Schedule and abstracts
Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Location: Convention Hall No. 4E (Level 1 of the Beijing International Convention Center)
| 09:00-10:00 | Invited talk: Elina Robeva |
| 10:00-10:20 | Poster spotlights |
| 10:20-10:40 | Coffee break |
| 10:40-11:40 | Invited talk: Prateek Jain |
| 11:40-11:50 | Poster spotlights |
| 11:50-12:30 | Poster session |
| 12:30-14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00-15:00 | Invited talk: Aravindan Vijayaraghavan |
| 15:00-15:40 | Poster session / coffee break |
| 15:40-16:40 | Invited talk: Anima Anandkumar |
Invited talks
Elina Robeva (UC Berkeley):
Title: Orthogonally Decomposable Tensors
Abstract: We describe tensor decomposition and the tensor power
method from an algebraic perspective. Given an orthogonally decomposable
tensor, we give a formula for all of its eigenvectors. Moreover, we give
polynomial equations that cut out the space of orthogonally decomposable
tensors.
Slides: pdf
Prateek Jain (MSR India):
Title: Provable Non-convex Projections for Low-rank Matrix
Recovery
Abstract: Typical low-rank matrix recovery problems such as
low-rank matrix completion, robust PCA etc can be solved using non-convex
projections onto the set of low-rank matrices. However, providing
theoretical guarantees for such methods is difficult due to the
non-convexity in projections. In this talk, we will discuss two of our
recent results that show that non-convex projections based methods can be
used to solve two important problems in this area: a) low-rank matrix
completion, b) robust PCA. For low-rank matrix completion, we provide
first provable algorithm with time and storage complexity O(n) (assuming
rank to be constant) while avoiding any dependence on the condition no.
of the underlying matrix to be recovered. For robust PCA, we provide
first provable algorithm with time complexity O(n^2 r) which matches the
time complexity of normal SVD and is faster than the usual
nuclear+L_1-regularization methods that incur O(n^3) time complexity.
This talk is based on joint works with Animashree Anandkumar, U N
Niranjan, Praneeth Netrapalli, and Sujay Sanghavi.
Slides: pdf
Aravindan Vijayaraghavan (CMU):
Title: Smoothed Analysis of Tensor Decompositions and Learning
Overcomplete Latent Variable Models
Abstract: Low-rank tensor decompositions, the high dimensional
analog of matrix decompositions, are a powerful tool that arise in
machine learning, statistics and signal processing. However, tensors pose
significant algorithmic challenges and tensors analogs of much of the
matrix algebra toolkit are unlikely to exist because of hardness results.
For instance, efficient tensor decompositions in the overcomplete case
(where rank exceeds dimension) are particularly challenging.
I will introduce a smoothed analysis model for studying tensor
decompositions. Smoothed analysis gives an appealing way to analyze non
worst-case instances: the assumption here is that the model is not
adversarially chosen, formalized by a perturbation of model parameters.
We give efficient algorithms for decomposing tensors, even in the highly
overcomplete case (rank being polynomial in the dimension) using smoothed
analysis. This gives new efficient algorithms for learning probabilistic
models like mixtures of axis-aligned gaussians and multi-view models even
in highly overcomplete settings.
Based on joint work with Aditya Bhaskara, Moses Charikar and Ankur Moitra.
Anima Anandkumar (UC Irvine):
Title: Learning Overcomplete Latent Variable Models Through
Tensor Decompositions.
Abstract: Tensor decomposition provide a guaranteed approach to
unsupervised learning of latent variable models such as Gaussian
mixtures, topic models and independent components. For these models,
tensors computed from low order moments (up to fourth order) are
decomposed to yield the model parameters. For overcomplete models, where
the latent dimensionality exceeds the observed dimensionality,
decomposing the tensor is challenging, since the tensor rank exceeds the
observed dimensionality. In this talk, I will present recent results on
guaranteed recovery of overcomplete tensors for generic parameters. This
is joint work with Majid Janzamin and Rong Ge.
Slides: pdf
Posters
Contributed posters
- Chi Wang, Xueqing Liu, Yanglei Song, and Jiawei Han, Scalable Exact Inference for Topic Model.
- Uri Shalit and Gal Chechik, Coordinate-descent for learning orthogonal matrices through Givens rotations.
- Guillaume Rabusseau and François Denis, Learning Negative Mixture Models by Tensor Decompositions.
- Han Zhao and Pascal Poupart, A Sober Look at Spectral Learning.
Invited posters
- Yuekai Sun, Stratis Ioannidis, and Andrea Montanari, Learning Mixtures of Linear Classifiers.
- François Denis, Mattias Gybels, and Amaury Habrard, Dimension-free Concentration Bounds on Hankel Matrices for Spectral Learning.
- Arun Tejasvi Chaganty and Percy Liang, Estimating Latent-Variable Graphical Models using Moments and Likelihoods.
- Alon Vinnikov and Shai Shalev-Shwartz, K-means Recovers ICA Filters when Independent Components are Sparse.
- Borja Balle, William Hamilton, and Joelle Pineau, Methods of Moments for Learning Stochastic Languages: Unified Presentation and Empirical Comparison.
- Ariadna Quattoni, Borja Balle, Xavier Carreras, and Amir Globerson, Spectral Regularization for Max-Margin Sequence Tagging.
- Alexandr Andoni, Rina Panigrahy, Gregory Valiant, and Li Zhang, Learning Polynomials with Neural Networks.
- Hossein Azari Soufiani, David Parkes, and Lirong Xia, Computing Parametric Ranking Models via Rank-Breaking.