pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gates
Authors: Tom Minka, John Winn
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

Gates are a new notation for representing mixture models and context-sensitive independence in factor graphs. Factor graphs provide a natural representation for message-passing algorithms, such as expectation propagation. However, message passing in mixture models is not well captured by factor graphs unless the entire mixture is represented by one factor, because the message equations have a containment structure. Gates capture this containment structure graphically, allowing both the independences and the message-passing equations for a model to be readily visualized. Different variational approximations for mixture models can be understood as different ways of drawing the gates in a model. We present general equations for expectation propagation and variational message passing in the presence of gates.
A Scalable Hierarchical Distributed Language Model
Authors: Andriy Mnih, Geoffrey E. Hinton
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

Neural probabilistic language models (NPLMs) have been shown to be competitive with and occasionally superior to the widely-used n-gram language models. The main drawback of NPLMs is their extremely long training and testing times. Morin and Bengio have proposed a hierarchical language model built around a binary tree of words that was two orders of magnitude faster than the non-hierarchical language model it was based on. However, it performed considerably worse than its non-hierarchical counterpart in spite of using a word tree created using expert knowledge. We introduce a fast hierarchical language model along with a simple feature-based algorithm for automatic construction of word trees from the data. We then show that the resulting models can outperform non-hierarchical models and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Bayesian Exponential Family PCA
Authors: Shakir Mohamed, Zoubin Ghahramani, Katherine A. Heller
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Dimensionality Reduction

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has become established as one of the key tools for dimensionality reduction when dealing with real valued data. Approaches such as exponential family PCA and non-negative matrix factorisation have successfully extended PCA to non-Gaussian data types, but these techniques fail to take advantage of Bayesian inference and can suffer from problems of overfitting and poor generalisation. This paper presents a fully probabilistic approach to PCA, which is generalised to the exponential family, based on Hybrid Monte Carlo sampling. We describe the model which is based on a factorisation of the observed data matrix, and show performance of the model on both synthetic and real data.
Rademacher Complexity Bounds for Non-I.I.D. Processes
Authors: Mehryar Mohri, Afshin Rostamizadeh
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Generalization Bounds

This paper presents the first data-dependent generalization bounds for non-i.i.d. settings based on the notion of Rademacher complexity. Our bounds extend to the non-i.i.d. case existing Rademacher complexity bounds derived for the i.i.d. setting. These bounds provide a strict generalization of the ones found in the i.i.d. case, and can also be used within the standard i.i.d. scenario. They apply to the standard scenario of beta-mixing stationary sequences examined in many previous studies of non-i.i.d. settings and benefit form the crucial advantages of Rademacher complexity over other measures of the complexity of hypothesis classes. In particular, they are data-dependent and measure the complexity of a class of hypotheses based on the training sample. The empirical Rademacher complexity can be estimated from finite samples and lead to tighter bounds.
Bounds on marginal probability distributions
Authors: Joris M. Mooij, Hilbert J. Kappen
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis

We propose a novel bound on single-variable marginal probability distributions in factor graphs with discrete variables. The bound is obtained by propagating bounds (convex sets of probability distributions) over a subtree of the factor graph, rooted in the variable of interest. By construction, the method not only bounds the exact marginal probability distribution of a variable, but also its approximate Belief Propagation marginal (``belief''). Thus, apart from providing a practical means to calculate bounds on marginals, our contribution also lies in providing a better understanding of the error made by Belief Propagation. We show that our bound outperforms the state-of-the-art on some inference problems arising in medical diagnosis.
Automatic online tuning for fast Gaussian summation
Authors: Vlad I. Morariu, Balaji V. Srinivasan, Vikas C. Raykar, Ramani Duraiswami, Larry S. Davis
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Many machine learning algorithms require the summation of Gaussian kernel functions, an expensive operation if implemented straightforwardly. Several methods have been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of evaluating such sums, including tree and analysis based methods. These achieve varying speedups depending on the bandwidth, dimension, and prescribed error, making the choice between methods difficult for machine learning tasks. We provide an algorithm that combines tree methods with the Improved Fast Gauss Transform (IFGT). As originally proposed the IFGT suffers from two problems: (1) the Taylor series expansion does not perform well for very low bandwidths, and (2) parameter selection is not trivial and can drastically affect performance and ease of use. We address the first problem by employing a tree data structure, resulting in four evaluation methods whose performance varies based on the distribution of sources and targets and input parameters such as desired accuracy and bandwidth. To solve the second problem, we present an online tuning approach that results in a black box method that automatically chooses the evaluation method and its parameters to yield the best performance for the input data, desired accuracy, and bandwidth. In addition, the new IFGT parameter selection approach allows for tighter error bounds. Our approach chooses the fastest method at negligible additional cost, and has superior performance in comparisons with previous approaches.
Artificial Olfactory Brain for Mixture Identification
Authors: Mehmet K. Muezzinoglu, Alexander Vergara, Ramon Huerta, Thomas Nowotny, Nikolai Rulkov, Henry Abarbanel, Allen Selverston, Mikhail Rabinovich
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

The odor transduction process has a large time constant and is susceptible to various types of noise. Therefore, the olfactory code at the sensor/receptor level is in general a slow and highly variable indicator of the input odor in both natural and artificial situations. Insects overcome this problem by using a neuronal device in their Antennal Lobe (AL), which transforms the identity code of olfactory receptors to a spatio-temporal code. This transformation improves the decision of the Mushroom Bodies (MBs), the subsequent classifier, in both speed and accuracy.Here we propose a rate model based on two intrinsic mechanisms in the insect AL, namely integration and inhibition. Then we present a MB classifier model that resembles the sparse and random structure of insect MB. A local Hebbian learning procedure governs the plasticity in the model. These formulations not only help to understand the signal conditioning and classification methods of insect olfactory systems, but also can be leveraged in synthetic problems. Among them, we consider here the discrimination of odor mixtures from pure odors. We show on a set of records from metal-oxide gas sensors that the cascade of these two new models facilitates fast and accurate discrimination of even highly imbalanced mixtures from pure odors.
Relative Performance Guarantees for Approximate Inference in Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Authors: Indraneel Mukherjee, David M. Blei
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Variational Inference

Hierarchical probabilistic modeling of discrete data has emerged as a powerful tool for text analysis. Posterior inference in such models is intractable, and practitioners rely on approximate posterior inference methods such as variational inference or Gibbs sampling. There has been much research in designing better approximations, but there is yet little theoretical understanding of which of the available techniques are appropriate, and in which data analysis settings. In this paper we provide the beginnings of such understanding. We analyze the improvement that the recently proposed collapsed variational inference (CVB) provides over mean field variational inference (VB) in latent Dirichlet allocation. We prove that the difference in the tightness of the bound on the likelihood of a document decreases as $O(k-1) + \log m /m$, where $k$ is the number of topics in the model and $m$ is the number of words in a document. As a consequence, the advantage of CVB over VB is lost for long documents but increases with the number of topics. We demonstrate empirically that the theory holds, using simulated text data and two text corpora. We provide practical guidelines for choosing an approximation.
Evaluating probabilities under high-dimensional latent variable models
Authors: Iain Murray, Ruslan R. Salakhutdinov
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We present a simple new Monte Carlo algorithm for evaluating probabilities of observations in complex latent variable models, such as Deep Belief Networks. While the method is based on Markov chains, estimates based on short runs are formally unbiased. In expectation, the log probability of a test set will be underestimated, and this could form the basis of a probabilistic bound. The method is much cheaper than gold-standard annealing-based methods and only slightly more expensive than the cheapest Monte Carlo methods. We give examples of the new method substantially improving simple variational bounds at modest extra cost.
Implicit Mixtures of Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Authors: Vinod Nair, Geoffrey E. Hinton
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

We present a mixture model whose components are Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). This possibility has not been considered before because computing the partition function of an RBM is intractable, which appears to make learning a mixture of RBMs intractable as well. Surprisingly, when formulated as a third-order Boltzmann machine, such a mixture model can be learned tractably using contrastive divergence. The energy function of the model captures three-way interactions among visible units, hidden units, and a single hidden multinomial unit that represents the cluster labels. The distinguishing feature of this model is that, unlike other mixture models, the mixing proportions are not explicitly parameterized. Instead, they are defined implicitly via the energy function and depend on all the parameters in the model. We present results for the MNIST and NORB datasets showing that the implicit mixture of RBMs learns clusters that reflect the class structure in the data.
Phase transitions for high-dimensional joint support recovery
Authors: Sahand Negahban, Martin J. Wainwright
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: regression, Transfer Learning, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We consider the following instance of transfer learning: given a pair of regression problems, suppose that the regression coefficients share a partially common support, parameterized by the overlap fraction $\overlap$ between the two supports. This set-up suggests the use of $1, \infty$-regularized linear regression for recovering the support sets of both regression vectors. Our main contribution is to provide a sharp characterization of the sample complexity of this $1,\infty$ relaxation, exactly pinning down the minimal sample size $n$ required for joint support recovery as a function of the model dimension $\pdim$, support size $\spindex$ and overlap $\overlap \in [0,1]$. For measurement matrices drawn from standard Gaussian ensembles, we prove that the joint $1,\infty$-regularized method undergoes a phase transition characterized by order parameter $\orpar(\numobs, \pdim, \spindex, \overlap) = \numobs{(4 - 3 \overlap) s \log(p-(2-\overlap)s)}$. More precisely, the probability of successfully recovering both supports converges to $1$ for scalings such that $\orpar > 1$, and converges to $0$ to scalings for which $\orpar < 1$. An implication of this threshold is that use of $1, \infty$-regularization leads to gains in sample complexity if the overlap parameter is large enough ($\overlap > 2/3$), but performs worse than a naive approach if $\overlap < 2/3$. We illustrate the close agreement between these theoretical predictions, and the actual behavior in simulations. Thus, our results illustrate both the benefits and dangers associated with block-$1,\infty$ regularization in high-dimensional inference.
Hebbian Learning of Bayes Optimal Decisions
Authors: Bernhard Nessler, Michael Pfeiffer, Wolfgang Maass
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Uncertainty is omnipresent when we perceive or interact with our environment, and the Bayesian framework provides computational methods for dealing with it. Mathematical models for Bayesian decision making typically require datastructures that are hard to implement in neural networks. This article shows that even the simplest and experimentally best supported type of synaptic plasticity, Hebbian learning, in combination with a sparse, redundant neural code, can in principle learn to infer optimal Bayesian decisions. We present a concrete Hebbian learning rule operating on log-probability ratios. Modulated by reward-signals, this Hebbian plasticity rule also provides a new perspective for understanding how Bayesian inference could support fast reinforcement learning in the brain. In particular we show that recent experimental results by Yang and Shadlen [1] on reinforcement learning of probabilistic inference in primates can be modeled in this way.
Fitted Q-iteration by Advantage Weighted Regression
Authors: Gerhard Neumann, Jan R. Peters
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: regression

Recently, fitted Q-iteration (FQI) based methods have become more popular due to their increased sample efficiency, a more stable learning process and the higher quality of the resulting policy. However, these methods remain hard to use for continuous action spaces which frequently occur in real-world tasks, e.g., in robotics and other technical applications. The greedy action selection commonly used for the policy improvement step is particularly problematic as it is expensive for continuous actions, can cause an unstable learning process, introduces an optimization bias and results in highly non-smooth policies unsuitable for real-world systems. In this paper, we show that by using a soft-greedy action selection the policy improvement step used in FQI can be simplified to an inexpensive advantage-weighted regression. With this result, we are able to derive a new, computationally efficient FQI algorithm which can even deal with high dimensional action spaces.
Robust Kernel Principal Component Analysis
Authors: Minh H. Nguyen, Fernando Torre
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is a popular generalization of linear PCA that allows non-linear feature extraction. In KPCA, data in the input space is mapped to higher (usually) dimensional feature space where the data can be linearly modeled. The feature space is typically induced implicitly by a kernel function, and linear PCA in the feature space is performed via the kernel trick. However, due to the implicitness of the feature space, some extensions of PCA such as robust PCA cannot be directly generalized to KPCA. This paper presents a technique to overcome this problem, and extends it to a unified framework for treating noise, missing data, and outliers in KPCA. Our method is based on a novel cost function to perform inference in KPCA. Extensive experiments, in both synthetic and real data, show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods.
Local Gaussian Process Regression for Real Time Online Model Learning
Authors: Duy Nguyen-Tuong, Jan R. Peters, Matthias Seeger
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: GPR, Prediction, regression

Learning in real-time applications, e.g., online approximation of the inverse dynamics model for model-based robot control, requires fast online regression techniques. Inspired by local learning, we propose a method to speed up standard Gaussian Process regression (GPR) with local GP models (LGP). The training data is partitioned in local regions, for each an individual GP model is trained. The prediction for a query point is performed by weighted estimation using nearby local models. Unlike other GP approximations, such as mixtures of experts, we use a distance based measure for partitioning of the data and weighted prediction. The proposed method achieves online learning and prediction in real-time. Comparisons with other nonparametric regression methods show that LGP has higher accuracy than LWPR and close to the performance of standard GPR and nu-SVR.
On the Efficient Minimization of Classification Calibrated Surrogates
Authors: Richard Nock, Frank Nielsen
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Bartlett et al (2006) recently proved that a ground condition for convex surrogates, classification calibration, ties up the minimization of the surrogates and classification risks, and left as an important problem the algorithmic questions about the minimization of these surrogates. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which provably minimizes any classification calibrated surrogate strictly convex and differentiable --- a set whose losses span the exponential, logistic and squared losses ---, with boosting-type guaranteed convergence rates under a weak learning assumption. A particular subclass of these surrogates, that we call balanced convex surrogates, has a key rationale that ties it to maximum likelihood estimation, zero-sum games and the set of losses that satisfy some of the most common requirements for losses in supervised learning. We report experiments on more than 50 readily available domains of 11 flavors of the algorithm, that shed light on new surrogates, and the potential of data dependent strategies to tune surrogates.
Multi-resolution Exploration in Continuous Spaces
Authors: Ali Nouri, Michael L. Littman
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The essence of exploration is acting to try to decrease uncertainty. We propose a new methodology for representing uncertainty in continuous-state control problems. Our approach, multi-resolution exploration (MRE), uses a hierarchical mapping to identify regions of the state space that would benefit from additional samples. We demonstrate MRE's broad utility by using it to speed up learning in a prototypical model-based and value-based reinforcement-learning method. Empirical results show that MRE improves upon state-of-the-art exploration approaches.
A general framework for investigating how far the decoding process in the brain can be simplified
Authors: Masafumi Oizumi, Toshiyuki Ishii, Kazuya Ishibashi, Toshihiko Hosoya, Masato Okada
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

``How is information decoded in the brain?'' is one of the most difficult and important questions in neuroscience. Whether neural correlation is important or not in decoding neural activities is of special interest. We have developed a general framework for investigating how far the decoding process in the brain can be simplified. First, we hierarchically construct simplified probabilistic models of neural responses that ignore more than $K$th-order correlations by using a maximum entropy principle. Then, we compute how much information is lost when information is decoded using the simplified models, i.e., ``mismatched decoders''. We introduce an information theoretically correct quantity for evaluating the information obtained by mismatched decoders. We applied our proposed framework to spike data for vertebrate retina. We used 100-ms natural movies as stimuli and computed the information contained in neural activities about these movies. We found that the information loss is negligibly small in population activities of ganglion cells even if all orders of correlation are ignored in decoding. We also found that if we assume stationarity for long durations in the information analysis of dynamically changing stimuli like natural movies, pseudo correlations seem to carry a large portion of the information.
Modeling Short-term Noise Dependence of Spike Counts in Macaque Prefrontal Cortex
Authors: Arno Onken, Steffen Grünewälder, Matthias Munk, Klaus Obermayer
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

Correlations between spike counts are often used to analyze neural coding. The noise is typically assumed to be Gaussian. Yet, this assumption is often inappropriate, especially for low spike counts. In this study, we present copulas as an alternative approach. With copulas it is possible to use arbitrary marginal distributions such as Poisson or negative binomial that are better suited for modeling noise distributions of spike counts. Furthermore, copulas place a wide range of dependence structures at the disposal and can be used to analyze higher order interactions. We develop a framework to analyze spike count data by means of copulas. Methods for parameter inference based on maximum likelihood estimates and for computation of Shannon entropy are provided. We apply the method to our data recorded from macaque prefrontal cortex. The data analysis leads to three significant findings: (1) copula-based distributions provide better fits than discretized multivariate normal distributions; (2) negative binomial margins fit the data better than Poisson margins; and (3) a dependence model that includes only pairwise interactions overestimates the information entropy by at least 19% compared to the model with higher order interactions.
Improving on Expectation Propagation
Authors: Manfred Opper, Ulrich Paquet, Ole Winther
Date: 2008-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2008 12

We develop as series of corrections to Expectation Propagation (EP), which is one of the most popular methods for approximate probabilistic inference. These corrections can lead to improvements of the inference approximation or serve as a sanity check, indicating when EP yields unrealiable results.