Ryan Prescott Adams

Ryan Prescott Adams, George E. Dahl, Iain Murray

Probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) is a powerful method for modeling data associ- ated with pairwise relationships, Finding use in collaborative Filtering, computational bi- ology, and document analysis, among other areas. In many domains, there are additional covariates that can assist in prediction. For example, when modeling movie ratings, we might know when the rating occurred, where the user lives, or what actors appear in the movie. It is difficult, however, to incorporate this side information into the PMF model. We propose a framework for incorporating side information by coupling together multi- ple PMF problems via Gaussian process priors. We replace scalar latent features with func- tions that vary over the covariate space. The GP priors on these functions require them to vary smoothly and share information. We apply this new method to predict the scores of professional basketball games, where side information about the venue and date of the game are relevant for the outcome.

Kevin Swersky, Jasper Snoek, Ryan Prescott Adams

In this paper we develop a dynamic form of Bayesian optimization for machine learning models with the goal of rapidly finding good hyperparameter settings. Our method uses the partial information gained during the training of a machine learning model in order to decide whether to pause training and start a new model, or resume the training of a previously-considered model. We specifically tailor our method to machine learning problems by developing a novel positive-definite covariance kernel to capture a variety of training curves. Furthermore, we develop a Gaussian process prior that scales gracefully with additional temporal observations. Finally, we provide an information-theoretic framework to automate the decision process. Experiments on several common machine learning models show that our approach is extremely effective in practice.

Oren Rippel, Ryan Prescott Adams

One of the fundamental problems in machine learning is the estimation of a probability distribution from data. Many techniques have been proposed to study the structure of data, most often building around the assumption that observations lie on a lower-dimensional manifold of high probability. It has been more difficult, however, to exploit this insight to build explicit, tractable density models for high-dimensional data. In this paper, we introduce the deep density model (DDM), a new approach to density estimation. We exploit insights from deep learning to construct a bijective map to a representation space, under which the transformation of the distribution of the data is approximately factorized and has identical and known marginal densities. The simplicity of the latent distribution under the model allows us to feasibly explore it, and the invertibility of the map to characterize contraction of measure across it. This enables us to compute normalized densities for out-of-sample data. This combination of tractability and flexibility allows us to tackle a variety of probabilistic tasks on high-dimensional datasets, including: rapid computation of normalized densities at test-time without evaluating a partition function; generation of samples without MCMC; and characterization of the joint entropy of the data.

Andrew Gordon Wilson, Ryan Prescott Adams

Gaussian processes are rich distributions over functions, which provide a Bayesian nonparametric approach to smoothing and interpolation. We introduce simple closed form kernels that can be used with Gaussian processes to discover patterns and enable extrapolation. These kernels are derived by modelling a spectral density -- the Fourier transform of a kernel -- with a Gaussian mixture. The proposed kernels support a broad class of stationary covariances, but Gaussian process inference remains simple and analytic. We demonstrate the proposed kernels by discovering patterns and performing long range extrapolation on synthetic examples, as well as atmospheric CO2 trends and airline passenger data. We also show that we can reconstruct standard covariances within our framework.

Daniel Tarlow, Kevin Swersky, Richard S. Zemel et al.

Cardinality potentials are a generally useful class of high order potential that affect probabilities based on how many of D binary variables are active. Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference for cardinality potential models is well-understood, with efficient computations taking O(DlogD) time. Yet efficient marginalization and sampling have not been addressed as thoroughly in the machine learning community. We show that there exists a simple algorithm for computing marginal probabilities and drawing exact joint samples that runs in O(Dlog2 D) time, and we show how to frame the algorithm as efficient belief propagation in a low order tree-structured model that includes additional auxiliary variables. We then develop a new, more general class of models, termed Recursive Cardinality models, which take advantage of this efficiency. Finally, we show how to do efficient exact inference in models composed of a tree structure and a cardinality potential. We explore the expressive power of Recursive Cardinality models and empirically demonstrate their utility.