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 Statistical Learning


Transfer Learning in a Transductive Setting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Category models for objects or activities typically rely on supervised learning requiring sufficiently large training sets. Transferring knowledge from known categories to novel classes with no or only a few labels is far less researched even though it is a common scenario. In this work, we extend transfer learning with semi-supervised learning to exploit unlabeled instances of (novel) categories with no or only a few labeled instances. Our proposed approach Propagated Semantic Transfer combines three techniques. First, we transfer information from known to novel categories by incorporating external knowledge, such as linguistic or expert-specified information, e.g., by a mid-level layer of semantic attributes.



20d135f0f28185b84a4cf7aa51f29500-Reviews.html

Neural Information Processing Systems

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. The goal of this paper is to build a markov chain that will sample from a determinantal point process. One that mixes rapidly, and improves on the O(n^3) direct computation. One benefit is that as the set of elements in the DPP changes, there is no expensive eigenvalue decomposition. The fast algorithm is achieved with the realization that the algorithm doesn't require the computation of matrix determinants, but the ratio of determinants.


Fast Determinantal Point Process Sampling with Application to Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

Determinantal Point Process (DPP) has gained much popularity for modeling sets of diverse items. The gist of DPP is that the probability of choosing a particular set of items is proportional to the determinant of a positive definite matrix that defines the similarity of those items. However, computing the determinant requires time cubic in the number of items, and is hence impractical for large sets. In this paper, we address this problem by constructing a rapidly mixing Markov chain, from which we can acquire a sample from the given DPP in sub-cubic time. In addition, we show that this framework can be extended to sampling from cardinality-constrained DPPs. As an application, we show how our sampling algorithm can be used to provide a fast heuristic for determining the number of clusters, resulting in better clustering. There are some crucial errors in the proofs of the theorem which invalidate the theoretical claims of this paper. Please consult the appendix for more details.


Outlier-Robust High-Dimensional Sparse Estimation via Iterative Filtering

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study high-dimensional sparse estimation tasks in a robust setting where a constant fraction of the dataset is adversarially corrupted. Specifically, we focus on the fundamental problems of robust sparse mean estimation and robust sparse PCA. We give the first practically viable robust estimators for these problems. In more detail, our algorithms are sample and computationally efficient and achieve near-optimal robustness guarantees. In contrast to prior provable algorithms which relied on the ellipsoid method, our algorithms use spectral techniques to iteratively remove outliers from the dataset. Our experimental evaluation on synthetic data shows that our algorithms are scalable and significantly outperform a range of previous approaches, nearly matching the best error rate without corruptions.





Greedy Subspace Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of subspace clustering: given points that lie on or near the union of many low-dimensional linear subspaces, recover the subspaces. To this end, one first identifies sets of points close to the same subspace and uses the sets to estimate the subspaces. As the geometric structure of the clusters (linear subspaces) forbids proper performance of general distance based approaches such as K -means, many model-specific methods have been proposed. In this paper, we provide new simple and efficient algorithms for this problem. Our statistical analysis shows that the algorithms are guaranteed exact (perfect) clustering performance under certain conditions on the number of points and the affinity between subspaces. These conditions are weaker than those considered in the standard statistical literature. Experimental results on synthetic data generated from the standard unions of subspaces model demonstrate our theory. We also show that our algorithm performs competitively against state-of-the-art algorithms on real-world applications such as motion segmentation and face clustering, with much simpler implementation and lower computational cost.


SySCD: A System-Aware Parallel Coordinate Descent Algorithm

Neural Information Processing Systems

Today's individual machines offer dozens of cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM that can, if used efficiently, significantly improve the training performance of machine learning models.