We use a graphical model for representing policies in Markov Decision Processes. This new representation can easily incorporate domain knowledge in the form of a state similarity graph that loosely indicates which states are supposed to have similar optimal actions. A bias is then introduced into the policy search process by sampling policies from a distribution that assigns high probabilities to policies that agree with the provided state similarity graph, i.e. smoother policies.

The Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is a popular density model that is also good for extracting features. A main source of tractability in RBM models is that, given an input, the posterior distribution over hidden variables is factorizable and can be easily computed and sampled from. Sparsity and competition in the hidden representation is beneficial, and while an RBM with competition among its hidden units would acquire some of the attractive properties of sparse coding, such constraints are typically not added, as the resulting posterior over the hidden units seemingly becomes intractable. In this paper we show that a dynamic programming algorithm can be used to implement exact sparsity in the RBM's hidden units. We also show how to pass derivatives through the resulting posterior marginals, which makes it possible to fine-tune a pre-trained neural network with sparse hidden layers.

Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models (HHMMs) are sophisticated stochastic models that enable us to capture a hierarchical context characterization of sequence data.

We consider infinite-horizon stationary γ-discounted Markov Decision Processes, for which it is known that there exists a stationary optimal policy.

We present a Bayesian nonparametric model for genetic sequence data in which a set of genetic sequences is modelled using a Markov model of partitions. The partitions at consecutive locations in the genome are related by the splitting and merging of their clusters. Our model can be thought of as a discrete analogue of the continuous fragmentation-coagulation process [Teh et al 2011], preserving the important properties of projectivity, exchangeability and reversibility, while being more scalable. We apply this model to the problem of genotype imputation, showing improved computational efficiency while maintaining accuracies comparable to other state-of-the-art genotype imputation methods.

In many large economic markets, goods are sold through sequential auctions. Examples include eBay, online ad auctions, wireless spectrum auctions, and the Dutch flower auctions. In this paper, we combine methods from game theory and decision theory to search for approximate equilibria in sequential auction domains, in which bidders do not know their opponents' values for goods, bidders only partially observe the actions of their opponents', and bidders demand multiple goods. We restrict attention to two-phased strategies: first predict (i.e., learn); second, optimize. We use best-reply dynamics [4] for prediction (i.e., to predict other bidders' strategies), and then assuming fixed other-bidder strategies, we estimate and solve the ensuing Markov decision processes (MDP) [18] for optimization. We exploit auction properties to represent the MDP in a more compact state space, and we use Monte Carlo simulation to make estimating the MDP tractable. We show how equilibria found using our search procedure compare to known equilibria for simpler auction domains, and we approximate an equilibrium for a more complex auction domain where analytical solutions are unknown.

We describe how the pretraining algorithm for Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs) is related to the pretraining algorithm for Deep Belief Networks and we show that under certain conditions, the pretraining procedure improves the variational lower bound of a two-hidden-layer DBM. Based on this analysis, we develop a different method of pretraining DBMs that distributes the modelling work more evenly over the hidden layers. Our results on the MNIST and NORB datasets demonstrate that the new pretraining algorithm allows us to learn better generative models.

While human listeners excel at selectively attending to a conversation in a cocktail party, machine performance is still far inferior by comparison. We show that the cocktail party problem, or the speech separation problem, can be effectively approached via structured prediction. To account for temporal dynamics in speech, we employ conditional random fields(CRFs) to classify speech dominance within each time-frequency unit for a sound mixture. To capture complex, nonlinear relationship between input and output, both state and transition feature functions in CRFs are learned by deep neural networks. The formulation of the problem as classification allows us to directly optimize a measure that is well correlated with human speech intelligibility. The proposed system substantially outperforms existing ones in a variety of noises.

The Shape Boltzmann Machine (SBM) [1] has recently been introduced as a stateof-the-art model of foreground/background object shape. We extend the SBM to account for the foreground object's parts. Our new model, the Multinomial SBM (MSBM), can capture both local and global statistics of part shapes accurately. We combine the MSBM with an appearance model to form a fully generative model of images of objects. Parts-based object segmentations are obtained simply by performing probabilistic inference in the model. We apply the model to two challenging datasets which exhibit significant shape and appearance variability, and find that it obtains results that are comparable to the state-of-the-art. There has been significant focus in computer vision on object recognition and detection e.g.

We propose a simple and novel framework for MCMC inference in continuoustime discrete-state systems with pure jump trajectories. We construct an exact MCMC sampler for such systems by alternately sampling a random discretization of time given a trajectory of the system, and then a new trajectory given the discretization. The first step can be performed efficiently using properties of the Poisson process, while the second step can avail of discrete-time MCMC techniques based on the forward-backward algorithm. We show the advantage of our approach compared to particle MCMC and a uniformization-based sampler.