Sparse and geometry-aware generalisation of the mutual information for joint discriminative clustering and feature selection
Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Maasai Team（马赛团队）；CHU de Québec Research Centre（魁北克大学中心医院研究中心）；Laval University（拉瓦尔大学）
Louis Ohl, Pierre-Alexandre Mattei, Charles Bouveyron, Mickaël Leclercq, Arnaud Droit, Frédéric Precioso
Feature selection in clustering is a hard task which involves simultaneously the discovery of relevant clusters as well as relevant variables with respect to these clusters. While feature selection algorithms are often model-based through optimised model selection or strong assumptions on the data distribution, we introduce a discriminative clustering model trying to maximise a geometry-aware generalisation of the mutual information called GEMINI with a simple l1 penalty: the Sparse GEMINI. This algorithm avoids the burden of combinatorial feature subset exploration and is easily scalable to high-dimensional data and large amounts of samples while only designing a discriminative clustering model. We demonstrate the performances of Sparse GEMINI on synthetic datasets and large-scale datasets. Our results show that Sparse GEMINI is a competitive algorithm and has the ability to select relevant subsets of variables with respect to the clustering without using relevance criteria or prior hypotheses.
This work discusses how to derive upper bounds for the expected generalisation error of supervised learning algorithms by means of the chaining technique. By developing a general theoretical framework, we establish a duality between generalisation bounds based on the regularity of the loss function, and their chained counterparts, which can be obtained by lifting the regularity assumption from the loss onto its gradient. This allows us to re-derive the chaining mutual information bound from the literature, and to obtain novel chained information-theoretic generalisation bounds, based on the Wa…
In this paper, we present an algorithm for minimizing the difference between two submodular functions using a variational framework which is based on (an extension of) the concave-convex procedure [17]. Because several commonly used metrics in machine learning, like mutual information and conditional mutual information, are submodular, the problem of minimizing the difference of two submodular problems arises naturally in many machine learning applications. Two such applications are learning discriminatively structured graphical models and feature selection under computational complexity const…
In this work, three lattice-free (LF) discriminative training criteria for purely sequence-trained neural network acoustic models are compared on LVCSR tasks, namely maximum mutual information (MMI), boosted maximum mutual information (bMMI) and state-level minimum Bayes risk (sMBR). We demonstrate that, analogous to LF-MMI, a neural network acoustic model can also be trained from scratch using LF-bMMI or LF-sMBR criteria respectively without the need of cross-entropy pre-training. Furthermore, experimental results on Switchboard-300hrs and Switchboard+Fisher-2100hrs datasets show that models …
Exponential models of distributions are widely used in machine learning for classiffication and modelling. It is well known that they can be interpreted as maximum entropy models under empirical expectation constraints. In this work, we argue that for classiffication tasks, mutual information is a more suitable information theoretic measure to be optimized. We show how the principle of minimum mutual information generalizes that of maximum entropy, and provides a comprehensive framework for building discriminative classiffiers. A game theoretic interpretation of our approach is then given, and…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
Over the past decade the rate of care unit (CU) use in the United States has been increasing. With an aging population and ever-growing demand for medical care, effective management of patients' transitions among different care facilities will prove indispensible for shortening the length of hospital stays, improving patient outcomes, allocating critical care resources, and reducing preventable re-admissions. In this paper, we focus on an important problem of predicting the so-called "patient flow" from longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), which has not been explored via existing mac…
The pretasks are mainly built on mutual information estimation, which requires data augmentation to construct positive samples with similar semantics to learn invariant signals and negative samples with dissimilar semantics in order to empower representation discriminability. However, an appropriate data augmentation configuration depends heavily on lots of empirical trials such as choosing the compositions of data augmentation techniques and the corresponding hyperparameter settings. We propose an augmentation-free graph contrastive learning method, invariant-discriminative graph contrastive …
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；Silicon Austria Labs（硅谷奥地利实验室）
Feature ranking and selection is a widely used approach in various applications of supervised dimensionality reduction in discriminative machine learning. Nevertheless there exists significant evidence on feature ranking and selection algorithms based on any criterion leading to potentially sub-optimal solutions for class separability. In that regard, we introduce emerging information theoretic feature transformation protocols as an end-to-end neural network training approach. We present a dimensionality reduction network (MMINet) training procedure based on the stochastic estimate of the mutu…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Lehigh University（理海大学）
Graph representation learning has attracted increasing research attention. However, most existing studies fuse all structural features and node attributes to provide an overarching view of graphs, neglecting finer substructures' semantics, and suffering from interpretation enigmas. This paper presents a novel hierarchical subgraph-level selection and embedding based graph neural network for graph classification, namely SUGAR, to learn more discriminative subgraph representations and respond in an explanatory way. SUGAR reconstructs a sketched graph by extracting striking subgraphs as the repre…
Fuzhou University（福州大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）
In this work, we study the problem of partitioning a set of graphs into different groups such that the graphs in the same group are similar while the graphs in different groups are dissimilar. This problem was rarely studied previously, although there have been a lot of work on node clustering and graph classification. The problem is challenging because it is difficult to measure the similarity or distance between graphs. One feasible approach is using graph kernels to compute a similarity matrix for the graphs and then performing spectral clustering, but the effectiveness of existing graph ke…
Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；CHU de Québec Research Center（魁北克大学医院研究中心）；Laval University（拉瓦尔大学）；Jellysmack；AI Labs（人工智能实验室）
In the last decade, recent successes in deep clustering majorly involved the mutual information (MI) as an unsupervised objective for training neural networks with increasing regularisations. While the quality of the regularisations have been largely discussed for improvements, little attention has been dedicated to the relevance of MI as a clustering objective. In this paper, we first highlight how the maximisation of MI does not lead to satisfying clusters. We identified the Kullback-Leibler divergence as the main reason of this behaviour. Hence, we generalise the mutual information by chang…
Generalised Mutual Information: a Framework for Discriminative Clustering
Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Laval（拉瓦尔大学）；CHU de Québec Research Centre（魁北克大学医院研究中心）；Jellysmack（Jellysmack公司）
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Estimating mutual information between continuous random variables is often intractable and extremely challenging for high-dimensional data. Recent progress has leveraged neural networks to optimize variational lower bounds on mutual information. Although showing promise for this difficult problem, the variational methods have been theoretically and empirically proven to have serious statistical limitations: 1) many methods struggle to produce accurate estimates when the underlying mutual information is either low or high; 2) the resulting estimators may suffer from high variance. Our approach …
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）
Novelty detection is the process of determining whether a query example differs from the learned training distribution. Previous methods attempt to learn the representation of the normal samples via generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, they will suffer from instability training, mode dropping, and low discriminative ability. Recently, various pretext tasks (e.g. rotation prediction and clustering) have been proposed for self-supervised learning in novelty detection. However, the learned latent features are still low discriminative. We overcome such problems by introducing a novel d…
In the context of recent deep clustering studies, discriminative models dominate the literature and report the most competitive performances. These models learn a deep discriminative neural network classifier in which the labels are latent. Typically, they use multinomial logistic regression posteriors and parameter regularization, as is very common in supervised learning. It is generally acknowledged that discriminative objective functions (e.g., those based on the mutual information or the KL divergence) are more flexible than generative approaches (e.g., K-means) in the sense that they make…
BI Norwegian Business School（BI挪威商学院）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）；Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）
Deep generative models with latent variables have been used lately to learn joint representations and generative processes from multi-modal data. These two learning mechanisms can, however, conflict with each other and representations can fail to embed information on the data modalities. This research studies the realistic scenario in which all modalities and class labels are available for model training, but where some modalities and labels required for downstream tasks are missing. We show, in this scenario, that the variational lower bound limits mutual information between joint representat…
We present a two-stage approach for learning dictionaries for object classification tasks based on the principle of information maximization. The proposed method seeks a dictionary that is compact, discriminative, and generative. In the first stage, dictionary atoms are selected from an initial dictionary by maximizing the mutual information measure on dictionary compactness, discrimination and reconstruction. In the second stage, the selected dictionary atoms are updated for improved reconstructive and discriminative power using a simple gradient ascent algorithm on mutual information. Experi…
Turtle shell clustering: A mixture approach to discriminative clustering with applications to flow cytometry and other data
Department of Mathematics & Statistics, McMaster University（数学与统计学系，麦斯特大学）；School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin（计算机科学与统计学学院，三一学院都柏林）
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Neural Processing Research Center（神经处理研究中心）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic motivation to guide the exploration via generative models, predictive forward models, or discriminative modeling of novelty. We propose EMI, which is an exploration method that constructs embedding representation of states and actions that does not rely on generative decoding of the full observation but extracts predictive signals that can be used to guide exploratio…
In this paper we present a method for learning a discriminative classifier from unlabeled or partially labeled data. Our approach is based on an objective function that trades-off mutual information between observed examples and their predicted categorical class distribution, against robustness of the classifier to an adversarial generative model. The resulting algorithm can either be interpreted as a natural generalization of the generative adversarial networks (GAN) framework or as an extension of the regularized information maximization (RIM) framework to robust classification against an op…
This work aims to address the long-established problem of learning diversified representations. To this end, we combine information-theoretic arguments with stochastic competition-based activations, namely Stochastic Local Winner-Takes-All (LWTA) units. In this context, we ditch the conventional deep architectures commonly used in Representation Learning, that rely on non-linear activations; instead, we replace them with sets of locally and stochastically competing linear units. In this setting, each network layer yields sparse outputs, determined by the outcome of the competition between unit…
Skill Learning via Policy Diversity Yields Identifiable Representations for Reinforcement Learning
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；ELLIS Institute Tübingen（图宾根ELLIS研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Tübingen AI Center（图宾根人工智能中心）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
本文从可辨识表征学习角度研究互信息技能学习，证明对比后继特征方法可在线性变换意义下可证明地恢复环境真实特征，并在 MuJoCo 与 DeepMind Control 上验证了该结论。
Recently, substantial research efforts in Deep Metric Learning (DML) focused on designing complex pairwise-distance losses, which require convoluted schemes to ease optimization, such as sample mining or pair weighting. The standard cross-entropy loss for classification has been largely overlooked in DML. On the surface, the cross-entropy may seem unrelated and irrelevant to metric learning as it does not explicitly involve pairwise distances. However, we provide a theoretical analysis that links the cross-entropy to several well-known and recent pairwise losses. Our connections are drawn from…
In recent years, deep learning-based feature representation methods have shown a promising impact in electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). Nonetheless, owing to high intra- and inter-subject variabilities, many studies on decoding EEG were designed in a subject-specific manner by using calibration samples, with no concern of its practical use, hampered by time-consuming steps and a large data requirement. To this end, recent studies adopted a transfer learning strategy, especially domain adaptation techniques. Among those, to our knowledge, an adversarial learning …
