No Arabic abstract
Despite having various attractive qualities such as high prediction accuracy and the ability to quantify uncertainty and avoid over-fitting, Bayesian Matrix Factorization has not been widely adopted because of the prohibitive cost of inference. In this paper, we propose a scalable distributed Bayesian matrix factorization algorithm using stochastic gradient MCMC. Our algorithm, based on Distributed Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics, can not only match the prediction accuracy of standard MCMC methods like Gibbs sampling, but at the same time is as fast and simple as stochastic gradient descent. In our experiments, we show that our algorithm can achieve the same level of prediction accuracy as Gibbs sampling an order of magnitude faster. We also show that our method reduces the prediction error as fast as distributed stochastic gradient descent, achieving a 4.1% improvement in RMSE for the Netflix dataset and an 1.8% for the Yahoo music dataset.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models, variational inference (VI) is often the preferable option. Unfortunately, VI makes strong assumptions on both the factorization and functional form of the posterior. In this work, we propose a new non-parametric variational approximation that makes no assumptions about the approximate posteriors functional form and allows practitioners to specify the exact dependencies the algorithm should respect or break. The approach relies on a new Langevin-type algorithm that operates on a modified energy function, where parts of the latent variables are averaged over samples from earlier iterations of the Markov chain. This way, statistical dependencies can be broken in a controlled way, allowing the chain to mix faster. This scheme can be further modified in a dropout manner, leading to even more scalability. By implementing the scheme on a ResNet-20 architecture, we obtain better predictive likelihoods and larger effective sample sizes than full SGMCMC.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed dimension and the log-posterior density is differentiable with respect to the parameters. This paper proposes an extended stochastic gradient MCMC lgoriathm which, by introducing appropriate latent variables, can be applied to more general large-scale Bayesian computing problems, such as those involving dimension jumping and missing data. Numerical studies show that the proposed algorithm is highly scalable and much more efficient than traditional MCMC algorithms. The proposed algorithms have much alleviated the pain of Bayesian methods in big data computing.
Numerous empirical evidences have corroborated the importance of noise in nonconvex optimization problems. The theory behind such empirical observations, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem through investigating the nonconvex rectangular matrix factorization problem, which has infinitely many global minima due to rotation and scaling invariance. Hence, gradient descent (GD) can converge to any optimum, depending on the initialization. In contrast, we show that a perturbed form of GD with an arbitrary initialization converges to a global optimum that is uniquely determined by the injected noise. Our result implies that the noise imposes implicit bias towards certain optima. Numerical experiments are provided to support our theory.
Multi-view clustering aims at integrating complementary information from multiple heterogeneous views to improve clustering results. Existing multi-view clustering solutions can only output a single clustering of the data. Due to their multiplicity, multi-view data, can have different groupings that are reasonable and interesting from different perspectives. However, how to find multiple, meaningful, and diverse clustering results from multi-view data is still a rarely studied and challenging topic in multi-view clustering and multiple clusterings. In this paper, we introduce a deep matrix factorization based solution (DMClusts) to discover multiple clusterings. DMClusts gradually factorizes multi-view data matrices into representational subspaces layer-by-layer and generates one clustering in each layer. To enforce the diversity between generated clusterings, it minimizes a new redundancy quantification term derived from the proximity between samples in these subspaces. We further introduce an iterative optimization procedure to simultaneously seek multiple clusterings with quality and diversity. Experimental results on benchmark datasets confirm that DMClusts outperforms state-of-the-art multiple clustering solutions.
Explaining the predictions of neural black-box models is an important problem, especially when such models are used in applications where user trust is crucial. Estimating the influence of training examples on a learned neural models behavior allows us to identify training examples most responsible for a given prediction and, therefore, to faithfully explain the output of a black-box model. The most generally applicable existing method is based on influence functions, which scale poorly for larger sample sizes and models. We propose gradient rollback, a general approach for influence estimation, applicable to neural models where each parameter update step during gradient descent touches a smaller number of parameters, even if the overall number of parameters is large. Neural matrix factorization models trained with gradient descent are part of this model class. These models are popular and have found a wide range of applications in industry. Especially knowledge graph embedding methods, which belong to this class, are used extensively. We show that gradient rollback is highly efficient at both training and test time. Moreover, we show theoretically that the difference between gradient rollbacks influence approximation and the true influence on a models behavior is smaller than known bounds on the stability of stochastic gradient descent. This establishes that gradient rollback is robustly estimating example influence. We also conduct experiments which show that gradient rollback provides faithful explanations for knowledge base completion and recommender datasets.