We propose directed time series regression, a new approach to estimating parameters of time-series models for use in certainty equivalent model predictive control. The approach combines merits of least squares regression and empirical optimization. Through a computational study involving a stochastic version of a well known inverted pendulum balancing problem, we demonstrate that directed time series regression can generate significant improvements in controller performance over either of the aforementioned alternatives.

Inference problems in graphical models are often approximated by casting them as constrained optimization problems. Message passing algorithms, such as belief propagation, have previously been suggested as methods for solving these optimization problems. However, there are few convergence guarantees for such algorithms, and the algorithms are therefore not guaranteed to solve the corresponding optimization problem. Here we present an oriented tree decomposition algorithm that is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum of the Tree-Reweighted (TRW) variational problem. Our algorithm performs local updates in the convex dual of the TRW problem - an unconstrained generalized geometric program. Primal updates, also local, correspond to oriented reparametrization operations that leave the distribution intact.

Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming (MBDP) has proved extremely effective in solving decentralized POMDPs with large horizons. We generalize the algorithm and improve its scalability by reducing the complexity with respect to the number of observations from exponential to polynomial. We derive error bounds on solution quality with respect to this new approximation and analyze the convergence behavior. To evaluate the effectiveness of the improvements, we introduce a new, larger benchmark problem. Experimental results show that despite the high complexity of decentralized POMDPs, scalable solution techniques such as MBDP perform surprisingly well.

We present a memory-bounded optimization approach for solving infinite-horizon decentralized POMDPs. Policies for each agent are represented by stochastic finite state controllers. We formulate the problem of optimizing these policies as a nonlinear program, leveraging powerful existing nonlinear optimization techniques for solving the problem. While existing solvers only guarantee locally optimal solutions, we show that our formulation produces higher quality controllers than the state-of-the-art approach. We also incorporate a shared source of randomness in the form of a correlation device to further increase solution quality with only a limited increase in space and time. Our experimental results show that nonlinear optimization can be used to provide high quality, concise solutions to decentralized decision problems under uncertainty.

We present a functional framework for automated mechanism design based on a two-stage game model of strategic interaction between the designer and the mechanism participants, and apply it to several classes of two-player infinite games of incomplete information. At the core of our framework is a black-box optimization algorithm which guides the selection process of candidate mechanisms. Our approach yields optimal or nearly optimal mechanisms in several application domains using various objective functions. By comparing our results with known optimal mechanisms, and in some cases improving on the best known mechanisms, we provide evidence that ours is a promising approach to parametric design of indirect mechanisms.

Finding the most probable assignment (MAP) in a general graphical model is known to be NP hard but good approximations have been attained with max-product belief propagation (BP) and its variants. In particular, it is known that using BP on a single-cycle graph or tree reweighted BP on an arbitrary graph will give the MAP solution if the beliefs have no ties. In this paper we extend the setting under which BP can be used to provably extract the MAP. We define Convex BP as BP algorithms based on a convex free energy approximation and show that this class includes ordinary BP with single-cycle, tree reweighted BP and many other BP variants. We show that when there are no ties, fixed-points of convex max-product BP will provably give the MAP solution. We also show that convex sum-product BP at sufficiently small temperatures can be used to solve linear programs that arise from relaxing the MAP problem. Finally, we derive a novel condition that allows us to derive the MAP solution even if some of the convex BP beliefs have ties. In experiments, we show that our theorems allow us to find the MAP in many real-world instances of graphical models where exact inference using junction-tree is impossible.

A wide variety of machine learning algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM), minimax probability machine (MPM), and Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA), exist for binary classification. The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified classification model that includes the above models through a robust optimization approach. This unified model has several benefits. One is that the extensions and improvements intended for SVM become applicable to MPM and FDA, and vice versa. Another benefit is to provide theoretical results to above learning methods at once by dealing with the unified model. We give a statistical interpretation of the unified classification model and propose a non-convex optimization algorithm that can be applied to non-convex variants of existing learning methods.

We propose a general information-theoretic approach called Seraph (SEmi-supervised metRic leArning Paradigm with Hyper-sparsity) for metric learning that does not rely upon the manifold assumption. Given the probability parameterized by a Mahalanobis distance, we maximize the entropy of that probability on labeled data and minimize it on unlabeled data following entropy regularization, which allows the supervised and unsupervised parts to be integrated in a natural and meaningful way. Furthermore, Seraph is regularized by encouraging a low-rank projection induced from the metric. The optimization of Seraph is solved efficiently and stably by an EM-like scheme with the analytical E-Step and convex M-Step. Experiments demonstrate that Seraph compares favorably with many well-known global and local metric learning methods.

This paper addresses the problem of inferring a regular expression from a given set of strings that resembles, as closely as possible, the regular expression that a human expert would have written to identify the language. This is motivated by our goal of automating the task of postmasters of an email service who use regular expressions to describe and blacklist email spam campaigns. Training data contains batches of messages and corresponding regular expressions that an expert postmaster feels confident to blacklist. We model this task as a learning problem with structured output spaces and an appropriate loss function, derive a decoder and the resulting optimization problem, and a report on a case study conducted with an email service.

Using sparse-inducing norms to learn robust models has received increasing attention from many fields for its attractive properties. Projection-based methods have been widely applied to learning tasks constrained by such norms. As a key building block of these methods, an efficient operator for Euclidean projection onto the intersection of $\ell_1$ and $\ell_{1,q}$ norm balls $(q=2\text{or}\infty)$ is proposed in this paper. We prove that the projection can be reduced to finding the root of an auxiliary function which is piecewise smooth and monotonic. Hence, a bisection algorithm is sufficient to solve the problem. We show that the time complexity of our solution is $O(n+g\log g)$ for $q=2$ and $O(n\log n)$ for $q=\infty$, where $n$ is the dimensionality of the vector to be projected and $g$ is the number of disjoint groups; we confirm this complexity by experimentation. Empirical study reveals that our method achieves significantly better performance than classical methods in terms of running time and memory usage. We further show that embedded with our efficient projection operator, projection-based algorithms can solve regression problems with composite norm constraints more efficiently than other methods and give superior accuracy.