Siyuan Ma

Soroosh Mariooryad, Matt Shannon, Siyuan Ma et al.

We present a noisy channel generative model of two sequences, for example text and speech, which enables uncovering the association between the two modalities when limited paired data is available. To address the intractability of the exact model under a realistic data setup, we propose a variational inference approximation. To train this variational model with categorical data, we propose a KL encoder loss approach which has connections to the wake-sleep algorithm. Identifying the joint or conditional distributions by only observing unpaired samples from the marginals is only possible under certain conditions in the data distribution and we discuss under what type of conditional independence assumptions that might be achieved, which guides the architecture designs. Experimental results show that even tiny amount of paired data (5 minutes) is sufficient to learn to relate the two modalities (graphemes and phonemes here) when a massive amount of unpaired data is available, paving the path to adopting this principled approach for all seq2seq models in low data resource regimes.

Amirhesam Abedsoltan, Siyuan Ma, Parthe Pandit et al.

Classical kernel machines have historically faced significant challenges in scaling to large datasets and model sizes--a key ingredient that has driven the success of neural networks. In this paper, we present a new methodology for building kernel machines that can scale efficiently with both data size and model size. Our algorithm introduces delayed projections to Preconditioned Stochastic Gradient Descent (PSGD) allowing the training of much larger models than was previously feasible, pushing the practical limits of kernel-based learning. We validate our algorithm, EigenPro4, across multiple datasets, demonstrating drastic training speed up over the existing methods while maintaining comparable or better classification accuracy.