Europe
Random function priors for exchangeable arrays with applications to graphs and relational data
Lloyd, James, Orbanz, Peter, Ghahramani, Zoubin, Roy, Daniel M.
A fundamental problem in the analysis of structured relational data like graphs, networks, databases, and matrices is to extract a summary of the common structure underlying relations between individual entities. Relational data are typically encoded in the form of arrays; invariance to the ordering of rows and columns corresponds to exchangeable arrays. Results in probability theory due to Aldous, Hoover and Kallenberg show that exchangeable arrays can be represented in terms of a random measurable function which constitutes the natural model parameter in a Bayesian model. We obtain a flexible yet simple Bayesian nonparametric model by placing a Gaussian process prior on the parameter function. Efficient inference utilises elliptical slice sampling combined with a random sparse approximation to the Gaussian process. We demonstrate applications of the model to network data and clarify its relation to models in the literature, several of which emerge as special cases.
Predicting Action Content On-Line and in Real Time before Action Onset – an Intracranial Human Study
Maoz, Uri, Ye, Shengxuan, Ross, Ian, Mamelak, Adam, Koch, Christof
The ability to predict action content from neural signals in real time before the action occurs has been long sought in the neuroscientific study of decision-making, agency and volition. Online real-time (ORT) prediction is important for understanding the relation between neural correlates of decision-making and conscious, voluntary action as well as for brain-machine interfaces. Here, epilepsy patients, implanted with intracranial depth microelectrodes or subdural grid electrodes for clinical purposes, participated in a "matching-pennies" game against an opponent. In each trial, subjects were given a 5 s countdown, after which they had to raise their left or right hand immediately as the "go" signal appeared on a computer screen. They won a fixed amount of money if they raised a different hand than their opponent and lost that amount otherwise.
Proximal Newton-type methods for convex optimization
Lee, Jason D., Sun, Yuekai, Saunders, Michael
R is a convex but not necessarily differentiable function whose proximal mapping can be evaluated efficiently. We derive a generalization of Newton-type methods to handle such convex but nonsmooth objective functions. We prove such methods are globally convergent and achieve superlinear rates of convergence in the vicinity of an optimal solution. We also demonstrate the performance of these methods using problems of relevance in machine learning and statistics.
3D Social Saliency from Head-mounted Cameras
Park, Hyun S., Jain, Eakta, Sheikh, Yaser
A gaze concurrence is a point in 3D where the gaze directions of two or more people intersect. It is a strong indicator of social saliency because the attention of the participating group is focused on that point. In scenes occupied by large groups of people, multiple concurrences may occur and transition over time. In this paper, we present a method to construct a 3D social saliency field and locate multiple gaze concurrences that occur in a social scene from videos taken by head-mounted cameras. We model the gaze as a cone-shaped distribution emanating from the center of the eyes, capturing the variation of eye-in-head motion. We calibrate the parameters of this distribution by exploiting the fixed relationship between the primary gaze ray and the head-mounted camera pose. The resulting gaze model enables us to build a social saliency field in 3D. We estimate the number and 3D locations of the gaze concurrences via provably convergent modeseeking in the social saliency field. Our algorithm is applied to reconstruct multiple gaze concurrences in several real world scenes and evaluated quantitatively against motion-captured ground truth.
Memorability of Image Regions
Khosla, Aditya, Xiao, Jianxiong, Torralba, Antonio, Oliva, Aude
While long term human visual memory can store a remarkable amount of visual information, it tends to degrade over time. Recent works have shown that image memorability is an intrinsic property of an image that can be reliably estimated using state-of-the-art image features and machine learning algorithms. However, the class of features and image information that is forgotten has not been explored yet. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework that models how and which local regions from an image may be forgotten using a data-driven approach that combines local and global images features. The model automatically discovers memorability maps of individual images without any human annotation. We incorporate multiple image region attributes in our algorithm, leading to improved memorability prediction of images as compared to previous works.
On the (Non-)existence of Convex, Calibrated Surrogate Losses for Ranking
Calauzènes, Clément, Usunier, Nicolas, Gallinari, Patrick
We study surrogate losses for learning to rank, in a framework where the rankings are induced by scores and the task is to learn the scoring function. We focus on the calibration of surrogate losses with respect to a ranking evaluation metric, where the calibration is equivalent to the guarantee that near-optimal values of the surrogate risk imply near-optimal values of the risk defined by the evaluation metric. We prove that if a surrogate loss is a convex function of the scores, then it is not calibrated with respect to two evaluation metrics widely used for search engine evaluation, namely the Average Precision and the Expected Reciprocal Rank. We also show that such convex surrogate losses cannot be calibrated with respect to the Pairwise Disagreement, an evaluation metric used when learning from pairwise preferences. Our results cast lights on the intrinsic difficulty of some ranking problems, as well as on the limitations of learning-to-rank algorithms based on the minimization of a convex surrogate risk.
Smooth-projected Neighborhood Pursuit for High-dimensional Nonparanormal Graph Estimation
Zhao, Tuo, Roeder, Kathryn, Liu, Han
We introduce a new learning algorithm, named smooth-projected neighborhood pursuit, for estimating high dimensional undirected graphs. In particularly, we focus on the nonparanormal graphical model and provide theoretical guarantees for graph estimation consistency. In addition to new computational and theoretical analysis, we also provide an alternative view to analyze the tradeoff between computational efficiency and statistical error under a smoothing optimization framework. Numerical results on both synthetic and real datasets are provided to support our theory.
AAAI Conferences Calendar
ICWSM-13 will be held 8-11 July at Conference. FLAIRS 2012 will be held MIT, Cambridge, MA USA May 22-24, 2012 at the TradeWinds Fifteenth International Conference Island Resort, St. Pete Beach, FL ICAPS 2013 will be held Intelligence Conference. IJCAI-13 will be held August 3-URL: www.iccbr.org ICINCO 2013 will be near Washington, DC USA. Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference of held July 27-31, 2014, in Quebec City, The Fifth Conference on Artificial the Cognitive Science Society.
Mirror Descent Meets Fixed Share (and feels no regret)
Cesa-bianchi, Nicolò, Gaillard, Pierre, Lugosi, Gabor, Stoltz, Gilles
Mirror descent with an entropic regularizer is known to achieve shifting regret bounds that are logarithmic in the dimension. This is done using either a carefully designed projection or by a weight sharing technique. Via a novel unified analysis, we show that these two approaches deliver essentially equivalent bounds on a notion of regret generalizing shifting, adaptive, discounted, and other related regrets. Our analysis also captures and extends the generalized weight sharing technique of Bousquet and Warmuth, and can be refined in several ways, including improvements for small losses and adaptive tuning of parameters.