VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ian En-Hsu Yen
dblp:134/4013 · also Enxu Yan
· DBLP profile ↗
34ranked-venue papers
14as first author
4since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 32 · 14 first-author · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 9 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1Theory of computation · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | MagicDec: Breaking the Latency-Throughput Tradeoff for Long Context Generation with Speculative DecodingabstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have become more prevalent in long-context applications such as interactive chatbots, document analysis, and agent workflows, but it is challenging to serve long-context requests with low latency and high throughput. Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely used technique to reduce latency losslessly, but the conventional wisdom suggests that its efficacy is limited to small batch sizes. In MagicDec, we show that surprisingly SD can achieve speedup even for a high throughput inference regime for moderate to long sequences. More interestingly, an intelligent drafting strategy can achieve better speedup with increasing batch size based on our rigorous analysis. MagicDec first identifies the bottleneck shifts with increasing batch size and sequence length, and uses these insights to deploy SD more effectively for high throughput inference. We leverage draft model with sparse KV cache to address the KV bottleneck, which scales with both sequence length and batch size. Additionally, we propose a theoretical model to select the optimal drafting strategy for maximum speedup. Our work highlights the broad applicability of speculative decoding in long-context serving, as it can enhance throughput and reduce latency without compromising accuracy. For moderate to long sequences, we demonstrate up to 2.51x speedup for LLaMA-3.1-8B when serving batch sizes ranging from 32 to 256 on various types of hardware and tasks. Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Zhuoming Chen, Vashisth Tiwari, Ruihang Lai, Jinyuan Shi, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Avner May, Tianqi Chen 0001, Beidi Chen |
ICLR | 7 |
| 2022 | Sparse Progressive Distillation: Resolving Overfitting under Pretrain-and-Finetune ParadigmabstractShaoyi Huang, Dongkuan Xu, Ian Yen, Yijue Wang, Sung-En Chang, Bingbing Li, Shiyang Chen, Mimi Xie, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Hang Liu, Caiwen Ding. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022. Shaoyi Huang, Dongkuan Xu, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Yijue Wang, Sung-En Chang, Shiyang Chen 0004, Mimi Xie, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Hang Liu 0001, Caiwen Ding |
ACL (1) | 3 |
| 2022 | Towards ℓ1 Regularization for Deep Neural Networks: Model Sparsity Versus Task DifficultyabstractNowadays, numerous AI systems employ deep neural network models with excessive number of parameters to obtain superior performance on real-world applications. Such systems relies on high-performance GPUs to achieve real-time inference, especially for the ones that involve convolutional operations. This prohibits the practical deployment on resourcescarce edge devices. To reduce model size and inference time, model pruning for deep neural network models has been an active thread of research in the recent years. Among a significant amount of literature towards different model pruning strategies, ℓ1regularization is commonly considered as a simple solution for sparse models. However, a fundamental issue is seldom addressed: "why ℓ1regularization can be effective for model pruning". In this work, we provide a theoretical explanation showing that, for a specific type of neural network models with ℓ1regularization, tasks of higher accuracy result in higher pruning ratio. Hence, network pruning could be exceptionally effective on high accuracy tasks. Based on the theoretical analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ℓ1regularization learning on two iconic computer vision tasks: (a) face detection and (b) image segmentation. The experiment results show that, with suitable ℓ1-regularized optimizations, even for a compact model like MobileNetV2, the model size can be reduced by an order of magnitude without significant losses on the accuracy. Furthermore, we show that with proper implementation of sparse convolution, the obtained sparse neural network models can achieve multiple times speed-ups not only in FLOPs, but also in actual inference time. Ta-Chun Shen, Chun-Pai Yang, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Shou-De Lin |
DSAA | 3 |
| 2021 | Rethinking Network Pruning - under the Pre-train and Fine-tune ParadigmabstractDongkuan Xu, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Jinxi Zhao, Zhibin Xiao. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021. Dongkuan Xu, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Jinxi Zhao |
NAACL-HLT | 2 |
| 2020 | Minimizing FLOPs to Learn Efficient Sparse Representations
Biswajit Paria, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Pradeep Ravikumar, Barnabás Póczos |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2019 | Temporal Structure Mining for Weakly Supervised Action DetectionabstractDifferent from the fully-supervised action detection problem that is dependent on expensive frame-level annotations, weakly supervised action detection (WSAD) only needs video-level annotations, making it more practical for real-world applications. Existing WSAD methods detect action instances by scoring each video segment (a stack of frames) individually. Most of them fail to model the temporal relations among video segments and cannot effectively characterize action instances possessing latent temporal structure. To alleviate this problem in WSAD, we propose the temporal structure mining (TSM) approach. In TSM, each action instance is modeled as a multi-phase process and phase evolving within an action instance, \emph{i.e.}, the temporal structure, is exploited. Meanwhile, the video background is modeled by a background phase, which separates different action instances in an untrimmed video. In this framework, phase filters are used to calculate the confidence scores of the presence of an action's phases in each segment. Since in the WSAD task, frame-level annotations are not available and thus phase filters cannot be trained directly. To tackle the challenge, we treat each segment's phase as a hidden variable. We use segments' confidence scores from each phase filter to construct a table and determine hidden variables, i.e., phases of segments, by a maximal circulant path discovery along the table. Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed TSM. Zhou Ren, Yuncheng Li, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Junsong Yuan 0001 |
ICCV | 4 |
| 2019 | Efficient Global String Kernel with Random Features: Beyond Counting SubstructuresabstractAnalysis of large-scale sequential data has been one of the most crucial tasks in areas such as bioinformatics, text, and audio mining. Existing string kernels, however, either (i) rely on local features of short substructures in the string, which hardly capture long discriminative patterns, (ii) sum over too many substructures, such as all possible subsequences, which leads to diagonal dominance of the kernel matrix, or (iii) rely on non-positive-definite similarity measures derived from the edit distance. Furthermore, while there have been works addressing the computational challenge with respect to the length of string, most of them still experience quadratic complexity in terms of the number of training samples when used in a kernel-based classifier. In this paper, we present a new class of global string kernels that aims to (i) discover global properties hidden in the strings through global alignments, (ii) maintain positive-definiteness of the kernel, without introducing a diagonal dominant kernel matrix, and (iii) have a training cost linear with respect to not only the length of the string but also the number of training string samples. To this end, the proposed kernels are explicitly defined through a series of different random feature maps, each corresponding to a distribution of random strings. We show that kernels defined this way are always positive-definite, and exhibit computational benefits as they always produce Random String Embeddings (RSE) that can be directly used in any linear classification models. Our extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets corroborate that RSE achieves better or comparable accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines, especially with the strings of longer lengths. In addition, we empirically show that RSE scales linearly with the increase of the number and the length of string. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Siyu Huo, Liang Zhao 0002, Kun Xu 0005, Liang Ma 0002, Shouling Ji, Charu C. Aggarwal |
KDD | 2 |
| 2019 | Scalable Global Alignment Graph Kernel Using Random Features: From Node Embedding to Graph EmbeddingabstractGraph kernels are widely used for measuring the similarity between graphs. Many existing graph kernels, which focus on local patterns within graphs rather than their global properties, suffer from significant structure information loss when representing graphs. Some recent global graph kernels, which utilizes the alignment of geometric node embeddings of graphs, yield state-of-the-art performance. However, these graph kernels are not necessarily positive-definite. More importantly, computing the graph kernel matrix will have at least quadratic time complexity in terms of the number and the size of the graphs. In this paper, we propose a new family of global alignment graph kernels, which take into account the global properties of graphs by using geometric node embeddings and an associated node transportation based on earth mover's distance. Compared to existing global kernels, the proposed kernel is positive-definite. Our graph kernel is obtained by defining a distribution over random graphs, which can naturally yield random feature approximations. The random feature approximations lead to our graph embeddings, which is named as "random graph embeddings" (RGE). In particular, RGE is shown to achieve (quasi-)linear scalability with respect to the number and the size of the graphs. The experimental results on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that RGE outperforms or matches twelve state-of-the-art graph classification algorithms. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Zhen Zhang 0007, Kun Xu 0005, Liang Zhao 0002, Xi Peng 0005, Yinglong Xia, Charu C. Aggarwal |
KDD | 2 |
| 2019 | Temporal popularity prediction of locations for geographical placement of retail stores
Hsun-Ping Hsieh, Fandel Lin, Cheng-Te Li, Ian En-Hsu Yen |
Knowl. Inf. Syst. | 4 |
| 2018 | Random Warping Series: A Random Features Method for Time-Series EmbeddingabstractTime series data analytics has been a problem of substantial interests for decades, and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) has been the most widely adopted technique to measure dissimilarity between time series. A number of global-alignment kernels have since been proposed in the spirit of DTW to extend its use to kernel-based estimation method such as support vector machine. However, those kernels suffer from diagonal dominance of the Gram matrix and a quadratic complexity w.r.t. the sample size. In this work, we study a family of alignment-aware positive definite (p.d.) kernels, with its feature embedding given by a distribution of Random Warping Series (RWS). The proposed kernel does not suffer from the issue of diagonal dominance while naturally enjoys a Random Features (RF) approximation, which reduces the computational complexity of existing DTW-based techniques from quadratic to linear in terms of both the number and the length of time-series. We also study the convergence of the RF approximation for the domain of time series of unbounded length. Our extensive experiments on 16 benchmark datasets demonstrate that RWS outperforms or matches state-of-the-art classification and clustering methods in both accuracy and computational time. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Jinfeng Yi, Fangli Xu, Michael Witbrock |
AISTATS | 2 |
| 2018 | Word Mover's Embedding: From Word2Vec to Document EmbeddingabstractLingfei Wu, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Kun Xu, Fangli Xu, Avinash Balakrishnan, Pin-Yu Chen, Pradeep Ravikumar, Michael J. Witbrock. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2018. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Kun Xu 0005, Fangli Xu, Avinash Balakrishnan, Pradeep Ravikumar, Michael Witbrock |
EMNLP | 2 |
| 2018 | Loss Decomposition for Fast Learning in Large Output SpacesabstractFor problems with large output spaces, evaluation of the loss function and its gradient are expensive, typically taking linear time in the size of the output space. Recently, methods have been developed to speed up learning via efficient data structures for Nearest-Neighbor Search (NNS) or Maximum Inner-Product Search (MIPS). However, the performance of such data structures typically degrades in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a novel technique to reduce the intractable high dimensional search problem to several much more tractable lower dimensional ones via dual decomposition of the loss function. At the same time, we demonstrate guaranteed convergence to the original loss via a greedy message passing procedure. In our experiments on multiclass and multilabel classification with hundreds of thousands of classes, as well as training skip-gram word embeddings with a vocabulary size of half a million, our technique consistently improves the accuracy of search-based gradient approximation methods and outperforms sampling-based gradient approximation methods by a large margin. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Satyen Kale, Felix X. Yu, Daniel Niels Holtmann-Rice, Sanjiv Kumar, Pradeep Ravikumar |
ICML | 1 |
| 2018 | Scalable Spectral Clustering Using Random Binning FeaturesabstractSpectral clustering is one of the most effective clustering approaches that capture hidden cluster structures in the data. However, it does not scale well to large-scale problems due to its quadratic complexity in constructing similarity graphs and computing subsequent eigendecomposition. Although a number of methods have been proposed to accelerate spectral clustering, most of them compromise considerable information loss in the original data for reducing computational bottlenecks. In this paper, we present a novel scalable spectral clustering method using Random Binning features (RB) to simultaneously accelerate both similarity graph construction and the eigendecomposition. Specifically, we implicitly approximate the graph similarity (kernel) matrix by the inner product of a large sparse feature matrix generated by RB. Then we introduce a state-of-the-art SVD solver to effectively compute eigenvectors of this large matrix for spectral clustering. Using these two building blocks, we reduce the computational cost from quadratic to linear in the number of data points while achieving similar accuracy. Our theoretical analysis shows that spectral clustering via RB converges faster to the exact spectral clustering than the standard Random Feature approximation. Extensive experiments on 8 benchmarks show that the proposed method either outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and runtime. Moreover, our method exhibits linear scalability in both the number of data samples and the number of RB features. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Fangli Xu, Yinglong Xia, Charu C. Aggarwal |
KDD | 3 |
| 2018 | Representer Point Selection for Explaining Deep Neural NetworksabstractWe propose to explain the predictions of a deep neural network, by pointing to the set of what we call representer points in the training set, for a given test point prediction. Specifically, we show that we can decompose the pre-activation prediction of a neural network into a linear combination of activations of training points, with the weights corresponding to what we call representer values, which thus capture the importance of that training point on the learned parameters of the network. But it provides a deeper understanding of the network than simply training point influence: with positive representer values corresponding to excitatory training points, and negative values corresponding to inhibitory points, which as we show provides considerably more insight. Our method is also much more scalable, allowing for real-time feedback in a manner not feasible with influence functions. Chih-Kuan Yeh, Joon Sik Kim, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Pradeep Ravikumar |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2018 | MixLasso: Generalized Mixed Regression via Convex Atomic-Norm RegularizationabstractWe consider a generalization of mixed regression where the response is an additive combination of several mixture components. Standard mixed regression is a special case where each response is generated from exactly one component. Typical approaches to the mixture regression problem employ local search methods such as Expectation Maximization (EM) that are prone to spurious local optima. On the other hand, a number of recent theoretically-motivated \emph{Tensor-based methods} either have high sample complexity, or require the knowledge of the input distribution, which is not available in most of practical situations. In this work, we study a novel convex estimator \emph{MixLasso} for the estimation of generalized mixed regression, based on an atomic norm specifically constructed to regularize the number of mixture components. Our algorithm gives a risk bound that trades off between prediction accuracy and model sparsity without imposing stringent assumptions on the input/output distribution, and can be easily adapted to the case of non-linear functions. In our numerical experiments on mixtures of linear as well as nonlinear regressions, the proposed method yields high-quality solutions in a wider range of settings than existing approaches. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Wei-Cheng Lee, Sung-En Chang, Pradeep Ravikumar, Shou-De Lin |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2017 | Greedy Direction Method of Multiplier for MAP Inference of Large Output DomainabstractMaximum-a-Posteriori (MAP) inference lies at the heart of Graphical Models and Structured Prediction. Despite the intractability of exact MAP inference, approximated methods based on LP relaxations have exhibited superior performance across a wide range of applications. Yet for problems involving large output domains (i.e., the state space for each variable is large), standard LP relaxations can easily give rise to a large number of variables and constraints which are beyond the limit of existing optimization algorithms. In this paper, we introduce an effective MAP inference method for problems with large output domains. The method builds upon alternating minimization of an Augmented Lagrangian that exploits the sparsity of messages through greedy optimization techniques. A key feature of our greedy approach is to introduce variables in an on-demand manner with a pre-built data structure over local factors. This results in a single-loop algorithm of sublinear cost per iteration and O(log(1/epsilon))-type iteration complexity to achieve epsilon sub-optimality. In addition, we introduce a variant of GDMM for binary MAP inference problems with a large number of factors. Empirically, the proposed algorithms demonstrate orders of magnitude speedup over state-of-the-art MAP inference techniques on MAP inference problems including Segmentation, Alignment, Protein Folding, Graph Matching, and Pairwise-Interacted Multilabel Prediction. Xiangru Huang, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Qixing Huang, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
AISTATS | 2 |
| 2017 | Scalable Convex Multiple Sequence Alignment via Entropy-Regularized Dual DecompositionabstractMultiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is one of the fundamental tasks in biological sequence analysis that underlies applications such as phylogenetic trees, profiles, and structure prediction. The task, however, is NP-hard, and the current practice resorts to heuristic and local-search methods. Recently, a convex optimization approach for MSA was proposed based on the concept of atomic norm, which demonstrates significant improvement over existing methods in the quality of alignments. However, the convex program is challenging to solve due to the constraint given by the intersection of two atomic-norm balls, for which the existing algorithm can only handle sequences of length up to 50, with an iteration complexity subject to constants of unknown relation to the natural parameters of MSA. In this work, we propose an accelerated dual decomposition algorithm that exploits entropy regularization to induce closed-form solutions for each atomic-norm-constrained subproblem, giving a single-loop algorithm of iteration complexity linear to the problem size (total length of all sequences). The proposed algorithm gives significantly better alignments than existing methods on sequences of length up to hundreds, where the existing convex programming method fails to converge in one day. Jiong Zhang 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
AISTATS | 2 |
| 2017 | Doubly Greedy Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent for Sparse Empirical Risk MinimizationabstractWe consider the popular problem of sparse empirical risk minimization with linear predictors and a large number of both features and observations. With a convex-concave saddle point objective reformulation, we propose a Doubly Greedy Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent algorithm that is able to exploit sparsity in both primal and dual variables. It enjoys a low cost per iteration and our theoretical analysis shows that it converges linearly with a good iteration complexity, provided that the set of primal variables is sparse. We then extend this algorithm further to leverage active sets. The resulting new algorithm is even faster, and experiments on large-scale Multi-class data sets show that our algorithm achieves up to 30 times speedup on several state-of-the-art optimization methods. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Chao-Yuan Wu, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Pradeep Ravikumar |
ICML | 2 |
| 2017 | Latent Feature LassoabstractThe latent feature model (LFM), proposed in (Griffiths \& Ghahramani, 2005), but possibly with earlier origins, is a generalization of a mixture model, where each instance is generated not from a single latent class but from a combination of latent features. Thus, each instance has an associated latent binary feature incidence vector indicating the presence or absence of a feature. Due to its combinatorial nature, inference of LFMs is considerably intractable, and accordingly, most of the attention has focused on nonparametric LFMs, with priors such as the Indian Buffet Process (IBP) on infinite binary matrices. Recent efforts to tackle this complexity either still have computational complexity that is exponential, or sample complexity that is high-order polynomial w.r.t. the number of latent features. In this paper, we address this outstanding problem of tractable estimation of LFMs via a novel atomic-norm regularization, which gives an algorithm with polynomial run-time and sample complexity without impractical assumptions on the data distribution. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Wei-Cheng Lee, Sung-En Chang, Arun Suggala, Shou-De Lin, Pradeep Ravikumar |
ICML | 1 |
| 2017 | PPDsparse: A Parallel Primal-Dual Sparse Method for Extreme ClassificationabstractExtreme Classification comprises multi-class or multi-label prediction where there is a large number of classes, and is increasingly relevant to many real-world applications such as text and image tagging. In this setting, standard classification methods, with complexity linear in the number of classes, become intractable, while enforcing structural constraints among classes (such as low-rank or tree-structure) to reduce complexity often sacrifices accuracy for efficiency. The recent PD-Sparse method addresses this via an algorithm that is sub-linear in the number of variables, by exploiting primal-dual sparsity inherent in a specific loss function, namely the max-margin loss. In this work, we extend PD-Sparse to be efficiently parallelized in large-scale distributed settings. By introducing separable loss functions, we can scale out the training, with network communication and space efficiency comparable to those in one-versus-all approaches while maintaining an overall complexity sub-linear in the number of classes. On several large-scale benchmarks our proposed method achieves accuracy competitive to the state-of-the-art while reducing the training time from days to tens of minutes compared with existing parallel or sparse methods on a cluster of 100 cores. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Xiangru Huang, Wei Dai 0003, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Eric P. Xing |
KDD | 1 |
| 2016 | Scalable Exemplar Clustering and Facility Location via Augmented Block Coordinate Descent with Column GenerationabstractIn recent years exemplar clustering has become a popular tool for applications in document and video summarization, active learning, and clustering with general similarity, where cluster centroids are required to be a subset of the data samples rather than their linear combinations. The problem is also well-known as facility location in the operations research literature. While the problem has well-developed convex relaxation with approximation and recovery guarantees, it has number of variables grows quadratically with the number of samples. Therefore, state-of-the-art methods can hardly handle more than 10^4 samples (i.e. 10^8 variables). In this work, we propose an Augmented-Lagrangian with Block Coordinate Descent (AL-BCD) algorithm that utilizes problem structure to obtain closed-form solution for each block sub-problem, and exploits low-rank representation of the dissimilarity matrix to search active columns without computing the entire matrix. Experiments show our approach to be orders of magnitude faster than existing approaches and can handle problems of up to 10^6 samples. We also demonstrate successful applications of the algorithm on world-scale facility location, document summarization and active learning. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Dmitry Malioutov, Abhishek Kumar 0001 |
AISTATS | 1 |
| 2016 | PD-Sparse : A Primal and Dual Sparse Approach to Extreme Multiclass and Multilabel ClassificationabstractWe consider Multiclass and Multilabel classification with extremely large number of classes, of which only few are labeled to each instance. In such setting, standard methods that have training, prediction cost linear to the number of classes become intractable. State-of-the-art methods thus aim to reduce the complexity by exploiting correlation between labels under assumption that the similarity between labels can be captured by structures such as low-rank matrix or balanced tree. However, as the diversity of labels increases in the feature space, structural assumption can be easily violated, which leads to degrade in the testing performance. In this work, we show that a margin-maximizing loss with l1 penalty, in case of Extreme Classification, yields extremely sparse solution both in primal and in dual without sacrificing the expressive power of predictor. We thus propose a Fully-Corrective Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (FC-BCFW) algorithm that exploits both primal and dual sparsity to achieve a complexity sublinear to the number of primal and dual variables. A bi-stochastic search method is proposed to further improve the efficiency. In our experiments on both Multiclass and Multilabel problems, the proposed method achieves significant higher accuracy than existing approaches of Extreme Classification with very competitive training and prediction time. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Xiangru Huang, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
ICML | 1 |
| 2016 | A Convex Atomic-Norm Approach to Multiple Sequence Alignment and Motif DiscoveryabstractMultiple Sequence Alignment and Motif Discovery, known as NP-hard problems, are two fundamental tasks in Bioinformatics. Existing approaches to these two problems are based on either local search methods such as Expectation Maximization (EM), Gibbs Sampling or greedy heuristic methods. In this work, we develop a convex relaxation approach to both problems based on the recent concept of atomic norm and develop a new algorithm, termed Greedy Direction Method of Multiplier, for solving the convex relaxation with two convex atomic constraints. Experiments show that our convex relaxation approach produces solutions of higher quality than those standard tools widely-used in Bioinformatics community on the Multiple Sequence Alignment and Motif Discovery problems. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Jiong Zhang 0001, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
ICML | 1 |
| 2016 | Revisiting Random Binning Features: Fast Convergence and Strong ParallelizabilityabstractKernel method has been developed as one of the standard approaches for nonlinear learning, which however, does not scale to large data set due to its quadratic complexity in the number of samples. A number of kernel approximation methods have thus been proposed in the recent years, among which the random features method gains much popularity due to its simplicity and direct reduction of nonlinear problem to a linear one. Different random feature functions have since been proposed to approximate a variety of kernel functions. Among them the Random Binning (RB) feature, proposed in the first random-feature paper [21], has drawn much less attention than the Random Fourier (RF) feature proposed also in [21]. In this work, we observe that the RB features, with right choice of optimization solver, could be orders-of-magnitude more efficient than other random features and kernel approximation methods under the same requirement of accuracy. We thus propose the first analysis of RB from the perspective of optimization, which by interpreting RB as a Randomized Block Coordinate Descent in the infinite-dimensional space, gives a faster convergence rate compared to that of other random features. In particular, we show that by drawing R random grids with at least κ number of non-empty bins per grid in expectation, RB method achieves a convergence rate of O(1/κ R)), which not only sharpens its O(1/√R) rate from Monte Carlo analysis, but also shows a κ times speedup over other random features under the same analysis framework. In addition, we demonstrate another advantage of RB in the L1-regularized setting, where unlike other random features, a RB-based Coordinate Descent solver can be parallelized with guaranteed speedup proportional to κ. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the RB features over other random features and kernel approximation methods. Lingfei Wu 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Jie Chen 0007, Rui Yan 0001 |
KDD | 2 |
| 2016 | Dual Decomposed Learning with Factorwise Oracle for Structural SVM of Large Output DomainabstractMany applications of machine learning involve structured output with large domain, where learning of structured predictor is prohibitive due to repetitive calls to expensive inference oracle. In this work, we show that, by decomposing training of Structural Support Vector Machine (SVM) into a series of multiclass SVM problems connected through messages, one can replace expensive structured oracle with Factorwise Maximization Oracle (FMO) that allows efficient implementation of complexity sublinear to the factor domain. A Greedy Direction Method of Multiplier (GDMM) algorithm is proposed to exploit sparsity of messages which guarantees $\epsilon$ sub-optimality after $O(log(1/\epsilon))$ passes of FMO calls. We conduct experiments on chain-structured problems and fully-connected problems of large output domains. The proposed approach is orders-of-magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art training algorithms for Structural SVM. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Xiangru Huang, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2016 | Large-scale Submodular Greedy Exemplar Selection with Structured Similarity Matrices
Dmitry Malioutov, Abhishek Kumar 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen |
UAI | 3 |
| 2015 | A Convex Exemplar-based Approach to MAD-Bayes Dirichlet Process Mixture ModelsabstractMAD-Bayes (MAP-based Asymptotic Derivations) has been recently proposed as a general technique to derive scalable algorithm for Bayesian Nonparametric models. However, the combinatorial nature of objective functions derived from MAD-Bayes results in hard optimization problem, for which current practice employs heuristic algorithms analogous to k-means to find local minimum. In this paper, we consider the exemplar-based version of MAD-Bayes formulation for DP and Hierarchical DP (HDP) mixture model. We show that an exemplar-based MAD-Bayes formulation can be relaxed to a convex structural-regularized program that, under cluster-separation conditions, shares the same optimal solution to its combinatorial counterpart. An algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) is then proposed to solve such program. In our experiments on several benchmark data sets, the proposed method finds optimal solution of the combinatorial problem and significantly improves existing methods in terms of the exemplar-based objective. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
ICML | 1 |
| 2015 | A Dual Augmented Block Minimization Framework for Learning with Limited MemoryabstractIn past few years, several techniques have been proposed for training of linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) in limited-memory setting, where a dual block-coordinate descent (dual-BCD) method was used to balance cost spent on I/O and computation. In this paper, we consider the more general setting of regularized \emph{Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM)} when data cannot fit into memory. In particular, we generalize the existing block minimization framework based on strong duality and \emph{Augmented Lagrangian} technique to achieve global convergence for ERM with arbitrary convex loss function and regularizer. The block minimization framework is flexible in the sense that, given a solver working under sufficient memory, one can integrate it with the framework to obtain a solver globally convergent under limited-memory condition. We conduct experiments on L1-regularized classification and regression problems to corroborate our convergence theory and compare the proposed framework to algorithms adopted from online and distributed settings, which shows superiority of the proposed approach on data of size ten times larger than the memory capacity. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Shan-Wei Lin, Shou-De Lin |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2015 | Sparse Linear Programming via Primal and Dual Augmented Coordinate DescentabstractOver the past decades, Linear Programming (LP) has been widely used in different areas and considered as one of the mature technologies in numerical optimization. However, the complexity offered by state-of-the-art algorithms (i.e. interior-point method and primal, dual simplex methods) is still unsatisfactory for problems in machine learning with huge number of variables and constraints. In this paper, we investigate a general LP algorithm based on the combination of Augmented Lagrangian and Coordinate Descent (AL-CD), giving an iteration complexity of $O((\log(1/\epsilon))^2)$ with $O(nnz(A))$ cost per iteration, where $nnz(A)$ is the number of non-zeros in the $m\times n$ constraint matrix $A$, and in practice, one can further reduce cost per iteration to the order of non-zeros in columns (rows) corresponding to the active primal (dual) variables through an active-set strategy. The algorithm thus yields a tractable alternative to standard LP methods for large-scale problems of sparse solutions and $nnz(A)\ll mn$. We conduct experiments on large-scale LP instances from $\ell_1$-regularized multi-class SVM, Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation, and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, where the proposed approach finds solutions of $10^{-3}$ precision orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art implementations of interior-point and simplex methods. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2015 | Tackling the Achilles Heel of Social Networks: Influence Propagation based Language Model SmoothingabstractOnline social networks nowadays enjoy their worldwide prosperity, as they have revolutionized the way for people to discover, to share, and to distribute information. With millions of registered users and the proliferation of user-generated contents, the social networks become "giants", likely eligible to carry on any research tasks. However, the giants do have their Achilles Heel: extreme data sparsity. Compared with the massive data over the whole collection, individual posting documents, (e.g., a microblog less than 140 characters), seem to be too sparse to make a difference under various research scenarios, while actually they are different. In this paper we propose to tackle the Achilles Heel of social networks by smoothing the language model via influence propagation. We formulate a socialized factor graph model, which utilizes both the textual correlations between document pairs and the socialized augmentation networks behind the documents, such as user relationships and social interactions. These factors are modeled as attributes and dependencies among documents and their corresponding users. An efficient algorithm is designed to learn the proposed factor graph model. Finally we propagate term counts to smooth documents based on the estimated influence. Experimental results on Twitter and Weibo datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. By leveraging the smoothed language model with social factors, our approach obtains significant improvement over several alternative methods on both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations measured in terms of perplexity, nDCG and MAP results. Rui Yan 0001, Ian En-Hsu Yen, Cheng-Te Li, Xiaohua Hu 0001 |
WWW | 2 |
| 2014 | Constant Nullspace Strong Convexity and Fast Convergence of Proximal Methods under High-Dimensional Settings
Ian En-Hsu Yen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2014 | Sparse Random Feature Algorithm as Coordinate Descent in Hilbert Space
Ian En-Hsu Yen, Ting-Wei Lin, Shou-De Lin, Pradeep Ravikumar, Inderjit S. Dhillon |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2014 | Proximal Quasi-Newton for Computationally Intensive L1-regularized M-estimators
Ian En-Hsu Yen, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Pradeep Ravikumar |
NIPS | 2 |
| 2013 | Indexed block coordinate descent for large-scale linear classification with limited memoryabstractLinear Classification has achieved complexity linear to the data size. However, in many applications, data contain large amount of samples that does not help improve the quality of model, but still cost much I/O and memory to process. In this paper, we show how a Block Coordinate Descent method based on Nearest-Neighbor Index can significantly reduce such cost when learning a dual-sparse model. In particular, we employ truncated loss function to induce a series of convex programs with superior dual sparsity, and solve each dual using Indexed Block Coordinate Descent, which makes use of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search to select active dual variables without I/O cost on irrelevant samples. We prove that, despite the bias and weak guarantee from ANN query, the proposed algorithm has global convergence to the solution defined on entire dataset, with sublinear complexity each iteration. Experiments in both sufficient and limited memory conditions show that the proposed approach learns many times faster than other state-of-the-art solvers without sacrificing accuracy. Ian En-Hsu Yen, Chun-Fu Chang, Ting-Wei Lin, Shan-Wei Lin, Shou-De Lin |
KDD | 1 |