Header logo is ei

349 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2010

no image
Recent trends in classification of remote sensing data: active and semisupervised machine learning paradigms

Bruzzone, L., Persello, C.

In pages: 3720-3723 , IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), July 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
This paper addresses the recent trends in machine learning methods for the automatic classification of remote sensing (RS) images. In particular, we focus on two new paradigms: semisupervised and active learning. These two paradigms allow one to address classification problems in the critical conditions where the available labeled training samples are limited. These operational conditions are very usual in RS problems, due to the high cost and time associated with the collection of labeled samples. Semisupervised and active learning techniques allow one to enrich the initial training set information and to improve classification accuracy by exploiting unlabeled samples or requiring additional labeling phases from the user, respectively. The two aforementioned strategies are theoretically and experimentally analyzed considering SVM-based techniques in order to highlight advantages and disadvantages of both strategies.

Web DOI [BibTex]

2010

Bruzzone, L., Persello, C. Recent trends in classification of remote sensing data: active and semisupervised machine learning paradigms In pages: 3720-3723 , IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), July 2010 (inproceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Source Separation and Higher-Order Causal Analysis of MEG and EEG

Zhang, K., Hyvärinen, A.

In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference (UAI 2010), pages: 709-716, (Editors: Grünwald, P. , P. Spirtes), AUAI Press, Corvallis, OR, USA, 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), July 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Separation of the sources and analysis of their connectivity have been an important topic in EEG/MEG analysis. To solve this problem in an automatic manner, we propose a twolayer model, in which the sources are conditionally uncorrelated from each other, but not independent; the dependence is caused by the causality in their time-varying variances (envelopes). The model is identified in two steps. We first propose a new source separation technique which takes into account the autocorrelations (which may be time-varying) and time-varying variances of the sources. The causality in the envelopes is then discovered by exploiting a special kind of multivariate GARCH (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity) model. The resulting causal diagram gives the effective connectivity between the separated sources; in our experimental results on MEG data, sources with similar functions are grouped together, with negative influences between groups, and the groups are connected via some interesting sources.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Zhang, K., Hyvärinen, A. Source Separation and Higher-Order Causal Analysis of MEG and EEG In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference (UAI 2010), pages: 709-716, (Editors: Grünwald, P. , P. Spirtes), AUAI Press, Corvallis, OR, USA, 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), July 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Invariant Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models and Application in Causal Discovery

Zhang, K., Schölkopf, B., Janzing, D.

In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages: 717-724, (Editors: P Grünwald and P Spirtes), AUAI Press, Corvallis, OR, USA, UAI, July 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In nonlinear latent variable models or dynamic models, if we consider the latent variables as confounders (common causes), the noise dependencies imply further relations between the observed variables. Such models are then closely related to causal discovery in the presence of nonlinear confounders, which is a challenging problem. However, generally in such models the observation noise is assumed to be independent across data dimensions, and consequently the noise dependencies are ignored. In this paper we focus on the Gaussian process latent variable model (GPLVM), from which we develop an extended model called invariant GPLVM (IGPLVM), which can adapt to arbitrary noise covariances. With the Gaussian process prior put on a particular transformation of the latent nonlinear functions, instead of the original ones, the algorithm for IGPLVM involves almost the same computational loads as that for the original GPLVM. Besides its potential application in causal discovery, IGPLVM has the advantage that its estimated latent nonlinear manifold is invariant to any nonsingular linear transformation of the data. Experimental results on both synthetic and realworld data show its encouraging performance in nonlinear manifold learning and causal discovery.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Zhang, K., Schölkopf, B., Janzing, D. Invariant Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models and Application in Causal Discovery In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages: 717-724, (Editors: P Grünwald and P Spirtes), AUAI Press, Corvallis, OR, USA, UAI, July 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Multi-Label Learning by Exploiting Label Dependency

Zhang, M., Zhang, K.

In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2010), pages: 999-1008, (Editors: Rao, B. , B. Krishnapuram, A. Tomkins, Q. Yang), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), July 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In multi-label learning, each training example is associated with a set of labels and the task is to predict the proper label set for the unseen example. Due to the tremendous (exponential) number of possible label sets, the task of learning from multi-label examples is rather challenging. Therefore, the key to successful multi-label learning is how to effectively exploit correlations between different labels to facilitate the learning process. In this paper, we propose to use a Bayesian network structure to efficiently encode the condi- tional dependencies of the labels as well as the feature set, with the feature set as the common parent of all labels. To make it practical, we give an approximate yet efficient procedure to find such a network structure. With the help of this network, multi-label learning is decomposed into a series of single-label classification problems, where a classifier is constructed for each label by incorporating its parental labels as additional features. Label sets of unseen examples are predicted recursively according to the label ordering given by the network. Extensive experiments on a broad range of data sets validate the effectiveness of our approach against other well-established methods.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Zhang, M., Zhang, K. Multi-Label Learning by Exploiting Label Dependency In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2010), pages: 999-1008, (Editors: Rao, B. , B. Krishnapuram, A. Tomkins, Q. Yang), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), July 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Efficient Filter Flow for Space-Variant Multiframe Blind Deconvolution

Hirsch, M., Sra, S., Schölkopf, B., Harmeling, S.

In Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 607-614, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, CVPR, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Ultimately being motivated by facilitating space-variant blind deconvolution, we present a class of linear transformations, that are expressive enough for space-variant filters, but at the same time especially designed for efficient matrix-vector-multiplications. Successful results on astronomical imaging through atmospheric turbulences and on noisy magnetic resonance images of constantly moving objects demonstrate the practical significance of our approach.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Hirsch, M., Sra, S., Schölkopf, B., Harmeling, S. Efficient Filter Flow for Space-Variant Multiframe Blind Deconvolution In Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 607-614, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, CVPR, June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Grasping with Vision Descriptors and Motor Primitives

Kroemer, O., Detry, R., Piater, J., Peters, J.

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2010), pages: 47-54, (Editors: Filipe, J. , J. Andrade-Cetto, J.-L. Ferrier), SciTePress , Lisboa, Portugal, 7th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Grasping is one of the most important abilities needed for future service robots. Given the task of picking up an object from betweem clutter, traditional robotics approaches would determine a suitable grasping point and then use a movement planner to reach the goal. The planner would require precise and accurate information about the environment and long computation times, both of which may not always be available. Therefore, methods for executing grasps are required, which perform well with information gathered from only standard stereo vision, and make only a few necessary assumptions about the task environment. We propose techniques that reactively modify the robot’s learned motor primitives based on information derived from Early Cognitive Vision descriptors. The proposed techniques employ non-parametric potential fields centered on the Early Cognitive Vision descriptors to allow for curving hand trajectories around objects, and finger motions that adapt to the object’s local geometry. The methods were tested on a real robot and found to allow for easier imitation learning of human movements and give a considerable improvement to the robot’s performance in grasping tasks.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Kroemer, O., Detry, R., Piater, J., Peters, J. Grasping with Vision Descriptors and Motor Primitives In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2010), pages: 47-54, (Editors: Filipe, J. , J. Andrade-Cetto, J.-L. Ferrier), SciTePress , Lisboa, Portugal, 7th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
An efficient divide-and-conquer cascade for nonlinear object detection

Lampert, CH.

In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2010), pages: 1022-1029, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, Twenty-Third IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We introduce a method to accelerate the evaluation of object detection cascades with the help of a divide-and-conquer procedure in the space of candidate regions. Compared to the exhaustive procedure that thus far is the state-of-the-art for cascade evaluation, the proposed method requires fewer evaluations of the classifier functions, thereby speeding up the search. Furthermore, we show how the recently developed efficient subwindow search (ESS) procedure [11] can be integrated into the last stage of our method. This allows us to use our method to act not only as a faster procedure for cascade evaluation, but also as a tool to perform efficient branch-and-bound object detection with nonlinear quality functions, in particular kernelized support vector machines. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2006 dataset show an acceleration of more than 50% by our method compared to standard cascade evaluation.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Lampert, CH. An efficient divide-and-conquer cascade for nonlinear object detection In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2010), pages: 1022-1029, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, Twenty-Third IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Non-parametric estimation of integral probability metrics

Sriperumbudur, B., Fukumizu, K., Gretton, A., Schölkopf, B., Lanckriet, G.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2010), pages: 1428-1432, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we develop and analyze a nonparametric method for estimating the class of integral probability metrics (IPMs), examples of which include the Wasserstein distance, Dudley metric, and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). We show that these distances can be estimated efficiently by solving a linear program in the case of Wasserstein distance and Dudley metric, while MMD is computable in a closed form. All these estimators are shown to be strongly consistent and their convergence rates are analyzed. Based on these results, we show that IPMs are simple to estimate and the estimators exhibit good convergence behavior compared to fi-divergence estimators.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Sriperumbudur, B., Fukumizu, K., Gretton, A., Schölkopf, B., Lanckriet, G. Non-parametric estimation of integral probability metrics In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2010), pages: 1428-1432, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Causal Markov condition for submodular information measures

Steudel, B., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory, pages: 464-476, (Editors: AT Kalai and M Mohri), OmniPress, Madison, WI, USA, COLT, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The causal Markov condition (CMC) is a postulate that links observations to causality. It describes the conditional independences among the observations that are entailed by a causal hypothesis in terms of a directed acyclic graph. In the conventional setting, the observations are random variables and the independence is a statistical one, i.e., the information content of observations is measured in terms of Shannon entropy. We formulate a generalized CMC for any kind of observations on which independence is defined via an arbitrary submodular information measure. Recently, this has been discussed for observations in terms of binary strings where information is understood in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity. Our approach enables us to find computable alternatives to Kolmogorov complexity, e.g., the length of a text after applying existing data compression schemes. We show that our CMC is justified if one restricts the attention to a class of causal mechanisms that is adapted to the respective information measure. Our justification is similar to deriving the statistical CMC from functional models of causality, where every variable is a deterministic function of its observed causes and an unobserved noise term. Our experiments on real data demonstrate the performance of compression based causal inference.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Steudel, B., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B. Causal Markov condition for submodular information measures In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory, pages: 464-476, (Editors: AT Kalai and M Mohri), OmniPress, Madison, WI, USA, COLT, June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
UDP Communication channel design of master-slave robot system

Hong, A., Cho, JH., Wang, H., Lee, DY.

In pages: 231-232, 2010 KSME Conference, June 2010 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

Hong, A., Cho, JH., Wang, H., Lee, DY. UDP Communication channel design of master-slave robot system In pages: 231-232, 2010 KSME Conference, June 2010 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

no image
Telling cause from effect based on high-dimensional observations

Janzing, D., Hoyer, P., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 479-486, (Editors: J Fürnkranz and T Joachims), International Machine Learning Society, Madison, WI, USA, ICML, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We describe a method for inferring linear causal relations among multi-dimensional variables. The idea is to use an asymmetry between the distributions of cause and effect that occurs if the covariance matrix of the cause and the structure matrix mapping the cause to the effect are independently chosen. The method applies to both stochastic and deterministic causal relations, provided that the dimensionality is sufficiently high (in some experiments, 5 was enough). It is applicable to Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian data.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Janzing, D., Hoyer, P., Schölkopf, B. Telling cause from effect based on high-dimensional observations In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 479-486, (Editors: J Fürnkranz and T Joachims), International Machine Learning Society, Madison, WI, USA, ICML, June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
A scalable trust-region algorithm with application to mixed-norm regression

Kim, D., Sra, S., Dhillon, I.

In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010), pages: 519-526, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Joachims), International Machine Learning Society, Madison, WI, USA, 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present a new algorithm for minimizing a convex loss-function subject to regularization. Our framework applies to numerous problems in machine learning and statistics; notably, for sparsity-promoting regularizers such as ℓ1 or ℓ1, ∞ norms, it enables efficient computation of sparse solutions. Our approach is based on the trust-region framework with nonsmooth objectives, which allows us to build on known results to provide convergence analysis. We avoid the computational overheads associated with the conventional Hessian approximation used by trust-region methods by instead using a simple separable quadratic approximation. This approximation also enables use of proximity operators for tackling nonsmooth regularizers. We illustrate the versatility of our resulting algorithm by specializing it to three mixed-norm regression problems: group lasso [36], group logistic regression [21], and multi-task lasso [19]. We experiment with both synthetic and real-world large-scale data—our method is seen to be competitive, robust, and scalable.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Kim, D., Sra, S., Dhillon, I. A scalable trust-region algorithm with application to mixed-norm regression In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010), pages: 519-526, (Editors: Fürnkranz, J. , T. Joachims), International Machine Learning Society, Madison, WI, USA, 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
The Influence of the Image Basis on Modeling and Steganalysis Performance

Schwamberger, V., Le, P., Schölkopf, B., Franz, M.

In Information Hiding, pages: 133-144, (Editors: R Böhme and PWL Fong and R Safavi-Naini), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 12th international Workshop (IH), June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We compare two image bases with respect to their capabilities for image modeling and steganalysis. The first basis consists of wavelets, the second is a Laplacian pyramid. Both bases are used to decompose the image into subbands where the local dependency structure is modeled with a linear Bayesian estimator. Similar to existing approaches, the image model is used to predict coefficient values from their neighborhoods, and the final classification step uses statistical descriptors of the residual. Our findings are counter-intuitive on first sight: Although Laplacian pyramids have better image modeling capabilities than wavelets, steganalysis based on wavelets is much more successful. We present a number of experiments that suggest possible explanations for this result.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Schwamberger, V., Le, P., Schölkopf, B., Franz, M. The Influence of the Image Basis on Modeling and Steganalysis Performance In Information Hiding, pages: 133-144, (Editors: R Böhme and PWL Fong and R Safavi-Naini), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 12th international Workshop (IH), June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
A PAC-Bayesian Analysis of Co-clustering, Graph Clustering, and Pairwise Clustering

Seldin, Y.

In ICML 2010 Workshop on Social Analytics: Learning from human interactions, pages: 1-5, ICML Workshop on Social Analytics: Learning from human interactions, June 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We review briefly the PAC-Bayesian analysis of co-clustering (Seldin and Tishby, 2008, 2009, 2010), which provided generalization guarantees and regularization terms absent in the preceding formulations of this problem and achieved state-of-the-art prediction results in MovieLens collaborative filtering task. Inspired by this analysis we formulate weighted graph clustering1 as a prediction problem: given a subset of edge weights we analyze the ability of graph clustering to predict the remaining edge weights. This formulation enables practical and theoretical comparison of different approaches to graph clustering as well as comparison of graph clustering with other possible ways to model the graph. Following the lines of (Seldin and Tishby, 2010) we derive PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for graph clustering. The bounds show that graph clustering should optimize a trade-off between empirical data fit and the mutual information that clusters preserve on the graph nodes. A similar trade-off derived from information-theoretic considerations was already shown to produce state-of-the-art results in practice (Slonim et al., 2005; Yom-Tov and Slonim, 2009). This paper supports the empirical evidence by providing a better theoretical foundation, suggesting formal generalization guarantees, and offering a more accurate way to deal with finite sample issues.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Seldin, Y. A PAC-Bayesian Analysis of Co-clustering, Graph Clustering, and Pairwise Clustering In ICML 2010 Workshop on Social Analytics: Learning from human interactions, pages: 1-5, ICML Workshop on Social Analytics: Learning from human interactions, June 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Gaussian Mixture Modeling with Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models

Nickisch, H., Rasmussen, C.

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, June 2010 (techreport)

Abstract
Density modeling is notoriously difficult for high dimensional data. One approach to the problem is to search for a lower dimensional manifold which captures the main characteristics of the data. Recently, the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GPLVM) has successfully been used to find low dimensional manifolds in a variety of complex data. The GPLVM consists of a set of points in a low dimensional latent space, and a stochastic map to the observed space. We show how it can be interpreted as a density model in the observed space. However, the GPLVM is not trained as a density model and therefore yields bad density estimates. We propose a new training strategy and obtain improved generalisation performance and better density estimates in comparative evaluations on several benchmark data sets.

Web [BibTex]

Nickisch, H., Rasmussen, C. Gaussian Mixture Modeling with Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, June 2010 (techreport)

Web [BibTex]

no image
Apprenticeship learning via soft local homomorphisms

Boularias, A., Chaib-Draa, B.

In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 2971-2976, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We consider the problem of apprenticeship learning when the expert's demonstration covers only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient solution to this problem based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, past work on IRL requires an accurate estimate of the frequency of encountering each feature of the states when the robot follows the expert‘s policy. Given that the complete policy of the expert is unknown, the features frequencies can only be empirically estimated from the demonstrated trajectories. In this paper, we propose to use a transfer method, known as soft homomorphism, in order to generalize the expert‘s policy to unvisited regions of the state space. The generalized policy can be used either as the robot‘s final policy, or to calculate the features frequencies within an IRL algorithm. Empirical results show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Boularias, A., Chaib-Draa, B. Apprenticeship learning via soft local homomorphisms In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 2971-2976, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Using Model Knowledge for Learning Inverse Dynamics

Nguyen-Tuong, D., Peters, J.

In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 2677-2682, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In recent years, learning models from data has become an increasingly interesting tool for robotics, as it allows straightforward and accurate model approximation. However, in most robot learning approaches, the model is learned from scratch disregarding all prior knowledge about the system. For many complex robot systems, available prior knowledge from advanced physics-based modeling techniques can entail valuable information for model learning that may result in faster learning speed, higher accuracy and better generalization. In this paper, we investigate how parametric physical models (e.g., obtained from rigid body dynamics) can be used to improve the learning performance, and, especially, how semiparametric regression methods can be applied in this context. We present two possible semiparametric regression approaches, where the knowledge of the physical model can either become part of the mean function or of the kernel in a nonparametric Gaussian process regression. We compare the learning performance o f these methods first on sampled data and, subsequently, apply the obtained inverse dynamics models in tracking control on a real Barrett WAM. The results show that the semiparametric models learned with rigid body dynamics as prior outperform the standard rigid body dynamics models on real data while generalizing better for unknown parts of the state space.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Nguyen-Tuong, D., Peters, J. Using Model Knowledge for Learning Inverse Dynamics In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 2677-2682, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Generalized Proximity and Projection with Norms and Mixed-norms

Sra, S.

(192), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, May 2010 (techreport)

Abstract
We discuss generalized proximity operators (GPO) and their associated generalized projection problems. On inputs of size n, we show how to efficiently apply GPOs and generalized projections for separable norms and distance-like functions to accuracy e in O(n log(1/e)) time. We also derive projection algorithms that run theoretically in O(n log n log(1/e)) time but can for suitable parameter ranges empirically outperform the O(n log(1/e)) projection method. The proximity and projection tasks are either separable, and solved directly, or are reduced to a single root-finding step. We highlight that as a byproduct, our analysis also yields an O(n log(1/e)) (weakly linear-time) procedure for Euclidean projections onto the l1;1-norm ball; previously only an O(n log n) method was known. We provide empirical evaluation to illustrate the performance of our methods, noting that for the l1;1-norm projection, our implementation is more than two orders of magnitude faster than the previously known method.

PDF [BibTex]

Sra, S. Generalized Proximity and Projection with Norms and Mixed-norms (192), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, May 2010 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

no image
Coherent Inference on Optimal Play in Game Trees

Hennig, P., Stern, D., Graepel, T.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 326-333, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington ), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Round-based games are an instance of discrete planning problems. Some of the best contemporary game tree search algorithms use random roll-outs as data. Relying on a good policy, they learn on-policy values by propagating information upwards in the tree, but not between sibling nodes. Here, we present a generative model and a corresponding approximate message passing scheme for inference on the optimal, off-policy value of nodes in smooth AND/OR trees, given random roll-outs. The crucial insight is that the distribution of values in game trees is not completely arbitrary. We define a generative model of the on-policy values using a latent score for each state, representing the value under the random roll-out policy. Inference on the values under the optimal policy separates into an inductive, pre-data step and a deductive, post-data part. Both can be solved approximately with Expectation Propagation, allowing off-policy value inference for any node in the (exponentially big) tree in linear time.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Hennig, P., Stern, D., Graepel, T. Coherent Inference on Optimal Play in Game Trees In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 326-333, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington ), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Incremental Sparsification for Real-time Online Model Learning

Nguyen-Tuong, D., Peters, J.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 557-564, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Online model learning in real-time is required by many applications such as in robot tracking control. It poses a difficult problem, as fast and incremental online regression with large data sets is the essential component which cannot be achieved by straightforward usage of off-the-shelf machine learning methods (such as Gaussian process regression or support vector regression). In this paper, we propose a framework for online, incremental sparsification with a fixed budget designed for large scale real-time model learning. The proposed approach combines a sparsification method based on an independence measure with a large scale database. In combination with an incremental learning approach such as sequential support vector regression, we obtain a regression method which is applicable in real-time online learning. It exhibits competitive learning accuracy when compared with standard regression techniques. Implementation on a real robot emphasizes the applicability of the proposed approach in real-time online model learning for real world systems.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Nguyen-Tuong, D., Peters, J. Incremental Sparsification for Real-time Online Model Learning In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 557-564, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Multitask Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces

Alamgir, M., Grosse-Wentrup, M., Altun, Y.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 17-24, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are limited in their applicability in everyday settings by the current necessity to record subjectspecific calibration data prior to actual use of the BCI for communication. In this paper, we utilize the framework of multitask learning to construct a BCI that can be used without any subject-specific calibration process. We discuss how this out-of-the-box BCI can be further improved in a computationally efficient manner as subject-specific data becomes available. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated on two sets of experimental EEG data recorded during a standard two-class motor imagery paradigm from a total of 19 healthy subjects. Specifically, we show that satisfactory classification results can be achieved with zero training data, and combining prior recordings with subjectspecific calibration data substantially outperforms using subject-specific data only. Our results further show that transfer between recordings under slightly different experimental setups is feasible.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Alamgir, M., Grosse-Wentrup, M., Altun, Y. Multitask Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 17-24, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Identifying Cause and Effect on Discrete Data using Additive Noise Models

Peters, J., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 597-604, (Editors: YW Teh and M Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Inferring the causal structure of a set of random variables from a finite sample of the joint distribution is an important problem in science. Recently, methods using additive noise models have been suggested to approach the case of continuous variables. In many situations, however, the variables of interest are discrete or even have only finitely many states. In this work we extend the notion of additive noise models to these cases. Whenever the joint distribution P(X;Y ) admits such a model in one direction, e.g. Y = f(X) + N; N ? X, it does not admit the reversed model X = g(Y ) + ~N ; ~N ? Y as long as the model is chosen in a generic way. Based on these deliberations we propose an efficient new algorithm that is able to distinguish between cause and effect for a finite sample of discrete variables. We show that this algorithm works both on synthetic and real data sets.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Peters, J., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B. Identifying Cause and Effect on Discrete Data using Additive Noise Models In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 597-604, (Editors: YW Teh and M Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Semi-supervised Learning via Generalized Maximum Entropy

Erkan, A., Altun, Y.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 209-216, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Various supervised inference methods can be analyzed as convex duals of the generalized maximum entropy (MaxEnt) framework. Generalized MaxEnt aims to find a distribution that maximizes an entropy function while respecting prior information represented as potential functions in miscellaneous forms of constraints and/or penalties. We extend this framework to semi-supervised learning by incorporating unlabeled data via modifications to these potential functions reflecting structural assumptions on the data geometry. The proposed approach leads to a family of discriminative semi-supervised algorithms, that are convex, scalable, inherently multi-class, easy to implement, and that can be kernelized naturally. Experimental evaluation of special cases shows the competitiveness of our methodology.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Erkan, A., Altun, Y. Semi-supervised Learning via Generalized Maximum Entropy In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings Volume 9: AISTATS 2010, pages: 209-216, (Editors: Teh, Y.W. , M. Titterington), JMLR, Cambridge, MA, USA, Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
A New Algorithm for Improving the Resolution of Cryo-EM Density Maps

Hirsch, M., Schölkopf, B., Habeck, M.

In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Vol. 6044 , pages: 174-188, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), May 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) plays an increasingly prominent role in structure elucidation of macromolecular assemblies. Advances in experimental instrumentation and computational power have spawned numerous cryo-EM studies of large biomolecular complexes resulting in the reconstruction of three-dimensional density maps at intermediate and low resolution. In this resolution range, identification and interpretation of structural elements and modeling of biomolecular structure with atomic detail becomes problematic. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that enhances the resolution of intermediate- and low-resolution density maps. Our underlying assumption is to model the low-resolution density map as a blurred and possibly noise-corrupted version of an unknown high-resolution map that we seek to recover by deconvolution. By exploiting the nonnegativity of both the high-resolution map and blur kernel we derive multiplicative updates reminiscent of those used in nonnegative matrix factorization. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of additional prior knowledge such as smoothness and sparseness, on both the sharpened density map and the blur kernel. A probabilistic formulation enables us to derive updates for the hyperparameters, therefore our approach has no parameter that needs adjustment. We apply the algorithm to simulated three-dimensional electron microscopic data. We show that our method provides better resolved density maps when compared with B-factor sharpening, especially in the presence of noise. Moreover, our method can use additional information provided by homologous structures, which helps to improve the resolution even further.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Hirsch, M., Schölkopf, B., Habeck, M. A New Algorithm for Improving the Resolution of Cryo-EM Density Maps In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, Vol. 6044 , pages: 174-188, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), May 2010 (inproceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Movement Templates for Learning of Hitting and Batting

Kober, J., Mülling, K., Krömer, O., Lampert, C., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J.

In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 853-858, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Kober, J., Mülling, K., Krömer, O., Lampert, C., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J. Movement Templates for Learning of Hitting and Batting In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010), pages: 853-858, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Cooperative Cuts: Graph Cuts with Submodular Edge Weights

Jegelka, S., Bilmes, J.

(189), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany, March 2010 (techreport)

Abstract
We introduce a problem we call Cooperative cut, where the goal is to find a minimum-cost graph cut but where a submodular function is used to define the cost of a subsets of edges. That means, the cost of an edge that is added to the current cut set C depends on the edges in C. This generalization of the cost in the standard min-cut problem to a submodular cost function immediately makes the problem harder. Not only do we prove NP hardness even for nonnegative submodular costs, but also show a lower bound of Omega(|V|^(1/3)) on the approximation factor for the problem. On the positive side, we propose and compare four approximation algorithms with an overall approximation factor of min { |V|/2, |C*|, O( sqrt(|E|) log |V|), |P_max|}, where C* is the optimal solution, and P_max is the longest s, t path across the cut between given s, t. We also introduce additional heuristics for the problem which have attractive properties from the perspective of practical applications and implementations in that existing fast min-cut libraries may be used as subroutines. Both our approximation algorithms, and our heuristics, appear to do well in practice.

PDF [BibTex]

Jegelka, S., Bilmes, J. Cooperative Cuts: Graph Cuts with Submodular Edge Weights (189), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany, March 2010 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

no image
Experiments with Motor Primitives to learn Table Tennis

Peters, J., Mülling, K., Kober, J.

In Experimental Robotics, pages: 1-13, (Editors: Khatib, O. , V. Kumar, G. Sukhatme), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 12th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), March 2010 (inproceedings)

Web [BibTex]

Peters, J., Mülling, K., Kober, J. Experiments with Motor Primitives to learn Table Tennis In Experimental Robotics, pages: 1-13, (Editors: Khatib, O. , V. Kumar, G. Sukhatme), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 12th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), March 2010 (inproceedings)

Web [BibTex]

no image
Causality: Objectives and Assessment

Guyon, I., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings: Volume 6 , pages: 1-42, (Editors: I Guyon and D Janzing and B Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop) , February 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The NIPS 2008 workshop on causality provided a forum for researchers from different horizons to share their view on causal modeling and address the difficult question of assessing causal models. There has been a vivid debate on properly separating the notion of causality from particular models such as graphical models, which have been dominating the field in the past few years. Part of the workshop was dedicated to discussing the results of a challenge, which offered a wide variety of applications of causal modeling. We have regrouped in these proceedings the best papers presented. Most lectures were videotaped or recorded. All information regarding the challenge and the lectures are found at http://www.clopinet.com/isabelle/Projects/NIPS2008/. This introduction provides a synthesis of the findings and a gentle introduction to causality topics, which are the object of active research.

Web [BibTex]

Guyon, I., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B. Causality: Objectives and Assessment In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings: Volume 6 , pages: 1-42, (Editors: I Guyon and D Janzing and B Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop) , February 2010 (inproceedings)

Web [BibTex]

no image
Leveraging Sequence Classification by Taxonomy-based Multitask Learning

Widmer, C., Leiva, J., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G.

In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, LNCS, Vol. 6044, pages: 522-534, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th Annual International Conference, RECOMB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Leiva, J., Altun, Y., Rätsch, G. Leveraging Sequence Classification by Taxonomy-based Multitask Learning In Research in Computational Molecular Biology, LNCS, Vol. 6044, pages: 522-534, (Editors: B Berger), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 14th Annual International Conference, RECOMB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

no image
Probabilistic latent variable models for distinguishing between cause and effect

Mooij, J., Stegle, O., Janzing, D., Zhang, K., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 1687-1695, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We propose a novel method for inferring whether X causes Y or vice versa from joint observations of X and Y. The basic idea is to model the observed data using probabilistic latent variable models, which incorporate the effects of unobserved noise. To this end, we consider the hypothetical effect variable to be a function of the hypothetical cause variable and an independent noise term (not necessarily additive). An important novel aspect of our work is that we do not restrict the model class, but instead put general non-parametric priors on this function and on the distribution of the cause. The causal direction can then be inferred by using standard Bayesian model selection. We evaluate our approach on synthetic data and real-world data and report encouraging results.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Mooij, J., Stegle, O., Janzing, D., Zhang, K., Schölkopf, B. Probabilistic latent variable models for distinguishing between cause and effect In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 1687-1695, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
JigPheno: Semantic Feature Extraction in biological images

Karaletsos, T., Stegle, O., Winn, J., Borgwardt, K.

In NIPS, Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, 2010 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

Karaletsos, T., Stegle, O., Winn, J., Borgwardt, K. JigPheno: Semantic Feature Extraction in biological images In NIPS, Workshop on Machine Learning in Computational Biology, 2010 (inproceedings)

[BibTex]

no image
Nonparametric Tree Graphical Models

Song, L., Gretton, A., Guestrin, C.

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Volume 9 , pages: 765-772, (Editors: YW Teh and M Titterington ), JMLR, AISTATS, 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

Song, L., Gretton, A., Guestrin, C. Nonparametric Tree Graphical Models In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, Volume 9 , pages: 765-772, (Editors: YW Teh and M Titterington ), JMLR, AISTATS, 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

no image
Novel machine learning methods for MHC Class I binding prediction

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Kohlbacher, O., Rätsch, G.

In Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, pages: 98-109, (Editors: TMH Dijkstra and E Tsivtsivadze and E Marchiori and T Heskes), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 5th IAPR International Conference, PRIB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

Widmer, C., Toussaint, N., Altun, Y., Kohlbacher, O., Rätsch, G. Novel machine learning methods for MHC Class I binding prediction In Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics, pages: 98-109, (Editors: TMH Dijkstra and E Tsivtsivadze and E Marchiori and T Heskes), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 5th IAPR International Conference, PRIB, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

no image
Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning

Boularias, A., Chaib-Draa, B.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 289-297, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We consider the problem of apprenticeship learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is maximizing a utility function that is a linear combination of state-action features. Most IRL algorithms use a simple Monte Carlo estimation to approximate the expected feature counts under the expert's policy. In this paper, we show that the quality of the learned policies is highly sensitive to the error in estimating the feature counts. To reduce this error, we introduce a novel approach for bootstrapping the demonstration by assuming that: (i), the expert is (near-)optimal, and (ii), the dynamics of the system is known. Empirical results on gridworlds and car racing problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Boularias, A., Chaib-Draa, B. Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 289-297, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Distinguishing Causes from Effects using Nonlinear Acyclic Causal Models

Zhang, K., Hyvärinen, A.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, Volume 6, pages: 157-164, (Editors: I Guyon and D Janzing and B Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Zhang, K., Hyvärinen, A. Distinguishing Causes from Effects using Nonlinear Acyclic Causal Models In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, Volume 6, pages: 157-164, (Editors: I Guyon and D Janzing and B Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Clustering Based Approach to Learning Regular Expressions over Large Alphabet for Noisy Unstructured Text

Babbar, R., Singh, N.

In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data, pages: 43-50, (Editors: R Basili and DP Lopresti and C Ringlstetter and S Roy and KU Schulz and LV Subramaniam), ACM, AND (in conjunction with CIKM), 2010 (inproceedings)

Web [BibTex]

Babbar, R., Singh, N. Clustering Based Approach to Learning Regular Expressions over Large Alphabet for Noisy Unstructured Text In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data, pages: 43-50, (Editors: R Basili and DP Lopresti and C Ringlstetter and S Roy and KU Schulz and LV Subramaniam), ACM, AND (in conjunction with CIKM), 2010 (inproceedings)

Web [BibTex]

no image
Characteristic Kernels on Structured Domains Excel in Robotics and Human Action Recognition

Danafar, S., Gretton, A., Schmidhuber, J.

In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, LNCS Vol. 6321, pages: 264-279, (Editors: JL Balcázar and F Bonchi and A Gionis and M Sebag), Springer, Berlin, Germany, ECML PKDD, 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Embedding probability distributions into a sufficiently rich (characteristic) reproducing kernel Hilbert space enables us to take higher order statistics into account. Characterization also retains effective statistical relation between inputs and outputs in regression and classification. Recent works established conditions for characteristic kernels on groups and semigroups. Here we study characteristic kernels on periodic domains, rotation matrices, and histograms. Such structured domains are relevant for homogeneity testing, forward kinematics, forward dynamics, inverse dynamics, etc. Our kernel-based methods with tailored characteristic kernels outperform previous methods on robotics problems and also on a widely used benchmark for recognition of human actions in videos.

DOI [BibTex]

Danafar, S., Gretton, A., Schmidhuber, J. Characteristic Kernels on Structured Domains Excel in Robotics and Human Action Recognition In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, LNCS Vol. 6321, pages: 264-279, (Editors: JL Balcázar and F Bonchi and A Gionis and M Sebag), Springer, Berlin, Germany, ECML PKDD, 2010 (inproceedings)

DOI [BibTex]

no image
Movement extraction by detecting dynamics switches and repetitions

Chiappa, S., Peters, J.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 388-396, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Many time-series such as human movement data consist of a sequence of basic actions, e.g., forehands and backhands in tennis. Automatically extracting and characterizing such actions is an important problem for a variety of different applications. In this paper, we present a probabilistic segmentation approach in which an observed time-series is modeled as a concatenation of segments corresponding to different basic actions. Each segment is generated through a noisy transformation of one of a few hidden trajectories representing different types of movement, with possible time re-scaling. We analyze three different approximation methods for dealing with model intractability, and demonstrate how the proposed approach can successfully segment table tennis movements recorded using a robot arm as haptic input device.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Chiappa, S., Peters, J. Movement extraction by detecting dynamics switches and repetitions In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 388-396, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Space-Variant Single-Image Blind Deconvolution for Removing Camera Shake

Harmeling, S., Hirsch, M., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 829-837, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Modelling camera shake as a space-invariant convolution simplifies the problem of removing camera shake, but often insufficiently models actual motion blur such as those due to camera rotation and movements outside the sensor plane or when objects in the scene have different distances to the camera. In an effort to address these limitations, (i) we introduce a taxonomy of camera shakes, (ii) we build on a recently introduced framework for space-variant filtering by Hirsch et al. and a fast algorithm for single image blind deconvolution for space-invariant filters by Cho and Lee to construct a method for blind deconvolution in the case of space-variant blur, and (iii), we present an experimental setup for evaluation that allows us to take images with real camera shake while at the same time recording the spacevariant point spread function corresponding to that blur. Finally, we demonstrate that our method is able to deblur images degraded by spatially-varying blur originating from real camera shake, even without using additionally motion sensor information.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Harmeling, S., Hirsch, M., Schölkopf, B. Space-Variant Single-Image Blind Deconvolution for Removing Camera Shake In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 829-837, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Getting lost in space: Large sample analysis of the resistance distance

von Luxburg, U., Radl, A., Hein, M.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 2622-2630, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The commute distance between two vertices in a graph is the expected time it takes a random walk to travel from the first to the second vertex and back. We study the behavior of the commute distance as the size of the underlying graph increases. We prove that the commute distance converges to an expression that does not take into account the structure of the graph at all and that is completely meaningless as a distance function on the graph. Consequently, the use of the raw commute distance for machine learning purposes is strongly discouraged for large graphs and in high dimensions. As an alternative we introduce the amplified commute distance that corrects for the undesired large sample effects.

PDF Web [BibTex]

von Luxburg, U., Radl, A., Hein, M. Getting lost in space: Large sample analysis of the resistance distance In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23, pages: 2622-2630, (Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Distinguishing between cause and effect

Mooij, J., Janzing, D.

In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings: Volume 6, pages: 147-156, (Editors: Guyon, I. , D. Janzing, B. Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop) , 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We describe eight data sets that together formed the CauseEffectPairs task in the Causality Challenge #2: Pot-Luck competition. Each set consists of a sample of a pair of statistically dependent random variables. One variable is known to cause the other one, but this information was hidden from the participants; the task was to identify which of the two variables was the cause and which one the effect, based upon the observed sample. The data sets were chosen such that we expect common agreement on the ground truth. Even though part of the statistical dependences may also be due to hidden common causes, common sense tells us that there is a significant cause-effect relation between the two variables in each pair. We also present baseline results using three different causal inference methods.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Mooij, J., Janzing, D. Distinguishing between cause and effect In JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings: Volume 6, pages: 147-156, (Editors: Guyon, I. , D. Janzing, B. Schölkopf), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, Causality: Objectives and Assessment (NIPS Workshop) , 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Information-theoretic inference of common ancestors

Steudel, B., Ay, N.

Computing Research Repository (CoRR), abs/1010.5720, pages: 18, 2010 (techreport)

Web [BibTex]

Steudel, B., Ay, N. Information-theoretic inference of common ancestors Computing Research Repository (CoRR), abs/1010.5720, pages: 18, 2010 (techreport)

Web [BibTex]

no image
Kernel Methods for Detecting the Direction of Time Series

Peters, J., Janzing, D., Gretton, A., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence, pages: 57-66, (Editors: A Fink and B Lausen and W Seidel and A Ultsch), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 32nd Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft f{\"u}r Klassifikation e.V. (GfKl), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We propose two kernel based methods for detecting the time direction in empirical time series. First we apply a Support Vector Machine on the finite-dimensional distributions of the time series (classification method) by embedding these distributions into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. For the ARMA method we fit the observed data with an autoregressive moving average process and test whether the regression residuals are statistically independent of the past values. Whenever the dependence in one direction is significantly weaker than in the other we infer the former to be the true one. Both approaches were able to detect the direction of the true generating model for simulated data sets. We also applied our tests to a large number of real world time series. The ARMA method made a decision for a significant fraction of them, in which it was mostly correct, while the classification method did not perform as well, but still exceeded chance level.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Peters, J., Janzing, D., Gretton, A., Schölkopf, B. Kernel Methods for Detecting the Direction of Time Series In Advances in Data Analysis, Data Handling and Business Intelligence, pages: 57-66, (Editors: A Fink and B Lausen and W Seidel and A Ultsch), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 32nd Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft f{\"u}r Klassifikation e.V. (GfKl), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Switched Latent Force Models for Movement Segmentation

Alvarez, M., Peters, J., Schölkopf, B., Lawrence, N.

In Advances in neural information processing systems 23, pages: 55-63, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Latent force models encode the interaction between multiple related dynamical systems in the form of a kernel or covariance function. Each variable to be modeled is represented as the output of a differential equation and each differential equation is driven by a weighted sum of latent functions with uncertainty given by a Gaussian process prior. In this paper we consider employing the latent force model framework for the problem of determining robot motor primitives. To deal with discontinuities in the dynamical systems or the latent driving force we introduce an extension of the basic latent force model, that switches between different latent functions and potentially different dynamical systems. This creates a versatile representation for robot movements that can capture discrete changes and non-linearities in the dynamics. We give illustrative examples on both synthetic data and for striking movements recorded using a BarrettWAM robot as haptic input device. Our inspiration is robot motor primitives, but we expect our model to have wide application for dynamical systems including models for human motion capture data and systems biology.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Alvarez, M., Peters, J., Schölkopf, B., Lawrence, N. Switched Latent Force Models for Movement Segmentation In Advances in neural information processing systems 23, pages: 55-63, (Editors: J Lafferty and CKI Williams and J Shawe-Taylor and RS Zemel and A Culotta), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2010 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Naı̈ve Security in a Wi-Fi World

Swanson, C., Urner, R., Lank, E.

In Trust Management IV - 4th IFIP WG 11.11 International Conference Proceedings, pages: 32-47, (Editors: Nishigaki, M., Josang, A., Murayama, Y., Marsh, S.), IFIPTM, 2010 (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Swanson, C., Urner, R., Lank, E. Naı̈ve Security in a Wi-Fi World In Trust Management IV - 4th IFIP WG 11.11 International Conference Proceedings, pages: 32-47, (Editors: Nishigaki, M., Josang, A., Murayama, Y., Marsh, S.), IFIPTM, 2010 (inproceedings)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2006

no image
Global Biclustering of Microarray Data

Wolf, T., Brors, B., Hofmann, T., Georgii, E.

In ICDMW 2006, pages: 125-129, (Editors: Tsumoto, S. , C. W. Clifton, N. Zhong, X. Wu, J. Liu, B. W. Wah, Y.-M. Cheung), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We consider the problem of simultaneously clustering genes and conditions of a gene expression data matrix. A bicluster is defined as a subset of genes that show similar behavior within a subset of conditions. Finding biclusters can be useful for revealing groups of genes involved in the same molecular process as well as groups of conditions where this process takes place. Previous work either deals with local, bicluster-based criteria or assumes a very specific structure of the data matrix (e.g. checkerboard or block-diagonal) [11]. In contrast, our goal is to find a set of flexibly arranged biclusters which is optimal in regard to a global objective function. As this is a NP-hard combinatorial problem, we describe several techniques to obtain approximate solutions. We benchmarked our approach successfully on the Alizadeh B-cell lymphoma data set [1].

Web DOI [BibTex]

2006

Wolf, T., Brors, B., Hofmann, T., Georgii, E. Global Biclustering of Microarray Data In ICDMW 2006, pages: 125-129, (Editors: Tsumoto, S. , C. W. Clifton, N. Zhong, X. Wu, J. Liu, B. W. Wah, Y.-M. Cheung), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Sixth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]

no image
Conformal Multi-Instance Kernels

Blaschko, M., Hofmann, T.

In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-6, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In the multiple instance learning setting, each observation is a bag of feature vectors of which one or more vectors indicates membership in a class. The primary task is to identify if any vectors in the bag indicate class membership while ignoring vectors that do not. We describe here a kernel-based technique that defines a parametric family of kernels via conformal transformations and jointly learns a discriminant function over bags together with the optimal parameter settings of the kernel. Learning a conformal transformation effectively amounts to weighting regions in the feature space according to their contribution to classification accuracy; regions that are discriminative will be weighted higher than regions that are not. This allows the classifier to focus on regions contributing to classification accuracy while ignoring regions that correspond to vectors found both in positive and in negative bags. We show how parameters of this transformation can be learned for support vector machines by posing the problem as a multiple kernel learning problem. The resulting multiple instance classifier gives competitive accuracy for several multi-instance benchmark datasets from different domains.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Blaschko, M., Hofmann, T. Conformal Multi-Instance Kernels In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-6, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
A New Projected Quasi-Newton Approach for the Nonnegative Least Squares Problem

Kim, D., Sra, S., Dhillon, I.

(TR-06-54), Univ. of Texas, Austin, December 2006 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

Kim, D., Sra, S., Dhillon, I. A New Projected Quasi-Newton Approach for the Nonnegative Least Squares Problem (TR-06-54), Univ. of Texas, Austin, December 2006 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

no image
Information-theoretic Metric Learning

Davis, J., Kulis, B., Sra, S., Dhillon, I.

In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-5, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We formulate the metric learning problem as that of minimizing the differential relative entropy between two multivariate Gaussians under constraints on the Mahalanobis distance function. Via a surprising equivalence, we show that this problem can be solved as a low-rank kernel learning problem. Specifically, we minimize the Burg divergence of a low-rank kernel to an input kernel, subject to pairwise distance constraints. Our approach has several advantages over existing methods. First, we present a natural information-theoretic formulation for the problem. Second, the algorithm utilizes the methods developed by Kulis et al. [6], which do not involve any eigenvector computation; in particular, the running time of our method is faster than most existing techniques. Third, the formulation offers insights into connections between metric learning and kernel learning.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Davis, J., Kulis, B., Sra, S., Dhillon, I. Information-theoretic Metric Learning In NIPS 2006 Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, pages: 1-5, NIPS Workshop on Learning to Compare Examples, December 2006 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

no image
Pattern Mining in Frequent Dynamic Subgraphs

Borgwardt, KM., Kriegel, H-P., Wackersreuther, P.

In pages: 818-822, (Editors: Clifton, C.W.), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), December 2006 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Graph-structured data is becoming increasingly abundant in many application domains. Graph mining aims at finding interesting patterns within this data that represent novel knowledge. While current data mining deals with static graphs that do not change over time, coming years will see the advent of an increasing number of time series of graphs. In this article, we investigate how pattern mining on static graphs can be extended to time series of graphs. In particular, we are considering dynamic graphs with edge insertions and edge deletions over time. We define frequency in this setting and provide algorithmic solutions for finding frequent dynamic subgraph patterns. Existing subgraph mining algorithms can be easily integrated into our framework to make them handle dynamic graphs. Experimental results on real-world data confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

Web DOI [BibTex]

Borgwardt, KM., Kriegel, H-P., Wackersreuther, P. Pattern Mining in Frequent Dynamic Subgraphs In pages: 818-822, (Editors: Clifton, C.W.), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), December 2006 (inproceedings)

Web DOI [BibTex]