Kernel methods, a new generation of learning algorithms, utilize techniques from optimization, statistics, and functional analysis to achieve maximal generality, flexibility, and performance. These algorithms are different from earlier techniques used in machine learning in many respects: For example, they are explicitly based on a theoretical model of learning rather than on loose analogies with natural learning systems or other heuristics. They come with theoretical guarantees about their performance and have a modular design that makes it possible to separately implement and analyze their components. They are not affected by the problem of local minima because their training amounts to convex optimization. In the last decade, a sizable community of theoreticians and practitioners has formed around these methods, and a number of practical applications have been realized.

Recently, classical kernel methods have been extended by the introduction of suitable tensor kernels so to promote sparsity in the solution of the underlying regression problem. Indeed they solve an l p -norm regularization problem, with p m/(m 1) and m even integer, which happens to be close to a lasso problem. However, a major drawback of the method is that storing tensors generally requires a considerable amount of memory, ultimately limiting its applicability. In this work we address this problem by proposing two advances. First, we directly reduce the memory requirement, by introducing a new and more efficient layout for storing the data. Second, we use Nyström-type subsampling approach, which allows for a training phase with a smaller number of data points, so to reduce the computational cost. Experiments, both on synthetic and real datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed improvements. Finally, we take care of implementing the code in C so to further speedup the computation.

Graph kernels are kernel methods measuring graph similarity and serve as a standard tool for graph classification. However, the use of kernel methods for node classification, which is a related problem to graph representation learning, is still ill-posed and the state-of-the-art methods are heavily based on heuristics. Here, we present a novel theoretical kernel-based framework for node classification that can bridge the gap between these two representation learning problems on graphs. Our approach is motivated by graph kernel methodology but extended to learn the node representations capturing the structural information in a graph. We theoretically show that our formulation is as powerful as any positive semidefinite kernels.

Super resolution (SR) methods typically assume that the low-resolution (LR) image was downscaled from the unknown high-resolution (HR) image by a fixed ideal' downscaling kernel (e.g. However, this is rarely the case in real LR images, in contrast to synthetically generated SR datasets. When the assumed downscaling kernel deviates from the true one, the performance of SR methods significantly deteriorates. This gave rise to Blind-SR - namely, SR when the downscaling kernel ( SR-kernel'') is unknown. It was further shown that the true SR-kernel is the one that maximizes the recurrence of patches across scales of the LR image.

Kernel methods have achieved very good performance on large scale regression and classification problems, by using the Nystr\"om method and preconditioning techniques. The Nystr\"om approximation -- based on a subset of landmarks -- gives a low rank approximation of the kernel matrix, and is known to provide a form of implicit regularization. We further elaborate on the impact of sampling diverse landmarks for constructing the Nystr\"om approximation in supervised as well as unsupervised kernel methods. By using Determinantal Point Processes for sampling, we obtain additional theoretical results concerning the interplay between diversity and regularization. Empirically, we demonstrate the advantages of training kernel methods based on subsets made of diverse points. In particular, if the dataset has a dense bulk and a sparser tail, we show that Nystr\"om kernel regression with diverse landmarks increases the accuracy of the regression in sparser regions of the dataset, with respect to a uniform landmark sampling. A greedy heuristic is also proposed to select diverse samples of significant size within large datasets when exact DPP sampling is not practically feasible.

In this paper we consider the fundamental problem of semi-supervised kernel function learning. We propose a general regularized framework for learning a kernel matrix, and then demonstrate an equivalence between our proposed kernel matrix learning framework and a general linear transformation learning problem. Our result shows that the learned kernel matrices parameterize a linear transformation kernel function and can be applied inductively to new data points. Furthermore, our result gives a constructive method for kernelizing most existing Mahalanobis metric learning formulations. To make our results practical for large-scale data, we modify our framework to limit the number of parameters in the optimization process.

We introduce a new family of positive-definite kernel functions that mimic the computation in large, multilayer neural nets. These kernel functions can be used in shallow architectures, such as support vector machines (SVMs), or in deep kernel-based architectures that we call multilayer kernel machines (MKMs). We evaluate SVMs and MKMs with these kernel functions on problems designed to illustrate the advantages of deep architectures. On several problems, we obtain better results than previous, leading benchmarks from both SVMs with Gaussian kernels as well as deep belief nets. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

We propose a novel kernel approach to dimension reduction for supervised learning: feature extraction and variable selection; the former constructs a small number of features from predictors, and the latter finds a subset of predictors. First, a method of linear feature extraction is proposed using the gradient of regression function, based on the recent development of the kernel method. In comparison with other existing methods, the proposed one has wide applicability without strong assumptions on the regressor or type of variables, and uses computationally simple eigendecomposition, thus applicable to large data sets. Second, in combination of a sparse penalty, the method is extended to variable selection, following the approach by Chen et al. (2010). Experimental results show that the proposed methods successfully find effective features and variables without parametric models.

We consider the problem of improving kernel approximation via randomized feature maps. These maps arise as Monte Carlo approximation to integral representations of kernel functions and scale up kernel methods for larger datasets. Based on an efficient numerical integration technique, we propose a unifying approach that reinterprets the previous random features methods and extends to better estimates of the kernel approximation. We derive the convergence behavior and conduct an extensive empirical study that supports our hypothesis. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

Given only information in the form of similarity triplets "Object A is more similar to object B than to object C" about a data set, we propose two ways of defining a kernel function on the data set. While previous approaches construct a low-dimensional Euclidean embedding of the data set that reflects the given similarity triplets, we aim at defining kernel functions that correspond to high-dimensional embeddings. These kernel functions can subsequently be used to apply any kernel method to the data set. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.