Large amounts of labeled data are typically required to train deep learning models. For many real-world problems, however, acquiring additional data can be expensive or even impossible. We present semi-supervised deep kernel learning (SSDKL), a semi-supervised regression model based on minimizing predictive variance in the posterior regularization framework. SSDKL combines the hierarchical representation learning of neural networks with the probabilistic modeling capabilities of Gaussian processes. By leveraging unlabeled data, we show improvements on a diverse set of real-world regression tasks over supervised deep kernel learning and semi-supervised methods such as VAT and mean teacher adapted for regression.

We present a new technique for deep reinforcement learning that automatically detects moving objects and uses the relevant information for action selection. The detection of moving objects is done in an unsupervised way by exploiting structure from motion. Instead of directly learning a policy from raw images, the agent first learns to detect and segment moving objects by exploiting flow information in video sequences. The learned representation is then used to focus the policy of the agent on the moving objects. Over time, the agent identifies which objects are critical for decision making and gradually builds a policy based on relevant moving objects.

Generative adversarial training for imitation learning has shown promising results on high-dimensional and continuous control tasks. This paradigm is based on reducing the imitation learning problem to the density matching problem, where the agent iteratively refines the policy to match the empirical state-action visitation frequency of the expert demonstration. Although this approach has shown to robustly learn to imitate even with scarce demonstration, one must still address the inherent challenge that collecting trajectory samples in each iteration is a costly operation. To address this issue, we first propose a Bayesian formulation of generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), where the imitation policy and the cost function are represented as stochastic neural networks. Then, we show that we can significantly enhance the sample efficiency of GAIL leveraging the predictive density of the cost, on an extensive set of imitation learning tasks with high-dimensional states and actions.

We address the problem of finding reliable dense correspondences between a pair of images. This is a challenging task due to strong appearance differences between the corresponding scene elements and ambiguities generated by repetitive patterns. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, inspired by the classic idea of disambiguating feature matches using semi-local constraints, we develop an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network architecture that identifies sets of spatially consistent matches by analyzing neighbourhood consensus patterns in the 4D space of all possible correspondences between a pair of images without the need for a global geometric model. Second, we demonstrate that the model can be trained effectively from weak supervision in the form of matching and non-matching image pairs without the need for costly manual annotation of point to point correspondences. Third, we show the proposed neighbourhood consensus network can be applied to a range of matching tasks including both category-and instance-level matching, obtaining the state-of-the-art results on the PF Pascal dataset and the InLoc indoor visual localization benchmark.

Stochastic partition models divide a multi-dimensional space into a number of rectangular regions, such that the data within each region exhibit certain types of homogeneity. Due to the nature of their partition strategy, existing partition models may create many unnecessary divisions in sparse regions when trying to describe data in dense regions. To avoid this problem we introduce a new parsimonious partition model -- the Rectangular Bounding Process (RBP) -- to efficiently partition multi-dimensional spaces, by employing a bounding strategy to enclose data points within rectangular bounding boxes. Unlike existing approaches, the RBP possesses several attractive theoretical properties that make it a powerful nonparametric partition prior on a hypercube. In particular, the RBP is self-consistent and as such can be directly extended from a finite hypercube to infinite (unbounded) space. We apply the RBP to regression trees and relational models as a flexible partition prior. The experimental results validate the merit of the RBP {in rich yet parsimonious expressiveness} compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

A large class of machine learning techniques requires the solution of optimization problems involving spectral functions of parametric matrices, e.g.

This paper studies the problem of sparse regression where the goal is to learn a sparse vector that best optimizes a given objective function. Under the assumption that the objective function satisfies restricted strong convexity (RSC), we analyze orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), a greedy algorithm that is used heavily in applications, and obtain support recovery result as well as a tight generalization error bound for OMP. Furthermore, we obtain lower bounds for OMP, showing that both our results on support recovery and generalization error are tight up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, these support recovery and generalization bounds are the first such matching upper and lower bounds (up to logarithmic factors) for {\em any} sparse regression algorithm under the RSC assumption.

We present an approach for simultaneously separating and localizing multiple sound sources using recorded microphone data. Inspired by topic models, our approach is based on a probabilistic model of inter-microphone phase differences, and poses separation and localization as a Bayesian inference problem. We assume sound activity is locally smooth across time, frequency, and location, and use the known position of the microphones to obtain a consistent separation. We compare the performance of our method against existing algorithms on simulated anechoic voice data and find that it obtains high performance across a variety of input conditions.

Sketching and stochastic gradient methods are arguably the most common techniques to derive efficient large scale learning algorithms. In this paper, we investigate their application in the context of nonparametric statistical learning. More precisely, we study the estimator defined by stochastic gradient with mini batches and random features. The latter can be seen as form of nonlinear sketching and used to define approximate kernel methods. The considered estimator is not explicitly penalized/constrained and regularization is implicit. Indeed, our study highlights how different parameters, such as number of features, iterations, step-size and mini-batch size control the learning properties of the solutions. We do this by deriving optimal finite sample bounds, under standard assumptions. The obtained results are corroborated and illustrated by numerical experiments.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great capability of solving various artificial intelligence tasks. However, the increasing model size has raised challenges in employing them in resource-limited applications. In this work, we propose to compress deep models by using channel-wise convolutions, which replace dense connections among feature maps with sparse ones in CNNs. Based on this novel operation, we build light-weight CNNs known as ChannelNets.