Learning Attributes Equals Multi-Source Domain Generalization

Attributes possess appealing properties and benefit many computer vision problems, such as object recognition, learning with humans in the loop, and image retrieval. Whereas the existing work mainly pursues utilizing attributes for various computer vision problems, we contend that the most basic problem---how to accurately and robustly detect attributes from images---has been left under explored. Especially, the existing work rarely explicitly tackles the need that attribute detectors should generalize well across different categories, including those previously unseen. Noting that this is analogous to the objective of multi-source domain generalization, if we treat each category as a domain, we provide a novel perspective to attribute detection and propose to gear the techniques in multi-source domain generalization for the purpose of learning cross-category generalizable attribute detectors. We validate our understanding and approach with extensive experiments on four challenging datasets and three different problems.

Stochastic subGradient Methods with Linear Convergence for Polyhedral Convex Optimization

In this paper, we show that simple {Stochastic} subGradient Decent methods with multiple Restarting, named {\bf RSGD}, can achieve a \textit{linear convergence rate} for a class of non-smooth and non-strongly convex optimization problems where the epigraph of the objective function is a polyhedron, to which we refer as {\bf polyhedral convex optimization}. Its applications in machine learning include $\ell_1$ constrained or regularized piecewise linear loss minimization and submodular function minimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result on the linear convergence rate of stochastic subgradient methods for non-smooth and non-strongly convex optimization problems.

Distributed Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Methods and A Lower Bound for Communication Complexity

We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of convex functions. The applications include empirical risk minimization problems in statistical machine learning where the datasets are large and have to be stored on different machines. We design a distributed stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm that, under certain conditions on the condition number, simultaneously achieves the optimal parallel runtime, amount of communication and rounds of communication among all distributed first-order methods up to constant factors. Our method and its accelerated extension also outperform existing distributed algorithms in terms of the rounds of communication as long as the condition number is not too large compared to the size of data in each machine. We also prove a lower bound for the number of rounds of communication for a broad class of distributed first-order methods including the proposed algorithms in this paper. We show that our accelerated distributed stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm achieves this lower bound so that it uses the fewest rounds of communication among all distributed first-order algorithms.

Stochastic Proximal Gradient Descent for Nuclear Norm Regularization

In this paper, we utilize stochastic optimization to reduce the space complexity of convex composite optimization with a nuclear norm regularizer, where the variable is a matrix of size $m \times n$. By constructing a low-rank estimate of the gradient, we propose an iterative algorithm based on stochastic proximal gradient descent (SPGD), and take the last iterate of SPGD as the final solution. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that its space complexity is $O(m+n)$, in contrast, most of previous algorithms have a $O(mn)$ space complexity. Theoretical analysis shows that it achieves $O(\log T/\sqrt{T})$ and $O(\log T/T)$ convergence rates for general convex functions and strongly convex functions, respectively.

On Data Preconditioning for Regularized Loss Minimization

In this work, we study data preconditioning, a well-known and long-existing technique, for boosting the convergence of first-order methods for regularized loss minimization. It is well understood that the condition number of the problem, i.e., the ratio of the Lipschitz constant to the strong convexity modulus, has a harsh effect on the convergence of the first-order optimization methods. Therefore, minimizing a small regularized loss for achieving good generalization performance, yielding an ill conditioned problem, becomes the bottleneck for big data problems. We provide a theory on data preconditioning for regularized loss minimization. In particular, our analysis exhibits an appropriate data preconditioner and characterizes the conditions on the loss function and on the data under which data preconditioning can reduce the condition number and therefore boost the convergence for minimizing the regularized loss. To make the data preconditioning practically useful, we endeavor to employ and analyze a random sampling approach to efficiently compute the preconditioned data. The preliminary experiments validate our theory.

Online Stochastic Linear Optimization under One-bit Feedback

In this paper, we study a special bandit setting of online stochastic linear optimization, where only one-bit of information is revealed to the learner at each round. This problem has found many applications including online advertisement and online recommendation. We assume the binary feedback is a random variable generated from the logit model, and aim to minimize the regret defined by the unknown linear function. Although the existing method for generalized linear bandit can be applied to our problem, the high computational cost makes it impractical for real-world problems. To address this challenge, we develop an efficient online learning algorithm by exploiting particular structures of the observation model. Specifically, we adopt online Newton step to estimate the unknown parameter and derive a tight confidence region based on the exponential concavity of the logistic loss. Our analysis shows that the proposed algorithm achieves a regret bound of $O(d\sqrt{T})$, which matches the optimal result of stochastic linear bandits.

Theory of Dual-sparse Regularized Randomized Reduction

In this paper, we study randomized reduction methods, which reduce high-dimensional features into low-dimensional space by randomized methods (e.g., random projection, random hashing), for large-scale high-dimensional classification. Previous theoretical results on randomized reduction methods hinge on strong assumptions about the data, e.g., low rank of the data matrix or a large separable margin of classification, which hinder their applications in broad domains. To address these limitations, we propose dual-sparse regularized randomized reduction methods that introduce a sparse regularizer into the reduced dual problem. Under a mild condition that the original dual solution is a (nearly) sparse vector, we show that the resulting dual solution is close to the original dual solution and concentrates on its support set. In numerical experiments, we present an empirical study to support the analysis and we also present a novel application of the dual-sparse regularized randomized reduction methods to reducing the communication cost of distributed learning from large-scale high-dimensional data.

Fast Sparse Least-Squares Regression with Non-Asymptotic Guarantees

In this paper, we study a fast approximation method for {\it large-scale high-dimensional} sparse least-squares regression problem by exploiting the Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) transforms, which embed a set of high-dimensional vectors into a low-dimensional space. In particular, we propose to apply the JL transforms to the data matrix and the target vector and then to solve a sparse least-squares problem on the compressed data with a {\it slightly larger regularization parameter}. Theoretically, we establish the optimization error bound of the learned model for two different sparsity-inducing regularizers, i.e., the elastic net and the $\ell_1$ norm. Compared with previous relevant work, our analysis is {\it non-asymptotic and exhibits more insights} on the bound, the sample complexity and the regularization. As an illustration, we also provide an error bound of the {\it Dantzig selector} under JL transforms.

An Explicit Sampling Dependent Spectral Error Bound for Column Subset Selection

In this paper, we consider the problem of column subset selection. We present a novel analysis of the spectral norm reconstruction for a simple randomized algorithm and establish a new bound that depends explicitly on the sampling probabilities. The sampling dependent error bound (i) allows us to better understand the tradeoff in the reconstruction error due to sampling probabilities, (ii) exhibits more insights than existing error bounds that exploit specific probability distributions, and (iii) implies better sampling distributions. In particular, we show that a sampling distribution with probabilities proportional to the square root of the statistical leverage scores is always better than uniform sampling and is better than leverage-based sampling when the statistical leverage scores are very nonuniform. And by solving a constrained optimization problem related to the error bound with an efficient bisection search we are able to achieve better performance than using either the leverage-based distribution or that proportional to the square root of the statistical leverage scores. Numerical simulations demonstrate the benefits of the new sampling distributions for low-rank matrix approximation and least square approximation compared to state-of-the art algorithms.

Analysis of Nuclear Norm Regularization for Full-rank Matrix Completion

In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of the nuclear-norm regularized least squares for full-rank matrix completion. Although similar formulations have been examined by previous studies, their results are unsatisfactory because only additive upper bounds are provided. Under the assumption that the top eigenspaces of the target matrix are incoherent, we derive a relative upper bound for recovering the best low-rank approximation of the unknown matrix. Our relative upper bound is tighter than previous additive bounds of other methods if the mass of the target matrix is concentrated on its top eigenspaces, and also implies perfect recovery if it is low-rank. The analysis is built upon the optimality condition of the regularized formulation and existing guarantees for low-rank matrix completion. To the best of our knowledge, this is first time such a relative bound is proved for the regularized formulation of matrix completion.