arXiv research

The NIPS 2018 Adversarial Vision Challenge is a competition to facilitate measurable progress towards robust machine vision models and more generally applicable adversarial attacks. This document is an updated version of our competition proposal that was accepted in the competition track of 32nd Conference on Neural In…

To accelerate research on adversarial examples and robustness of machine learning classifiers, Google Brain organized a NIPS 2017 competition that encouraged researchers to develop new methods to generate adversarial examples as well as to develop new ways to defend against them. In this chapter, we describe the struct…

This paper presents details of our winning solutions to the task IV of NIPS 2017 Competition Track entitled Classifying Clinically Actionable Genetic Mutations. The machine learning task aims to classify genetic mutations based on text evidence from clinical literature with promising performance. We develop a novel mul…

Though CNNs have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on various vision tasks, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples --- crafted by adding human-imperceptible perturbations to clean images. However, most of the existing adversarial attacks only achieve relatively low success rates under the challenging black…

This is the Proceedings of NIPS 2017 Symposium on Interpretable Machine Learning, held in Long Beach, California, USA on December 7, 2017

This is the Proceedings of NIPS 2016 Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning for Complex Systems, held in Barcelona, Spain on December 9, 2016

This is the Proceedings of NIPS 2017 Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World, held in Long Beach, California, USA on December 8, 2017

Study tackles discretization problem in crafting adversarial examples for discrete integer domains.

Random Gaussian noise and pixel discretization improve image classifier robustness.

New algorithm approximates optimal transport cost with additive error in near-linear time.

Sparse model selection is ubiquitous from linear regression to graphical models where regularization paths, as a family of estimators upon the regularization parameter varying, are computed when the regularization parameter is unknown or decided data-adaptively. Traditional computational methods rely on solving a set o…

Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) is a top-tier annual conference in machine learning. The 2016 edition of the conference comprised more than 2,400 paper submissions, 3,000 reviewers, and 8,000 attendees. This represents a growth of nearly 40% in terms of submissions, 96% in terms of reviewers, and over 100%…

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which poses security concerns on these algorithms due to the potentially severe consequences. Adversarial attacks serve as an important surrogate to evaluate the robustness of deep learning models before they are deployed. However, most of existing adversaria…

The problem of Hybrid Linear Modeling (HLM) is to model and segment data using a mixture of affine subspaces. Different strategies have been proposed to solve this problem, however, rigorous analysis justifying their performance is missing. This paper suggests the Theoretical Spectral Curvature Clustering (TSCC) algori…

Given a graph where every node has certain attributes associated with it and some nodes have labels associated with them, Collective Classification (CC) is the task of assigning labels to every unlabeled node using information from the node as well as its neighbors. It is often the case that a node is not only influenc…

Adversarial examples are perturbed inputs designed to fool machine learning models. Adversarial training injects such examples into training data to increase robustness. To scale this technique to large datasets, perturbations are crafted using fast single-step methods that maximize a linear approximation of the model'…

Improved guarantees for sparse random embeddings with explicit bounds and empirical superiority.

Notions of "fair classification" that have arisen in computer science generally revolve around equalizing certain statistics across protected groups. This approach has been criticized as ignoring societal issues, including how errors can hurt certain groups disproportionately. We pose a modification of one of the fairn…

Study no-arbitrage conditions in 1D diffusion markets with interest rates.

Neural Index Policy for multi-action bandits with heterogeneous budgets.

New research shows many recent defenses against adversarial examples are ineffective against black-box attacks.

New algorithm finds optimal policy with polynomial trajectories in deterministic systems.

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its approximation by implementing a form of functional gradient descent on a reprod…

A new model CDTM improves text classification by concentrating document topics.

We study an interacting particle system in $\mathbf{R}^d$ motivated by Stein variational gradient descent [Q. Liu and D. Wang, NIPS 2016], a deterministic algorithm for sampling from a given probability density with unknown normalization. We prove that in the large particle limit the empirical measure of the particle s…

This volume is a collection of contributions from the 5th Workshop on Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging (MLINI) at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2015) conference. Modern multivariate statistical methods developed in the rapidly growing field of machine learning are being increasingly…

In the NIPS 2017 Learning to Run challenge, participants were tasked with building a controller for a musculoskeletal model to make it run as fast as possible through an obstacle course. Top participants were invited to describe their algorithms. In this work, we present eight solutions that used deep reinforcement lea…

Objective: To determine the completeness of argumentative steps necessary to conclude effectiveness of an algorithm in a sample of current ML/AI supervised learning literature. Data Sources: Papers published in the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS, née NIPS) journal where the official record showed a 2017…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically determine the batch size in stochastic gradient descent methods. The choice of the batch size induces a trade-off between the accuracy of the gradient estimate and the cost in terms of samples of each update. We propose to determine the batch size by optimizin…

We study Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in a setting where a part of the corrupting noise is data-dependent and, as a result, the noise and the true data are correlated. Under a bounded-ness assumption on the true data and the noise, and a simple assumption on data-noise correlation, we obtain a nearly optimal samp…

Global pooling, such as max- or sum-pooling, is one of the key ingredients in deep neural networks used for processing images, texts, graphs and other types of structured data. Based on the recent DeepSets architecture proposed by Zaheer et al. (NIPS 2017), we introduce a Set Aggregation Network (SAN) as an alternative…

ETM identifies field-specific keywords in text classification.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a very popular technique in machine learning because it automatically extracts meaningful features through a sparse and part-based representation. However, NMF has the drawback of being highly ill-posed, that is, there typically exist many different but equivalent facto…

Although nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is NP-hard in general, it has been shown very recently that it is tractable under the assumption that the input nonnegative data matrix is close to being separable (separability requires that all columns of the input matrix belongs to the cone spanned by a small subset of…

We present the Wright-Fisher Indian buffet process (WF-IBP), a probabilistic model for time-dependent data assumed to have been generated by an unknown number of latent features. This model is suitable as a prior in Bayesian nonparametric feature allocation models in which the features underlying the observed data exhi…

Lecture notes on kernel functions and Random Fourier Features.

Variational inference improves neural network matrix factorization for stochastic blockmodels.

We formulate a principle for classification with the knowledge of the marginal distribution over the data points (unlabeled data). The principle is cast in terms of Tikhonov style regularization where the regularization penalty articulates the way in which the marginal density should constrain otherwise unrestricted co…

Many popular network models rely on the assumption of (vertex) exchangeability, in which the distribution of the graph is invariant to relabelings of the vertices. However, the Aldous-Hoover theorem guarantees that these graphs are dense or empty with probability one, whereas many real-world graphs are sparse. We prese…

Explaining the output of a complicated machine learning model like a deep neural network (DNN) is a central challenge in machine learning. Several proposed local explanation methods address this issue by identifying what dimensions of a single input are most responsible for a DNN's output. The goal of this work is to a…

In the context of clustering, we assume a generative model where each cluster is the result of sampling points in the neighborhood of an embedded smooth surface; the sample may be contaminated with outliers, which are modeled as points sampled in space away from the clusters. We consider a prototype for a higher-order …

We introduce the author-topic model, a generative model for documents that extends Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA; Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003) to include authorship information. Each author is associated with a multinomial distribution over topics and each topic is associated with a multinomial distribution over words.…

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been shown recently to be tractable under the separability assumption, under which all the columns of the input data matrix belong to the convex cone generated by only a few of these columns. Bittorf, Recht, Ré and Tropp (`Factoring nonnegative matrices with linear programs', …

Topic models have proven to be a useful tool for discovering latent structures in document collections. However, most document collections often come as temporal streams and thus several aspects of the latent structure such as the number of topics, the topics' distribution and popularity are time-evolving. Several mode…

We consider the problem of object recognition with a large number of classes. In order to overcome the low amount of labeled examples available in this setting, we introduce a new feature learning and extraction procedure based on a factor model we call spike-and-slab sparse coding (S3C). Prior work on S3C has not prio…

We consider the problem of using a factor model we call {\em spike-and-slab sparse coding} (S3C) to learn features for a classification task. The S3C model resembles both the spike-and-slab RBM and sparse coding. Since exact inference in this model is intractable, we derive a structured variational inference procedure …

Proposes CoPO, a new policy optimization method for competitive games.

Kaggle competitions offer valuable insights for business forecasting.