Factorized Topic Models

In this paper we present a modification to a latent topic model, which makes the model exploit supervision to produce a factorized representation of the observed data. The structured parameterization separately encodes variance that is shared between classes from variance that is private to each class by the introduction of a new prior over the topic space. The approach allows for a more eff{}icient inference and provides an intuitive interpretation of the data in terms of an informative signal together with structured noise. The factorized representation is shown to enhance inference performance for image, text, and video classification.Comment: ICLR 201

Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing

Transfer learning is a vital technique that generalizes models trained for one setting or task to other settings or tasks. For example in speech recognition, an acoustic model trained for one language can be used to recognize speech in another language, with little or no re-training data. Transfer learning is closely related to multi-task learning (cross-lingual vs. multilingual), and is traditionally studied in the name of `model adaptation'. Recent advance in deep learning shows that transfer learning becomes much easier and more effective with high-level abstract features learned by deep models, and the `transfer' can be conducted not only between data distributions and data types, but also between model structures (e.g., shallow nets and deep nets) or even model types (e.g., Bayesian models and neural models). This review paper summarizes some recent prominent research towards this direction, particularly for speech and language processing. We also report some results from our group and highlight the potential of this very interesting research field.Comment: 13 pages, APSIPA 201