Gradient-following learning methods can encounter problems of implementation in many applications, and stochastic variants are frequently used to overcome these difficulties. We derive quantitative learning curves for three online training methods used with a linear perceptron: direct gradient descent, node perturbation, and weight perturbation. The maximum learning rate for the stochastic methods scales inversely with the first power of the dimensionality of the noise injected into the system; with sufficiently small learning rate, all three methods give identical learning curves. These results suggest guidelines for when these stochastic methods will be limited in their utility, and considerations for architectures in which they will be effective.

We consider the problem of reconstructing patterns from a feature map. Learning algorithms using kernels to operate in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) express their solutions in terms of input points mapped into the RKHS. We introduce a technique based on kernel principal component analysis and regression to reconstruct corresponding patterns in the input space (aka pre-images) and review its performance in several applications requiring the construction of pre-images. The introduced technique avoids difficult and/or unstable numerical optimization, is easy to implement and, unlike previous methods, permits the computation of pre-images in discrete input spaces.

We propose an approach to learning the semantics of images which allows us to automatically annotate an image with keywords and to retrieve images based on text queries. We do this using a formalism that models the generation of annotated images. We assume that every image is divided into regions, each described by a continuous-valued feature vector. Given a training set of images with annotations, we compute a joint probabilistic model of image features and words which allow us to predict the probability of generating a word given the image regions. This may be used to automatically annotate and retrieve images given a word as a query. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the best of the previously reported results on the tasks of automatic image annotation and retrieval.

We consider learning to classify cognitive states of human subjects, based on their brain activity observed via functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This problem is important because such classifiers constitute "virtual sensors" of hidden cognitive states, which may be useful in cognitive science research and clinical applications. In recent work, Mitchell, et al. [6,7,9] have demonstrated the feasibility of training such classifiers for individual human subjects (e.g., to distinguish whether the subject is reading an ambiguous or unambiguous sentence, or whether they are reading a noun or a verb). Here we extend that line of research, exploring how to train classifiers that can be applied across multiple human subjects, including subjects who were not involved in training the classifier. We describe the design of several machine learning approaches to training multiple-subject classifiers, and report experimental results demonstrating the success of these methods in learning cross-subject classifiers for two different fMRI data sets.

A key issue in supervised protein classification is the representation of input sequences of amino acids. Recent work using string kernels for protein data has achieved state-of-the-art classification performance. However, such representations are based only on labeled data -- examples with known 3D structures, organized into structural classes -- while in practice, unlabeled data is far more plentiful. In this work, we develop simple and scalable cluster kernel techniques for incorporating unlabeled data into the representation of protein sequences. We show that our methods greatly improve the classification performance of string kernels and outperform standard approaches for using unlabeled data, such as adding close homologs of the positive examples to the training data. We achieve equal or superior performance to previously presented cluster kernel methods while achieving far greater computational efficiency.

This article addresses the issues of colour classification and collision detection as they occur in the legged league robot soccer environment of RoboCup. We show how the method of one-class classification with support vector machines (SVMs) can be applied to solve these tasks satisfactorily using the limited hardware capacity of the prescribed Sony AIBO quadruped robots. The experimental evaluation shows an improvement over our previous methods of ellipse fitting for colour classification and the statistical approach used for collision detection.

In this paper, sparse representation (factorization) of a data matrix is first discussed. An overcomplete basis matrix is estimated by using the K means method.

This work presents an architecture based on perceptrons to recognize phrase structures, and an online learning algorithm to train the perceptrons together and dependently. The recognition strategy applies learning in two layers: a filtering layer, which reduces the search space by identifying plausible phrase candidates, and a ranking layer, which recursively builds the optimal phrase structure. We provide a recognition-based feedback rule which reflects to each local function its committed errors from a global point of view, and allows to train them together online as perceptrons. Experimentation on a syntactic parsing problem, the recognition of clause hierarchies, improves state-of-the-art results and evinces the advantages of our global training method over optimizing each function locally and independently.

Nonlinear filtering can solve very complex problems, but typically involve very time consuming calculations. Here we show that for filters that are constructed as a RBF network with Gaussian basis functions, a decomposition into linear filters exists, which can be computed efficiently in the frequency domain, yielding dramatic improvement in speed. We present an application of this idea to image processing. In electron micrograph images of photoreceptor terminals of the fruit fly, Drosophila, synaptic vesicles containing neurotransmitter should be detected and labeled automatically. We use hand labels, provided by human experts, to learn a RBF filter using Support Vector Regression with Gaussian kernels. We will show that the resulting nonlinear filter solves the task to a degree of accuracy, which is close to what can be achieved by human experts. This allows the very time consuming task of data evaluation to be done efficiently.

This paper is concerned with transductive learning. Although transduction appears to be an easier task than induction, there have not been many provably useful algorithms and bounds for transduction. We present explicit error bounds for transduction and derive a general technique for devising bounds within this setting. The technique is applied to derive error bounds for compression schemes such as (transductive) SVMs and for transduction algorithms based on clustering.