3,605 research outputs found
Stabilizing Training of Generative Adversarial Networks through Regularization
Deep generative models based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have
demonstrated impressive sample quality but in order to work they require a
careful choice of architecture, parameter initialization, and selection of
hyper-parameters. This fragility is in part due to a dimensional mismatch or
non-overlapping support between the model distribution and the data
distribution, causing their density ratio and the associated f-divergence to be
undefined. We overcome this fundamental limitation and propose a new
regularization approach with low computational cost that yields a stable GAN
training procedure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this regularizer across
several architectures trained on common benchmark image generation tasks. Our
regularization turns GAN models into reliable building blocks for deep
learning
-MLE: A fast algorithm for learning statistical mixture models
We describe -MLE, a fast and efficient local search algorithm for learning
finite statistical mixtures of exponential families such as Gaussian mixture
models. Mixture models are traditionally learned using the
expectation-maximization (EM) soft clustering technique that monotonically
increases the incomplete (expected complete) likelihood. Given prescribed
mixture weights, the hard clustering -MLE algorithm iteratively assigns data
to the most likely weighted component and update the component models using
Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs). Using the duality between exponential
families and Bregman divergences, we prove that the local convergence of the
complete likelihood of -MLE follows directly from the convergence of a dual
additively weighted Bregman hard clustering. The inner loop of -MLE can be
implemented using any -means heuristic like the celebrated Lloyd's batched
or Hartigan's greedy swap updates. We then show how to update the mixture
weights by minimizing a cross-entropy criterion that implies to update weights
by taking the relative proportion of cluster points, and reiterate the mixture
parameter update and mixture weight update processes until convergence. Hard EM
is interpreted as a special case of -MLE when both the component update and
the weight update are performed successively in the inner loop. To initialize
-MLE, we propose -MLE++, a careful initialization of -MLE guaranteeing
probabilistically a global bound on the best possible complete likelihood.Comment: 31 pages, Extend preliminary paper presented at IEEE ICASSP 201
Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems
Abstract: We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theoryâin particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-grainingâthat motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary Afghanistan insurgency
Sliced Wasserstein Distance for Learning Gaussian Mixture Models
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many
applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization
(EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However,
EM guarantees only convergence to a stationary point of the log-likelihood
function, which could be arbitrarily worse than the optimal solution. Inspired
by the relationship between the negative log-likelihood function and the
Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, we propose an alternative formulation for
estimating the GMM parameters using the sliced Wasserstein distance, which
gives rise to a new algorithm. Specifically, we propose minimizing the
sliced-Wasserstein distance between the mixture model and the data distribution
with respect to the GMM parameters. In contrast to the KL-divergence, the
energy landscape for the sliced-Wasserstein distance is more well-behaved and
therefore more suitable for a stochastic gradient descent scheme to obtain the
optimal GMM parameters. We show that our formulation results in parameter
estimates that are more robust to random initializations and demonstrate that
it can estimate high-dimensional data distributions more faithfully than the EM
algorithm
A Triclustering Approach for Time Evolving Graphs
This paper introduces a novel technique to track structures in time evolving
graphs. The method is based on a parameter free approach for three-dimensional
co-clustering of the source vertices, the target vertices and the time. All
these features are simultaneously segmented in order to build time segments and
clusters of vertices whose edge distributions are similar and evolve in the
same way over the time segments. The main novelty of this approach lies in that
the time segments are directly inferred from the evolution of the edge
distribution between the vertices, thus not requiring the user to make an a
priori discretization. Experiments conducted on a synthetic dataset illustrate
the good behaviour of the technique, and a study of a real-life dataset shows
the potential of the proposed approach for exploratory data analysis
- âŠ