This paper describes a new approach for computing nonnegative matrix factorizations (NMFs) with linear programming. The key idea is a data-driven model for the factorization, in which the most salient features in the data are used to express the remaining features. More precisely, given a data matrix X, the algorithm identifies a matrix C that satisfies X = CX and some linear constraints. The matrix C selects features, which are then used to compute a low-rank NMF of X. A theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach has the same type of guarantees as the recent NMF algorithm of Arora et al.~(2012). In contrast with this earlier work, the proposed method has (1) better noise tolerance, (2) extends to more general noise models, and (3) leads to efficient, scalable algorithms. Experiments with synthetic and real datasets provide evidence that the new approach is also superior in practice. An optimized C++ implementation of the new algorithm can factor a multi-Gigabyte matrix in a matter of minutes.

This paper focuses on the problem of learning binary codes for efficient retrieval of high-dimensional nonnegative data that arises in vision and text applications where counts or frequencies are used as features. The similarity of such feature vectors is commonly measured using the cosine of the angle between them. In this work, we introduce a novel angular quantization-based binary coding (AQBC) technique for such data and analyze its properties. In its most basic form, AQBC works by mapping each nonnegative feature vector onto the vertex of the binary hypercubewith which it has the smallest angle. Even though the number of vertices (quantization landmarks) in this scheme grows exponentially with data dimensionalityd, we propose a method for mapping feature vectors to their smallest-angle binary vertices that scales as O(d log d). Further, we propose a method for learning a linear transformation of the data to minimize the quantization error,and show that it results in improved binary codes. Experiments on image and text datasets show that the proposed AQBC method outperforms the state of the art.

We present a novel marginalized particle Gaussian process (MPGP) regression, which provides a fast, accurate online Bayesian filtering framework to model the latent function. Using a state space model established by the data construction procedure, our MPGP recursively filters out the estimation of hidden function values by a Gaussian mixture. Meanwhile, it provides a new online method for training hyperparameters with a number of weighted particles. We demonstrate the estimated performance of our MPGP on both simulated and real large data sets. The results show that our MPGP is a robust estimation algorithm with high computational efficiency, which outperforms other state-of-art sparse GP methods.

Approaches to audio classification and retrieval tasks largely rely on detectionbased discriminativemodels. We submit that such models make a simplistic assumption inmapping acoustics directly to semantics, whereas the actual process is likely more complex. We present a generative model that maps acoustics in a hierarchical manner to increasingly higher-level semantics. Our model has two layers with the first layer modeling generalized sound units with no clear semantic associations, while the second layer models local patterns over these sound units. We evaluate our model on a large-scale retrieval task from TRECVID 2011, and report significant improvements over standard baselines.

We present a multi-task learning approach to jointly estimate the means of multiple independent data sets. The proposed multi-task averaging (MTA) algorithm results in a convex combination of the single-task averages. We derive the optimal amount of regularization, and show that it can be effectively estimated. Simulations and real data experiments demonstrate that MTA both maximum likelihood and James-Stein estimators, and that our approach to estimating the amount of regularization rivals cross-validation in performance but is more computationally efficient.

The Lovasz $\theta$ function of a graph, is a fundamental tool in combinatorial optimization and approximation algorithms. Computing $\theta$ involves solving a SDP and is extremely expensive even for moderately sized graphs. In this paper we establish that the Lovasz $\theta$ function is equivalent to a kernel learning problem related to one class SVM. This interesting connection opens up many opportunities bridging graph theoretic algorithms and machine learning. We show that there exist graphs, which we call $SVM-\theta$ graphs, on which the Lovasz $\theta$ function can be approximated well by a one-class SVM. This leads to a novel use of SVM techniques to solve algorithmic problems in large graphs e.g. identifying a planted clique of size $\Theta({\sqrt{n}})$ in a random graph $G(n,\frac{1}{2})$. A classic approach for this problem involves computing the $\theta$ function, however it is not scalable due to SDP computation. We show that the random graph with a planted clique is an example of $SVM-\theta$ graph, and as a consequence a SVM based approach easily identifies the clique in large graphs and is competitive with the state-of-the-art. Further, we introduce the notion of a ''common orthogonal labeling'' which extends the notion of a ''orthogonal labelling of a single graph (used in defining the $\theta$ function) to multiple graphs. The problem of finding the optimal common orthogonal labelling is cast as a Multiple Kernel Learning problem and is used to identify a large common dense region in multiple graphs. The proposed algorithm achieves an order of magnitude scalability compared to the state of the art.

Diversified ranking is a fundamental task in machine learning. It is broadly applicable in many real world problems, e.g., information retrieval, team assembling, product search, etc. In this paper, we consider a generic setting where we aim to diversify the top-k ranking list based on an arbitrary relevance function and an arbitrary similarity function among all the examples. We formulate it as an optimization problem and show that in general it is NP-hard. Then, we show that for a large volume of the parameter space, the proposed objective function enjoys the diminishing returns property, which enables us to design a scalable, greedy algorithm to find the near-optimal solution. Experimental results on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

We consider the problem of learning control policies via trajectory preference queries to an expert. In particular, the learning agent can present an expert with short runs of a pair of policies originating from the same state and the expert then indicates the preferred trajectory. The agent's goal is to elicit a latent target policy from the expert with as few queries as possible. To tackle this problem we propose a novel Bayesian model of the querying process and introduce two methods that exploit this model to actively select expert queries. Experimental results on four benchmark problems indicate that our model can effectively learn policies from trajectory preference queries and that active query selection can be substantially more efficient than random selection.

In this work, we consider the problem of modeling the dynamic structure of human activities in the attributes space. A video sequence is first represented in a semantic feature space, where each feature encodes the probability of occurrence of an activity attribute at a given time. A generative model, denoted the binary dynamic system (BDS), is proposed to learn both the distribution and dynamics of different activities in this space. The BDS is a non-linear dynamic system, which extends both the binary principal component analysis (PCA) and classical linear dynamic systems (LDS), by combining binary observation variables with a hidden Gauss-Markov state process. In this way, it integrates the representation power of semantic modeling with the ability of dynamic systems to capture the temporal structure of time-varying processes. An algorithm for learning BDS parameters, inspired by a popular LDS learning method from dynamic textures, is proposed. A similarity measure between BDSs, which generalizes the Binet-Cauchy kernel for LDS, is then introduced and used to design activity classifiers. The proposed method is shown to outperform similar classifiers derived from the kernel dynamic system (KDS) and state-of-the-art approaches for dynamics-based or attribute-based action recognition.

Time delay is pervasive in neural information processing. To achieve real-time tracking, it is critical to compensate the transmission and processing delays in a neural system. In the present study we show that dynamical synapses with short-term depression can enhance the mobility of a continuous attractor network to the extent that the system tracks time-varying stimuli in a timely manner. The state of the network can either track the instantaneous position of a moving stimulus perfectly (with zero-lag) or lead it with an effectively constant time, in agreement with experiments on the head-direction systems in rodents. The parameter regions for delayed, perfect and anticipative tracking correspond to network states that are static, ready-to-move and spontaneously moving, respectively, demonstrating the strong correlation between tracking performance and the intrinsic dynamics of the network. We also find that when the speed of the stimulus coincides with the natural speed of the network state, the delay becomes effectively independent of the stimulus amplitude.