Olivier Bousquet

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49ranked-venue papers
16as first author
7since 2021 · last 2023
0000-0002-2567-2079ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 43 · 13 first-author · 5 since 2021Theory of computation · 3 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 1 first-authorDatabases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2023 Fine-Grained Distribution-Dependent Learning Curves
abstract
Learning curves plot the expected error of a learning algorithm as a function of the number of labeled samples it receives from a target distribution. They are widely used as a measure of an algorithm’s performance, but classic PAC learning theory cannot explain their behavior. As observed by Antos and Lugosi (1996, 1998), the classic ‘No Free Lunch’ lower bounds only trace the upper envelope above all learning curves of specific target distributions. For a concept class with VC dimension $d$ the classic bound decays like $d/n$, yet it is possible that the learning curve for \emph{every} specific distribution decays exponentially. In this case, for each $n$ there exists a different ‘hard’ distribution requiring $d/n$ samples. Antos and Lugosi asked which concept classes admit a ‘strong minimax lower bound’ – a lower bound of $d’/n$ that holds for a fixed distribution for infinitely many $n$.We solve this problem in a principled manner, by introducing a combinatorial dimension called VCL that characterizes the best $d’$ for which $d’/n$ is a strong minimax lower bound. Conceptually, the VCL dimension determines the asymptotic rate of decay of the minimax learning curve, which we call the ‘distribution-free trail’ of the class. Our characterization strengthens the lower bounds of Bousquet, Hanneke, Moran, van Handel, and Yehudayoff (2021), and it refines their analysis of learning curves, by showing that for classes with finite VCL the learning rate can be decomposed into a linear component that depends only on the hypothesis class and a faster (e.g., exponential) component that depends also on the target distribution. As a corollary, we recover the lower bound of Antos and Lugosi (1996, 1998) for half-spaces in $\mathbb{R}^d$.Finally, to provide another viewpoint on our work and how it compares to traditional PAC learning bounds, we also present an alternative formulation of our results in a language that is closer to the PAC setting.
Olivier Bousquet, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Jonathan Shafer, Ilya O. Tolstikhin
COLT1
2023 Compositional Semantic Parsing with Large Language Models
Andrew Drozdov, Nathanael Schärli, Ekin Akyürek, Nathan Scales, Xinying Song, Olivier Bousquet, Denny Zhou
ICLR7
2023 Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models
Denny Zhou, Nathanael Schärli, Le Hou, Jason Wei, Nathan Scales, Xuezhi Wang 0002, Dale Schuurmans, Claire Cui, Olivier Bousquet, Quoc V. Le, Ed H. Chi
ICLR9
2023 The Dynamics of Sharpness-Aware Minimization: Bouncing Across Ravines and Drifting Towards Wide Minima
abstract
We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a gradient-based optimization method for deep networks that has exhibited performance improvements on image and language prediction problems. We show that when SAM is applied with a convex quadratic objective, for most random initializations it converges to a cycle that oscillates between either side of the minimum in the direction with the largest curvature, and we provide bounds on the rate of convergence. In the non-quadratic case, we show that such oscillations effectively perform gradient descent, with a smaller step-size, on the spectral norm of the Hessian. In such cases, SAM's update may be regarded as a third derivative---the derivative of the Hessian in the leading eigenvector direction---that encourages drift toward wider minima.
Peter L. Bartlett, Philip M. Long, Olivier Bousquet
J. Mach. Learn. Res.3
2022 Monotone Learning
abstract
The amount of training-data is one of the key factors which determines the generalization capacity of learning algorithms. Intuitively, one expects the error rate to decrease as the amount of training-data increases. Perhaps surprisingly, natural attempts to formalize this intuition give rise to interesting and challenging mathematical questions. For example, in their classical book on pattern recognition, Devroye, Gyorfi and Lugosi (1996) ask whether there exists a {monotone} Bayes-consistent algorithm.This question remained open for over 25 years, until recently Pestov (2021) resolved it for binary classification, using an intricate construction of a monotone Bayes-consistent algorithm. We derive a general result in multiclass classification, showing that every learning algorithm $A$ can be transformed to a monotone one with similar performance. Further, the transformation is efficient and only uses a black-box oracle access to $A$. This demonstrates that one can provably avoid non-monotonic behaviour without compromising performance, thus answering questions asked by Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi (1996), Viering, Mey, and Loog (2019), Viering and Loog (2021), and by Mhammedi (2021). Our general transformation readily implies monotone learners in a variety of contexts: for example, Pestov’s result follows by applying it on \emph{any} Bayes-consistent algorithm (e.g., $k$-Nearest-Neighbours). In fact, our transformation extends Pestov’s result to classification tasks with an arbitrary number of labels. This is contrast with Pestov’s work which is tailored to binary classification. In addition, we provide uniform bounds on the error of the monotone algorithm. This makes our transformation applicable in distribution-free settings. For example, in PAC learning it implies that every learnable class admits a monotone PAC learner. This resolves questions asked by Viering, Mey, and Loog (2019); Viering and Loog (2021); Mhammedi (2021)
Olivier Bousquet, Amit Daniely, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran, Uri Stemmer
COLT1
2021 Statistically Near-Optimal Hypothesis Selection
abstract
Hypothesis Selection is a fundamental distribution learning problem where given a comparator-class$\mathcal{Q}=\{q_{1}, \ldots, q_{n}\}$of distributions, and a sampling access to an unknown target distribution$p$, the goal is to output a distribution$q$such that$\mathsf{TV}(p, q)$is close to opt, where$\mathsf{opt}=\min\nolimits_{i}\{\mathsf{TV}(p, q_{i})\}$and TV (.,.) denotes the total-variation distance. Despite the fact that this problem has been studied since the 19th century, its complexity in terms of basic resources, such as number of samples and approximation guarantees, remains unsettled (this is discussed, e.g., in the charming book by Devroye and Lugosi '00). This is in stark contrast with other (younger) learning settings, such as PAC learning, for which these complexities are well understood. We derive an optimal 2-approximation learning strategy for the Hypothesis Selection problem, outputting$q$such that,$\mathsf{TV}(p, q)\leq 2\cdot\text{opt}+\varepsilon$, with a (nearly) optimal sample complexity of$\tilde{O}(\log n/\varepsilon^{2})$. This is the first algorithm that simultaneously achieves the best approximation factor and sample complexity: previously, Bousquet, Kane, and Moran (COLT ‘19) gave a learner achieving the optimal 2-approximation, but with an exponentially worse sample complexity of$\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon^{2.5})$, and Yatracos (Annals of Statistics '85) gave a learner with optimal sample complexity of$O(\log n/\varepsilon^{2})$but with a sub-optimal approximation factor of 3. We mention that many works in the Density Estimation (a.k.a., Distribution Learning) literature use Hypothesis Selection as a black box subroutine. Our result therefore implies an improvement on the approximation factors obtained by these works, while keeping their sample complexity intact. For example, our result improves the approximation factor of the algorithm of Ashtiani, Ben-David, Harvey, Liaw, and Mehrabian (JACM '20) for agnostic learning of mixtures of gaussians from 9 to 6, while maintaining its nearly-tight sample complexity.
Olivier Bousquet, Mark Braverman, Gillat Kol, Klim Efremenko, Shay Moran
FOCS1
2021 A theory of universal learning
abstract
How quickly can a given class of concepts be learned from examples? It is common to measure the performance of a supervised machine learning algorithm by plotting its “learning curve”, that is, the decay of the error rate as a function of the number of training examples. However, the classical theoretical framework for understanding learnability, the PAC model of Vapnik-Chervonenkis and Valiant, does not explain the behavior of learning curves: the distribution-free PAC model of learning can only bound the upper envelope of the learning curves over all possible data distributions. This does not match the practice of machine learning, where the data source is typically fixed in any given scenario, while the learner may choose the number of training examples on the basis of factors such as computational resources and desired accuracy.
Olivier Bousquet, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Ramon van Handel, Amir Yehudayoff
STOC1
2020 Google Research Football: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Environment
abstract
Recent progress in the field of reinforcement learning has been accelerated by virtual learning environments such as video games, where novel algorithms and ideas can be quickly tested in a safe and reproducible manner. We introduce the Google Research Football Environment, a new reinforcement learning environment where agents are trained to play football in an advanced, physics-based 3D simulator. The resulting environment is challenging, easy to use and customize, and it is available under a permissive open-source license. In addition, it provides support for multiplayer and multi-agent experiments. We propose three full-game scenarios of varying difficulty with the Football Benchmarks and report baseline results for three commonly used reinforcement algorithms (IMPALA, PPO, and Ape-X DQN). We also provide a diverse set of simpler scenarios with the Football Academy and showcase several promising research directions.
Karol Kurach, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stanczyk, Michal Zajac 0005, Olivier Bachem, Lasse Espeholt, Carlos Riquelme, Damien Vincent, Marcin Michalski, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly
AAAI10
2020 Precision-Recall Curves Using Information Divergence Frontiers
abstract
Despite the tremendous progress in the estimation of generative models, the development of tools for diagnosing their failures and assessing their performance has advanced at a much slower pace. Recent developments have investigated metrics that quantify which parts of the true distribution is modeled well, and, on the contrary, what the model fails to capture, akin to precision and recall in information retrieval. In this paper, we present a general evaluation framework for generative models that measures the trade-off between precision and recall using Renyi divergences. Our framework provides a novel perspective on existing techniques and extends them to more general domains. As a key advantage, this formulation encompasses both continuous and discrete models and allows for the design of efficient algorithms that do not have to quantize the data. We further analyze the biases of the approximations used in practice.
Josip Djolonga, Mario Lucic, Marco Cuturi, Olivier Bachem, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly
AISTATS5
2020 Proper Learning, Helly Number, and an Optimal SVM Bound
abstract
The classical PAC sample complexity bounds are stated for any Empirical Risk Minimizer (ERM) and contain an extra logarithmic factor $\log(1/\epsilon)$ which is known to be necessary for ERM in general. It has been recently shown by Hanneke (2016) that the optimal sample complexity of PAC learning for any VC class C does not include this log factor and is achieved by a particular improper learning algorithm, which outputs a specific majority-vote of hypotheses in C. This leaves the question of when this bound can be achieved by proper learning algorithms, which are restricted to always output a hypothesis from C. In this paper we aim to characterize the classes for which the optimal sample complexity can be achieved by a proper learning algorithm. We identify that these classes can be characterized by the dual Helly number, which is a combinatorial parameter that arises in discrete geometry and abstract convexity. In particular, under general conditions on C, we show that the dual Helly number is bounded if and only if there is a proper learner that obtains the optimal dependence on $\epsilon$. As further implications of our techniques we resolve a long-standing open problem posed by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974) on the performance of the Support Vector Machine by proving that the sample complexity of SVM in the realizable case is $\Theta((n/\epsilon)+(1/\epsilon)\log(1/\delta))$, where $n$ is the dimension. This gives the first optimal PAC bound for Halfspaces achieved by a proper learning algorithm, and moreover is computationally efficient.
Olivier Bousquet, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
COLT1
2020 Sharper Bounds for Uniformly Stable Algorithms
abstract
Deriving generalization bounds for stable algorithms is a classical question in learning theory taking its roots in the early works by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974) and Rogers and Wagner (1978). In a series of recent breakthrough papers by Feldman and Vondrak (2018, 2019), it was shown that the best known high probability upper bounds for uniformly stable learning algorithms due to Bousquet and Elisseef (2002) are sub-optimal in some natural regimes. To do so, they proved two generalization bounds that significantly outperform the simple generalization bound of Bousquet and Elisseef (2002). Feldman and Vondrak also asked if it is possible to provide sharper bounds and prove corresponding high probability lower bounds. This paper is devoted to these questions: firstly, inspired by the original arguments of Feldman and Vondrak (2019), we provide a short proof of the moment bound that implies the generalization bound stronger than both recent results in Feldman and Vondrak (2018, 2019). Secondly, we prove general lower bounds, showing that our moment bound is sharp (up to a logarithmic factor) unless some additional properties of the corresponding random variables are used. Our main probabilistic result is a general concentration inequality for weakly correlated random variables, which may be of independent interest.
Olivier Bousquet, Yegor Klochkov, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
COLT1
2020 Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data
Daniel Keysers, Nathanael Schärli, Nathan Scales, Hylke Buisman, Daniel Furrer, Sergii Kashubin, Nikola Momchev, Danila Sinopalnikov, Lukasz Stafiniak, Tibor Tihon, Dmitry Tsarkov, Xiao Wang 0038, Marc van Zee, Olivier Bousquet
ICLR14
2020 Synthetic Data Generators - Sequential and Private
abstract
We study the sample complexity of private synthetic data generation over an unbounded sized class of statistical queries, and show that any class that is privately proper PAC learnable admits a private synthetic data generator (perhaps non-efficient). A differentially private synthetic generator is an algorithm that receives an IID data and publishes synthetic data that is indistinguishable from the true data w.r.t a given fixed class of statistical queries. The synthetic data set can then be used by a data scientist without compromising the privacy of the original data set. Previous work on synthetic data generators focused on the case that the query class $\D$ is finite and obtained sample complexity bounds that scale logarithmically with the size $|\D|$. Here we construct a private synthetic data generator whose sample complexity is independent of the domain size, and we replace finiteness with the assumption that $\D$ is privately PAC learnable (a formally weaker task, hence we obtain equivalence between the two tasks). Our proof relies on a new type of synthetic data generator, Sequential Synthetic Data Generators, which we believe may be of interest of their own right. A sequential SDG is defined by a sequential game between a generator that proposes synthetic distributions and a discriminator that tries to distinguish between real and fake distributions. We characterize the classes that admit a sequential-SDG and show that they are exactly Littlestone classes. Given the online nature of the sequential setting, it is natural that Littlestone classes arise in this context. Nevertheless, the characterization of sequential--SDGs by Littlestone classes turns out to be technically challenging, and to the best of the author's knowledge, does not follow via simple reductions to online prediction.
Olivier Bousquet, Roi Livni, Shay Moran
NeurIPS1
2020 What Do Neural Networks Learn When Trained With Random Labels?
abstract
We study deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on natural image data with entirely random labels. Despite its popularity in the literature, where it is often used to study memorization, generalization, and other phenomena, little is known about what DNNs learn in this setting. In this paper, we show analytically for convolutional and fully connected networks that an alignment between the principal components of network parameters and data takes place when training with random labels. We study this alignment effect by investigating neural networks pre-trained on randomly labelled image data and subsequently fine-tuned on disjoint datasets with random or real labels. We show how this alignment produces a positive transfer: networks pre-trained with random labels train faster downstream compared to training from scratch even after accounting for simple effects, such as weight scaling. We analyze how competing effects, such as specialization at later layers, may hide the positive transfer. These effects are studied in several network architectures, including VGG16 and ResNet18, on CIFAR10 and ImageNet.
Hartmut Maennel, Ibrahim Alabdulmohsin, Ilya O. Tolstikhin, Robert J. N. Baldock, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly, Daniel Keysers
NeurIPS5
2019 The Optimal Approximation Factor in Density Estimation
abstract
Consider the following problem: given two arbitrary densities $q_1,q_2$ and a sample-access to an unknown target density $p$, find which of the $q_i$’s is closer to $p$ in total variation. A remarkable result due to Yatracos shows that this problem is tractable in the following sense: there exists an algorithm that uses $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ samples from $p$ and outputs $q_i$ such that with high probability, $TV(q_i,p) \leq 3\cdot OPT + \epsilon$, where $OPT= \min\{TV(q_1,p),TV(q_2,p)\}$. Moreover, this result extends to any finite class of densities $\mathcal{Q}$: there exists an algorithm that outputs the best density in $\mathcal{Q}$ up to a multiplicative approximation factor of 3. We complement and extend this result by showing that: (i) the factor 3 can not be improved if one restricts the algorithm to output a density from $\mathcal{Q}$, and (ii) if one allows the algorithm to output arbitrary densities (e.g. a mixture of densities from $\mathcal{Q}$), then the approximation factor can be reduced to 2, which is optimal. In particular this demonstrates an advantage of improper learning over proper in this setup. We develop two approaches to achieve the optimal approximation factor of $2$: an adaptive one and a static one. Both approaches are based on a geometric point of view of the problem and rely on estimating surrogate metrics to the total variation. Our sample complexity bounds exploit techniques from {\it Adaptive Data Analysis}.
Olivier Bousquet, Daniel M. Kane, Shay Moran
COLT1
2019 When can unlabeled data improve the learning rate?
abstract
In semi-supervised classification, one is given access both to labeled and unlabeled data. As unlabeled data is typically cheaper to acquire than labeled data, this setup becomes advantageous as soon as one can exploit the unlabeled data in order to produce a better classifier than with labeled data alone. However, the conditions under which such an improvement is possible are not fully understood yet. Our analysis focuses on improvements in the \emph{minimax} learning rate in terms of the number of labeled examples (with the number of unlabeled examples being allowed to depend on the number of labeled ones). We argue that for such improvements to be realistic and indisputable, certain specific conditions should be satisfied and previous analyses have failed to meet those conditions. We then demonstrate examples where these conditions can be met, in particular showing rate changes from $1/\sqrt{\ell}$ to $e^{-c\ell}$ and from $1/\sqrt{\ell}$ to $1/\ell$. These results improve our understanding of what is and isn’t possible in semi-supervised learning.
Christina Göpfert, Shai Ben-David, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly, Ilya O. Tolstikhin, Ruth Urner
COLT3
2019 Practical and Consistent Estimation of f-Divergences
abstract
The estimation of an f-divergence between two probability distributions based on samples is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Most works study this problem under very weak assumptions, in which case it is provably hard. We consider the case of stronger structural assumptions that are commonly satisfied in modern machine learning, including representation learning and generative modelling with autoencoder architectures. Under these assumptions we propose and study an estimator that can be easily implemented, works well in high dimensions, and enjoys faster rates of convergence. We verify the behavior of our estimator empirically in both synthetic and real-data experiments, and discuss its direct implications for total correlation, entropy, and mutual information estimation.
Paul K. Rubenstein, Olivier Bousquet, Josip Djolonga, Carlos Riquelme, Ilya O. Tolstikhin
NeurIPS2
2018 Wasserstein Auto-Encoders
Ilya O. Tolstikhin, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly, Bernhard Schölkopf
ICLR2
2018 Are GANs Created Equal? A Large-Scale Study
abstract
Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are a powerful subclass of generative models. Despite a very rich research activity leading to numerous interesting GAN algorithms, it is still very hard to assess which algorithm(s) perform better than others. We conduct a neutral, multi-faceted large-scale empirical study on state-of-the art models and evaluation measures. We find that most models can reach similar scores with enough hyperparameter optimization and random restarts. This suggests that improvements can arise from a higher computational budget and tuning more than fundamental algorithmic changes. To overcome some limitations of the current metrics, we also propose several data sets on which precision and recall can be computed. Our experimental results suggest that future GAN research should be based on more systematic and objective evaluation procedures. Finally, we did not find evidence that any of the tested algorithms consistently outperforms the non-saturating GAN introduced in \cite{goodfellow2014generative}.
Mario Lucic, Karol Kurach, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bousquet
NeurIPS5
2018 Assessing Generative Models via Precision and Recall
abstract
Recent advances in generative modeling have led to an increased interest in the study of statistical divergences as means of model comparison. Commonly used evaluation methods, such as the Frechet Inception Distance (FID), correlate well with the perceived quality of samples and are sensitive to mode dropping. However, these metrics are unable to distinguish between different failure cases since they only yield one-dimensional scores. We propose a novel definition of precision and recall for distributions which disentangles the divergence into two separate dimensions. The proposed notion is intuitive, retains desirable properties, and naturally leads to an efficient algorithm that can be used to evaluate generative models. We relate this notion to total variation as well as to recent evaluation metrics such as Inception Score and FID. To demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed approach we perform an empirical study on several variants of Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoders. In an extensive set of experiments we show that the proposed metric is able to disentangle the quality of generated samples from the coverage of the target distribution.
Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Olivier Bachem, Mario Lucic, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly
NeurIPS4
2017 Approximation and Convergence Properties of Generative Adversarial Learning
abstract
Generative adversarial networks (GAN) approximate a target data distribution by jointly optimizing an objective function through a "two-player game" between a generator and a discriminator. Despite their empirical success, however, two very basic questions on how well they can approximate the target distribution remain unanswered. First, it is not known how restricting the discriminator family affects the approximation quality. Second, while a number of different objective functions have been proposed, we do not understand when convergence to the global minima of the objective function leads to convergence to the target distribution under various notions of distributional convergence. In this paper, we address these questions in a broad and unified setting by defining a notion of adversarial divergences that includes a number of recently proposed objective functions. We show that if the objective function is an adversarial divergence with some additional conditions, then using a restricted discriminator family has a moment-matching effect. Additionally, we show that for objective functions that are strict adversarial divergences, convergence in the objective function implies weak convergence, thus generalizing previous results.
Olivier Bousquet, Kamalika Chaudhuri
NIPS2
2017 AdaGAN: Boosting Generative Models
abstract
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are an effective method for training generative models of complex data such as natural images. However, they are notoriously hard to train and can suffer from the problem of missing modes where the model is not able to produce examples in certain regions of the space. We propose an iterative procedure, called AdaGAN, where at every step we add a new component into a mixture model by running a GAN algorithm on a re-weighted sample. This is inspired by boosting algorithms, where many potentially weak individual predictors are greedily aggregated to form a strong composite predictor. We prove analytically that such an incremental procedure leads to convergence to the true distribution in a finite number of steps if each step is optimal, and convergence at an exponential rate otherwise. We also illustrate experimentally that this procedure addresses the problem of missing modes.
Ilya O. Tolstikhin, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bousquet, Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, Bernhard Schölkopf
NIPS3
2009 Prototype Classification: Insights from Machine Learning
abstract
We shed light on the discrimination between patterns belonging to two different classes by casting this decoding problem into a generalized prototype framework. The discrimination process is then separated into two stages: a projection stage that reduces the dimensionality of the data by projecting it on a line and a threshold stage where the distributions of the projected patterns of both classes are separated. For this, we extend the popular mean-of-class prototype classification using algorithms from machine learning that satisfy a set of invariance properties. We report a simple yet general approach to express different types of linear classification algorithms in an identical and easy-to-visualize formal framework using generalized prototypes where these prototypes are used to express the normal vector and offset of the hyperplane. We investigate non-margin classifiers such as the classical prototype classifier, the Fisher classifier, and the relevance vector machine. We then study hard and soft margin classifiers such as the support vector machine and a boosted version of the prototype classifier. Subsequently, we relate mean-of-class prototype classification to other classification algorithms by showing that the prototype classifier is a limit of any soft margin classifier and that boosting a prototype classifier yields the support vector machine. While giving novel insights into classification per se by presenting a common and unified formalism, our generalized prototype framework also provides an efficient visualization and a principled comparison of machine learning classification.
Arnulf B. A. Graf, Olivier Bousquet, Gunnar Rätsch, Bernhard Schölkopf
Neural Comput.2
2007 The Tradeoffs of Large Scale Learning
abstract
This contribution develops a theoretical framework that takes into account the effect of approximate optimization on learning algorithms. The analysis shows distinct tradeoffs for the case of small-scale and large-scale learning problems. Small-scale learning problems are subject to the usual approximation--estimation tradeoff. Large-scale learning problems are subject to a qualitatively different tradeoff involving the computational complexity of the underlying optimization algorithms in non-trivial ways.
Léon Bottou, Olivier Bousquet
NIPS2
2007 Combining PAC-Bayesian and Generic Chaining Bounds
Jean-Yves Audibert, Olivier Bousquet
J. Mach. Learn. Res.2
2007 Statistical properties of kernel principal component analysis
Gilles Blanchard, Olivier Bousquet, Laurent Zwald
Mach. Learn.2
2007 Guest editorial: Learning theory
Olivier Bousquet, André Elisseeff
Mach. Learn.1
2006 Cascade Evaluation of Clustering Algorithms
Laurent Candillier, Isabelle Tellier, Fabien Torre, Olivier Bousquet
ECML4
2005 Measuring Statistical Dependence with Hilbert-Schmidt Norms
Arthur Gretton, Olivier Bousquet, Alexander J. Smola, Bernhard Schölkopf
ALT2
2005 Maximal margin classification for metric spaces
Matthias Hein 0001, Olivier Bousquet, Bernhard Schölkopf
J. Comput. Syst. Sci.2
2005 Kernel Methods for Measuring Independence
abstract
We introduce two new functionals, the constrained covariance and the kernel mutual information, to measure the degree of independence of random variables. These quantities are both based on the covariance between functions of the random variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). We prove that when the RKHSs are universal, both functionals are zero if and only if the random variables are pairwise independent. We also show that the kernel mutual information is an upper bound near independence on the Parzen window estimate of the mutual information. Analogous results apply for two correlation-based dependence functionals introduced earlier: we show the kernel canonical correlation and the kernel generalised variance to be independence measures for universal kernels, and prove the latter to be an upper bound on the mutual information near independence. The performance of the kernel dependence functionals in measuring independence is verified in the context of independent component analysis.
Arthur Gretton, Ralf Herbrich, Alexander J. Smola, Olivier Bousquet, Bernhard Schölkopf
J. Mach. Learn. Res.4
2004 On the Convergence of Spectral Clustering on Random Samples: The Normalized Case
Ulrike von Luxburg, Olivier Bousquet, Mikhail Belkin
COLT2
2004 Statistical Properties of Kernel Principal Component Analysis
Laurent Zwald, Olivier Bousquet, Gilles Blanchard
COLT2
2004 Limits of Spectral Clustering
abstract
An important aspect of clustering algorithms is whether the partitions constructed on finite samples converge to a useful clustering of the whole data space as the sample size increases. This paper investigates this question for normalized and unnormalized versions of the popular spec- tral clustering algorithm. Surprisingly, the convergence of unnormalized spectral clustering is more difficult to handle than the normalized case. Even though recently some first results on the convergence of normal- ized spectral clustering have been obtained, for the unnormalized case we have to develop a completely new approach combining tools from numerical integration, spectral and perturbation theory, and probability. It turns out that while in the normalized case, spectral clustering usually converges to a nice partition of the data space, in the unnormalized case the same only holds under strong additional assumptions which are not always satisfied. We conclude that our analysis gives strong evidence for the superiority of normalized spectral clustering. It also provides a basis for future exploration of other Laplacian-based methods.
Ulrike von Luxburg, Olivier Bousquet, Mikhail Belkin
NIPS2
2004 Distance-Based Classification with Lipschitz Functions
Ulrike von Luxburg, Olivier Bousquet
J. Mach. Learn. Res.2
2004 A Compression Approach to Support Vector Model Selection
Ulrike von Luxburg, Olivier Bousquet, Bernhard Schölkopf
J. Mach. Learn. Res.2
2003 Kernel methods and their applications to signal processing
abstract
Recently introduced in machine learning, the notion of kernels has drawn a lot of interest as it allows nonlinear algorithms to be obtained from linear ones in a simple and elegant manner. This, in conjunction with the introduction of new linear classification methods such as the support vector machines has produced significant progress. The success of such algorithms is now spreading as they are applied to more and more domains. Many signal processing problems, by their nonlinear and high-dimensional nature, may benefit from such techniques. We give an overview of kernel methods and their recent applications.
Olivier Bousquet, Fernando Pérez-Cruz
ICASSP (4)1
2003 PAC-Bayesian Generic Chaining
abstract
There exist many different generalization error bounds for classification. Each of these bounds contains an improvement over the others for cer- tain situations. Our goal is to combine these different improvements into a single bound. In particular we combine the PAC-Bayes approach intro- duced by McAllester [1], which is interesting for averaging classifiers, with the optimal union bound provided by the generic chaining technique developed by Fernique and Talagrand [2]. This combination is quite nat- ural since the generic chaining is based on the notion of majorizing mea- sures, which can be considered as priors on the set of classifiers, and such priors also arise in the PAC-bayesian setting.
Jean-Yves Audibert, Olivier Bousquet
NIPS2
2003 Measure Based Regularization
abstract
We address in this paper the question of how the knowledge of the marginal distribution P (x) can be incorporated in a learning algorithm. We suggest three theoretical methods for taking into account this distribution for regularization and provide links to existing graph-based semi-supervised learning algorithms. We also propose practical implementations.
Olivier Bousquet, Olivier Chapelle, Matthias Hein 0001
NIPS1
2003 Learning with Local and Global Consistency
abstract
We consider the general problem of learning from labeled and unlabeled data, which is often called semi-supervised learning or transductive in- ference. A principled approach to semi-supervised learning is to design a classifying function which is suf(cid:2)ciently smooth with respect to the intrinsic structure collectively revealed by known labeled and unlabeled points. We present a simple algorithm to obtain such a smooth solution. Our method yields encouraging experimental results on a number of clas- si(cid:2)cation problems and demonstrates effective use of unlabeled data.
Dengyong Zhou, Olivier Bousquet, Thomas Navin Lal, Jason Weston, Bernhard Schölkopf
NIPS2
2003 Ranking on Data Manifolds
abstract
The Google search engine has enjoyed huge success with its web page ranking algorithm, which exploits global, rather than local, hyperlink structure of the web using random walks. Here we propose a simple universal ranking algorithm for data lying in the Euclidean space, such as text or image data. The core idea of our method is to rank the data with respect to the intrinsic manifold structure collectively revealed by a great amount of data. Encouraging experimental results from synthetic, image, and text data illustrate the validity of our method.
Dengyong Zhou, Jason Weston, Arthur Gretton, Olivier Bousquet, Bernhard Schölkopf
NIPS4
2003 Feature selection and transduction for prediction of molecular bioactivity for drug design
abstract
Abstract Motivation: In drug discovery a key task is to identify characteristics that separate active (binding) compounds from inactive (non-binding) ones. An automated prediction system can help reduce resources necessary to carry out this task. Results: Two methods for prediction of molecular bioactivity for drug design are introduced and shown to perform well in a data set previously studied as part of the KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) Cup 2001. The data is characterized by very few positive examples, a very large number of features (describing three-dimensional properties of the molecules) and rather different distributions between training and test data. Two techniques are introduced specifically to tackle these problems: a feature selection method for unbalanced data and a classifier which adapts to the distribution of the the unlabeled test data (a so-called transductive method). We show both techniques improve identification performance and in conjunction provide an improvement over using only one of the techniques. Our results suggest the importance of taking into account the characteristics in this data which may also be relevant in other problems of a similar type. Availability: Matlab source code is available at http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bs/people/weston/kdd/kdd.html Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary material is available at http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/bs/people/weston/kdd/kdd.html. * To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jason Weston, Fernando Pérez-Cruz, Olivier Bousquet, Olivier Chapelle, André Elisseeff, Bernhard Schölkopf
Bioinform.3
2002 Localized Rademacher Complexities
Peter L. Bartlett, Olivier Bousquet, Shahar Mendelson
COLT2
2002 Some Local Measures of Complexity of Convex Hulls and Generalization Bounds
Olivier Bousquet, Vladimir Koltchinskii, Dmitry Panchenko
COLT1
2002 On the Complexity of Learning the Kernel Matrix
abstract
We investigate data based procedures for selecting the kernel when learn- ing with Support Vector Machines. We provide generalization error bounds by estimating the Rademacher complexities of the corresponding function classes. In particular we obtain a complexity bound for function classes induced by kernels with given eigenvectors, i.e., we allow to vary the spectrum and keep the eigenvectors fix. This bound is only a loga- rithmic factor bigger than the complexity of the function class induced by a single kernel. However, optimizing the margin over such classes leads to overfitting. We thus propose a suitable way of constraining the class. We use an efficient algorithm to solve the resulting optimization problem, present preliminary experimental results, and compare them to an alignment-based approach.
Olivier Bousquet, Daniel J. L. Herrmann
NIPS1
2002 Stability and Generalization
Olivier Bousquet, André Elisseeff
J. Mach. Learn. Res.1
2002 Tracking a Small Set of Experts by Mixing Past Posteriors
Olivier Bousquet, Manfred K. Warmuth
J. Mach. Learn. Res.1
2002 Choosing Multiple Parameters for Support Vector Machines
Olivier Chapelle, Vladimir Vapnik, Olivier Bousquet, Sayan Mukherjee 0001
Mach. Learn.3
2000 Algorithmic Stability and Generalization Performance
abstract
We present a novel way of obtaining PAC-style bounds on the gen(cid:173) eralization error of learning algorithms, explicitly using their stabil(cid:173) ity properties. A stable learner is one for which the learned solution does not change much with small changes in the training set. The bounds we obtain do not depend on any measure of the complexity of the hypothesis space (e.g. VC dimension) but rather depend on how the learning algorithm searches this space, and can thus be applied even when the VC dimension is infinite. We demonstrate that regularization networks possess the required stability property and apply our method to obtain new bounds on their generalization performance.
Olivier Bousquet, André Elisseeff
NIPS1