313 research outputs found
Non-Uniform Stochastic Average Gradient Method for Training Conditional Random Fields
We apply stochastic average gradient (SAG) algorithms for training
conditional random fields (CRFs). We describe a practical implementation that
uses structure in the CRF gradient to reduce the memory requirement of this
linearly-convergent stochastic gradient method, propose a non-uniform sampling
scheme that substantially improves practical performance, and analyze the rate
of convergence of the SAGA variant under non-uniform sampling. Our experimental
results reveal that our method often significantly outperforms existing methods
in terms of the training objective, and performs as well or better than
optimally-tuned stochastic gradient methods in terms of test error.Comment: AI/Stats 2015, 24 page
A Multi-Plane Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Training Structural SVMs with a Costly max-Oracle
Structural support vector machines (SSVMs) are amongst the best performing
models for structured computer vision tasks, such as semantic image
segmentation or human pose estimation. Training SSVMs, however, is
computationally costly, because it requires repeated calls to a structured
prediction subroutine (called \emph{max-oracle}), which has to solve an
optimization problem itself, e.g. a graph cut.
In this work, we introduce a new algorithm for SSVM training that is more
efficient than earlier techniques when the max-oracle is computationally
expensive, as it is frequently the case in computer vision tasks. The main idea
is to (i) combine the recent stochastic Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm
with efficient hyperplane caching, and (ii) use an automatic selection rule for
deciding whether to call the exact max-oracle or to rely on an approximate one
based on the cached hyperplanes.
We show experimentally that this strategy leads to faster convergence to the
optimum with respect to the number of requires oracle calls, and that this
translates into faster convergence with respect to the total runtime when the
max-oracle is slow compared to the other steps of the algorithm.
A publicly available C++ implementation is provided at
http://pub.ist.ac.at/~vnk/papers/SVM.html
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