Search

We consider the task of assigning experts from a portfolio of specialists in order to solve a set of tasks. We apply a Bayesian model which combines collaborative filtering with a feature-based description of tasks and experts to yield a general framework for managing a portfolio of experts. The model learns an embedding of tasks and problems into a latent space in which affinity is measured by the inner product. The model can be trained incrementally and can track non-stationary data, tracking potentially changing expert and task characteristics. The approach allows us to use a principled decision theoretic framework for expert selection, allowing the user to choose a utility function that best suits their objectives. The model component for taking into account the performance feedback data is pluggable, allowing flexibility. We apply the model to manage a portfolio of algorithms to solve hard combinatorial problems. This is a well studied area and we demonstrate a large improvement on the state of the art in one domain (constraint solving) and in a second domain (combinatorial auctions) created a portfolio that performed significantly better than any single algorithm.

Round-based games are an instance of discrete planning problems. Some of the best contemporary game tree search algorithms use random roll-outs as data. Relying on a good policy, they learn on-policy values by propagating information upwards in the tree, but not between sibling nodes. Here, we present a generative model and a corresponding approximate message passing scheme for inference on the optimal, off-policy value of nodes in smooth AND/OR trees, given random roll-outs. The crucial insight is that the distribution of values in game trees is not completely arbitrary. We define a generative model of the on-policy values using a latent score for each state, representing the value under the random roll-out policy. Inference on the values under the optimal policy separates into an inductive, pre-data step and a deductive, post-data part. Both can be solved approximately with Expectation Propagation, allowing off-policy value inference for any node in the (exponentially big) tree in linear time.

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a classical multivariate method concerned with describing linear dependencies between sets of variables. After a short exposition of the linear sample CCA problem and its analytical solution, the article proceeds with a detailed characterization of its geometry. Projection operators are used to illustrate the relations between canonical vectors and variates. The article then addresses the problem of CCA between spaces spanned by objects mapped into kernel feature spaces. An exact solution for this kernel canonical correlation (KCCA) problem is derived from a geometric point of view. It shows that the expansion coefficients of the canonical vectors in their respective feature space can be found by linear CCA in the basis induced by kernel principal component analysis. The effect of mappings into higher dimensional feature spaces is considered critically since it simplifies the CCA problem in general. Then two regularized variants of KCCA are discussed. Relations to other methods are illustrated, e.g., multicategory kernel Fisher discriminant analysis, kernel principal component regression and possible applications thereof in blind source separation.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation models discrete data as a mixture of discrete distributions, using Dirichlet beliefs over the mixture weights. We study a variation of this concept, in which the documents' mixture weight beliefs are replaced with squashed Gaussian distributions. This allows documents to be associated with elements of a Hilbert space, admitting kernel topic models (KTM), modelling temporal, spatial, hierarchical, social and other structure between documents. The main challenge is efficient approximate inference on the latent Gaussian. We present an approximate algorithm cast around a Laplace approximation in a transformed basis. The KTM can also be interpreted as a type of Gaussian process latent variable model, or as a topic model conditional on document features, uncovering links between earlier work in these areas.