Co-clustering computes clusters of data items and the related features concurrently, and it has been used in many applications such as community detection, product recommendation, computer vision, and pricing optimization. In this paper, we propose a new co-clustering method, called CoDiNMF, which improves the clustering quality and finds directional patterns among co-clusters by using multiple directed and undirected graphs. We design the objective function of co-clustering by using min-cut criterion combined with an additional term which controls the sum of net directional flow between different co-clusters. In addition, we show that a variant of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) can solve the proposed objective function effectively. We run experiments on the US patents and BlogCatalog data sets whose ground truth have been known, and show that CoDiNMF improves clustering results compared to other co-clustering methods in terms of average F1 score, Rand index, and adjusted Rand index (ARI). Finally, we compare CoDiNMF and other co-clustering methods on the Wikipedia data set of philosophers, and we can find meaningful directional flow of influence among co-clusters of philosophers.

Kernel methods are powerful tools for modeling nonlinear data. However, the amount of computation and memory required for kernel methods becomes the bottleneck when dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose Nested Nystrom Method (NNM) which achieves a delicate balance between the approximation accuracy and computational efficiency by exploiting the multilayer structure and multiple compressions. Even when the size of the kernel matrix is very large, NNM consistently decomposes very small matrices to update the eigen-decomposition of the kernel matrix. We theoretically show that NNM implicitly updates the principal subspace through the multiple layers, and also prove that its corresponding errors of rank-k PSD matrix approximation and kernel PCA (KPCA) are decreased by using additional sublayers before the final layer. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the decreasing property of errors of NNM with the additional sublayers through the experiments on the constructed kernel matrices of real data sets, and show that NNM effectively controls the efficiency both for rank-k PSD matrix approximation and KPCA.

Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) provides a formal framework for optimal exploration-exploitation tradeoff in reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, it is generally intractable to find the Bayes-optimal behavior except for restricted cases. As a consequence, many BRL algorithms, model-based approaches in particular, rely on approximated models or real-time search methods. In this paper, we present potential-based shaping for improving the learning performance in model-based BRL. We propose a number of potential functions that are particularly well suited for BRL, and are domain-independent in the sense that they do not require any prior knowledge about the actual environment. By incorporating the potential function into real-time heuristic search, we show that we can significantly improve the learning performance in standard benchmark domains.

The Nyström method has been one of the most effective techniques for kernel-based approach that scales well to large data sets. Since its introduction, there has been a large body of work that improves the approximation accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel Nyström method that improves both accuracy and efficiency based on a new theoretical analysis. We first provide a generalized sampling scheme, CAPS, that minimizes a novel error bound based on the subspace distance. We then present our double Nyström method that reduces the size of the decomposition in two stages. We show that our method is highly efficient and accurate compared to other state-of-the-art Nyström methods by evaluating them on a number of real data sets.

How can we scale-up logistic regression, or L1 regularized loss minimization in general, for Terabyte-scale data which do not fit in the memory? How to design the distributed algorithm efficiently? Although there exist two major algorithms for logistic regression, namely Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Stochastic Coordinate Descent (SCD), they face limitations in distributed environments. Distributed SGD enables data parallelism (i.e., different machines access different part of the input data), but it does not allow feature parallelism (i.e., different machines compute different subsets of the output), and thus the communication cost is high. On the other hand, Distributed SCD allows feature parallelism, but it does not allow data parallelism and thus is not suitable to work in distributed environments.

For robust spoken dialog management, various dialog state tracking methods have been proposed. Although discriminative models are gaining popularity due to their superior performance, generative models based on the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process model still remain at-tractive since they provide an integrated framework for dialog state tracking and dialog policy optimization. Although a straightforward way to fit a generative model is to independently train the com-ponent probability models, we present a gradient descent algorithm that simultane-ously train all the component models. We show that the resulting tracker performs competitively with other top-performing trackers that participated in DSTC2. 1