To build a flexible and interpretable model for document analysis, we develop deep autoencoding topic model (DATM) that uses a hierarchy of gamma distributions to construct its multi-stochastic-layer generative network. In order to provide scalable posterior inference for the parameters of the generative network, we develop topic-layer-adaptive stochastic gradient Riemannian MCMC that jointly learns simplex-constrained global parameters across all layers and topics, with topic and layer specific learning rates. Given a posterior sample of the global parameters, in order to efficiently infer the local latent representations of a document under DATM across all stochastic layers, we propose a Weibull upward-downward variational encoder that deterministically propagates information upward via a deep neural network, followed by a Weibull distribution based stochastic downward generative model. To jointly model documents and their associated labels, we further propose supervised DATM that enhances the discriminative power of its latent representations. The efficacy and scalability of our models are demonstrated on both unsupervised and supervised learning tasks on big corpora.
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
We develop new models and algorithms for learning the temporal dynamics of the topic polytopes and related geometric objects that arise in topic model based inference. Our model is nonparametric Bayesian and the corresponding inference algorithm is able to discover new topics as the time progresses. By exploiting the connection between the modeling of topic polytope evolution, Beta-Bernoulli process and the Hungarian matching algorithm, our method is shown to be several orders of magnitude faster than existing topic modeling approaches, as demonstrated by experiments working with several milli…
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology（胡志明市理工大学）
Aspect-based Opinion Summary (AOS), consisting of aspect discovery and sentiment classification steps, has recently been emerging as one of the most crucial data mining tasks in e-commerce systems. Along this direction, the LDA-based model is considered as a notably suitable approach, since this model offers both topic modeling and sentiment classification. However, unlike traditional topic modeling, in the context of aspect discovery it is often required some initial seed words, whose prior knowledge is not easy to be incorporated into LDA models. Moreover, LDA approaches rely on sampling met…
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯撒斯劳滕工业大学）；Disney Research（迪士尼研究院）
Dynamic topic models (DTMs) model the evolution of prevalent themes in literature, online media, and other forms of text over time. DTMs assume that word co-occurrence statistics change continuously and therefore impose continuous stochastic process priors on their model parameters. These dynamical priors make inference much harder than in regular topic models, and also limit scalability. In this paper, we present several new results around DTMs. First, we extend the class of tractable priors from Wiener processes to the generic class of Gaussian processes (GPs). This allows us to explore topi…
We present Variational Aspect-based Latent Topic Allocation (VALTA), a family of autoencoding topic models that learn aspect-based representations of reviews. VALTA defines a user-item encoder that maps bag-of-words vectors for combined reviews associated with each paired user and item onto structured embeddings, which in turn define per-aspect topic weights. We model individual reviews in a structured manner by inferring an aspect assignment for each sentence in a given review, where the per-aspect topic weights obtained by the user-item encoder serve to define a mixture over topics, conditio…
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）
Non-convex optimization problems often arise from probabilistic modeling, such as estimation of posterior distributions. Non-convexity makes the problems intractable, and poses various obstacles for us to design efficient algorithms. In this work, we attack non-convexity by first introducing the concept of \emph{probable convexity} for analyzing convexity of real functions in practice. We then use the new concept to analyze an inference problem in the \emph{Correlated Topic Model} (CTM) and related nonconjugate models. Contrary to the existing belief of intractability, we show that this infere…
Our world is full of physics-driven data where effective mappings between data manifolds are desired. There is an increasing demand for understanding combined model-based and data-driven methods. We propose a nonlinear, learned singular value decomposition (L-SVD), which combines autoencoders that simultaneously learn and connect latent codes for desired signals and given measurements. We provide a convergence analysis for a specifically structured L-SVD that acts as a regularisation method. In a more general setting, we investigate the topic of model reduction via data dimensionality reductio…
Dynamic topic models (DTMs) are very effective in discovering topics and capturing their evolution trends in time series data. To do posterior inference of DTMs, existing methods are all batch algorithms that scan the full dataset before each update of the model and make inexact variational approximations with mean-field assumptions. Due to a lack of a more scalable inference algorithm, despite the usefulness, DTMs have not captured large topic dynamics. This paper fills this research void, and presents a fast and parallelizable inference algorithm using Gibbs Sampling with Stochastic Gradient…
Machines, not humans, are the world's dominant knowledge accumulators but humans remain the dominant decision makers. Interpreting and disseminating the knowledge accumulated by machines requires expertise, time, and is prone to failure. The problem of how best to convey accumulated knowledge from computers to humans is a critical bottleneck in the broader application of machine learning. We propose an approach based on human teaching where the problem is formalized as selecting a small subset of the data that will, with high probability, lead the human user to the correct inference. This appr…
Statistical inference on the cancer-site specificities of collective ultra-rare whole genome somatic mutations is an open problem. Traditional statistical methods cannot handle whole-genome mutation data due to their ultra-high-dimensionality and extreme data sparsity -- e.g., >30 million unique variants are observed in the ~1700 whole-genome tumor dataset considered herein, of which >99% variants are encountered only once. To harness information in these rare variants we have recently proposed the "hidden genome model", a formal multilevel multi-logistic model that mines information in ultra-…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We present an LDA approach to entity disambiguation. Each topic is associated with a Wikipedia article and topics generate either content words or entity mentions. Training such models is challenging because of the topic and vocabulary size, both in the millions. We tackle these problems using a novel distributed inference and representation framework based on a parallel Gibbs sampler guided by the Wikipedia link graph, and pipelines of MapReduce allowing fast and memory-frugal processing of large datasets. We report state-of-the-art performance on a public dataset.
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
We present a scalable and efficient neural waveform coding system for speech compression. We formulate the speech coding problem as an autoencoding task, where a convolutional neural network (CNN) performs encoding and decoding as a neural waveform codec (NWC) during its feedforward routine. The proposed NWC also defines quantization and entropy coding as a trainable module, so the coding artifacts and bitrate control are handled during the optimization process. We achieve efficiency by introducing compact model components to NWC, such as gated residual networks and depthwise separable convolu…
Nested Chinese Restaurant Process (nCRP) topic models are powerful nonparametric Bayesian methods to extract a topic hierarchy from a given text corpus, where the hierarchical structure is automatically determined by the data. Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation (hLDA) is a popular instance of nCRP topic models. However, hLDA has only been evaluated at small scale, because the existing collapsed Gibbs sampling and instantiated weight variational inference algorithms either are not scalable or sacrifice inference quality with mean-field assumptions. Moreover, an efficient distributed imple…
The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
While most topic modeling algorithms model text corpora with unigrams, human interpretation often relies on inherent grouping of terms into phrases. As such, we consider the problem of discovering topical phrases of mixed lengths. Existing work either performs post processing to the inference results of unigram-based topic models, or utilizes complex n-gram-discovery topic models. These methods generally produce low-quality topical phrases or suffer from poor scalability on even moderately-sized datasets. We propose a different approach that is both computationally efficient and effective. Our…
University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Learning meaningful topic models with massive document collections which contain millions of documents and billions of tokens is challenging because of two reasons: First, one needs to deal with a large number of topics (typically in the order of thousands). Second, one needs a scalable and efficient way of distributing the computation across multiple machines. In this paper we present a novel algorithm F+Nomad LDA which simultaneously tackles both these problems. In order to handle large number of topics we use an appropriately modified Fenwick tree. This data structure allows us to sample fr…
University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）
Many data sets contain rich information about objects, as well as pairwise relations between them. For instance, in networks of websites, scientific papers, and other documents, each node has content consisting of a collection of words, as well as hyperlinks or citations to other nodes. In order to perform inference on such data sets, and make predictions and recommendations, it is useful to have models that are able to capture the processes which generate the text at each node and the links between them. In this paper, we combine classic ideas in topic modeling with a variant of the mixed-mem…
Université de Lyon（里昂大学）；ERIC UR 3083（埃里克研究单位3083）
Information spread on networks can be efficiently modeled by considering three features: documents' content, time of publication relative to other publications, and position of the spreader in the network. Most previous works model up to two of those jointly, or rely on heavily parametric approaches. Building on recent Dirichlet-Point processes literature, we introduce the Houston (Hidden Online User-Topic Network) model, that jointly considers all those features in a non-parametric unsupervised framework. It infers dynamic topic-dependent underlying diffusion networks in a continuous-time set…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
A topic model is often formulated as a generative model that explains how each word of a document is generated given a set of topics and document-specific topic proportions. It is focused on capturing the word co-occurrences in a document and hence often suffers from poor performance in analyzing short documents. In addition, its parameter estimation often relies on approximate posterior inference that is either not scalable or suffers from large approximation error. This paper introduces a new topic-modeling framework where each document is viewed as a set of word embedding vectors and each t…
It is challenging to develop stochastic gradient based scalable inference for deep discrete latent variable models (LVMs), due to the difficulties in not only computing the gradients, but also adapting the step sizes to different latent factors and hidden layers. For the Poisson gamma belief network (PGBN), a recently proposed deep discrete LVM, we derive an alternative representation that is referred to as deep latent Dirichlet allocation (DLDA). Exploiting data augmentation and marginalization techniques, we derive a block-diagonal Fisher information matrix and its inverse for the simplex-co…
We present a Bayesian non-negative tensor factorization model for count-valued tensor data, and develop scalable inference algorithms (both batch and online) for dealing with massive tensors. Our generative model can handle overdispersed counts as well as infer the rank of the decomposition. Moreover, leveraging a reparameterization of the Poisson distribution as a multinomial facilitates conjugacy in the model and enables simple and efficient Gibbs sampling and variational Bayes (VB) inference updates, with a computational cost that only depends on the number of nonzeros in the tensor. The mo…
AgriLens: Semantic Retrieval in Agricultural Texts Using Topic Modeling and Language Models
3 Dept. of Computer Science \& Applications, Sharda University, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India；4 The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
We propose a neural network based approach for learning topics from text and image datasets. The model makes no assumptions about the conditional distribution of the observed features given the latent topics. This allows us to perform topic modelling efficiently using sentences of documents and patches of images as observed features, rather than limiting ourselves to words. Moreover, the proposed approach is online, and hence can be used for streaming data. Furthermore, since the approach utilizes neural networks, it can be implemented on GPU with ease, and hence it is very scalable.
In this paper we present a model for unsupervised topic discovery in texts corpora. The proposed model uses documents, words, and topics lookup table embedding as neural network model parameters to build probabilities of words given topics, and probabilities of topics given documents. These probabilities are used to recover by marginalization probabilities of words given documents. For very large corpora where the number of documents can be in the order of billions, using a neural auto-encoder based document embedding is more scalable then using a lookup table embedding as classically done. We…
NICTA（澳大利亚国家信息与通信技术研究院）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
We investigate the problem of learning a topic model - the well-known Latent Dirichlet Allocation - in a distributed manner, using a cluster of C processors and dividing the corpus to be learned equally among them. We propose a simple approximated method that can be tuned, trading speed for accuracy according to the task at hand. Our approach is asynchronous, and therefore suitable for clusters of heterogenous machines.
Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
We consider the situation in which a user has collected a small set of documents on a cohesive topic, and they want to retrieve additional documents on this topic from a large collection. Information Retrieval (IR) solutions treat the document set as a query, and look for similar documents in the collection. We propose to extend the IR approach by treating the problem as an instance of positive-unlabeled (PU) learning -- i.e., learning binary classifiers from only positive and unlabeled data, where the positive data corresponds to the query documents, and the unlabeled data is the results retu…
Unraveling Media Perspectives: A Comprehensive Methodology Combining Large Language Models, Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Ontology Learning to Analyse Media Bias
Institute of IT Management and Digitization Research (IFID)（信息管理与数字化研究学院）
Information hierarchies are organizational structures that often used to organize and present large and complex information as well as provide a mechanism for effective human navigation. Fortunately, many statistical and computational models exist that automatically generate hierarchies; however, the existing approaches do not consider linkages in information {\em networks} that are increasingly common in real-world scenarios. Current approaches also tend to present topics as an abstract probably distribution over words, etc rather than as tangible nodes from the original network. Furthermore,…
There is an explosion of data, documents, and other content, and people require tools to analyze and interpret these, tools to turn the content into information and knowledge. Topic modeling have been developed to solve these problems. Topic models such as LDA [Blei et. al. 2003] allow salient patterns in data to be extracted automatically. When analyzing texts, these patterns are called topics. Among numerous extensions of LDA, few of them can reliably analyze multiple groups of documents and extract topic similarities. Recently, the introduction of differential topic modeling (SPDP) [Chen et…
Deep generative models of 3D shapes have received a great deal of research interest. Yet, almost all of them generate discrete shape representations, such as voxels, point clouds, and polygon meshes. We present the first 3D generative model for a drastically different shape representation --- describing a shape as a sequence of computer-aided design (CAD) operations. Unlike meshes and point clouds, CAD models encode the user creation process of 3D shapes, widely used in numerous industrial and engineering design tasks. However, the sequential and irregular structure of CAD operations poses sig…
University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；National Institute of Standards and Technology（国家标准与技术研究院）
The problem of topic modeling can be seen as a generalization of the clustering problem, in that it posits that observations are generated due to multiple latent factors (e.g., the words in each document are generated as a mixture of several active topics, as opposed to just one). This increased representational power comes at the cost of a more challenging unsupervised learning problem of estimating the topic probability vectors (the distributions over words for each topic), when only the words are observed and the corresponding topics are hidden. We provide a simple and efficient learning pr…
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an emerging topic in machine learning and computer vision. The fundamental ideology of NAS is using an automatic mechanism to replace manual designs for exploring powerful network architectures. One of the key factors of NAS is to scale-up the search space, e.g., increasing the number of operators, so that more possibilities are covered, but existing search algorithms often get lost in a large number of operators. For avoiding huge computing and competition among similar operators in the same pool, this paper presents a scalable algorithm by factorizing a la…
This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying desirable properties of neural networks, i.e., obtaining provable guarantees that neural networks satisfy specifications relating their inputs and outputs (robustness to bounded norm adversarial perturbations, for example). Most previous work on this topic was limited in its applicability by the size of the network, network architecture and the complexity of properties to be verified. In contrast, our framework applies to a general class of activation functions and specifications on neural network inputs and outputs. We formulate verificat…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Collaborative Topic Regression (CTR) combines ideas of probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) and topic modeling (e.g., LDA) for recommender systems, which has gained increasing successes in many applications. Despite enjoying many advantages, the existing CTR algorithms have some critical limitations. First of all, they are often designed to work in a batch learning manner, making them unsuitable to deal with streaming data or big data in real-world recommender systems. Second, the document-specific topic proportions of LDA are fed to the downstream PMF, but not reverse, which is sub-optima…
The wireless network is undergoing a trend from "onnection of things" to "connection of intelligence". With data spread over the communication networks and computing capability enhanced on the devices, distributed learning becomes a hot topic in both industrial and academic communities. Many frameworks, such as federated learning and federated distillation, have been proposed. However, few of them takes good care of obstacles such as the time-varying topology resulted by the characteristics of wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed learning framework based on a scalable dee…
The problem of searching for experts in a given academic field is hugely important in both industry and academia. We study exactly this issue with respect to a database of authors and their publications. The idea is to use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to perform topic modelling in order to find authors who have worked in a query field. We then construct a coauthorship graph and motivate the use of influence maximisation and a variety of graph centrality measures to obtain a ranked list of experts. The ranked lists are further improved using a Markov Chai…
Formal verification of neural networks is an active topic of research, and recent advances have significantly increased the size of the networks that verification tools can handle. However, most methods are designed for verification of an idealized model of the actual network which works over real arithmetic and ignores rounding imprecisions. This idealization is in stark contrast to network quantization, which is a technique that trades numerical precision for computational efficiency and is, therefore, often applied in practice. Neglecting rounding errors of such low-bit quantized neural net…
University of Twente（特温特大学）；Polytechnic Institute of Porto（波尔图理工学院）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）；University of Liège（列日大学）
A fundamental task for artificial intelligence is learning. Deep Neural Networks have proven to cope perfectly with all learning paradigms, i.e. supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, traditional deep learning approaches make use of cloud computing facilities and do not scale well to autonomous agents with low computational resources. Even in the cloud, they suffer from computational and memory limitations, and they cannot be used to model adequately large physical worlds for agents which assume networks with billions of neurons. These issues are addressed in the l…
