Dropout has been witnessed with great success in training deep neural networks by independently zeroing out the outputs of neurons at random. It has also received a surge of interest for shallow learning, e.g., logistic regression. However, the independent sampling for dropout could be suboptimal for the sake of convergence. In this paper, we propose to use multinomial sampling for dropout, i.e., sampling features or neurons according to a multinomial distribution with different probabilities for different features/neurons. To exhibit the optimal dropout probabilities, we analyze the shallow learning with multinomial dropout and establish the risk bound for stochastic optimization. By minimizing a sampling dependent factor in the risk bound, we obtain a distribution-dependent dropout with sampling probabilities dependent on the second order statistics of the data distribution. To tackle the issue of evolving distribution of neurons in deep learning, we propose an efficient adaptive dropout (named evolutional dropout) that computes the sampling probabilities on-the-fly from a mini-batch of examples. Empirical studies on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed dropouts achieve not only much faster convergence and but also a smaller testing error than the standard dropout. For example, on the CIFAR-100 data, the evolutional dropout achieves relative improvements over 10% on the prediction performance and over 50% on the convergence speed compared to the standard dropout.

You are a robot and you live in a Markov decision process (MDP) with a finite or an infinite number of transitions from state-action to next states. You got brains and so you plan before you act. Luckily, your roboparents equipped you with a generative model to do some Monte-Carlo planning. The world is waiting for you and you have no time to waste. You want your planning to be efficient.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Joint matrix triangularization is often used for estimating the joint eigenstructure of a set M of matrices, with applications in signal processing and machine learning. We consider the problem of approximate joint matrix triangularization when the matrices in M are jointly diagonalizable and real, but we only observe a set M' of noise perturbed versions of the matrices in M. Our main result is a first-order upper bound on the distance between any approximate joint triangularizer of the matrices in M' and any exact joint triangularizer of the matrices in M. The bound depends only on the observable matrices in M' and the noise level. In particular, it does not depend on optimization specific properties of the triangularizer, such as its proximity to critical points, that are typical of existing bounds in the literature. To our knowledge, this is the first a posteriori bound for joint matrix decomposition. We demonstrate the bound on synthetic data for which the ground truth is known.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We present a new boosting algorithm for the key scenario of binary classification with abstention where the algorithm can abstain from predicting the label of a point, at the price of a fixed cost. At each round, our algorithm selects a pair of functions, a base predictor and a base abstention function. We define convex upper bounds for the natural loss function associated to this problem, which we prove to be calibrated with respect to the Bayes solution. Our algorithm benefits from general margin-based learning guarantees which we derive for ensembles of pairs of base predictor and abstention functions, in terms of the Rademacher complexities of the corresponding function classes. We give convergence guarantees for our algorithm along with a linear-time weak-learning algorithm for abstention stumps. We also report the results of several experiments suggesting that our algorithm provides a significant improvement in practice over two confidence-based algorithms.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We consider cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over anundirected network of agents, where only those agents connected by an edgecan directly communicate. The objective is to minimize the sum of agent-specific composite convex functions over agent-specific private conic constraintsets; hence, the optimal consensus decision should lie in the intersection of theseprivate sets. We provide convergence rates in sub-optimality, infeasibility andconsensus violation; examine the effect of underlying network topology on theconvergence rates of the proposed decentralized algorithms; and show how to ex-tend these methods to handle time-varying communication networks.