No Arabic abstract
The computational cost of training with softmax cross entropy loss grows linearly with the number of classes. For the settings where a large number of classes are involved, a common method to speed up training is to sample a subset of classes and utilize an estimate of the loss gradient based on these classes, known as the sampled softmax method. However, the sampled softmax provides a biased estimate of the gradient unless the samples are drawn from the exact softmax distribution, which is again expensive to compute. Therefore, a widely employed practical approach involves sampling from a simpler distribution in the hope of approximating the exact softmax distribution. In this paper, we develop the first theoretical understanding of the role that different sampling distributions play in determining the quality of sampled softmax. Motivated by our analysis and the work on kernel-based sampling, we propose the Random Fourier Softmax (RF-softmax) method that utilizes the powerful Random Fourier Features to enable more efficient and accurate sampling from an approximate softmax distribution. We show that RF-softmax leads to low bias in estimation in terms of both the full softmax distribution and the full softmax gradient. Furthermore, the cost of RF-softmax scales only logarithmically with the number of classes.
Estimating the gradients of stochastic nodes is one of the crucial research questions in the deep generative modeling community, which enables the gradient descent optimization on neural network parameters. This estimation problem becomes further complex when we regard the stochastic nodes to be discrete because pathwise derivative techniques cannot be applied. Hence, the stochastic gradient estimation of discrete distributions requires either a score function method or continuous relaxation of the discrete random variables. This paper proposes a general version of the Gumbel-Softmax estimator with continuous relaxation, and this estimator is able to relax the discreteness of probability distributions including more diverse types, other than categorical and Bernoulli. In detail, we utilize the truncation of discrete random variables and the Gumbel-Softmax trick with a linear transformation for the relaxed reparameterization. The proposed approach enables the relaxed discrete random variable to be reparameterized and to backpropagated through a large scale stochastic computational graph. Our experiments consist of (1) synthetic data analyses, which show the efficacy of our methods; and (2) applications on VAE and topic model, which demonstrate the value of the proposed estimation in practices.
Analysis of large-scale sequential data has been one of the most crucial tasks in areas such as bioinformatics, text, and audio mining. Existing string kernels, however, either (i) rely on local features of short substructures in the string, which hardly capture long discriminative patterns, (ii) sum over too many substructures, such as all possible subsequences, which leads to diagonal dominance of the kernel matrix, or (iii) rely on non-positive-definite similarity measures derived from the edit distance. Furthermore, while there have been works addressing the computational challenge with respect to the length of string, most of them still experience quadratic complexity in terms of the number of training samples when used in a kernel-based classifier. In this paper, we present a new class of global string kernels that aims to (i) discover global properties hidden in the strings through global alignments, (ii) maintain positive-definiteness of the kernel, without introducing a diagonal dominant kernel matrix, and (iii) have a training cost linear with respect to not only the length of the string but also the number of training string samples. To this end, the proposed kernels are explicitly defined through a series of different random feature maps, each corresponding to a distribution of random strings. We show that kernels defined this way are always positive-definite, and exhibit computational benefits as they always produce emph{Random String Embeddings (RSE)} that can be directly used in any linear classification models. Our extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets corroborate that RSE achieves better or comparable accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines, especially with the strings of longer lengths. In addition, we empirically show that RSE scales linearly with the increase of the number and the length of string.
We investigate the use of spatial interpolation methods for reconstructing the horizontal near-surface wind field given a sparse set of measurements. In particular, random Fourier features is compared to a set of benchmark methods including Kriging and Inverse distance weighting. Random Fourier features is a linear model $beta(pmb x) = sum_{k=1}^K beta_k e^{iomega_k pmb x}$ approximating the velocity field, with frequencies $omega_k$ randomly sampled and amplitudes $beta_k$ trained to minimize a loss function. We include a physically motivated divergence penalty term $| abla cdot beta(pmb x)|^2$, as well as a penalty on the Sobolev norm. We derive a bound on the generalization error and derive a sampling density that minimizes the bound. Following (arXiv:2007.10683 [math.NA]), we devise an adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for sampling the frequencies of the optimal distribution. In our experiments, our random Fourier features model outperforms the benchmark models.
Spectral clustering is one of the most effective clustering approaches that capture hidden cluster structures in the data. However, it does not scale well to large-scale problems due to its quadratic complexity in constructing similarity graphs and computing subsequent eigendecomposition. Although a number of methods have been proposed to accelerate spectral clustering, most of them compromise considerable information loss in the original data for reducing computational bottlenecks. In this paper, we present a novel scalable spectral clustering method using Random Binning features (RB) to simultaneously accelerate both similarity graph construction and the eigendecomposition. Specifically, we implicitly approximate the graph similarity (kernel) matrix by the inner product of a large sparse feature matrix generated by RB. Then we introduce a state-of-the-art SVD solver to effectively compute eigenvectors of this large matrix for spectral clustering. Using these two building blocks, we reduce the computational cost from quadratic to linear in the number of data points while achieving similar accuracy. Our theoretical analysis shows that spectral clustering via RB converges faster to the exact spectral clustering than the standard Random Feature approximation. Extensive experiments on 8 benchmarks show that the proposed method either outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and runtime. Moreover, our method exhibits linear scalability in both the number of data samples and the number of RB features.
The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has discovered connections between deep neural networks and kernel methods with insights of optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, recent works report that NTK can achieve better performances compared to training neural networks on small-scale datasets. However, results under large-scale settings are hardly studied due to the computational limitation of kernel methods. In this work, we propose an efficient feature map construction of the NTK of fully-connected ReLU network which enables us to apply it to large-scale datasets. We combine random features of the arc-cosine kernels with a sketching-based algorithm which can run in linear with respect to both the number of data points and input dimension. We show that dimension of the resulting features is much smaller than other baseline feature map constructions to achieve comparable error bounds both in theory and practice. We additionally utilize the leverage score based sampling for improved bounds of arc-cosine random features and prove a spectral approximation guarantee of the proposed feature map to the NTK matrix of two-layer neural network. We benchmark a variety of machine learning tasks to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. In particular, our algorithm can run tens of magnitude faster than the exact kernel methods for large-scale settings without performance loss.