Recent approaches to multi-view learning have shown that factorizing the information into parts that are shared across all views and parts that are private to each view could effectively account for the dependencies and independencies between the different input modalities. Unfortunately, these approaches involve minimizing non-convex objective functions. In this paper, we propose an approach to learning such factorized representations inspired by sparse coding techniques. In particular, we show that structured sparsity allows us to address the multi-view learning problem by alternately solving two convex optimization problems. Furthermore, the resulting factorized latent spaces generalize over existing approaches in that they allow :having latent dimensions shared between any subset of the views instead of between all the views only. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the task of human pose estimation.

We consider the problem of apprenticeship learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is maximizing a utility function that is a linear combination of state-action features. Most IRL algorithms use a simple Monte Carlo estimation to approximate the expected feature counts under the expert's policy. In this paper, we show that the quality of the learned policies is highly sensitive to the error in estimating the feature counts. To reduce this error, we introduce a novel approach for bootstrapping the demonstration by assuming that: (i), the expert is (near-)optimal, and (ii), the dynamics of the system is known. Empirical results on gridworlds and car racing problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.

Sparse methods for supervised learning aim at finding good linear predictors from as few variables as possible, i.e., with small cardinality of their supports. This combinatorial selection problem is often turned into a convex optimization problem by replacing the cardinality function by its convex envelope (tightest convex lower bound), in this case the L1-norm. In this paper, we investigate more general set-functions than the cardinality, that may incorporate prior knowledge or structural constraints which are common in many applications: namely, we show that for nondecreasing submodular set-functions, the corresponding convex envelope can be obtained from its Lovasz extension, a common tool in submodular analysis. This defines a family of polyhedral norms, for which we provide generic algorithmic tools (subgradients and proximal operators) and theoretical results (conditions for support recovery or high-dimensional inference). By selecting specific submodular functions, we can give a new interpretation to known norms, such as those based on rank-statistics or grouped norms with potentially overlapping groups; we also define new norms, in particular ones that can be used as non-factorial priors for supervised learning.

Many time-series such as human movement data consist of a sequence of basic actions, e.g., forehands and backhands in tennis. Automatically extracting and characterizing such actions is an important problem for a variety of different applications. In this paper, we present a probabilistic segmentation approach in which an observed time-series is modeled as a concatenation of segments corresponding to different basic actions. Each segment is generated through a noisy transformation of one of a few hidden trajectories representing different types of movement, with possible time re-scaling. We analyze three different approximation methods for dealing with model intractability, and demonstrate how the proposed approach can successfully segment table tennis movements recorded using a robot arm as haptic input device.

Sodium entry during an action potential determines the energy efficiency of a neuron. The classic Hodgkin-Huxley model of action potential generation is notoriously inefficient in that regard with about 4 times more charges flowing through the membrane than the theoretical minimum required to achieve the observed depolarization. Yet, recent experimental results show that mammalian neurons are close to the optimal metabolic efficiency and that the dynamics of their voltage-gated channels is significantly different than the one exhibited by the classic Hodgkin-Huxley model during the action potential. Nevertheless, the original Hodgkin-Huxley model is still widely used and rarely to model the squid giant axon from which it was extracted. Here, we introduce a novel family of Hodgkin-Huxley models that correctly account for sodium entry, action potential width and whose voltage-gated channels display a dynamics very similar to the most recent experimental observations in mammalian neurons. We speak here about a family of models because the model is parameterized by a unique parameter the variations of which allow to reproduce the entire range of experimental observations from cortical pyramidal neurons to Purkinje cells, yielding a very economical framework to model a wide range of different central neurons. The present paper demonstrates the performances and discuss the properties of this new family of models.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be applied to study the functional connectivity of the neural elements which form complex network at a whole brain level. Most analyses of functional resting state networks (RSN) have been based on the analysis of correlation between the temporal dynamics of various regions of the brain. While these models can identify coherently behaving groups in terms of correlation they give little insight into how these groups interact. In this paper we take a different view on the analysis of functional resting state networks. Starting from the definition of resting state as functional coherent groups we search for functional units of the brain that communicate with other parts of the brain in a coherent manner as measured by mutual information. We use the infinite relational model (IRM) to quantify functional coherent groups of resting state networks and demonstrate how the extracted component interactions can be used to discriminate between functional resting state activity in multiple sclerosis and normal subjects.

We introduce a new Bayesian nonparametric approach to identification of sparse dynamic linear systems. The impulse responses are modeled as Gaussian processes whose autocovariances encode the BIBO stability constraint, as defined by the recently introduced “Stable Spline kernel”. Sparse solutions are obtained by placing exponential hyperpriors on the scale factors of such kernels. Numerical experiments regarding estimation of ARMAX models show that this technique provides a definite advantage over a group LAR algorithm and state-of-the-art parametric identification techniques based on prediction error minimization.

We present a new learning strategy for classification problems in which train and/or test data suffer from missing features. In previous work, instances are represented as vectors from some feature space and one is forced to impute missing values or to consider an instance-specific subspace. In contrast, our method considers instances as sets of (feature,value) pairs which naturally handle the missing value case. Building onto this framework, we propose a classification strategy for sets. Our proposal maps (feature,value) pairs into an embedding space and then non-linearly combines the set of embedded vectors. The embedding and the combination parameters are learned jointly on the final classification objective. This simple strategy allows great flexibility in encoding prior knowledge about the features in the embedding step and yields advantageous results compared to alternative solutions over several datasets.

In this paper we consider the problem of learning from data the support of a probability distribution when the distribution {\em does not} have a density (with respect to some reference measure). We propose a new class of regularized spectral estimators based on a new notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space, which we call {\em ``completely regular''}. Completely regular kernels allow to capture the relevant geometric and topological properties of an arbitrary probability space. In particular, they are the key ingredient to prove the universal consistency of the spectral estimators and in this respect they are the analogue of universal kernels for supervised problems. Numerical experiments show that spectral estimators compare favorably to state of the art machine learning algorithms for density support estimation.

Modelling camera shake as a space-invariant convolution simplifies the problem of removing camera shake, but often insufficiently models actual motion blur such as those due to camera rotation and movements outside the sensor plane or when objects in the scene have different distances to the camera. In order to overcome such limitations we contribute threefold: (i) we introduce a taxonomy of camera shakes, (ii) we show how to combine a recently introduced framework for space-variant filtering based on overlap-add from Hirsch et al.~and a fast algorithm for single image blind deconvolution for space-invariant filters from Cho and Lee to introduce a method for blind deconvolution for space-variant blur. And (iii), we present an experimental setup for evaluation that allows us to take images with real camera shake while at the same time record the space-variant point spread function corresponding to that blur. Finally, we demonstrate that our method is able to deblur images degraded by spatially-varying blur originating from real camera shake.