minimizes the loss while traversing from the start to finish node. At the end of each episode the loss function (given by weights on the edges) is revealed to the learning algorithm. The goal is to minimize regret with respect to a fixed policy for selecting paths. This problem is a special case of the online MDP problem. For randomly chosen graphs and adversarial losses, this problem can be efficiently solved. We show that it also can be efficiently solved for adversarial graphs and randomly chosen losses.  When both graphs and losses are adversarially chosen, we present an efficient algorithm whose regret scales linearly with the number of distinct graphs.  Finally, we show that designing efficient algorithms for the adversarial online shortest path problem (and hence for the adversarial MDP problem) is as hard as learning parity with noise, a notoriously difficult problem that has been used to design efficient cryptographic schemes.
Approximate Inference in Continuous Determinantal Processes
Authors: Raja Hafiz Affandi, Emily B. Fox, Ben Taskar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are random point processes well-suited for modeling repulsion. In machine learning, the focus of DPP-based models has been on diverse subset selection from a discrete and finite base set. This discrete setting admits an efficient algorithm for sampling based on the eigendecomposition of the defining kernel matrix. Recently, there has been growing interest in using DPPs defined on continuous spaces. While the discrete-DPP sampler extends formally to the continuous case, computationally, the steps required cannot be directly extended except in a few restricted cases. In this paper, we present efficient approximate DPP sampling schemes based on Nystrom and random Fourier feature approximations that apply to a wide range of kernel functions. We demonstrate the utility of continuous DPPs in repulsive mixture modeling applications and synthesizing human poses spanning activity spaces.
Streaming Variational Bayes
Authors: Tamara Broderick, Nicholas Boyd, Andre Wibisono, Ashia C Wilson, Michael I Jordan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present SDA-Bayes, a framework for (S)treaming, (D)istributed, (A)synchronous computation of a Bayesian posterior. The framework makes streaming updates to the estimated posterior according to a user-specified approximation primitive function.  We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework, with variational Bayes (VB) as the primitive, by fitting the latent Dirichlet allocation model to two large-scale document collections.  We demonstrate the advantages of our algorithm over stochastic variational inference (SVI), both in the single-pass setting SVI was designed for and in the streaming setting, to which SVI does not apply.
One-shot learning by inverting a compositional causal process
Authors: Brenden M Lake, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Josh Tenenbaum
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: People can learn a new visual class from just one example, yet machine learning algorithms typically require hundreds or thousands of examples to tackle the same problems. Here we present a Hierarchical Bayesian model based on compositionality and causality that can learn a wide range of natural (although simple) visual concepts, generalizing in human-like ways from just one image. We evaluated performance on a challenging one-shot classification task, where our model achieved a human-level error rate while substantially outperforming two deep learning models. We also used a visual Turing test" to show that our model produces human-like performance on other conceptual tasks, including generating new examples and parsing."
Large Scale Distributed Sparse Precision Estimation
Authors: Huahua Wang, Arindam Banerjee, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Pradeep K Ravikumar, Inderjit S Dhillon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We consider the problem of sparse precision matrix estimation in high dimensions using the CLIME estimator, which has several desirable theoretical properties. We present an inexact alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) algorithm for CLIME, and establish rates of convergence for both the objective and optimality conditions. Further, we develop a large scale distributed framework for the computations, which scales to millions of dimensions and trillions of parameters, using hundreds of cores. The proposed framework solves CLIME in column-blocks and only involves elementwise operations and parallel matrix multiplications.  We evaluate our algorithm on both shared-memory and distributed-memory architectures, which can use block cyclic distribution of data and parameters to achieve load balance and improve the efficiency in the use of memory hierarchies. Experimental results show that our algorithm is substantially more scalable than state-of-the-art methods and scales almost linearly with the number of cores.
Online Variational Approximations to non-Exponential Family Change Point Models: With Application to Radar Tracking
Authors: Ryan D Turner, Steven Bottone, Clay J Stanek
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The Bayesian online change point detection (BOCPD) algorithm provides an efficient way to do exact inference when the parameters of an underlying model may suddenly change over time. BOCPD requires computation of the underlying model's posterior predictives, which can only be computed online in $O(1)$ time and memory for exponential family models. We develop variational approximations to the posterior on change point times (formulated as run lengths) for efficient inference when the underlying model is not in the exponential family, and does not have tractable posterior predictive distributions. In doing so, we develop improvements to online variational inference. We apply our methodology to a tracking problem using radar data with a signal-to-noise feature that is Rice distributed. We also develop a variational method for inferring the parameters of the (non-exponential family) Rice distribution.
RNADE: The real-valued neural autoregressive density-estimator
Authors: Benigno Uria, Iain Murray, Hugo Larochelle
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We introduce RNADE, a new model for joint density estimation of real-valued vectors. Our model calculates the density of a datapoint as the product of one-dimensional conditionals modeled using mixture density networks with shared parameters. RNADE learns a distributed representation of the data, while having a tractable expression for the calculation of densities. A tractable likelihood allows direct comparison with other methods and training by standard gradient-based optimizers. We compare the performance of RNADE on several datasets of heterogeneous and perceptual data, finding it outperforms mixture models in all but one case.
Estimating the Unseen: Improved Estimators for Entropy and other Properties
Authors: Paul Valiant, Gregory Valiant
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recently, [Valiant and Valiant] showed that a class of distributional properties, which includes such practically relevant properties as entropy, the number of distinct elements, and distance metrics between pairs of distributions, can be estimated given a SUBLINEAR sized sample.  Specifically, given a sample consisting of independent draws from any distribution over at most n distinct elements, these properties can be estimated accurately using a sample of size O(n / log n).  We propose a novel modification of this approach and show: 1) theoretically, our estimator is optimal (to constant factors, over worst-case instances), and 2) in practice, it performs exceptionally well for a variety of estimation tasks, on a variety of natural distributions, for a wide range of parameters.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the key step in this approach is to first use the sample to characterize the unseen" portion of the distribution.  This goes beyond such tools as the Good-Turing frequency estimation scheme, which estimates the total probability mass of the unobserved portion of the distribution: we seek to estimate the "shape"of the unobserved portion of the distribution.  This approach is robust, general, and theoretically principled;  we expect that it may be fruitfully used as a component within larger machine learning and data analysis systems. "
Dynamic Clustering via Asymptotics of the Dependent Dirichlet Process Mixture
Authors: Trevor Campbell, Miao Liu, Brian Kulis, Jonathan P How, Lawrence Carin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm, based upon the dependent Dirichlet process mixture model (DDPMM), for clustering batch-sequential data containing an unknown number of evolving clusters. The algorithm is derived via a low-variance asymptotic analysis of the Gibbs sampling algorithm for the DDPMM, and provides a hard clustering with convergence guarantees similar to those of the k-means algorithm. Empirical results from a synthetic test with moving Gaussian clusters and a test with real ADS-B aircraft trajectory data demonstrate that the algorithm requires orders of magnitude less computational time than contemporary probabilistic and hard clustering algorithms, while providing higher accuracy on the examined datasets.
Parametric Task Learning
Authors: Ichiro Takeuchi, Tatsuya Hongo, Masashi Sugiyama, Shinichi Nakajima
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We introduce a novel formulation of multi-task learning (MTL) called parametric task learning (PTL) that can systematically handle infinitely many tasks parameterized by a continuous parameter. Our key finding is that, for a certain class of PTL problems, the path of optimal task-wise solutions can be represented as piecewise-linear functions of the continuous task parameter. Based on this fact, we employ a parametric programming technique to obtain the common shared representation across all the continuously parameterized tasks efficiently. We show that our PTL formulation is useful in various scenarios such as learning under non-stationarity, cost-sensitive learning, and quantile regression, and demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method experimentally in these scenarios.
Generalized Denoising Auto-Encoders as Generative Models
Authors: Yoshua Bengio, Li Yao, Guillaume Alain, Pascal Vincent
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recent work has shown how denoising and contractive autoencoders implicitly capture the structure of the data generating density, in the case where the corruption noise is Gaussian, the reconstruction error is the squared error, and the data is continuous-valued. This has led to various proposals for sampling from this implicitly learned density function, using Langevin and Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. However, it remained unclear how to connect the training procedure of regularized auto-encoders to the implicit estimation of the underlying data generating distribution when the data are discrete, or using other forms of corruption process and reconstruction errors. Another issue is the mathematical justification which is only valid in the limit of small corruption noise.  We propose here a different attack on the problem, which deals with all these issues: arbitrary (but noisy enough) corruption, arbitrary reconstruction loss (seen as a log-likelihood), handling both discrete and continuous-valued variables, and removing the bias due to non-infinitesimal corruption noise (or non-infinitesimal contractive penalty).
Local Privacy and Minimax Bounds: Sharp Rates for Probability Estimation
Authors: John Duchi, Martin J. Wainwright, Michael I Jordan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We provide a detailed study of the estimation of probability distributions---discrete and continuous---in a stringent setting in which data is kept private even from the statistician.  We give sharp minimax rates of convergence for estimation in these locally private settings, exhibiting fundamental tradeoffs between privacy and convergence rate, as well as providing tools to allow movement along the privacy-statistical efficiency continuum. One of the consequences of our results is that Warner's classical work on randomized response is an optimal way to perform survey sampling while maintaining privacy of the respondents.
Reward Mapping for Transfer in Long-Lived Agents
Authors: Xiaoxiao Guo, Satinder Singh, Richard L. Lewis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We consider how to transfer knowledge from previous tasks to a current task in long-lived and bounded agents that must solve a sequence of MDPs over a finite lifetime.  A novel aspect of our transfer approach is that we reuse reward functions.   While this may seem counterintuitive, we build on the insight of recent work on the optimal rewards problem that guiding an agent's behavior with reward functions other than the task-specifying reward function can help overcome computational  bounds of  the agent.    Specifically, we use good guidance reward functions learned on previous tasks in the sequence to incrementally train a reward mapping function that maps task-specifying reward functions into good initial guidance reward functions for subsequent tasks. We demonstrate that our approach can substantially improve the agent's performance relative to other approaches, including an approach that transfers policies.
Distributed Exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors: Eshcar Hillel, Zohar S Karnin, Tomer Koren, Ronny Lempel, Oren Somekh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study exploration in Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) in a setting where~$k$ players collaborate in order to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal arm. Our motivation comes from recent employment of MAB algorithms in computationally intensive, large-scale applications. Our results demonstrate a non-trivial tradeoff between the number of arm pulls required by each of the players, and the amount of communication between them. In particular, our main result shows that by allowing the $k$ players to communicate \emph{only once}, they are able to learn $\sqrt{k}$ times faster than a single player. That is, distributing learning to $k$ players gives rise to a factor~$\sqrt{k}$ parallel speed-up. We complement this result with a lower bound showing this is in general the best possible.  On the other extreme, we present an algorithm that achieves the ideal factor $k$ speed-up in learning performance, with communication only logarithmic in~$1/\epsilon$.
It is all in the noise: Efficient multi-task Gaussian process inference with structured residuals
Authors: Barbara Rakitsch, Christoph Lippert, Karsten Borgwardt, Oliver Stegle
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Multi-task prediction models are widely being used to couple regressors or classification models by sharing information across related tasks. A common pitfall of these models is that they assume that the output tasks are independent conditioned on the inputs. Here, we propose a multi-task Gaussian process approach to model both the relatedness between regressors as well as the task correlations in the residuals, in order to more accurately identify true sharing between regressors. The resulting Gaussian model has a covariance term that is the sum of Kronecker products, for which efficient parameter inference and out of sample prediction are feasible. On both synthetic examples and applications to phenotype prediction in genetics, we find substantial benefits of modeling structured noise compared to established alternatives.
Projecting Ising Model Parameters for Fast Mixing
Authors: Justin Domke, Xianghang Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Inference in general Ising models is difficult, due to high treewidth making tree-based algorithms intractable. Moreover, when interactions are strong, Gibbs sampling may take exponential time to converge to the stationary distribution. We present an algorithm to project Ising model parameters onto a parameter set that is guaranteed to be fast mixing, under several divergences. We find that Gibbs sampling using the projected parameters is more accurate than with the original parameters when interaction strengths are strong and when limited time is available for sampling.
Low-rank matrix reconstruction and clustering via approximate message passing
Authors: Ryosuke Matsushita, Toshiyuki Tanaka
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study the problem of reconstructing low-rank matrices from their noisy observations. We formulate the problem in the Bayesian framework, which allows us to exploit structural properties of matrices in addition to low-rankedness, such as sparsity. We propose an efficient approximate message passing algorithm, derived from the belief propagation algorithm, to perform the Bayesian inference for matrix reconstruction. We have also successfully applied the proposed algorithm to a clustering problem, by formulating the problem of clustering as a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem with an additional structural property. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms Lloyd's K-means algorithm.
Inverse Density as an Inverse Problem: the Fredholm Equation Approach
Authors: Qichao Que, Mikhail Belkin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating the ratio $\frac{q}{p}$ where $p$ is a density function and $q$ is another density, or, more generally an arbitrary function.  Knowing or approximating this ratio is needed in various problems of inference and integration, in particular, when one needs to average a function with respect to one probability distribution, given a sample from another. It is often referred as {\it importance sampling} in statistical inference and is  also closely related to the problem of {\it covariate shift} in transfer learning as well as to various MCMC methods. Our approach is based on reformulating the problem of estimating the ratio as an inverse problem in terms of an integral operator corresponding to a kernel, and thus reducing it to an integral equation, known as the Fredholm problem of the first kind.   This formulation, combined with the techniques of regularization and kernel methods, leads to a principled kernel-based framework for constructing algorithms and for analyzing them theoretically.  The resulting family of algorithms (FIRE, for Fredholm Inverse Regularized Estimator) is flexible,  simple and  easy to implement. We provide detailed theoretical analysis including concentration bounds and convergence rates for the Gaussian kernel for densities defined on $\R^d$ and smooth $d$-dimensional sub-manifolds of the Euclidean space. Model selection for unsupervised or semi-supervised inference is generally a difficult problem. Interestingly, it turns out that in the density ratio estimation setting, when samples from both distributions are available, there are simple completely unsupervised methods for choosing parameters. We  call this model selection mechanism CD-CV for Cross-Density Cross-Validation. Finally, we show encouraging experimental results including applications to classification  within the covariate shift framework.
Modeling Overlapping Communities with Node Popularities
Authors: Prem Gopalan, Chong Wang, David Blei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We develop a probabilistic approach for accurate network modeling using node popularities within the framework of the mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel (MMSB). Our model integrates some of the basic properties of nodes in social networks: homophily and preferential connection to popular nodes. We develop a scalable algorithm for posterior inference, based on a novel nonconjugate variant of stochastic variational inference. We evaluate the link prediction accuracy of our algorithm on eight real-world networks with up to 60,000 nodes, and 24 benchmark networks. We demonstrate that our algorithm predicts better than the MMSB. Further, using benchmark networks we show that node popularities are essential to achieving high accuracy in the presence of skewed degree distribution and noisy links---both characteristics of real networks.
Reflection methods for user-friendly submodular optimization
Authors: Stefanie Jegelka, Francis Bach, Suvrit Sra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. In consequence, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular functions, in particular for minimization problems. While general submodular minimization is challenging, we propose a new approach that exploits existing decomposability of submodular functions. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is neither approximate, nor impractical, nor does it need any cumbersome parameter tuning. Moreover, it is easy to implement and parallelize. A key component of our approach is a formulation of the discrete submodular minimization problem as a continuous best approximation problem. It is solved through a sequence of reflections and its solution can be  automatically thresholded to obtain an optimal discrete solution. Our method solves both the continuous and discrete formulations of the problem, and therefore has applications in learning, inference, and reconstruction. In our experiments, we show the benefits of our new algorithms for two image segmentation tasks.
Compressive Feature Learning
Authors: Hristo S Paskov, Robert West, John C Mitchell, Trevor Hastie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of unsupervised feature learning for text data. Our method is grounded in the principle of minimum description length and uses a dictionary-based compression scheme to extract a succinct feature set. Specifically, our method finds a set of word $k$-grams that minimizes the cost of reconstructing the text losslessly. We formulate document compression as a binary optimization task and show how to solve it approximately via a sequence of reweighted linear programs that are efficient to solve and parallelizable. As our method is unsupervised, features may be extracted once and subsequently used in a variety of tasks. We demonstrate the performance of these features over a range of scenarios including unsupervised exploratory analysis and supervised text categorization. Our compressed feature space is two orders of magnitude smaller than the full $k$-gram space and matches the text categorization accuracy achieved in the full feature space. This dimensionality reduction not only results in faster training times, but it can also help elucidate structure in unsupervised learning tasks and reduce the amount of training data necessary for supervised learning.
Sparse nonnegative deconvolution for compressive calcium imaging: algorithms and phase transitions
Authors: Eftychios A Pnevmatikakis, Liam Paninski
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a compressed sensing (CS) calcium imaging framework for monitoring large neuronal populations, where we image randomized projections of the spatial calcium concentration at each timestep, instead of measuring the concentration at individual locations. We develop scalable nonnegative deconvolution methods for extracting the neuronal spike time series from such observations. We also address the problem of demixing the spatial locations of the neurons using rank-penalized matrix factorization methods. By exploiting the sparsity of neural spiking we demonstrate that the number of measurements needed per timestep is significantly smaller than the total number of neurons, a result that can potentially enable imaging of larger populations at considerably faster rates compared to traditional raster-scanning techniques. Unlike traditional CS setups, our problem involves a block-diagonal sensing matrix and a non-orthogonal sparse basis that spans multiple timesteps. We study the effect of these distinctive features in a noiseless setup using recent results relating conic geometry to CS. We provide tight approximations to the number of measurements needed for perfect deconvolution for certain classes of spiking processes, and show that this number displays a phase transition," similar to phenomena observed in more standard CS settings; however, in this case the required measurement rate depends not just on the mean sparsity level but also on other details of the underlying spiking process."
Probabilistic Low-Rank Matrix Completion with Adaptive Spectral Regularization Algorithms
Authors: Adrien Todeschini, François Caron, Marie Chavent
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a novel class of algorithms for low rank matrix completion. Our approach builds on novel penalty functions on the singular values of the low rank matrix. By exploiting a mixture model representation of this penalty, we show that a suitably chosen set of latent variables enables to derive an Expectation-Maximization algorithm to obtain a Maximum A Posteriori estimate of the completed low rank matrix. The resulting algorithm is an iterative soft-thresholded algorithm which iteratively adapts the shrinkage coefficients associated to the singular values. The algorithm is simple to implement and can scale to large matrices. We provide numerical comparisons between our approach and recent alternatives showing the interest of the proposed approach for low rank matrix completion.
Global Solver and Its Efficient Approximation for Variational Bayesian Low-rank Subspace Clustering
Authors: Shinichi Nakajima, Akiko Takeda, S. Derin Babacan, Masashi Sugiyama, Ichiro Takeuchi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: When a probabilistic model and its  prior are given, Bayesian learning offers inference with automatic parameter tuning. However, Bayesian learning is often obstructed by computational difficulty: the rigorous Bayesian learning is  intractable in many models, and its variational Bayesian (VB) approximation is prone to suffer from local minima. In this paper, we overcome this difficulty for low-rank subspace clustering (LRSC) by providing an exact global solver and its efficient approximation. LRSC extracts a low-dimensional structure of data by embedding  samples into the union of low-dimensional subspaces, and its variational Bayesian variant has shown good performance. We first prove a key property that the VB-LRSC model is highly redundant. Thanks to this property, the optimization problem of VB-LRSC can be separated into small subproblems, each of which has only a small number of unknown variables. Our exact global solver relies on another key property that the stationary condition of each subproblem is written as a set of polynomial equations, which is solvable with the homotopy method. For further computational efficiency,  we also propose an efficient approximate variant, of which the stationary condition can be written as a polynomial equation with a single variable. Experimental results show the usefulness of our approach.
Reservoir Boosting : Between Online and Offline Ensemble Learning
Authors: Leonidas Lefakis, François Fleuret
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose to train an ensemble with the help of a reservoir in which the learning algorithm can store a limited number of samples. This novel approach lies in the area between offline and online ensemble approaches and can be seen either as a restriction of the former or an enhancement of the latter.  We identify some basic strategies that can be used to populate this reservoir and present our main contribution, dubbed Greedy Edge Expectation Maximization (GEEM), that maintains the reservoir content in the case of Boosting by viewing the samples through their projections into the weak classifier response space.  We propose an efficient algorithmic implementation which makes it tractable in practice, and demonstrate its efficiency experimentally on several compute-vision data-sets, on which it outperforms both online and offline methods in a memory constrained setting.
Faster Ridge Regression via the Subsampled Randomized Hadamard Transform
Authors: Yichao Lu, Paramveer Dhillon, Dean P. Foster, Lyle Ungar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a fast algorithm for ridge regression when the number of features is much larger than the number of observations ($p \gg n$). The standard way to solve ridge regression in this setting works in the dual space and gives a running time of $O(n^2p)$. Our algorithm (SRHT-DRR) runs in time $O(np\log(n))$ and works by preconditioning the design matrix by a Randomized Walsh-Hadamard Transform with a subsequent subsampling of features. We provide risk bounds for our SRHT-DRR algorithm in the fixed design setting and show experimental results on synthetic and real datasets.
Convex Relaxations for Permutation Problems
Authors: Fajwel Fogel, Rodolphe Jenatton, Francis Bach, Alexandre D'Aspremont
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Seriation seeks to reconstruct a linear order between variables using unsorted similarity information. It has direct applications in archeology and shotgun gene sequencing for example. We prove the equivalence between the seriation and the combinatorial 2-sum problem (a quadratic minimization problem over permutations) over a class of similarity matrices. The seriation problem can be solved exactly by a spectral algorithm in the noiseless case and we produce a convex relaxation for the 2-sum problem to improve the robustness of solutions in a noisy setting.  This relaxation also allows us to impose additional structural constraints on the solution, to solve semi-supervised seriation problems. We present numerical experiments on archeological data, Markov chains and gene sequences.
Online Learning of Dynamic Parameters in Social Networks
Authors: Shahin Shahrampour, Sasha Rakhlin, Ali Jadbabaie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of online learning in a dynamic setting. We consider a social network in which each individual observes a private signal about the underlying state of the world and communicates with her neighbors at each time period. Unlike many existing approaches, the underlying state is dynamic, and evolves according to a geometric random walk. We view the scenario as an optimization problem where agents aim to learn the true state while suffering the smallest possible loss. Based on the decomposition of the global loss function, we introduce two update mechanisms, each of which generates an estimate of the true state. We establish a tight bound on the rate of change of the underlying state, under which individuals can track the parameter with a bounded variance. Then, we characterize explicit expressions for the steady state mean-square deviation(MSD) of the estimates from the truth, per individual. We observe that only one of the estimators recovers the optimal MSD, which underscores the impact of the objective function decomposition on the learning quality. Finally, we provide an upper bound on the regret of the proposed methods, measured as an average of errors in estimating the parameter in a finite time.
Discovering Hidden Variables in Noisy-Or Networks using Quartet Tests
Authors: Yacine Jernite, Yonatan Halpern, David Sontag
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We give a polynomial-time algorithm for provably learning the structure and parameters of bipartite noisy-or Bayesian networks of binary variables where the top layer is completely hidden. Unsupervised learning of these models is a form of discrete factor analysis, enabling the discovery of hidden variables and their causal relationships with observed data. We obtain an efficient learning algorithm for a family of Bayesian networks that we call quartet-learnable, meaning that every latent variable has four children that do not have any other parents in common. We show that the existence of such a quartet allows us to uniquely identify each latent variable and to learn all parameters involving that latent variable. Underlying our algorithm are two new techniques for structure learning: a quartet test to determine whether a set of binary variables are singly coupled, and a conditional mutual information test that we use to learn parameters. We also show how to subtract already learned latent variables from the model to create new singly-coupled quartets, which substantially expands the class of structures that we can learn. Finally, we give a proof of the polynomial sample complexity of our learning algorithm, and experimentally compare it to variational EM.
Gaussian Process Conditional Copulas with Applications to Financial Time Series
Authors: José Miguel Hernández-Lobato, James R Lloyd, Daniel Hernández-Lobato
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The estimation of dependencies between multiple variables is a central problem in the analysis of financial time series. A common approach is to express these dependencies in terms of a copula function. Typically the copula function is assumed to be constant but this may be innacurate when there are covariates that could have a large influence on the dependence structure of the data. To account for this, a Bayesian framework for the estimation of conditional copulas is proposed. In this framework the parameters of a copula are non-linearly related to some arbitrary conditioning variables. We evaluate the ability of our method to predict time-varying dependencies on several equities and currencies and observe consistent performance gains compared to static copula models and other time-varying copula methods.
Non-Uniform Camera Shake Removal Using a Spatially-Adaptive Sparse Penalty
Authors: Haichao Zhang, David Wipf
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Typical blur from camera shake often deviates from the standard uniform convolutional assumption, in part because of problematic rotations which create greater blurring away from some unknown center point.  Consequently, successful blind deconvolution for removing shake artifacts requires the estimation of a spatially-varying or non-uniform blur operator.  Using ideas from Bayesian inference and convex analysis, this paper derives a non-uniform blind deblurring algorithm with several desirable, yet previously-unexplored attributes.  The underlying objective function includes a spatially-adaptive penalty that couples the latent sharp image, non-uniform blur operator, and noise level together.  This coupling allows the penalty to automatically adjust its shape based on the estimated degree of local blur and image structure such that regions with large blur or few prominent edges are discounted.  Remaining regions with modest blur and revealing edges therefore dominate the overall estimation process without explicitly incorporating structure-selection heuristics.  The algorithm can be implemented using an optimization strategy  that is virtually parameter free and simpler than existing methods.  Detailed theoretical analysis and empirical validation on real images serve to validate the proposed method.
Online learning in episodic Markovian decision processes by relative entropy policy search
Authors: Alexander Zimin, Gergely Neu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26  (NIPS 2013) (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study the problem of online learning in finite episodic Markov decision processes where the loss function is allowed to change between episodes. The natural performance measure in this learning problem is the regret defined as the difference between the total loss of the best stationary policy and the total loss suffered by the learner. We assume that the learner is given access to a finite action space $\A$ and the state space $\X$ has a layered structure with $L$ layers, so that state transitions are only possible between consecutive layers. We describe a variant of the recently proposed Relative Entropy Policy Search algorithm and show that its regret after $T$ episodes is $2\sqrt{L\nX\nA T\log(\nX\nA/L)}$ in the bandit setting and $2L\sqrt{T\log(\nX\nA/L)}$ in the full information setting. These guarantees largely improve previously known results under much milder assumptions and cannot be significantly improved under general assumptions.