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Although many techniques have been applied to matrix factorization (MF), they may not fully exploit the feature structure. In this paper, we incorporate the grouping effect into MF and propose a novel method called Robust Matrix Factorization with Grouping effect (GRMF). The grouping effect is a generalization of the sparsity effect, which conducts denoising by clustering similar values around multiple centers instead of just around 0. Compared with existing algorithms, the proposed GRMF can automatically learn the grouping structure and sparsity in MF without prior knowledge, by introducing a naturally adjustable non-convex regularization to achieve simultaneous sparsity and grouping effect. Specifically, GRMF uses an efficient alternating minimization framework to perform MF, in which the original non-convex problem is first converted into a convex problem through Difference-of-Convex (DC) programming, and then solved by Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). In addition, GRMF can be easily extended to the Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) settings. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world data sets with outliers and contaminated noise, where the experimental results show that GRMF has promoted performance and robustness, compared to five benchmark algorithms.
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.
This paper presents a new approach to a robust Gaussian process (GP) regression. Most existing approaches replace an outlier-prone Gaussian likelihood with a non-Gaussian likelihood induced from a heavy tail distribution, such as the Laplace distribution and Student-t distribution. However, the use of a non-Gaussian likelihood would incur the need for a computationally expensive Bayesian approximate computation in the posterior inferences. The proposed approach models an outlier as a noisy and biased observation of an unknown regression function, and accordingly, the likelihood contains bias terms to explain the degree of deviations from the regression function. We entail how the biases can be estimated accurately with other hyperparameters by a regularized maximum likelihood estimation. Conditioned on the bias estimates, the robust GP regression can be reduced to a standard GP regression problem with analytical forms of the predictive mean and variance estimates. Therefore, the proposed approach is simple and very computationally attractive. It also gives a very robust and accurate GP estimate for many tested scenarios. For the numerical evaluation, we perform a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate the proposed approach with the comparison to the existing robust GP approaches under various simulated scenarios of different outlier proportions and different noise levels. The approach is applied to data from two measurement systems, where the predictors are based on robust environmental parameter measurements and the response variables utilize more complex chemical sensing methods that contain a certain percentage of outliers. The utility of the measurement systems and value of the environmental data are improved through the computationally efficient GP regression and bias model.
With the recent success of representation learning methods, which includes deep learning as a special case, there has been considerable interest in developing representation learning techniques that can incorporate known physical constraints into the learned representation. As one example, in many applications that involve a signal propagating through physical media (e.g., optics, acoustics, fluid dynamics, etc), it is known that the dynamics of the signal must satisfy constraints imposed by the wave equation. Here we propose a matrix factorization technique that decomposes such signals into a sum of components, where each component is regularized to ensure that it satisfies wave equation constraints. Although our proposed formulation is non-convex, we prove that our model can be efficiently solved to global optimality in polynomial time. We demonstrate the benefits of our work by applications in structural health monitoring, where prior work has attempted to solve this problem using sparse dictionary learning approaches that do not come with any theoretical guarantees regarding convergence to global optimality and employ heuristics to capture desired physical constraints.
Fully unsupervised topic models have found fantastic success in document clustering and classification. However, these models often suffer from the tendency to learn less-than-meaningful or even redundant topics when the data is biased towards a set of features. For this reason, we propose an approach based upon the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) model, deemed textit{Guided NMF}, that incorporates user-designed seed word supervision. Our experimental results demonstrate the promise of this model and illustrate that it is competitive with other methods of this ilk with only very little supervision information.
We present a general-purpose data compression algorithm, Regularized L21 Semi-NonNegative Matrix Factorization (L21 SNF). L21 SNF provides robust, parts-based compression applicable to mixed-sign data for which high fidelity, individualdata point reconstruction is paramount. We derive a rigorous proof of convergenceof our algorithm. Through experiments, we show the use-case advantages presentedby L21 SNF, including application to the compression of highly overdeterminedsystems encountered broadly across many general machine learning processes.