2,149 research outputs found
Herding as a Learning System with Edge-of-Chaos Dynamics
Herding defines a deterministic dynamical system at the edge of chaos. It
generates a sequence of model states and parameters by alternating parameter
perturbations with state maximizations, where the sequence of states can be
interpreted as "samples" from an associated MRF model. Herding differs from
maximum likelihood estimation in that the sequence of parameters does not
converge to a fixed point and differs from an MCMC posterior sampling approach
in that the sequence of states is generated deterministically. Herding may be
interpreted as a"perturb and map" method where the parameter perturbations are
generated using a deterministic nonlinear dynamical system rather than randomly
from a Gumbel distribution. This chapter studies the distinct statistical
characteristics of the herding algorithm and shows that the fast convergence
rate of the controlled moments may be attributed to edge of chaos dynamics. The
herding algorithm can also be generalized to models with latent variables and
to a discriminative learning setting. The perceptron cycling theorem ensures
that the fast moment matching property is preserved in the more general
framework
Blending Learning and Inference in Structured Prediction
In this paper we derive an efficient algorithm to learn the parameters of
structured predictors in general graphical models. This algorithm blends the
learning and inference tasks, which results in a significant speedup over
traditional approaches, such as conditional random fields and structured
support vector machines. For this purpose we utilize the structures of the
predictors to describe a low dimensional structured prediction task which
encourages local consistencies within the different structures while learning
the parameters of the model. Convexity of the learning task provides the means
to enforce the consistencies between the different parts. The
inference-learning blending algorithm that we propose is guaranteed to converge
to the optimum of the low dimensional primal and dual programs. Unlike many of
the existing approaches, the inference-learning blending allows us to learn
efficiently high-order graphical models, over regions of any size, and very
large number of parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach,
while presenting state-of-the-art results in stereo estimation, semantic
segmentation, shape reconstruction, and indoor scene understanding
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