Neural networks have seen limited use in prediction for high-dimensional data with small sample sizes, because they tend to overfit and require tuning many more hyperparameters than existing off-the-shelf machine learning methods. With small modifications to the network architecture and training procedure, we show that dense neural networks can be a practical data analysis tool in these settings. The proposed method, Ensemble by Averaging Sparse-Input Hierarchical networks (EASIER-net), appropriately prunes the network structure by tuning only two L1-penalty parameters, one that controls the input sparsity and another that controls the number of hidden layers and nodes. The method selects variables from the true support if the irrelevant covariates are only weakly correlated with the response; otherwise, it exhibits a grouping effect, where strongly correlated covariates are selected at similar rates. On a collection of real-world datasets with different sizes, EASIER-net selected network architectures in a data-adaptive manner and achieved higher prediction accuracy than off-the-shelf methods on average.
In this paper, we propose a hierarchical feature-aware tracking framework for efficient visual tracking. Recent years, ensembled trackers which combine multiple component trackers have achieved impressive performance. In ensembled trackers, the decision of results is usually a post-event process, i.e., tracking result for each tracker is first obtained and then the suitable one is selected according to result ensemble. In this paper, we propose a pre-event method. We construct an expert pool with each expert being one set of features. For each frame, several experts are first selected in the p…
We propose a hierarchical learning strategy aimed at generating sparse representations and associated models for large noisy datasets. The hierarchy follows from approximation spaces identified at successively finer scales. For promoting model generalization at each scale, we also introduce a novel, projection based penalty operator across multiple dimension, using permutation operators for incorporating proximity and ordering information. The paper presents a detailed analysis of approximation properties in the reconstruction Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS) with emphasis on optimalit…
In a deep neural network (DNN), the number of the parameters is usually huge to get high learning performances. For that reason, it costs a lot of memory and substantial computational resources, and also causes overfitting. It is known that some parameters are redundant and can be removed from the network without decreasing performance. Many sparse regularization criteria have been proposed to solve this problem. In a convolutional neural network (CNN), group sparse regularizations are often used to remove unnecessary subsets of the weights, such as filters or channels. When we apply a group s…
There has been a surge in the number of large and flat data sets - data sets containing a large number of features and a relatively small number of observations - due to the growing ability to collect and store information in medical research and other fields. Hierarchical clustering is a widely used clustering tool. In hierarchical clustering, large and flat data sets may allow for a better coverage of clustering features (features that help explain the true underlying clusters) but, such data sets usually include a large fraction of noise features (non-clustering features) that may hide the …
Language Technologies Institute（语言技术研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose a new method for learning word representations using hierarchical regularization in sparse coding inspired by the linguistic study of word meanings. We show an efficient learning algorithm based on stochastic proximal methods that is significantly faster than previous approaches, making it possible to perform hierarchical sparse coding on a corpus of billions of word tokens. Experiments on various benchmark tasks---word similarity ranking, analogies, sentence completion, and sentiment analysis---demonstrate that the method outperforms or is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.…
Center for Security Theory and Algorithmic Research（安全理论与算法研究中心）；International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）；Facebook（脸书）；Parallel Computing Lab（并行计算实验室）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
Sparse deep neural networks(DNNs) are efficient in both memory and compute when compared to dense DNNs. But due to irregularity in computation of sparse DNNs, their efficiencies are much lower than that of dense DNNs on regular parallel hardware such as TPU. This inefficiency leads to poor/no performance benefits for sparse DNNs. Performance issue for sparse DNNs can be alleviated by bringing structure to the sparsity and leveraging it for improving runtime efficiency. But such structural constraints often lead to suboptimal accuracies. In this work, we jointly address both accuracy and perfor…
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
This paper introduces a new sparse spatio-temporal structured Gaussian process regression framework for online and offline Bayesian inference. This is the first framework that gives a time-evolving representation of the interdependencies between the components of the sparse signal of interest. A hierarchical Gaussian process describes such structure and the interdependencies are represented via the covariance matrices of the prior distributions. The inference is based on the expectation propagation method and the theoretical derivation of the posterior distribution is provided in the paper. Th…
In this paper a new Bayesian model for sparse linear regression with a spatio-temporal structure is proposed. It incorporates the structural assumptions based on a hierarchical Gaussian process prior for spike and slab coefficients. We design an inference algorithm based on Expectation Propagation and evaluate the model over the real data.
Architectures for sparse hierarchical representation learning have recently been proposed for graph-structured data, but so far assume the absence of edge features in the graph. We close this gap and propose a method to pool graphs with edge features, inspired by the hierarchical nature of chemistry. In particular, we introduce two types of pooling layers compatible with an edge-feature graph-convolutional architecture and investigate their performance for molecules relevant to drug discovery on a set of two classification and two regression benchmark datasets of MoleculeNet. We find that our …
Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院运筹学中心）
We present a novel method for exact hierarchical sparse polynomial regression. Our regressor is that degree $r$ polynomial which depends on at most $k$ inputs, counting at most $\ell$ monomial terms, which minimizes the sum of the squares of its prediction errors. The previous hierarchical sparse specification aligns well with modern big data settings where many inputs are not relevant for prediction purposes and the functional complexity of the regressor needs to be controlled as to avoid overfitting. We present a two-step approach to this hierarchical sparse regression problem. First, we dis…
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
This paper fortifies the recently introduced hierarchical-optimization recursive least squares (HO-RLS) against outliers which contaminate infrequently linear-regression models. Outliers are modeled as nuisance variables and are estimated together with the linear filter/system variables via a sparsity-inducing (non-)convexly regularized least-squares task. The proposed outlier-robust HO-RLS builds on steepest-descent directions with a constant step size (learning rate), needs no matrix inversion (lemma), accommodates colored nominal noise of known correlation matrix, exhibits small computation…
Filter banks are a popular tool for the analysis of piecewise smooth signals such as natural images. Motivated by the empirically observed properties of scale and detail coefficients of images in the wavelet domain, we propose a hierarchical deep generative model of piecewise smooth signals that is a recursion across scales: the low pass scale coefficients at one layer are obtained by filtering the scale coefficients at the next layer, and adding a high pass detail innovation obtained by filtering a sparse vector. This recursion describes a linear dynamic system that is a non-Gaussian Markov p…
We propose a nonparametric factorization approach for sparsely observed tensors. The sparsity does not mean zero-valued entries are massive or dominated. Rather, it implies the observed entries are very few, and even fewer with the growth of the tensor; this is ubiquitous in practice. Compared with the existent works, our model not only leverages the structural information underlying the observed entry indices, but also provides extra interpretability and flexibility -- it can simultaneously estimate a set of location factors about the intrinsic properties of the tensor nodes, and another set …
Existing methods for sparse channel estimation typically provide an estimate computed as the solution maximizing an objective function defined as the sum of the log-likelihood function and a penalization term proportional to the l1-norm of the parameter of interest. However, other penalization terms have proven to have strong sparsity-inducing properties. In this work, we design pilot-assisted channel estimators for OFDM wireless receivers within the framework of sparse Bayesian learning by defining hierarchical Bayesian prior models that lead to sparsity-inducing penalization terms. The estim…
This paper describes a hierarchical learning strategy for generating sparse representations of multivariate datasets. The hierarchy arises from approximation spaces considered at successively finer scales. A detailed analysis of stability, convergence and behavior of error functionals associated with the approximations are presented, along with a well chosen set of applications. Results show the performance of the approach as a data reduction mechanism for both synthetic (univariate and multivariate) and real datasets (geospatial and numerical model outcomes). The sparse representation generat…
Structural damage due to excessive loading or environmental degradation typically occurs in localized areas in the absence of collapse. This prior information about the spatial sparseness of structural damage is exploited here by a hierarchical sparse Bayesian learning framework with the goal of reducing the source of ill-conditioning in the stiffness loss inversion problem for damage detection. Sparse Bayesian learning methodologies automatically prune away irrelevant or inactive features from a set of potential candidates, and so they are effective probabilistic tools for producing sparse ex…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Ericsson AB（爱立信公司）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
To scale non-parametric extensions of probabilistic topic models such as Latent Dirichlet allocation to larger data sets, practitioners rely increasingly on parallel and distributed systems. In this work, we study data-parallel training for the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP) topic model. Based upon a representation of certain conditional distributions within an HDP, we propose a doubly sparse data-parallel sampler for the HDP topic model. This sampler utilizes all available sources of sparsity found in natural language - an important way to make computation efficient. We benchmark our me…
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Université de Nice Sofia Antipolis（尼斯索菲亚安蒂波利斯大学）；Université de Bretagne Sud（南布列塔尼大学）
In this paper, we tackle the question of discovering an effective set of spatial filters to solve hyperspectral classification problems. Instead of fixing a priori the filters and their parameters using expert knowledge, we let the model find them within random draws in the (possibly infinite) space of possible filters. We define an active set feature learner that includes in the model only features that improve the classifier. To this end, we consider a fast and linear classifier, multiclass logistic classification, and show that with a good representation (the filters discovered), such a sim…
The focus in this paper is Bayesian system identification based on noisy incomplete modal data where we can impose spatially-sparse stiffness changes when updating a structural model. To this end, based on a similar hierarchical sparse Bayesian learning model from our previous work, we propose two Gibbs sampling algorithms. The algorithms differ in their strategies to deal with the posterior uncertainty of the equation-error precision parameter, but both sample from the conditional posterior probability density functions (PDFs) for the structural stiffness parameters and system modal parameter…
Sparse coding consists in representing signals as sparse linear combinations of atoms selected from a dictionary. We consider an extension of this framework where the atoms are further assumed to be embedded in a tree. This is achieved using a recently introduced tree-structured sparse regularization norm, which has proven useful in several applications. This norm leads to regularized problems that are difficult to optimize, and we propose in this paper efficient algorithms for solving them. More precisely, we show that the proximal operator associated with this norm is computable exactly via …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Berkeley AI Research（伯克利人工智能研究院）；Redwood Center（雷德伍德中心）
Flow-based generative models have become an important class of unsupervised learning approaches. In this work, we incorporate the key ideas of renormalization group (RG) and sparse prior distribution to design a hierarchical flow-based generative model, RG-Flow, which can separate information at different scales of images and extract disentangled representations at each scale. We demonstrate our method on synthetic multi-scale image datasets and the CelebA dataset, showing that the disentangled representations enable semantic manipulation and style mixing of the images at different scales. To …
Sparse modeling is a powerful framework for data analysis and processing. Traditionally, encoding in this framework is performed by solving an L1-regularized linear regression problem, commonly referred to as Lasso or Basis Pursuit. In this work we combine the sparsity-inducing property of the Lasso model at the individual feature level, with the block-sparsity property of the Group Lasso model, where sparse groups of features are jointly encoded, obtaining a sparsity pattern hierarchically structured. This results in the Hierarchical Lasso (HiLasso), which shows important practical modeling a…
Recent breakthrough results in compressed sensing (CS) have established that many high dimensional objects can be accurately recovered from a relatively small number of non- adaptive linear projection observations, provided that the objects possess a sparse representation in some basis. Subsequent efforts have shown that the performance of CS can be improved by exploiting the structure in the location of the non-zero signal coefficients (structured sparsity) or using some form of online measurement focusing (adaptivity) in the sensing process. In this paper we examine a powerful hybrid of thes…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Faculty of Computing, Union University, Belgrade（贝尔格莱德联盟大学计算学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Recent advances in representation learning on graphs, mainly leveraging graph convolutional networks, have brought a substantial improvement on many graph-based benchmark tasks. While novel approaches to learning node embeddings are highly suitable for node classification and link prediction, their application to graph classification (predicting a single label for the entire graph) remains mostly rudimentary, typically using a single global pooling step to aggregate node features or a hand-designed, fixed heuristic for hierarchical coarsening of the graph structure. An important step towards a…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Reducing communication in training large-scale machine learning applications on distributed platform is still a big challenge. To address this issue, we propose a distributed hierarchical averaging stochastic gradient descent (Hier-AVG) algorithm with infrequent global reduction by introducing local reduction. As a general type of parallel SGD, Hier-AVG can reproduce several popular synchronous parallel SGD variants by adjusting its parameters. We show that Hier-AVG with infrequent global reduction can still achieve standard convergence rate for non-convex optimization problems. In addition, w…
In sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), Gaussian scale mixtures (GSMs) have been used to model sparsity-inducing priors that realize a class of concave penalty functions for the regression task in real-valued signal models. Motivated by the relative scarcity of formal tools for SBL in complex-valued models, this paper proposes a GSM model - the Bessel K model - that induces concave penalty functions for the estimation of complex sparse signals. The properties of the Bessel K model are analyzed when it is applied to Type I and Type II estimation. This analysis reveals that, by tuning the parameters …
Demanding sparsity in estimated models has become a routine practice in statistics. In many situations, we wish to require that the sparsity patterns attained honor certain problem-specific constraints. Hierarchical sparse modeling (HSM) refers to situations in which these constraints specify that one set of parameters be set to zero whenever another is set to zero. In recent years, numerous papers have developed convex regularizers for this form of sparsity structure, which arises in many areas of statistics including interaction modeling, time series analysis, and covariance estimation. In t…
