A Cooperative Coevolution Framework for Parallel Learning to Rank

Abstract—We propose CCRank, the first parallel framework for learning to rank based on evolutionary algorithms (EA), aiming to significantly improve learning efficiency while maintaining accuracy. CCRank is based on cooperative coevolution (CC), a divide-and-conquer framework that has demonstrated high promise in function optimization for problems with large search space and complex structures. Moreover, CC naturally allows parallelization of sub-solutions to the decomposed sub-problems, which can substantially boost learning efficiency. With CCRank, we investigate parallel CC in the context of learning to rank. We implement CCRank with three EA-based learning to rank algorithms for demonstration. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms show the performance gains of CCRank in efficiency and accuracy. Index Terms—Cooperative coevolution, learning to rank, information retrieval, genetic programming, immune programming Ç

Content-based Information Retrieval via Nearest Neighbor Search

Content-based information retrieval (CBIR) has attracted significant interest in the past few years. When given a search query, the search engine will compare the query with all the stored information in the database through nearest neighbor search. Finally, the system will return the most similar items. We contribute to the CBIR research the following: firstly, Distance Metric Learning (DML) is studied to improve retrieval accuracy of nearest neighbor search. Additionally, Hash Function Learning (HFL) is considered to accelerate the retrieval process. On one hand, a new local metric learning framework is proposed - Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (R2LML). By considering a conical combination of Mahalanobis metrics, the proposed method is able to better capture information like data\u27s similarity and location. A regularization to suppress the noise and avoid over-fitting is also incorporated into the formulation. Based on the different methods to infer the weights for the local metric, we considered two frameworks: Transductive Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (T-R2LML), which utilizes transductive learning, while Efficient Reduced-Rank Local Metric Learning (E-R2LML)employs a simpler and faster approximated method. Besides, we study the convergence property of the proposed block coordinate descent algorithms for both our frameworks. The extensive experiments show the superiority of our approaches. On the other hand, *Supervised Hash Learning (*SHL), which could be used in supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning scenarios, was proposed in the dissertation. By considering several codewords which could be learned from the data, the proposed method naturally derives to several Support Vector Machine (SVM) problems. After providing an efficient training algorithm, we also study the theoretical generalization bound of the new hashing framework. In the final experiments, *SHL outperforms many other popular hash function learning methods. Additionally, in order to cope with large data sets, we also conducted experiments running on big data using a parallel computing software package, namely LIBSKYLARK

ForestHash: Semantic Hashing With Shallow Random Forests and Tiny Convolutional Networks

Hash codes are efficient data representations for coping with the ever growing amounts of data. In this paper, we introduce a random forest semantic hashing scheme that embeds tiny convolutional neural networks (CNN) into shallow random forests, with near-optimal information-theoretic code aggregation among trees. We start with a simple hashing scheme, where random trees in a forest act as hashing functions by setting `1' for the visited tree leaf, and `0' for the rest. We show that traditional random forests fail to generate hashes that preserve the underlying similarity between the trees, rendering the random forests approach to hashing challenging. To address this, we propose to first randomly group arriving classes at each tree split node into two groups, obtaining a significantly simplified two-class classification problem, which can be handled using a light-weight CNN weak learner. Such random class grouping scheme enables code uniqueness by enforcing each class to share its code with different classes in different trees. A non-conventional low-rank loss is further adopted for the CNN weak learners to encourage code consistency by minimizing intra-class variations and maximizing inter-class distance for the two random class groups. Finally, we introduce an information-theoretic approach for aggregating codes of individual trees into a single hash code, producing a near-optimal unique hash for each class. The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods for image retrieval tasks on large-scale public datasets, while performing at the level of other state-of-the-art image classification techniques while utilizing a more compact and efficient scalable representation. This work proposes a principled and robust procedure to train and deploy in parallel an ensemble of light-weight CNNs, instead of simply going deeper.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 201

Challenging Ubiquitous Inverted Files

Stand-alone ranking systems based on highly optimized inverted file structures are generally considered ‘the’ solution for building search engines. Observing various developments in software and hardware, we argue however that IR research faces a complex engineering problem in the quest for more flexible yet efficient retrieval systems. We propose to base the development of retrieval systems on ‘the database approach’: mapping high-level declarative specifications of the retrieval process into efficient query plans. We present the Mirror DBMS as a prototype implementation of a retrieval system based on this approach