Modeling Images using Transformed Indian Buffet Processes

Latent feature models are attractive for image modeling, since images generally contain multiple objects. However, many latent feature models ignore that objects can appear at different locations or require pre-segmentation of images. While the transformed Indian buffet process (tIBP) provides a method for modeling transformation-invariant features in unsegmented binary images, its current form is inappropriate for real images because of its computational cost and modeling assumptions. We combine the tIBP with likelihoods appropriate for real images and develop an efficient inference, using the cross-correlation between images and features, that is theoretically and empirically faster than existing inference techniques. Our method discovers reasonable components and achieve effective image reconstruction in natural images.

Using Variational Inference and MapReduce to Scale Topic Modeling

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a popular topic modeling technique for exploring document collections. Because of the increasing prevalence of large datasets, there is a need to improve the scalability of inference of LDA. In this paper, we propose a technique called ~\emph{MapReduce LDA} (Mr. LDA) to accommodate very large corpus collections in the MapReduce framework. In contrast to other techniques to scale inference for LDA, which use Gibbs sampling, we use variational inference. Our solution efficiently distributes computation and is relatively simple to implement. More importantly, this variational implementation, unlike highly tuned and specialized implementations, is easily extensible. We demonstrate two extensions of the model possible with this scalable framework: informed priors to guide topic discovery and modeling topics from a multilingual corpus.