ICML 2017poster151 citations

End-to-End Learning for Structured Prediction Energy Networks

David Belanger, Bishan Yang, Andrew McCallum

Abstract

Structured Prediction Energy Networks (SPENs) are a simple, yet expressive family of structured prediction models (Belanger and McCallum, 2016). An energy function over candidate structured outputs is given by a deep network, and predictions are formed by gradient-based optimization. This paper presents end-to-end learning for SPENs, where the energy function is discriminatively trained by back-propagating through gradient-based prediction. In our experience, the approach is substantially more accurate than the structured SVM method of Belanger and McCallum (2016), as it allows us to use more sophisticated non-convex energies. We provide a collection of techniques for improving the speed, accuracy, and memory requirements of end-to-end SPENs, and demonstrate the power of our method on 7-Scenes image denoising and CoNLL-2005 semantic role labeling tasks. In both, inexact minimization of non-convex SPEN energies is superior to baseline methods that use simplistic energy functions that can be minimized exactly.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v70-belanger17a,
  title = 	 {End-to-End Learning for Structured Prediction Energy Networks},
  author =       {David Belanger and Bishan Yang and Andrew McCallum},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {429--439},
  year = 	 {2017},
  editor = 	 {Precup, Doina and Teh, Yee Whye},
  volume = 	 {70},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {06--11 Aug},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/belanger17a/belanger17a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/belanger17a.html},
  abstract = 	 {Structured Prediction Energy Networks (SPENs) are a simple, yet expressive family of structured prediction models (Belanger and McCallum, 2016). An energy function over candidate structured outputs is given by a deep network, and predictions are formed by gradient-based optimization. This paper presents end-to-end learning for SPENs, where the energy function is discriminatively trained by back-propagating through gradient-based prediction. In our experience, the approach is substantially more accurate than the structured SVM method of Belanger and McCallum (2016), as it allows us to use more sophisticated non-convex energies. We provide a collection of techniques for improving the speed, accuracy, and memory requirements of end-to-end SPENs, and demonstrate the power of our method on 7-Scenes image denoising and CoNLL-2005 semantic role labeling tasks. In both, inexact minimization of non-convex SPEN energies is superior to baseline methods that use simplistic energy functions that can be minimized exactly.}
}