Publications

Within machine learning, the subfield of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has recently garnered research attention due to its ability to improve upon human-designed models. However, the computational requirements for finding an exact solution to this problem are often intractable, and the design of the search space still requires manual intervention. In this paper we attempt to establish a formalized framework

Sentiment analysis is a task that may suffer from a lack of data in certain cases, as the datasets are often generated and annotated by humans. In cases where data is inadequate for training discriminative models, generate models may aid training via data augmentation. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one such model that has advanced the state of the art in several tasks, including as image and

We present a novel approach to dialogue state tracking and referring expression resolution tasks. Successful contextual understanding of multi-turn spoken dialogues requires resolving referring expressions across turns and tracking the entities relevant to the conversation across turns. Tracking conversational state is particularly challenging in a multi-domain scenario when there exist multiple spoken

Pretrained contextual word representations in NLP have greatly improved performance on various downstream tasks. For speech, we propose contextual frame representations that capture phonetic information at the acoustic frame level and can be used for utterance-level language, speaker, and speech recognition. These representations come from the frame-wise intermediate representations of an end-to-end, self-attentive

Estimation of the accuracy of a large-scale knowledge graph (KG) often requires humans to annotate samples from the graph. How to obtain statistically meaningful estimates for accuracy evaluation while keeping human annotation costs low is a problem critical to the development cycle of a KG and its practical applications. Surprisingly, this challenging problem has largely been ignored in prior research.

Classifying forecasting methods as being either of a “machine learning” or “statistical” nature has become commonplace in parts of the forecasting literature and community, as exemplified by the M4 competition and the conclusion drawn by the organizers. We argue that this distinction does not stem from fundamental differences in the methods assigned to either class. Instead, this distinction is probably

Consider a standard recommendation/retrieval problem where given a query, the goal is to retrieve the most relevant items. Inductive matrix completion (IMC) method is a standard approach for this problem where the given query as well as the items are embedded in a common low-dimensional space. The inner product between a query embedding and an item embedding reflects relevance of the (query, item) pair.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently received considerable attention due to its applicability to a wide range of real-world applications. However, achieving efficient communication among agents has always been an overarching problem in MARL. In this work, we propose Variance Based Control (VBC), a simple yet efficient technique to improve communication efficiency in MARL. By limiting the

We present Matrix Krasulina, an algorithm for online k-PCA, by generalizing the classic Krasulina’s method (Krasulina, 1969) from vector to matrix case. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that the algorithm naturally adapts to data low-rankness and converges exponentially fast to the ground-truth principal subspace. Notably, our result suggests that despite various recent efforts to accelerate

We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same product recommendation repeatedly) or infeasible (e.g. compute job scheduling on machines). We show that with prior knowledge of the rewards and delays of all the arms,

We propose a constraint-based causal feature selection method for identifying causes of a given target variable, selecting from a set of candidate variables, while there can also be hidden variables acting as common causes with the target. We prove that if we observe a cause for each candidate cause, then a single conditional independence test with one conditioning variable is sufficient to decide whether

We might hope that when faced with unexpected inputs, well-designed software systems would fire off warnings. Machine learning (ML) systems, however, which depend strongly on properties of their inputs (e.g. the i.i.d. assumption), tend to fail silently. This paper explores the problem of building ML systems that fail loudly, investigating methods for detecting dataset shift, identifying exemplars that

We consider dynamic pricing with many products under an evolving but low-dimensional demand model. Assuming the temporal variation in cross-elasticities exhibits low-rank structure based on fixed (latent) features of the products, we show that the revenue maximization problem reduces to an online bandit convex optimization with side information given by the observed demands. We design dynamic pricing algorithms

In the last decade, it has been shown that many hard AI tasks, especially in NLP, can be naturally modeled as extreme classification problems leading to improved precision. However, such models are prohibitively expensive to train due to the memory blow-up in the last layer. For example, a reasonable softmax layer for the dataset of interest in this paper can easily reach well beyond 100 billion parameters

Algorithms that fuse multiple input sources benefit from both complementary and shared information. Shared information may provide robustness against faulty or noisy inputs, which is indispensable for safety-critical applications like self-driving cars. We investigate learning fusion algorithms that are robust against noise added to a single source. We first demonstrate that robustness against single source