No Arabic abstract
Many applications generate data with an intrinsic network structure such as time series data, image data or social network data. The network Lasso (nLasso) has been proposed recently as a method for joint clustering and optimization of machine learning models for networked data. The nLasso extends the Lasso from sparse linear models to clustered graph signals. This paper explores the duality of nLasso and network flow optimization. We show that, in a very precise sense, nLasso is equivalent to a minimum-cost flow problem on the data network structure. Our main technical result is a concise characterization of nLasso solutions via existence of certain network flows. The main conceptual result is a useful link between nLasso methods and basic graph algorithms such as clustering or maximum flow.
The compression of deep neural networks (DNNs) to reduce inference cost becomes increasingly important to meet realistic deployment requirements of various applications. There have been a significant amount of work regarding network compression, while most of them are heuristic rule-based or typically not friendly to be incorporated into varying scenarios. On the other hand, sparse optimization yielding sparse solutions naturally fits the compression requirement, but due to the limited study of sparse optimization in stochastic learning, its extension and application onto model compression is rarely well explored. In this work, we propose a model compression framework based on the recent progress on sparse stochastic optimization. Compared to existing model compression techniques, our method is effective and requires fewer extra engineering efforts to incorporate with varying applications, and has been numerically demonstrated on benchmark compression tasks. Particularly, we achieve up to 7.2 and 2.9 times FLOPs reduction with the same level of evaluation accuracy on VGG16 for CIFAR10 and ResNet50 for ImageNet compared to the baseline heavy models, respectively.
The Group-Lasso is a well-known tool for joint regularization in machine learning methods. While the l_{1,2} and the l_{1,infty} version have been studied in detail and efficient algorithms exist, there are still open questions regarding other l_{1,p} variants. We characterize conditions for solutions of the l_{1,p} Group-Lasso for all p-norms with 1 <= p <= infty, and we present a unified active set algorithm. For all p-norms, a highly efficient projected gradient algorithm is presented. This new algorithm enables us to compare the prediction performance of many variants of the Group-Lasso in a multi-task learning setting, where the aim is to solve many learning problems in parallel which are coupled via the Group-Lasso constraint. We conduct large-scale experiments on synthetic data and on two real-world data sets. In accordance with theoretical characterizations of the different norms we observe that the weak-coupling norms with p between 1.5 and 2 consistently outperform the strong-coupling norms with p >> 2.
We propose networked exponential families to jointly leverage the information in the topology as well as the attributes (features) of networked data points. Networked exponential families are a flexible probabilistic model for heterogeneous datasets with intrinsic network structure. These models can be learnt efficiently using network Lasso which implicitly pools or clusters the data points according to the intrinsic network structure and the local likelihood. The resulting method can be formulated as a non-smooth convex optimization problem which we solve using a primal-dual splitting method. This primal-dual method is appealing for big data applications as it can be implemented as a highly scalable message passing algorithm.
Topic modeling is widely studied for the dimension reduction and analysis of documents. However, it is formulated as a difficult optimization problem. Current approximate solutions also suffer from inaccurate model- or data-assumptions. To deal with the above problems, we propose a polynomial-time deep topic model with no model and data assumptions. Specifically, we first apply multilayer bootstrap network (MBN), which is an unsupervised deep model, to reduce the dimension of documents, and then use the low-dimensional data representations or their clustering results as the target of supervised Lasso for topic word discovery. To our knowledge, this is the first time that MBN and Lasso are applied to unsupervised topic modeling. Experimental comparison results with five representative topic models on the 20-newsgroups and TDT2 corpora illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
We present a new approach to solve the sparse approximation or best subset selection problem, namely find a $k$-sparse vector ${bf x}inmathbb{R}^d$ that minimizes the $ell_2$ residual $lVert A{bf x}-{bf y} rVert_2$. We consider a regularized approach, whereby this residual is penalized by the non-convex $textit{trimmed lasso}$, defined as the $ell_1$-norm of ${bf x}$ excluding its $k$ largest-magnitude entries. We prove that the trimmed lasso has several appealing theoretical properties, and in particular derive sparse recovery guarantees assuming successful optimization of the penalized objective. Next, we show empirically that directly optimizing this objective can be quite challenging. Instead, we propose a surrogate for the trimmed lasso, called the $textit{generalized soft-min}$. This penalty smoothly interpolates between the classical lasso and the trimmed lasso, while taking into account all possible $k$-sparse patterns. The generalized soft-min penalty involves summation over $binom{d}{k}$ terms, yet we derive a polynomial-time algorithm to compute it. This, in turn, yields a practical method for the original sparse approximation problem. Via simulations, we demonstrate its competitive performance compared to current state of the art.