14,919 research outputs found
A Contextual Bandit Bake-off
Contextual bandit algorithms are essential for solving many real-world
interactive machine learning problems. Despite multiple recent successes on
statistically and computationally efficient methods, the practical behavior of
these algorithms is still poorly understood. We leverage the availability of
large numbers of supervised learning datasets to empirically evaluate
contextual bandit algorithms, focusing on practical methods that learn by
relying on optimization oracles from supervised learning. We find that a recent
method (Foster et al., 2018) using optimism under uncertainty works the best
overall. A surprisingly close second is a simple greedy baseline that only
explores implicitly through the diversity of contexts, followed by a variant of
Online Cover (Agarwal et al., 2014) which tends to be more conservative but
robust to problem specification by design. Along the way, we also evaluate
various components of contextual bandit algorithm design such as loss
estimators. Overall, this is a thorough study and review of contextual bandit
methodology
Log-Euclidean Bag of Words for Human Action Recognition
Representing videos by densely extracted local space-time features has
recently become a popular approach for analysing actions. In this paper, we
tackle the problem of categorising human actions by devising Bag of Words (BoW)
models based on covariance matrices of spatio-temporal features, with the
features formed from histograms of optical flow. Since covariance matrices form
a special type of Riemannian manifold, the space of Symmetric Positive Definite
(SPD) matrices, non-Euclidean geometry should be taken into account while
discriminating between covariance matrices. To this end, we propose to embed
SPD manifolds to Euclidean spaces via a diffeomorphism and extend the BoW
approach to its Riemannian version. The proposed BoW approach takes into
account the manifold geometry of SPD matrices during the generation of the
codebook and histograms. Experiments on challenging human action datasets show
that the proposed method obtains notable improvements in discrimination
accuracy, in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods
Attention-Based Capsule Networks with Dynamic Routing for Relation Extraction
A capsule is a group of neurons, whose activity vector represents the
instantiation parameters of a specific type of entity. In this paper, we
explore the capsule networks used for relation extraction in a multi-instance
multi-label learning framework and propose a novel neural approach based on
capsule networks with attention mechanisms. We evaluate our method with
different benchmarks, and it is demonstrated that our method improves the
precision of the predicted relations. Particularly, we show that capsule
networks improve multiple entity pairs relation extraction.Comment: To be published in EMNLP 201
Learning Models over Relational Data using Sparse Tensors and Functional Dependencies
Integrated solutions for analytics over relational databases are of great
practical importance as they avoid the costly repeated loop data scientists
have to deal with on a daily basis: select features from data residing in
relational databases using feature extraction queries involving joins,
projections, and aggregations; export the training dataset defined by such
queries; convert this dataset into the format of an external learning tool; and
train the desired model using this tool. These integrated solutions are also a
fertile ground of theoretically fundamental and challenging problems at the
intersection of relational and statistical data models.
This article introduces a unified framework for training and evaluating a
class of statistical learning models over relational databases. This class
includes ridge linear regression, polynomial regression, factorization
machines, and principal component analysis. We show that, by synergizing key
tools from database theory such as schema information, query structure,
functional dependencies, recent advances in query evaluation algorithms, and
from linear algebra such as tensor and matrix operations, one can formulate
relational analytics problems and design efficient (query and data)
structure-aware algorithms to solve them.
This theoretical development informed the design and implementation of the
AC/DC system for structure-aware learning. We benchmark the performance of
AC/DC against R, MADlib, libFM, and TensorFlow. For typical retail forecasting
and advertisement planning applications, AC/DC can learn polynomial regression
models and factorization machines with at least the same accuracy as its
competitors and up to three orders of magnitude faster than its competitors
whenever they do not run out of memory, exceed 24-hour timeout, or encounter
internal design limitations.Comment: 61 pages, 9 figures, 2 table
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