Our aim in this paper is to develop a Bayesian framework for matching hierarchical relational models. The goal is to make discrete label assignments so as to optimise a global cost function that draws information concerning the consistency of match from different levels of the hierarchy.

We are frequently called upon to perform multiple tasks that compete for our attention and resource. Often we know the optimal solution to each task in isolation; in this paper, we describe how this knowledge can be exploited to efficiently find good solutions for doing the tasks in parallel. We formulate this problem as that of dynamically merging multiple Markov decision processes (MDPs) into a composite MDP, and present a new theoretically-sound dynamic programming algorithm for finding an optimal policy for the composite MDP. We analyze various aspects of our algorithm and illustrate its use on a simple merging problem. Every day, we are faced with the problem of doing mUltiple tasks in parallel, each of which competes for our attention and resource. If we are running a job shop, we must decide which machines to allocate to which jobs, and in what order, so that no jobs miss their deadlines. If we are a mail delivery robot, we must find the intended recipients of the mail while simultaneously avoiding fixed obstacles (such as walls) and mobile obstacles (such as people), and still manage to keep ourselves sufficiently charged up. Frequently we know how to perform each task in isolation; this paper considers how we can take the information we have about the individual tasks and combine it to efficiently find an optimal solution for doing the entire set of tasks in parallel. More importantly, we describe a theoretically-sound algorithm for doing this merging dynamically; new tasks (such as a new job arrival at a job shop) can be assimilated online into the solution being found for the ongoing set of simultaneous tasks.

In contrast to the maximum likelihood approach which finds only a single estimate for the regression parameters, the Bayesian approach yields a distribution of weight parameters, p(wID), conditional on the training data D, and predictions are ex- ·Present address: SNN, University of Nijmegen, Geert Grooteplein 21, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) for automatic speech recognition rely on high dimensional feature vectors to summarize the shorttime properties of speech. Correlations between features can arise when the speech signal is non-stationary or corrupted by noise. We investigate how to model these correlations using factor analysis, a statistical method for dimensionality reduction. Factor analysis uses a small number of parameters to model the covariance structure of high dimensional data. These parameters are estimated by an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm that can be embedded in the training procedures for HMMs.

We discuss a solution to the problem of separating waveforms produced by multiple cells in an extracellular neural recording. We take an explicitly probabilistic approach, using latent-variable models of varying sophistication to describe the distribution of waveforms produced by a single cell. The models range from a single Gaussian distribution of waveforms for each cell to a mixture of hidden Markov models. We stress the overall statistical structure of the approach, allowing the details of the generative model chosen to depend on the specific neural preparation.

Bayesian methods have been successfully applied to regression and classification problems in multi-layer perceptrons. We present a novel application of Bayesian techniques to Radial Basis Function networks by developing a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution which, for fixed basis function widths, is analytic in the parameters. The setting of regularization constants by crossvalidation is wasteful as only a single optimal parameter estimate is retained. We treat this issue by assigning prior distributions to these constants, which are then adapted in light of the data under a simple re-estimation formula. 1 Introduction Radial Basis Function networks are popular regression and classification tools[lO]. For fixed basis function centers, RBFs are linear in their parameters and can therefore be trained with simple one shot linear algebra techniques[lO]. The use of unsupervised techniques to fix the basis function centers is, however, not generally optimal since setting the basis function centers using density estimation on the input data alone takes no account of the target values associated with that data. Ideally, therefore, we should include the target values in the training procedure[7, 3, 9]. Unfortunately, allowing centers to adapt to the training targets leads to the RBF being a nonlinear function of its parameters, and training becomes more problematic. Most methods that perform supervised training of RBF parameters minimize the ·Present address: SNN, University of Nijmegen, Geert Grooteplein 21, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Recently, a model for supervised learning of probabilistic transducers represented by suffix trees was introduced. However, this algorithm tends to build very large trees, requiring very large amounts of computer memory. In this paper, we propose anew, more compact, transducer model in which one shares the parameters of distributions associated to contexts yielding similar conditional output distributions. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm with comparative experiments on inducing a noun phrase recogmzer.

A new policy iteration algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes is presented that is simpler and more efficient than an earlier policy iteration algorithm of Sondik (1971,1978). The key simplification is representation of a policy as a finite-state controller. This representation makes policy evaluation straightforward. The paper's contribution is to show that the dynamic-programming update used in the policy improvement step can be interpreted as the transformation of a finite-state controller into an improved finite-state controller. The new algorithm consistently outperforms value iteration as an approach to solving infinite-horizon problems.

We present a new approximate learning algorithm for Boltzmann Machines, using a systematic expansion of the Gibbs free energy to second order in the weights. The linear response correction to the correlations is given by the Hessian of the Gibbs free energy. The computational complexity of the algorithm is cubic in the number of neurons. We compare the performance of the exact BM learning algorithm with first order (Weiss) mean field theory and second order (TAP) mean field theory. The learning task consists of a fully connected Ising spin glass model on 10 neurons. We conclude that 1) the method works well for paramagnetic problems 2) the TAP correction gives a significant improvement over the Weiss mean field theory, both for paramagnetic and spin glass problems and 3) that the inclusion of diagonal weights improves the Weiss approximation for paramagnetic problems, but not for spin glass problems.

An image is often represented by a set of detected features. We get an enormous compression by representing images in this way. Furthermore, we get a representation which is little affected by small amounts of noise in the image. However, features are typically chosen in an ad hoc manner.