Paraphrase detection is the task of examining two sentences and determining whether they have the same meaning. In order to obtain high accuracy on this task, thorough syntactic and semantic analysis of the two statements is needed. We introduce a method for paraphrase detection based on recursive autoencoders (RAE). Our unsupervised RAEs are based on a novel unfolding objective and learn feature vectors for phrases in syntactic trees. These features are used to measure the word-and phrase-wise similarity between two sentences. Since sentences may be of arbitrary length, the resulting matrix of similarity measures is of variable size. We introduce a novel dynamic pooling layer which computes a fixed-sized representation from the variable-sized matrices. The pooled representation is then used as input to a classifier. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on the challenging MSRP paraphrase corpus.

Extracting good representations from images is essential for many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose hierarchical matching pursuit (HMP), which builds a feature hierarchy layer-by-layer using an efficient matching pursuit encoder. It includes three modules: batch (tree) orthogonal matching pursuit, spatial pyramid max pooling, and contrast normalization. We investigate the architecture of HMP, and show that all three components are critical for good performance. To speed up the orthogonal matching pursuit, we propose a batch tree orthogonal matching pursuit that is particularly suitable to encode a large number of observations that share the same large dictionary. HMP is scalable and can efficiently handle full-size images. In addition, HMP enables linear support vector machines (SVM) to match the performance of nonlinear SVM while being scalable to large datasets. We compare HMP with many state-of-the-art algorithms including convolutional deep belief networks, SIFT based single layer sparse coding, and kernel based feature learning. HMP consistently yields superior accuracy on three types of image classification problems: object recognition (Caltech-101), scene recognition (MIT-Scene), and static event recognition (UIUC-Sports).

We combine three important ideas present in previous work for building classifiers: the semi-supervised hypothesis (the input distribution contains information about the classifier), the unsupervised manifold hypothesis (data density concentrates near low-dimensional manifolds), and the manifold hypothesis for classification (different classes correspond to disjoint manifolds separated by low density). We exploit a novel algorithm for capturing manifold structure (high-order contractive auto-encoders) and we show how it builds a topological atlas of charts, each chart being characterized by the principal singular vectors of the Jacobian of a representation mapping. This representation learning algorithm can be stacked to yield a deep architecture, and we combine it with a domain knowledge-free version of the TangentProp algorithm to encourage the classifier to be insensitive to local directions changes along the manifold. Record-breaking classification results are obtained.

Independent Components Analysis (ICA) and its variants have been successfully used for unsupervised feature learning. However, standard ICA requires an orthonoramlity constraint to be enforced, which makes it difficult to learn overcomplete features. In addition, ICA is sensitive to whitening. These properties make it challenging to scale ICA to high dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a robust soft reconstruction cost for ICA that allows us to learn highly overcomplete sparse features even on unwhitened data. Our formulation reveals formal connections between ICA and sparse autoencoders, which have previously been observed only empirically. Our algorithm can be used in conjunction with off-the-shelf fast unconstrained optimizers. We show that the soft reconstruction cost can also be used to prevent replicated features in tiled convolutional neural networks. Using our method to learn highly overcomplete sparse features and tiled convolutional neural networks, we obtain competitive performances on a wide variety of object recognition tasks. We achieve state-of-the-art test accuracies on the STL-10 and Hollywood2 datasets.

We present explicit classes of probability distributions that can be learned by Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) depending on the number of units that they contain, and which are representative for the expressive power of the model. We use this to show that the maximal Kullback-Leibler divergence to the RBM model with n visible and m hidden units is bounded from above by (n-1)-log(m+1). In this way we can specify the number of hidden units that guarantees a sufficiently rich model containing different classes of distributions and respecting a given error tolerance.

We introduce HD (or ``Hierarchical-Deep'') models, a new compositional learning architecture that integrates deep learning models with structured hierarchical Bayesian models. Specifically we show how we can learn a hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) prior over the activities of the top-level features in a Deep Boltzmann Machine (DBM). This compound HDP-DBM model learns to learn novel concepts from very few training examples, by learning low-level generic features, high-level features that capture correlations among low-level features, and a category hierarchy for sharing priors over the high-level features that are typical of different kinds of concepts. We present efficient learning and inference algorithms for the HDP-DBM model and show that it is able to learn new concepts from very few examples on CIFAR-100 object recognition, handwritten character recognition, and human motion capture datasets.

Unsupervised feature learning has been shown to be effective at learning representations that perform well on image, video and audio classification. However, many existing feature learning algorithms are hard to use and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this work, we present sparse filtering, a simple new algorithm which is efficient and only has one hyperparameter, the number of features to learn. In contrast to most other feature learning methods, sparse filtering does not explicitly attempt to construct a model of the data distribution. Instead, it optimizes a simple cost function -- the sparsity of L2-normalized features -- which can easily be implemented in a few lines of MATLAB code. Sparse filtering scales gracefully to handle high-dimensional inputs, and can also be used to learn meaningful features in additional layers with greedy layer-wise stacking. We evaluate sparse filtering on natural images, object classification (STL-10), and phone classification (TIMIT), and show that our method works well on a range of different modalities.

Speech conveys different yet mixed information ranging from linguistic to speaker-specific components, and each of them should be exclusively used in a specific task. However, it is extremely difficult to extract a specific information component given the fact that nearly all existing acoustic representations carry all types of speech information. Thus, the use of the same representation in both speech and speaker recognition hinders a system from producing better performance due to interference of irrelevant information. In this paper, we present a deep neural architecture to extract speaker-specific information from MFCCs. As a result, a multi-objective loss function is proposed for learning speaker-specific characteristics and regularization via normalizing interference of non-speaker related information and avoiding information loss. With LDC benchmark corpora and a Chinese speech corpus, we demonstrate that a resultant speaker-specific representation is insensitive to text/languages spoken and environmental mismatches and hence outperforms MFCCs and other state-of-the-art techniques in speaker recognition. We discuss relevant issues and relate our approach to previous work.

We investigate the representational power of sum-product networks (computation networks analogous to neural networks, but whose individual units compute either products or weighted sums), through a theoretical analysis that compares deep (multiple hidden layers) vs. shallow (one hidden layer) architectures. We prove there exist families of functions that can be represented much more efficiently with a deep network than with a shallow one, i.e. with substantially fewer hidden units. Such results were not available until now, and contribute to motivate recent research involving learning of deep sum-product networks, and more generally motivate research in Deep Learning.

Recent deep learning and unsupervised feature learning systems that learn from unlabeled data have achieved high performance in benchmarks by using extremely large architectures with many features (hidden units) at each layer. Unfortunately, for such large architectures the number of parameters usually grows quadratically in the width of the network, thus necessitating hand-coded "local receptive fields" that limit the number of connections from lower level features to higher ones (e.g., based on spatial locality). In this paper we propose a fast method to choose these connections that may be incorporated into a wide variety of unsupervised training methods. Specifically, we choose local receptive fields that group together those low-level features that are most similar to each other according to a pairwise similarity metric. This approach allows us to harness the advantages of local receptive fields (such as improved scalability, and reduced data requirements) when we do not know how to specify such receptive fields by hand or where our unsupervised training algorithm has no obvious generalization to a topographic setting. We produce results showing how this method allows us to use even simple unsupervised training algorithms to train successful multi-layered etworks that achieve state-of-the-art results on CIFAR and STL datasets: 82.0% and 60.1% accuracy, respectively.