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Learning with feature evolution studies the scenario where the features of the data streams can evolve, i.e., old features vanish and new features emerge. Its goal is to keep the model always performing well even when the features happen to evolve. To tackle this problem, canonical methods assume that the old features will vanish simultaneously and the new features themselves will emerge simultaneously as well. They also assume that there is an overlapping period where old and new features both exist when the feature space starts to change. However, in reality, the feature evolution could be unpredictable, which means that the features can vanish or emerge arbitrarily, causing the overlapping period incomplete. In this article, we propose a novel paradigm: prediction with unpredictable feature evolution (PUFE) where the feature evolution is unpredictable. To address this problem, we fill the incomplete overlapping period and formulate it as a new matrix completion problem. We give a theoretical bound on the least number of observed entries to make the overlapping period intact. With this intact overlapping period, we leverage an ensemble method to take the advantage of both the old and new feature spaces without manually deciding which base models should be incorporated. Theoretical and experimental results validate that our method can always follow the best base models and, thus, realize the goal of learning with feature evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margin is an important concept in machine learning; theoretical analyses further reveal that the distribution of margin plays a more critical role than the minimum margin in generalization power. Recently, several approaches have achieved performance breakthroughs by optimizing the margin distribution, but their computational cost, which is usually higher than before, still hinders them to be widely applied. In this article, we propose margin distribution analysis (MDA), which optimizes the margin distribution more simply by maximizing the margin mean and minimizing the margin variance simultaneously. MDA is efficient and resistive to class-imbalance naturally, since its objective distinguishes the margin means of different classes and can be broken up into two linear equations. In practice, it can also cooperate with other frameworks such as reweight-minimization when facing complex circumstances with noise and outliers. Empirical studies validate the superiority of MDA in real-world data sets, and demonstrate that simple approaches can also perform competitively by optimizing margin distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretability of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years. It will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this article, we focus on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), especially gated RNNs whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that finite-state automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data have a more interpretable inner mechanism according to the definition of interpretability and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. With the learned FSA and via experiments on artificial and real data sets, we find that FSA is more trustable than the RNN from which it learned, which gives FSA a chance to substitute RNNs in applications involving humans’ lives or dangerous facilities. Besides, we analyze how the number of gates affects the performance of RNN. Our result suggests that gate in RNN is important but the less the better, which could be a guidance to design other RNNs. Finally, we observe that the FSA learned from RNN gives semantic aggregated states, and its transition graph shows us a very interesting vision of how RNNs intrinsically handle text classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reinforcement learning has shown great success in helping learning agents accomplish tasks autonomously from environment interactions. Meanwhile in many real-world applications, an agent needs to accomplish not only a fixed task but also a range of tasks. For this goal, an agent can learn a metapolicy over a set of training tasks that are drawn from an underlying distribution. By maximizing the total reward summed over all the training tasks, the metapolicy can then be reused in accomplishing test tasks from the same distribution. However, in practice, we face two major obstacles to train and reuse metapolicies well. First, how to identify tasks that are unrelated or even opposite with each other, in order to avoid their mutual interference in the training. Second, how to characterize task features, according to which a metapolicy can be reused. In this paper, we propose the MetA-Policy LEarning (MAPLE) approach that overcomes the two difficulties by introducing the shallow trail. It probes a task by running a roughly trained policy. Using the rewards of the shallow trail, MAPLE automatically groups similar tasks. Moreover, when the task parameters are unknown, the rewards of the shallow trail also serve as task features. Empirical studies on several controlling tasks verify that MAPLE can train metapolicies well and receives high reward on test tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-instance learning (MIL) has been widely applied to diverse applications involving complicated data objects, such as images and genes. However, most existing MIL algorithms can only handle small- or moderate-sized data. In order to deal with large-scale MIL problems, we propose MIL based on the vector of locally aggregated descriptors representation (miVLAD) and MIL based on the Fisher vector representation (miFV), two efficient and scalable MIL algorithms. They map the original MIL bags into new vector representations using their corresponding mapping functions. The new feature representations keep essential bag-level information, and at the same time lead to excellent MIL performances even when linear classifiers are used. Thanks to the low computational cost in the mapping step and the scalability of linear classifiers, miVLAD and miFV can handle large-scale MIL data efficiently and effectively. Experiments show that miVLAD and miFV not only achieve comparable accuracy rates with the state-of-the-art MIL algorithms, but also have hundreds of times faster speed. Moreover, we can regard the new miVLAD and miFV representations as multiview data, which improves the accuracy rates in most cases. In addition, our algorithms perform well even when they are used without parameter tuning (i.e., adopting the default parameters), which is convenient for practical MIL applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiview representations reveal the fundamental attributes of the studied instances from different perspectives. Some common perspectives are reviewed by multiple views simultaneously, while some specific ones are reflected by individual views. That is, there are two kinds of properties embedded in the multiview data: 1) consistency and 2) complementarity. Different from most multiview learning approaches only focusing on either consistency or complementarity, this paper proposes a novel semisupervised multiview learning algorithm, called partially shared latent factor (PSLF) learning, which jointly exploits both consistent and complementary information among multiple views. In PSLF, a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based formulation is adopted to learn a compact and comprehensive partially shared latent representation, which is composed of common latent factors shared by multiple views and some specific latent factors to each view. With the learned representations of multiview data, we introduce a robust sparse regression model to predict the cluster labels of labeled data. By integrating the NMF-based model and the regression model, we obtain a unified formulation and propose a multiplicative-based alternative algorithm for optimization. In addition, PSLF can learn the weights of different views adaptively according to the reconstruction precisions of data matrices. Our experimental study indicates different multiview data that contains consistent and complementary information in different degrees. In addition, the encouraging results of the proposed algorithm are achieved in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms on real-world data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]