Technology
Out-of-Distribution Detection using Multiple Semantic Label Representations
Deep Neural Networks are powerful models that attained remarkable results on a variety of tasks. These models are shown to be extremely efficient when training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. However, it is not clear how a network will act when it is fed with an out-of-distribution example. In this work, we consider the problem of out-of-distribution detection in neural networks. We propose to use multiple semantic dense representations instead of sparse representation as the target label. Specifically, we propose to use several word representations obtained from different corpora or architectures as target labels. We evaluated the proposed model on computer vision, and speech commands detection tasks and compared it to previous methods. Results suggest that our method compares favorably with previous work. Besides, we present the efficiency of our approach for detecting wrongly classified and adversarial examples.
Diffusion Maps for Textual Network Embedding
Textual network embedding leverages rich text information associated with the network to learn low-dimensional vectorial representations of vertices. Rather than using typical natural language processing (NLP) approaches, recent research exploits the relationship of texts on the same edge to graphically embed text. However, these models neglect to measure the complete level of connectivity between any two texts in the graph. We present diffusion maps for textual network embedding (DMTE), integrating global structural information of the graph to capture the semantic relatedness between texts, with a diffusion-convolution operation applied on the text inputs. In addition, a new objective function is designed to efficiently preserve the high-order proximity using the graph diffusion. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the vertex-classification and link-prediction tasks.
Fighting Boredom in Recommender Systems with Linear Reinforcement Learning
A common assumption in recommender systems (RS) is the existence of a best fixed recommendation strategy. Such strategy may be simple and work at the item level (e.g., in multi-armed bandit it is assumed one best fixed arm/item exists) or implement more sophisticated RS (e.g., the objective of A/B testing is to find the best fixed RS and execute it thereafter). We argue that this assumption is rarely verified in practice, as the recommendation process itself may impact the user's preferences. For instance, a user may get bored by a strategy, while she may gain interest again, if enough time passed since the last time that strategy was used. In this case, a better approach consists in alternating different solutions at the right frequency to fully exploit their potential. In this paper, we first cast the problem as a Markov decision process, where the rewards are a linear function of the recent history of actions, and we show that a policy considering the long-term influence of the recommendations may outperform both fixed-action and contextual greedy policies. We then introduce an extension of the UCRL algorithm ( L IN UCRL) to effectively balance exploration and exploitation in an unknown environment, and we derive a regret bound that is independent of the number of states.
Mixture Matrix Completion
Completing a data matrix X has become an ubiquitous problem in modern data science, with motivations in recommender systems, computer vision, and networks inference, to name a few. One typical assumption is that X is low-rank. A more general model assumes that each column of X corresponds to one of several low-rank matrices. This paper generalizes these models to what we call mixture matrix completion (MMC): the case where each entry of X corresponds to one of several low-rank matrices. MMC is a more accurate model for recommender systems, and brings more flexibility to other completion and clustering problems.
Learning to Reconstruct Shapes from Unseen Classes
From a single image, humans are able to perceive the full 3D shape of an object by exploiting learned shape priors from everyday life. Contemporary single-image 3D reconstruction algorithms aim to solve this task in a similar fashion, but often end up with priors that are highly biased by training classes. Here we present an algorithm, Generalizable Reconstruction (GenRe), designed to capture more generic, class-agnostic shape priors. We achieve this with an inference network and training procedure that combine 2.5D representations of visible surfaces (depth and silhouette), spherical shape representations of both visible and non-visible surfaces, and 3D voxel-based representations, in a principled manner that exploits the causal structure of how 3D shapes give rise to 2D images. Experiments demonstrate that GenRe performs well on single-view shape reconstruction, and generalizes to diverse novel objects from categories not seen during training.
When do random forests fail?
Random forests are learning algorithms that build large collections of random trees and make predictions by averaging the individual tree predictions. In this paper, we consider various tree constructions and examine how the choice of parameters affects the generalization error of the resulting random forests as the sample size goes to infinity. We show that subsampling of data points during the tree construction phase is important: Forests can become inconsistent with either no subsampling or too severe subsampling. As a consequence, even highly randomized trees can lead to inconsistent forests if no subsampling is used, which implies that some of the commonly used setups for random forests can be inconsistent. As a second consequence we can show that trees that have good performance in nearest-neighbor search can be a poor choice for random forests.
Bayesian Semi-supervised Learning with Graph Gaussian Processes
We propose a data-efficient Gaussian process-based Bayesian approach to the semi-supervised learning problem on graphs. The proposed model shows extremely competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art graph neural networks on semi-supervised learning benchmark experiments, and outperforms the neural networks in active learning experiments where labels are scarce. Furthermore, the model does not require a validation data set for early stopping to control over-fitting. Our model can be viewed as an instance of empirical distribution regression weighted locally by network connectivity. We further motivate the intuitive construction of the model with a Bayesian linear model interpretation where the node features are filtered by an operator related to the graph Laplacian. The method can be easily implemented by adapting off-the-shelf scalable variational inference algorithms for Gaussian processes.
Scalable Coordinated Exploration in Concurrent Reinforcement Learning
We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently operate in a common environment, and we develop an approach to efficient coordinated exploration that is suitable for problems of practical scale. Our approach builds on the seed sampling concept introduced in Dimakopoulou and Van Roy (2018) and on a randomized value function learning algorithm from Osband et al. (2016). We demonstrate that, for simple tabular contexts, the approach is competitive with those previously proposed in Dimakopoulou and Van Roy (2018) and with a higher-dimensional problem and a neural network value function representation, the approach learns quickly with far fewer agents than alternative exploration schemes.
Unsupervised Learning of Object Landmarks through Conditional Image Generation
We propose a method for learning landmark detectors for visual objects (such as the eyes and the nose in a face) without any manual supervision. We cast this as the problem of generating images that combine the appearance of the object as seen in a first example image with the geometry of the object as seen in a second example image, where the two examples differ by a viewpoint change and/or an object deformation. In order to factorize appearance and geometry, we introduce a tight bottleneck in the geometry-extraction process that selects and distils geometry-related features. Compared to standard image generation problems, which often use generative adversarial networks, our generation task is conditioned on both appearance and geometry and thus is significantly less ambiguous, to the point that adopting a simple perceptual loss formulation is sufficient. We demonstrate that our approach can learn object landmarks from synthetic image deformations or videos, all without manual supervision, while outperforming state-of-the-art unsupervised landmark detectors. We further show that our method is applicable to a large variety of datasets - faces, people, 3D objects, and digits - without any modifications.