We propose Laplace max-margin Markov networks (LapM³N), and a general class of Bayesian M³N (BM³N) of which the LapM³N is a special case with sparse structural bias, for robust structured prediction. BM³N generalizes extant structured prediction rules ...

This paper presents a cutting plane algorithm for multiclass maximum margin clustering (MMC). The proposed algorithm constructs a nested sequence of successively tighter relaxations of the original MMC problem, and each optimization problem in this ...

EM algorithm is a very popular iteration-based method to estimate the parameters of Gaussian Mixture Model from a large observation set. However, in most cases, EM algorithm is not guaranteed to converge to the global optimum. Instead, it stops at some ...

Low-rank matrix approximation is an effective tool in alleviating the memory and computational burdens of kernel methods and sampling, as the mainstream of such algorithms, has drawn considerable attention in both theory and practice. This paper ...

We extend the well-known BFGS quasi-Newton method and its limited-memory variant LBFGS to the optimization of non-smooth convex objectives. This is done in a rigorous fashion by generalizing three components of BFGS to subdifferentials: The local ...

This paper extends many of the recent popular policy evaluation algorithms to a generalized framework that includes least-squares temporal difference (LSTD) learning, least-squares policy evaluation (LSPE) and a variant of incremental LSTD (iLSTD). The ...

Previous algorithms for learning lexicographic preference models (LPMs) produce a "best guess" LPM that is consistent with the observations. Our approach is more democratic: we do not commit to a single LPM. Instead, we approximate the target using the ...

In EM and related algorithms, E-step computations distribute easily, because data items are independent given parameters. For very large data sets, however, even storing all of the parameters in a single node for the M-step can be impractical. We ...

Exponential Family PSR (EFPSR) models capture stochastic dynamical systems by representing state as the parameters of an exponential family distribution over a shortterm window of future observations. They are appealing from a learning perspective ...

We show how nonlinear embedding algorithms popular for use with shallow semi-supervised learning techniques such as kernel methods can be applied to deep multilayer architectures, either as a regularizer at the output layer, or on each layer of the ...

Graph transduction methods label input data by learning a classification function that is regularized to exhibit smoothness along a graph over labeled and unlabeled samples. In practice, these algorithms are sensitive to the initial set of labels ...

We consider feature extraction (dimensionality reduction) for compositional data, where the data vectors are constrained to be positive and constant-sum. In real-world problems, the data components (variables) usually have complicated "correlations" ...

In this paper we introduce a novel approach to manifold alignment, based on Procrustes analysis. Our approach differs from "semi-supervised alignment" in that it results in a mapping that is defined everywhere - when used with a suitable dimensionality ...

Most existing sparse Gaussian process (g.p.) models seek computational advantages by basing their computations on a set of m basis functions that are the covariance function of the g.p. with one of its two inputs fixed. We generalise this for the case ...

We show that the Brier game of prediction is mixable and find the optimal learning rate and substitution function for it. The resulting prediction algorithm is applied to predict results of football and tennis matches. The theoretical performance ...

The infinite hidden Markov model is a non-parametric extension of the widely used hidden Markov model. Our paper introduces a new inference algorithm for the infinite Hidden Markov model called beam sampling. Beam sampling combines slice sampling, which ...

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods based on least-squares temporal difference (LSTD) have been developed recently and have shown good practical performance. However, the quality of their estimation has not been well elucidated. In this article, we ...

A new algorithm for training Restricted Boltzmann Machines is introduced. The algorithm, named Persistent Contrastive Divergence, is different from the standard Contrastive Divergence algorithms in that it aims to draw samples from almost exactly the ...

The ν-support vector classification (ν-SVC) algorithm was shown to work well and provide intuitive interpretations, e.g., the parameter ν roughly specifies the fraction of support vectors. Although ν corresponds to a fraction, it cannot take the entire ...

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods. Here, we ...