We combine Riemannian geometry with the mean field theory of high dimensional chaos to study the nature of signal propagation in deep neural networks with random weights. Our results reveal a phase transition in the expressivity of random deep networks, with networks in the chaotic phase computing nonlinear functions whose global curvature grows exponentially with depth, but not with width. We prove that this generic class of random functions cannot be efficiently computed by any shallow network, going beyond prior work that restricts their analysis to single functions. Moreover, we formally quantify and demonstrate the long conjectured idea that deep networks can disentangle exponentially curved manifolds in input space into flat manifolds in hidden space. Our theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of deep networks is broadly applicable and provides a basis for quantifying previously abstract notions about the geometry of deep functions.

Factorization machines (FMs) are a supervised learning approach that can use second-order feature combinations even when the data is very high-dimensional. Unfortunately, despite increasing interest in FMs, there exists to date no efficient training algorithm for higher-order FMs (HOFMs). In this paper, we present the first generic yet efficient algorithms for training arbitrary-order HOFMs. We also present new variants of HOFMs with shared parameters, which greatly reduce model size and prediction times while maintaining similar accuracy. We demonstrate the proposed approaches on four different link prediction tasks.

A central challenge in neuroscience is understanding how neural system implements computation through its dynamics. We propose a nonlinear time series model aimed at characterizing interpretable dynamics from neural trajectories. Our model assumes low-dimensional continuous dynamics in a finite volume. It incorporates a prior assumption about globally contractional dynamics to avoid overly enthusiastic extrapolation outside of the support of observed trajectories. We show that our model can recover qualitative features of the phase portrait such as attractors, slow points, and bifurcations, while also producing reliable long-term future predictions in a variety of dynamical models and in real neural data.

We study the problem of efficiently estimating the coefficients of generalized linear models (GLMs) in the large-scale setting where the number of observations n is much larger than the number of predictors p, i.e. n p 1. We show that in GLMs with random (not necessarily Gaussian) design, the GLM coefficients are approximately proportional to the corresponding ordinary least squares (OLS) coefficients. Usingthis relation, we design an algorithm that achieves the same accuracy as the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) through iterations that attain up to a cubic convergence rate, and that are cheaper than any batch optimization algorithm by at least a factor of O(p). We provide theoretical guarantees for our algorithm, and analyze the convergence behavior in terms of data dimensions. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our algorithm through extensive numerical studies on large-scale real and synthetic datasets, and show that it achieves the highest performance compared to several other widely used optimization algorithms.

In recent years, structured matrix recovery problems have gained considerable attention for its real world applications, such as recommender systems and computer vision. Much of the existing work has focused on matrices with low-rank structure, and limited progress has been made on matrices with other types of structure. In this paper we present non-asymptotic analysis for estimation of generally structured matrices via the generalized Dantzig selector based on sub-Gaussian measurements. We show that the estimation error can always be succinctly expressed in terms of a few geometric measures such as Gaussian widths of suitable sets associated with the structure of the underlying true matrix. Further, we derive general bounds on these geometric measures for structures characterized by unitarily invariant norms, a large family covering most matrix norms of practical interest. Examples are provided to illustrate the utility of our theoretical development.

We consider log-supermodular models on binary variables, which are probabilistic models with negative log-densities which are submodular. These models provide probabilistic interpretations of common combinatorial optimization tasks such as image segmentation. In this paper, we focus primarily on parameter estimation in the models from known upper-bounds on the intractable log-partition function. We show that the bound based on separable optimization on the base polytope of the submodular function is always inferior to a bound based on ``perturb-and-MAP'' ideas. Then, to learn parameters, given that our approximation of the log-partition function is an expectation (over our own randomization), we use a stochastic subgradient technique to maximize a lower-bound on the log-likelihood. This can also be extended to conditional maximum likelihood. We illustrate our new results in a set of experiments in binary image denoising, where we highlight the flexibility of a probabilistic model to learn with missing data.

We present a framework for efficient inference in structured image models that explicitly reason about objects. We achieve this by performing probabilistic inference using a recurrent neural network that attends to scene elements and processes them one at a time. Crucially, the model itself learns to choose the appropriate number of inference steps. We use this scheme to learn to perform inference in partially specified 2D models (variable-sized variational auto-encoders) and fully specified 3D models (probabilistic renderers). We show that such models learn to identify multiple objects - counting, locating and classifying the elements of a scene - without any supervision, e.g., decomposing 3D images with various numbers of objects in a single forward pass of a neural network at unprecedented speed. We further show that the networks produce accurate inferences when compared to supervised counterparts, and that their structure leads to improved generalization.

Convolutional neural networks have achieved extraordinary results in many computer vision and pattern recognition applications; however, their adoption in the computer graphics and geometry processing communities is limited due to the non-Euclidean structure of their data. In this paper, we propose Anisotropic Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN), a generalization of classical CNNs to non-Euclidean domains, where classical convolutions are replaced by projections over a set of oriented anisotropic diffusion kernels. We use ACNNs to effectively learn intrinsic dense correspondences between deformable shapes, a fundamental problem in geometry processing, arising in a wide variety of applications. We tested ACNNs performance in very challenging settings, achieving state-of-the-art results on some of the most difficult recent correspondence benchmarks.

Practical applications of machine learning often involve successive training iterations with changes to features and training examples. Ideally, changes in the output of any new model should only be improvements (wins) over the previous iteration, but in practice the predictions may change neutrally for many examples, resulting in extra net-zero wins and losses, referred to as unnecessary churn. These changes in the predictions are problematic for usability for some applications, and make it harder and more expensive to measure if a change is statistically significant positive. In this paper, we formulate the problem and present a stabilization operator to regularize a classifier towards a previous classifier. We use a Markov chain Monte Carlo stabilization operator to produce a model with more consistent predictions without adversely affecting accuracy. We investigate the properties of the proposal with theoretical analysis. Experiments on benchmark datasets for different classification algorithms demonstrate the method and the resulting reduction in churn.

Statistical relational models provide compact encodings of probabilistic dependencies in relational domains, but result in highly intractable graphical models. The goal of lifted inference is to carry out probabilistic inference without needing to reason about each individual separately, by instead treating exchangeable, undistinguished objects as a whole. In this paper, we study the domain recursion inference rule, which, despite its central role in early theoretical results on domain-lifted inference, has later been believed redundant. We show that this rule is more powerful than expected, and in fact significantly extends the range of models for which lifted inference runs in time polynomial in the number of individuals in the domain. This includes an open problem called S4, the symmetric transitivity model, and a first-order logic encoding of the birthday paradox. We further identify new classes S2FO2 and S2RU of domain-liftable theories, which respectively subsume FO2 and recursively unary theories, the largest classes of domain-liftable theories known so far, and show that using domain recursion can achieve exponential speedup even in theories that cannot fully be lifted with the existing set of inference rules.