Search

A model of human visual search is proposed. It predicts both response time (RT) and error rates (RT) as a function of image parameters such as target contrast and clutter. The model is an ideal observer, in that it optimizes the Bayes ratio of target present vs target absent. The ratio is computed on the firing pattern of V1/V2 neurons, modeled by Poisson distributions. The optimal mechanism for integrating information over time is shown to be a ‘soft max’ of diffusions, computed over the visual field by ‘hypercolumns’ of neurons that share the same receptive field and have different response properties to image features. An approximation of the optimal Bayesian observer, based on integrating local decisions, rather than diffusions, is also derived; it is shown experimentally to produce very similar predictions to the optimal observer in common psychophysics conditions. A psychophyisics experiment is proposed that may discriminate between which mechanism is used in the human brain.

Is it possible to crowdsource categorization? Amongst the challenges: (a) each worker has only a partial view of data, (b) different workers may have different clustering criteria and may produce different numbers of categories, (c) the underlying category structure may be hierarchical. We propose a Bayesian model of how workers may approach clustering and show how one may infer clusters/categories, as well as worker parameters, using this model. Our experiments, carried out on large collections of images, suggest that Bayesian crowdclustering works well and may be superior to single-expert annotations.

Diversified retrieval and online learning are two core research areas in the design of modern information retrieval systems.In this paper, we propose the linear submodular bandits problem, which is an online learning setting for optimizing a general class of feature-rich submodular utility models for diversified retrieval. We present an algorithm, called LSBGREEDY, and prove that it efficiently converges to a near-optimal model. As a case study, we applied our approach to the setting of personalized news recommendation, where the system must recommend small sets of news articles selected from tens of thousands of available articles each day. In a live user study, we found that LSBGREEDY significantly outperforms existing online learning approaches.

We consider unsupervised estimation of mixtures of discrete graphical models, where the class variable is hidden and each mixture component can have a potentially different Markov graph structure and parameters over the observed variables. We propose a novel method for estimating the mixture components with provable guarantees. Our output is a tree-mixture model which serves as a good approximation to the underlying graphical model mixture. The sample and computational requirements for our method scale as poly(p,r), for an r-component mixture of p-variate graphical models, for a wide class of models which includes tree mixtures and mixtures over bounded degree graphs.

This work considers the problem of learning the structure of multivariate linear tree models, which include a variety of directed tree graphical models with continuous, discrete, and mixed latent variables such as linear-Gaussian models, hidden Markov models, Gaussian mixture models, and Markov evolutionary trees. The setting is one where we only have samples from certain observed variables in the tree, and our goal is to estimate the tree structure (i.e., the graph of how the underlying hidden variables are connected to each other and to the observed variables). We propose the Spectral Recursive Grouping algorithm, an efficient and simple bottom-up procedure for recovering the tree structure from independent samples of the observed variables. Our finite sample size bounds for exact recovery of the tree structure reveal certain natural dependencies on underlying statistical and structural properties of the underlying joint distribution. Furthermore, our sample complexity guarantees have no explicit dependence on the dimensionality of the observed variables, making the algorithm applicable to many high-dimensional settings. At the heart of our algorithm is a spectral quartet test for determining the relative topology of a quartet of variables from second-order statistics.

Distributing labeling tasks among hundreds or thousands of annotators is an increasingly important method for annotating large datasets. We present a method for estimating the underlying value (e.g. the class) of each image from (noisy) annotations provided by multiple annotators. Our method is based on a model of the image formation and annotation process. Each image has different characteristics that are represented in an abstract Euclidean space. Each annotator is modeled as a multidimensional entity with variables representing competence, expertise and bias. This allows the model to discover and represent groups of annotators that have different sets of skills and knowledge, as well as groups of images that differ qualitatively. We find that our model predicts ground truth labels on both synthetic and real data more accurately than state of the art methods. Experiments also show that our model, starting from a set of binary labels, may discover rich information, such as different “schools of thought” amongst the annotators, and can group together images belonging to separate categories.

Is there a principled way to learn a probabilistic discriminative classifier from an unlabeled data set? We present a framework that simultaneously clusters the data and trains a discriminative classifier. We call it Regularized Information Maximization (RIM). RIM optimizes an intuitive information-theoretic objective function which balances class separation, class balance and classifier complexity. The approach can flexibly incorporate different likelihood functions, express prior assumptions about the relative size of different classes and incorporate partial labels for semi-supervised learning. In particular, we instantiate the framework to unsupervised, multi-class kernelized logistic regression. Our empirical evaluation indicates that RIM outperforms existing methods on several real data sets, and demonstrates that RIM is an effective model selection method.

The max-norm was proposed as a convex matrix regularizer in [1] and was shown to be empirically superior to the trace-norm for collaborative filtering problems. Although the max-norm can be computed in polynomial time, there are currently no practical algorithms for solving large-scale optimization problems that incorporate the max-norm. The present work uses a factorization technique of Burer and Monteiro [2] to devise scalable first-order algorithms for convex programs involving the max-norm. These algorithms are applied to solve huge collaborative filtering, graph cut, and clustering problems. Empirically, the new methods outperform mature techniques from all three areas.

Many combinatorial problems arising in machine learning can be reduced to the problem of minimizing a submodular function. Submodular functions are a natural discrete analog of convex functions, and can be minimized in strongly polynomial time. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art algorithms for general submodular minimization are intractable for larger problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel subclass of submodular minimization problems that we call decomposable. Decomposable submodular functions are those that can be represented as sums of concave functions applied to modular functions. We develop an algorithm, SLG, that can efficiently minimize decomposable submodular functions with tens of thousands of variables. Our algorithm exploits recent results in smoothed convex minimization. We apply SLG to synthetic benchmarks and a joint classification-and-segmentation task, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art general purpose submodular minimization algorithms by several orders of magnitude.