848 research outputs found
Supervised Machine Learning Under Test-Time Resource Constraints: A Trade-off Between Accuracy and Cost
The past decade has witnessed how the field of machine learning has established itself as a necessary component in several multi-billion-dollar industries. The real-world industrial setting introduces an interesting new problem to machine learning research: computational resources must be budgeted and cost must be strictly accounted for during test-time. A typical problem is that if an application consumes x additional units of cost during test-time, but will improve accuracy by y percent, should the additional x resources be allocated? The core of this problem is a trade-off between accuracy and cost. In this thesis, we examine components of test-time cost, and develop different strategies to manage this trade-off.
We first investigate test-time cost and discover that it typically consists of two parts: feature extraction cost and classifier evaluation cost. The former reflects the computational efforts of transforming data instances to feature vectors, and could be highly variable when features are heterogeneous. The latter reflects the effort of evaluating a classifier, which could be substantial, in particular nonparametric algorithms. We then propose three strategies to explicitly trade-off accuracy and the two components of test-time cost during classifier training.
To budget the feature extraction cost, we first introduce two algorithms: GreedyMiser and Anytime Representation Learning (AFR). GreedyMiser employs a strategy that incorporates the extraction cost information during classifier training to explicitly minimize the test-time cost. AFR extends GreedyMiser to learn a cost-sensitive feature representation rather than a classifier, and turns traditional Support Vector Machines (SVM) into test- time cost-sensitive anytime classifiers. GreedyMiser and AFR are evaluated on two real-world data sets from two different application domains, and both achieve record performance.
We then introduce Cost Sensitive Tree of Classifiers (CSTC) and Cost Sensitive Cascade of Classifiers (CSCC), which share a common strategy that trades-off the accuracy and the amortized test-time cost. CSTC introduces a tree structure and directs test inputs along different tree traversal paths, each is optimized for a specific sub-partition of the input space, extracting different, specialized subsets of features. CSCC extends CSTC and builds a linear cascade, instead of a tree, to cope with class-imbalanced binary classification tasks. Since both CSTC and CSCC extract different features for different inputs, the amortized test-time cost is greatly reduced while maintaining high accuracy. Both approaches out-perform the current state-of-the-art on real-world data sets.
To trade-off accuracy and high classifier evaluation cost of nonparametric classifiers, we propose a model compression strategy and develop Compressed Vector Machines (CVM). CVM focuses on the nonparametric kernel Support Vector Machines (SVM), whose test-time evaluation cost is typically substantial when learned from large training sets. CVM is a post-processing algorithm which compresses the learned SVM model by reducing and optimizing support vectors. On several benchmark data sets, CVM maintains high test accuracy while reducing the test-time evaluation cost by several orders of magnitude
Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction
We present paired learning and inference algorithms for significantly
reducing computation and increasing speed of the vector dot products in the
classifiers that are at the heart of many NLP components. This is accomplished
by partitioning the features into a sequence of templates which are ordered
such that high confidence can often be reached using only a small fraction of
all features. Parameter estimation is arranged to maximize accuracy and early
confidence in this sequence. Our approach is simpler and better suited to NLP
than other related cascade methods. We present experiments in left-to-right
part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and transition-based
dependency parsing. On the typical benchmarking datasets we can preserve POS
tagging accuracy above 97% and parsing LAS above 88.5% both with over a
five-fold reduction in run-time, and NER F1 above 88 with more than 2x increase
in speed.Comment: Appears in The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, Beijing, China, July 201
Learning Complexity-Aware Cascades for Deep Pedestrian Detection
The design of complexity-aware cascaded detectors, combining features of very
different complexities, is considered. A new cascade design procedure is
introduced, by formulating cascade learning as the Lagrangian optimization of a
risk that accounts for both accuracy and complexity. A boosting algorithm,
denoted as complexity aware cascade training (CompACT), is then derived to
solve this optimization. CompACT cascades are shown to seek an optimal
trade-off between accuracy and complexity by pushing features of higher
complexity to the later cascade stages, where only a few difficult candidate
patches remain to be classified. This enables the use of features of vastly
different complexities in a single detector. In result, the feature pool can be
expanded to features previously impractical for cascade design, such as the
responses of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). This is demonstrated
through the design of a pedestrian detector with a pool of features whose
complexities span orders of magnitude. The resulting cascade generalizes the
combination of a CNN with an object proposal mechanism: rather than a
pre-processing stage, CompACT cascades seamlessly integrate CNNs in their
stages. This enables state of the art performance on the Caltech and KITTI
datasets, at fairly fast speeds
Classification with Costly Features using Deep Reinforcement Learning
We study a classification problem where each feature can be acquired for a
cost and the goal is to optimize a trade-off between the expected
classification error and the feature cost. We revisit a former approach that
has framed the problem as a sequential decision-making problem and solved it by
Q-learning with a linear approximation, where individual actions are either
requests for feature values or terminate the episode by providing a
classification decision. On a set of eight problems, we demonstrate that by
replacing the linear approximation with neural networks the approach becomes
comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms developed specifically for this
problem. The approach is flexible, as it can be improved with any new
reinforcement learning enhancement, it allows inclusion of pre-trained
high-performance classifier, and unlike prior art, its performance is robust
across all evaluated datasets.Comment: AAAI 201
Hierarchical Cascade of Classifiers for Efficient Poselet Evaluation
Poselets have been used in a variety of computer vision tasks, such as detection, segmentation, action classification, pose estimation and action recognition, often achieving state-of-the-art performance. Poselet evaluation, however, is computationally intensive as it involves running thousands of scanning window classifiers. We present an algorithm for training a hierarchical cascade of part-based detectors and apply it to speed up poselet evaluation. Our cascade hierarchy leverages common components shared across poselets. We generate a family of cascade hierarchies, including trees that grow logarithmically on the number of poselet classifiers. Our algorithm, under some reasonable assumptions, finds the optimal tree structure that maximizes speed for a given target detection rate. We test our system on the PASCAL dataset and show an order of magnitude speedup at less than 1% loss in AP
Learning Anytime Predictions in Neural Networks via Adaptive Loss Balancing
This work considers the trade-off between accuracy and test-time
computational cost of deep neural networks (DNNs) via \emph{anytime}
predictions from auxiliary predictions. Specifically, we optimize auxiliary
losses jointly in an \emph{adaptive} weighted sum, where the weights are
inversely proportional to average of each loss. Intuitively, this balances the
losses to have the same scale. We demonstrate theoretical considerations that
motivate this approach from multiple viewpoints, including connecting it to
optimizing the geometric mean of the expectation of each loss, an objective
that ignores the scale of losses. Experimentally, the adaptive weights induce
more competitive anytime predictions on multiple recognition data-sets and
models than non-adaptive approaches including weighing all losses equally. In
particular, anytime neural networks (ANNs) can achieve the same accuracy faster
using adaptive weights on a small network than using static constant weights on
a large one. For problems with high performance saturation, we also show a
sequence of exponentially deepening ANNscan achieve near-optimal anytime
results at any budget, at the cost of a const fraction of extra computation
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