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We present a new model called LATTICERNN, which generalizes recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to process weighted lattices as input, instead of sequences. A LATTICERNN can encode the complete structure of a lattice into a dense representation, which makes it suitable to a variety of problems, including rescoring, classifying, parsing, or translating lattices using deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper

We propose two new methods of speech detection in the context of voice-controlled far-field appliances. While conventional detection methods are designed to differentiate between speech and nonspeech, we aim at distinguishing desired speech, which we define as speech originating from the person interacting with the device, from background noise and interfering talkers. Our two proposed methods use the first

Search queries are appropriate when users have explicit intent, but they perform poorly when the intent is difficult to express or if the user is simply looking to be inspired. Visual browsing systems allow e-commerce platforms to address these scenarios while offering the user an engaging shopping experience. Here we explore extensions in the direction of adaptive personalization and item diversification

Amazon is one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites and Amazon Search powers the majority of Amazon’s sales. As a consequence, even small improvements in relevance ranking both positively influence the shopping experience of millions of customers and significantly impact revenue. In the past, Amazon’s product search engine consisted of several handtuned ranking functions using a handful of input features

An adaptive image sampling framework is proposed for identifying text regions in natural scene images. A small fraction of the pixels actually correspond to text regions. It is desirable to eliminate non-text regions at the early stages of text detection. First, the image is sampled row-by-row at a specific rate and each row is tested for containing text using an 1D adaptation of the Maximally Stable Extremal

In structured prediction, a predictor optimizes an objective function over a combinatorial search space, such as the set of all image segmentations, or the set of all part-of-speech taggings. Unfortunately, finding the optimal structured labeling—sometimes referred to as maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference—is, in general, NP-hard [12], due to the combinatorial structure of the problem. Many inference approximations

We present a scalable and robust Bayesian method for demand forecasting in the context of a large e-commerce platform, paying special attention to intermittent and bursty target statistics. Inference is approximated by the Newton-Raphson algorithm, reduced to linear-time Kalman smoothing, which allows us to operate on several orders of magnitude larger problems than previous related work. In a study on

Online optimization is central to display advertising, where we must sequentially allocate ad impressions to maximize the total welfare among advertisers, while respecting various advertiser-specified long-term constraints (e.g., total amount of the ad’s budget that is consumed at the end of the campaign). In this paper, we present the online dual decomposition (ODD) framework for large-scale, online, distributed

Stochastic variance reduction algorithms have recently become popular for minimizing the average of a large, but finite, number of loss functions. In this paper, we propose a novel Riemannian extension of the Euclidean stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm (R-SVRG) to a compact manifold search space.

Our research focuses on the storage decision in a semi-automated storage system, where the inventory is stored on mobile storage pods. In a typical system, each storage pod carries a mixture of items, and the inventory of each item is spread over multiple storage pods.

We introduce dropout compaction, a novel method for training feed-forward neural networks which realizes the performance gains of training a large model with dropout regularization, yet extracts a compact neural network for run-time efficiency. In the proposed method, we introduce a sparsity-inducing prior on the per unit dropout retention probability so that the optimizer can effectively prune hidden units

Structured prediction from bandit feedback describes a learning scenario where instead of having access to a gold standard structure, a learner only receives partial feedback in form of the loss value of a predicted structure. We present new learning objectives and algorithms for this interactive scenario, focusing on convergence speed and ease of elicitability of feedback. We present supervised-to-bandit

We propose a technique that combines generative adversarial networks with probabilistic graphical models to explicitly model dependencies in structured distributions. Generative adversarial structured networks (GASNs) produce samples by passing random inputs through a neural network to construct the potentials of a graphical model; maximum a-posteriori inference in this graphical model then yields a sample

Inverse Propensity Score estimator (IPS) is a basic, unbiased, offpolicy evaluation technique to measure the impact of a user-interactive system without serving live traffic. We present our work on applying IPS to real-world settings by addressing some practical challenges, thereby enabling successful policy evaluation. In particular, we show that off-policy evaluation can be impossible in the absence of

Machine Learning (ML) has become a mature technology that is being applied to a wide range of business problems such as web search, online advertising, product recommendations, object recognition, and so on. As a result, it has become imperative for researchers and practitioners to have a fundamental understanding of ML concepts and practical knowledge of end-to-end modeling. This tutorial takes a hands-on

In this paper we focus on the anomaly detection problem for dynamic data streams through the lens of random cut forests. We investigate a robust random cut data structure that can be used as a sketch or synopsis of the input stream. We provide a plausible definition of non-parametric anomalies based on the influence of an unseen point on the remainder of the data, i.e., the externality imposed by that point

We provide a unified modeling framework of sparse and low-rank decomposition to investigate the fundamental limits of communication, computation, and storage in mobile big data systems. The resulting sparse and low-rank optimization problems are highly intractable non-convex optimization problems and conventional convex relaxation approaches are inapplicable, for which we propose a smoothed Riemannian optimization

We compare submodular and Jaccard methods to diversify Amazon Music recommendations. Submodularity significantly improves recommendation quality and user engagement. Unlike the Jaccard method, our submodular approach incorporates item relevance score within its optimization function, and produces a relevant and uniformly diverse set.

In this paper, we propose novel gossip algorithms for the low-rank decentralized matrix completion problem. The proposed approach is on the Riemannian Grassmann manifold that allows local matrix completion by different agents while achieving asymptotic consensus on the global low-rank factors. The resulting approach is scalable and parallelizable. Our numerical experiments show the good performance of the

We present an adaptive online gradient descent algorithm to solve online convex optimization problems with long-term constraints, which are constraints that need to be satisfied when accumulated over a finite number of rounds T, but can be violated in intermediate rounds. For some user-defined trade-off parameter β ∈ (0, 1), the proposed algorithm achieves cumulative regret bounds of O(T max{β,1−β} ) and