The Bregman Variational Dual-Tree Framework

Graph-based methods provide a powerful tool set for many non-parametric frameworks in Machine Learning. In general, the memory and computational complexity of these methods is quadratic in the number of examples in the data which makes them quickly infeasible for moderate to large scale datasets. A significant effort to find more efficient solutions to the problem has been made in the literature. One of the state-of-the-art methods that has been recently introduced is the Variational Dual-Tree (VDT) framework. Despite some of its unique features, VDT is currently restricted only to Euclidean spaces where the Euclidean distance quantifies the similarity. In this paper, we extend the VDT framework beyond the Euclidean distance to more general Bregman divergences that include the Euclidean distance as a special case. By exploiting the properties of the general Bregman divergence, we show how the new framework can maintain all the pivotal features of the VDT framework and yet significantly improve its performance in non-Euclidean domains. We apply the proposed framework to different text categorization problems and demonstrate its benefits over the original VDT.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2013

Fast Conversion Algorithms for Orthogonal Polynomials

We discuss efficient conversion algorithms for orthogonal polynomials. We describe a known conversion algorithm from an arbitrary orthogonal basis to the monomial basis, and deduce a new algorithm of the same complexity for the converse operation

A CUDA-based implementation of an improved SPH method on GPU

We present a CUDA-based parallel implementation on GPU architecture of a modified version of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. This modified formulation exploits a strategy based on the Taylor series expansion, which simultaneously improves the approximation of a function and its derivatives with respect to the standard formulation. The improvement in accuracy comes at the cost of an additional computational effort. The computational demand becomes increasingly crucial as problem size increases but can be addressed by employing fast summations in a parallel computational scheme. The experimental analysis showed that our parallel implementation significantly reduces the runtime, with speed-ups of up to 90,when compared to the CPU-based implementation