similarity function
Hierarchical Clustering via Spreading Metrics
We study the cost function for hierarchical clusterings introduced by [16] where hierarchies are treated as first-class objects rather than deriving their cost from projections into flat clusters. It was also shown in [16] that a top-down algorithm returns a hierarchical clustering of cost at most O(αnlog n) times the cost of the optimal hierarchical clustering, where αn is the approximation ratio of the Sparsest Cut subroutine used. Thus using the best known approximation algorithm for Sparsest Cut due to Arora-Rao-Vazirani, the top-down algorithm returns a hierarchical clustering of cost at most O log3/2 ntimes the cost of the optimal solution. We improve this by giving an O(log n)-approximation algorithm for this problem. Our main technical ingredients are a combinatorial characterization of ultrametrics induced by this cost function, deriving an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for this family of ultrametrics, and showing how to iteratively round an LP relaxation of this formulation by using the idea of sphere growing which has been extensively used in the context of graph partitioning. We also prove that our algorithm returns an O(log n)-approximate hierarchical clustering for a generalization of this cost function also studied in [16]. We also give constant factor inapproximability results for this problem.
Comparing Apples to Oranges: Learning Similarity Functions for Data Produced by Different Distributions
Similarity functions measure how comparable pairs of elements are, and play a key role in a wide variety of applications, e.g., notions of Individual Fairness abiding by the seminal paradigm of Dwork et al., as well as Clustering problems. However, access to an accurate similarity function should not always be considered guaranteed, and this point was even raised by Dwork et al. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that when the elements to be compared are produced by different distributions, or in other words belong to different ``demographic'' groups, knowledge of their true similarity might be very difficult to obtain. In this work, we present an efficient sampling framework that learns these across-groups similarity functions, using only a limited amount of experts' feedback. We show analytical results with rigorous theoretical bounds, and empirically validate our algorithms via a large suite of experiments.
Revisiting (\epsilon, \gamma, \tau) -similarity learning for domain adaptation
Similarity learning is an active research area in machine learning that tackles the problem of finding a similarity function tailored to an observable data sample in order to achieve efficient classification. This learning scenario has been generally formalized by the means of a $(\epsilon, \gamma, \tau)-$good similarity learning framework in the context of supervised classification and has been shown to have strong theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose to extend the theoretical analysis of similarity learning to the domain adaptation setting, a particular situation occurring when the similarity is learned and then deployed on samples following different probability distributions. We give a new definition of an $(\epsilon, \gamma)-$good similarity for domain adaptation and prove several results quantifying the performance of a similarity function on a target domain after it has been trained on a source domain. We particularly show that if the source distribution dominates the target one, then principally new domain adaptation learning bounds can be proved.
1 Details about the observation formats Figure 1: Example of the observation of WebShop The observation of WebShop is simplified based on the text_rich
The observation of WikiHow is represented in exactly the same way with Zhang et al. [2023]. Table 1: Patterns of WebShop pages Pattern Description search The page to search for an item itemlisting The page listing the search results item The information page of a specific item others The item description page, item feature page, and review pageThe similarity lookup table is defined in Table 2. 1 Table 2: Lookup table of the page similarity of WebShop search itemlisting item others search 1 0 0 0 itemlisting 0 1 0 0 item 0 0 1 0.3 others 0 0 0.3 1 2.2 Lookup table of the instruction similarity function of WikiHow Table 3. Table 3: Patterns of WikiHow instructions Pattern Name Pattern Template search Search an article to learn . . . Owing to the limit of budgets, a subset of only 20 tasks is sampled from the full test set. The visualization is available in Figure 2. It can be seen that the performance of R However, there seems to be a saturation for the performance, which may be attributed to the limited number of the active exemplars and training tasks. The saturation of the average reward comes later than that of the success rate. Double Q-Learning [van Hasselt, 2010] is usually leveraged to ameliorate over-estimation for lookup-based Q-Learning.