Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Jun Zhu: Bayesian Inference with Max-margin Posterior Regularization

Speaker: Jun Zhu, Tsinghua University

Talk Title: Bayesian Inference with Max-margin Posterior Regularization

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Existing Bayesian models, especially nonparametric Bayesian methods, rely heavily on specially conceived priors to incorporate domain knowledge for discovering improved latent representations. While priors can affect posterior distributions through Bayes' theorem, imposing posterior regularization is arguably more direct and in some cases can be more natural and easier. In this talk, I will present regularized Bayesian inference (RegBayes), a computational framework to perform posterior inference with a convex regularization on the desired post-data posterior distributions. When the convex regularization is induced from a linear operator on the posterior distributions, RegBayes can be solved with convex analysis theory. Furthermore, I will present some concrete examples, including MedLDA for learning discriminative topic representations and infinite latent support vector machines for learning discriminative latent features for classification. All these models explore the large-margin idea in combination with a (nonparametric) Bayesian model for discovering predictive latent representations. I will discuss both variational and Monte Carlo methods for approximate inference.

Biography: Dr. Jun Zhu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. His principal research interests lie in the development of statistical machine learning methods for solving scientific and engineering problems arising from artificial and biological learning, reasoning, and decision-making in the high-dimensional and dynamic worlds. Prof. Zhu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and his advisor was Prof. Bo Zhang. He did post-doctoral research with Prof. Eric P. Xing in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His current work involves both the foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for probabilistic latent variable models, sparse learning in high dimensions, Bayesian nonparametrics, and large-margin learning; and the application of statistical learning in social network analysis, data mining, and multi-media data analysis.
http://www.ml-thu.net/~jun/

Host: Fei Sha

More Info: http://www.cs.usc.edu/calendar/csevents.asp?date=10%2F11%2F2012

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair

Event Link: http://www.cs.usc.edu/calendar/csevents.asp?date=10%2F11%2F2012