Cognitive control refers to the flexible deployment of memory and attention in response to task demands and current goals. Control is often studied experimentally by presenting sequences of stimuli, some demanding a response, and others modulating the stimulus-response mapping. In these tasks, participants must maintain information about the current stimulus-response mapping in working memory. Prominent theories of cognitive control use recurrent neural nets to implement working memory, and optimize memory utilization via reinforcement learning. We present a novel perspective on cognitive control in which working memory representations are intrinsically probabilistic, and control operations that maintain and update working memory are dynamically determined via probabilistic inference. We show that our model provides a parsimonious account of behavioral and neuroimaging data, and suggest that it offers an elegant conceptualization of control in which behavior can be cast as optimal, subject to limitations on learning and the rate of information processing. Moreover, our model provides insight into how task instructions can be directly translated into appropriate behavior and then efficiently refined with subsequent task experience.

We develop a statistical framework for the simultaneous, unsupervised segmentation and discovery of visual object categories from image databases. Examining a large set of manually segmented scenes, we use chi--square tests to show that object frequencies and segment sizes both follow power law distributions, which are well modeled by the Pitman--Yor (PY) process. This nonparametric prior distribution leads to learning algorithms which discover an unknown set of objects, and segmentation methods which automatically adapt their resolution to each image. Generalizing previous applications of PY processes, we use Gaussian processes to discover spatially contiguous segments which respect image boundaries. Using a novel family of variational approximations, our approach produces segmentations which compare favorably to state--of--the--art methods, while simultaneously discovering categories shared among natural scenes.

A non-parametric Bayesian model is proposed for processing multiple images. The analysis employs image features and, when present, the words associated with accompanying annotations. The model clusters the images into classes, and each image is segmented into a set of objects, also allowing the opportunity to assign a word to each object (localized labeling). Each object is assumed to be represented as a heterogeneous mix of components, with this realized via mixture models linking image features to object types. The number of image classes, number of object types, and the characteristics of the object-feature mixture models are inferred non-parametrically. To constitute spatially contiguous objects, a new logistic stick-breaking process is developed. Inference is performed efficiently via variational Bayesian analysis, with example results presented on two image databases.

Unexpected stimuli are a challenge to any machine learning algorithm. Here we identify distinct types of unexpected events, focusing on 'incongruent events' - when 'general level' and 'specific level' classifiers give conflicting predictions. We define a formal framework for the representation and processing of incongruent events: starting from the notion of label hierarchy, we show how partial order on labels can be deduced from such hierarchies. For each event, we compute its probability in different ways, based on adjacent levels (according to the partial order) in the label hierarchy . An incongruent event is an event where the probability computed based on some more specific level (in accordance with the partial order) is much smaller than the probability computed based on some more general level, leading to conflicting predictions. We derive algorithms to detect incongruent events from different types of hierarchies, corresponding to class membership or part membership. Respectively, we show promising results with real data on two specific problems: Out Of Vocabulary words in speech recognition, and the identification of a new sub-class (e.g., the face of a new individual) in audio-visual facial object recognition.

Most models of categorization learn categories defined by characteristic features but some categories are described more naturally in terms of relations. We present a generative model that helps to explain how relational categories are learned and used. Our model learns abstract schemata that specify the relational similarities shared by instances of a category, and our emphasis on abstraction departs from previous theoretical proposals that focus instead on comparison of concrete instances. Ourfirst experiment suggests that abstraction can help to explain some of the findings that have previously been used to support comparison-based approaches. Oursecond experiment focuses on one-shot schema learning, a problem that raises challenges for comparison-based approaches but is handled naturally by our abstraction-based account.

In many settings, such as protein interactions and gene regulatory networks, collections ofauthor-recipient email, and social networks, the data consist of pairwise measurements, e.g., presence or absence of links between pairs of objects. Analyzing such data with probabilistic models requires nonstandard assumptions, since the usual independence or exchangeability assumptions no longer hold. In this paper, we introduce a class of latent variable models for pairwise measurements: mixedmembership stochastic blockmodels. Models in this class combine a global model of dense patches of connectivity (blockmodel) with a local model to instantiate node-specific variability in the connections (mixed membership). We develop a general variational inference algorithm for fast approximate posterior inference.We demonstrate the advantages of mixed membership stochastic blockmodel with applications to social networks and protein interaction networks.

We consider the problem of using nearest neighbor methods to provide a conditional probability estimate, P(y|a), when the number of labels y is large and the labels share some underlying structure. We propose a method for learning error-correcting output codes (ECOCs) to model the similarity between labels within a nearest neighbor framework. The learned ECOCs and nearest neighbor information are used to provide conditional probability estimates. We apply these estimates to the problem of acoustic modeling for speech recognition. We demonstrate an absolute reduction in word error rate (WER) of 0.9% (a 2.5% relative reduction in WER) on a lecture recognition task over a state-of-the-art baseline GMM model.

We study unsupervised learning in a probabilistic generative model for occlusion. The model uses two types of latent variables: one indicates which objects are present in the image, and the other how they are ordered in depth. This depth order then determines how the positions and appearances of the objects present, specified in the model parameters, combine to form the image. We show that the object parameters can be learnt from an unlabelled set of images in which objects occlude one another. Exact maximum-likelihood learning is intractable. However, we show that tractable approximations to Expectation Maximization (EM) can be found if the training images each contain only a small number of objects on average. In numerical experiments it is shown that these approximations recover the correct set of object parameters. Experiments on a novel version of the bars test using colored bars, and experiments on more realistic data, show that the algorithm performs well in extracting the generating causes. Experiments based on the standard bars benchmark test for object learning show that the algorithm performs well in comparison to other recent component extraction approaches. The model and the learning algorithm thus connect research on occlusion with the research field of multiple-cause component extraction methods.

Accurate and efficient inference in evolutionary trees is a central problem in computational biology.While classical treatments have made unrealistic site independence assumptions, ignoring insertions and deletions, realistic approaches require tracking insertions and deletions along the phylogenetic tree--a challenging and unsolved computational problem. We propose a new ancestry resampling procedure for inference in evolutionary trees. We evaluate our method in two problem domains--multiple sequence alignment and reconstruction of ancestral sequences--and show substantial improvement over the current state of the art.

The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle selects the model that has the shortest code for data plus model. We show that for a countable class of models, MDL predictions are close to the true distribution in a strong sense. The result is completely general. No independence, ergodicity, stationarity, identifiability, or other assumption on the model class need to be made. More formally, we show that for any countable class of models, the distributions selected by MDL (or MAP) asymptotically predict (merge with) the true measure in the class in total variation distance.