12 accepted papers
Metropolis-Hastings (MH) is a commonly-used MCMC algorithm, but it can be intractable on large datasets due to requiring computations over the whole dataset. In this paper, we study \emph{minibatch MH} methods, which instead use subsamples to enable scaling. We observe that most existing minibatch M…
To better conform to data geometry, recent deep generative modelling techniques adapt Euclidean constructions to non-Euclidean spaces. In this paper, we study normalizing flows on manifolds. Previous work has developed flow models for specific cases; however, these advancements hand craft layers on…
Many learning algorithms, such as stochastic gradient descent, are affected by the order in which training examples are used. It is often observed that sampling the training examples without-replacement, also known as random reshuffling, causes learning algorithms to converge faster. We give a count…
This paper introduces channel gating, a dynamic, fine-grained, and hardware－efficient pruning scheme to reduce the computation cost for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Channel gating identifies regions in the features that contribute less to the classification result, and skips the computation…
Low-precision training is a promising way of decreasing the time and energy cost of training machine learning models. Previous work has analyzed low-precision training algorithms, such as low-precision stochastic gradient descent, and derived theoretical bounds on their convergence rates. These boun…
Hyperbolic embeddings achieve excellent performance when embedding hierarchical data structures like synonym or type hierarchies, but they can be limited by numerical error when ordinary floating-point numbers are used to represent points in hyperbolic space. Standard models such as the Poincar{\'e}…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method that is often used for learning and inference on graphical models. Minibatching, in which a small random subset of the graph is used at each iteration, can help make Gibbs sampling scale to large graphical models by reducing its computational cost.…
Kernel methods have recently attracted resurgent interest, showing performance competitive with deep neural networks in tasks such as speech recognition. The random Fourier features map is a technique commonly used to scale up kernel machines, but employing the randomized feature map means that $O(\…
Large labeled training sets are the critical building blocks of supervised learning methods and are key enablers of deep learning techniques. For some applications, creating labeled training sets is the most time-consuming and expensive part of applying machine learning. We therefore propose a parad…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling technique that iteratively samples variables from their conditional distributions. There are two common scan orders for the variables: random scan and systematic scan. Due to the benefits of locality in hardware, systematic scan is commonly used,…
Gibbs sampling on factor graphs is a widely used inference technique, which often produces good empirical results. Theoretical guarantees for its performance are weak: even for tree structured graphs, the mixing time of Gibbs may be exponential in the number of variables. To help understand the beha…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. Researchers and industry have developed several techniques to optimize SGD's runtime performance, including asynchronous execution and reduced precision. Our main result is a martingale-based anal…