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Ehsan Kazemi

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7 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

CTIN: Robust Contextual Transformer Network for Inertial Navigation

Bingbing Rao
Ehsan Kazemi
Yifan Ding
Devu M Shila
Frank M Tucker
Liqiang Wang

Recently, data-driven inertial navigation approaches have demonstrated their capability of using well-trained neural networks to obtain accurate position estimates from inertial measurement units (IMUs) measurements. In this paper, we propose a novel robust Contextual Transformer-based network for Inertial Navigation (CTIN) to accurately predict velocity and trajectory. To this end, we first design a ResNetbased encoder enhanced by local and global multi-head selfattention to capture spatial contextual information from IMU measurements. Then we fuse these spatial representations with temporal knowledge by leveraging multi-head attention in the Transformer decoder. Finally, multi-task learning with uncertainty reduction is leveraged to improve learning efficiency and prediction accuracy of velocity and trajectory. Through extensive experiments over a wide range of inertial datasets (e. g. , RIDI, OxIOD, RoNIN, IDOL, and our own), CTIN is very robust and outperforms state-of-the-art models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Submodular Maximization in Clean Linear Time

Wenxin Li
Moran Feldman
Ehsan Kazemi
Amin Karbasi

In this paper, we provide the first deterministic algorithm that achieves $1/2$-approximation for monotone submodular maximization subject to a knapsack constraint, while making a number of queries that scales only linearly with the size of the ground set $n$. Moreover, our result automatically paves the way for developing a linear-time deterministic algorithm that achieves the tight $1-1/e$ approximation guarantee for monotone submodular maximization under a cardinality (size) constraint. To complement our positive results, we also show strong information-theoretic lower bounds. More specifically, we show that when the maximum cardinality allowed for a solution is constant, no deterministic or randomized algorithm making a sub-linear number of function evaluations can guarantee any constant approximation ratio. Furthermore, when the constraint allows the selection of a constant fraction of the ground set, we show that any algorithm making fewer than $\Omega(n/\log(n))$ function evaluations cannot perform better than an algorithm that simply outputs a uniformly random subset of the ground set of the right size. We extend our results to the general case of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to the intersection of a $p$-set system and multiple knapsack constraints. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our algorithms on multiple real-life applications, including movie recommendation, location summarization, Twitter text summarization, and video summarization.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Submodular Maximization Through Barrier Functions

Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru
Amin Karbasi
Ehsan Kazemi
Jan Vondrak

In this paper, we introduce a novel technique for constrained submodular maximization, inspired by barrier functions in continuous optimization. This connection not only improves the running time for constrained submodular maximization but also provides the state of the art guarantee. More precisely, for maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to the combination of a $k$-matchoid and $\ell$-knapsack constraints (for $\ell\leq k$), we propose a potential function that can be approximately minimized. Once we minimize the potential function up to an $\epsilon$ error, it is guaranteed that we have found a feasible set with a $2(k+1+\epsilon)$-approximation factor which can indeed be further improved to $(k+1+\epsilon)$ by an enumeration technique. We extensively evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm over several real-world applications, including a movie recommendation system, summarization tasks for YouTube videos, Twitter feeds and Yelp business locations, and a set cover problem.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Adaptive Sequence Submodularity

Marko Mitrovic
Ehsan Kazemi
Moran Feldman
Andreas Krause
Amin Karbasi

In many machine learning applications, one needs to interactively select a sequence of items (e. g. , recommending movies based on a user's feedback) or make sequential decisions in a certain order (e. g. , guiding an agent through a series of states). Not only do sequences already pose a dauntingly large search space, but we must also take into account past observations, as well as the uncertainty of future outcomes. Without further structure, finding an optimal sequence is notoriously challenging, if not completely intractable. In this paper, we view the problem of adaptive and sequential decision making through the lens of submodularity and propose an adaptive greedy policy with strong theoretical guarantees. Additionally, to demonstrate the practical utility of our results, we run experiments on Amazon product recommendation and Wikipedia link prediction tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Asynchronous Delay-Aware Accelerated Proximal Coordinate Descent for Nonconvex Nonsmooth Problems

Ehsan Kazemi
Liqiang Wang

Nonconvex and nonsmooth problems have recently attracted considerable attention in machine learning. However, developing efficient methods for the nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems with certain performance guarantee remains a challenge. Proximal coordinate descent (PCD) has been widely used for solving optimization problems, but the knowledge of PCD methods in the nonconvex setting is very limited. On the other hand, the asynchronous proximal coordinate descent (APCD) recently have received much attention in order to solve large-scale problems. However, the accelerated variants of APCD algorithms are rarely studied. In this paper, we extend APCD method to the accelerated algorithm (AAPCD) for nonsmooth and nonconvex problems that satisfies the sufficient descent property, by comparing between the function values at proximal update and a linear extrapolated point using a delay-aware momentum value. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide stochastic and deterministic accelerated extension of APCD algorithms for general nonconvex and nonsmooth problems ensuring that for both bounded delays and unbounded delays every limit point is a critical point. By leveraging Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz property, we will show linear and sublinear convergence rates for the deterministic AAPCD with bounded delays. Numerical results demonstrate the practical efficiency of our algorithm in speed.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Eliminating Latent Discrimination: Train Then Mask

Soheil Ghili
Ehsan Kazemi
Amin Karbasi

How can we control for latent discrimination in predictive models? How can we provably remove it? Such questions are at the heart of algorithmic fairness and its impacts on society. In this paper, we define a new operational fairness criteria, inspired by the well-understood notion of omitted variable-bias in statistics and econometrics. Our notion of fairness effectively controls for sensitive features and provides diagnostics for deviations from fair decision making. We then establish analytical and algorithmic results about the existence of a fair classifier in the context of supervised learning. Our results readily imply a simple, but rather counter-intuitive, strategy for eliminating latent discrimination. In order to prevent other features proxying for sensitive features, we need to include sensitive features in the training phase, but exclude them in the test/evaluation phase while controlling for their effects. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on several realworld datasets and show how fairness for these datasets can be improved with a very small loss in accuracy.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Do Less, Get More: Streaming Submodular Maximization with Subsampling

Moran Feldman
Amin Karbasi
Ehsan Kazemi

In this paper, we develop the first one-pass streaming algorithm for submodular maximization that does not evaluate the entire stream even once. By carefully subsampling each element of the data stream, our algorithm enjoys the tightest approximation guarantees in various settings while having the smallest memory footprint and requiring the lowest number of function evaluations. More specifically, for a monotone submodular function and a $p$-matchoid constraint, our randomized algorithm achieves a $4p$ approximation ratio (in expectation) with $O(k)$ memory and $O(km/p)$ queries per element ($k$ is the size of the largest feasible solution and $m$ is the number of matroids used to define the constraint). For the non-monotone case, our approximation ratio increases only slightly to $4p+2-o(1)$. To the best or our knowledge, our algorithm is the first that combines the benefits of streaming and subsampling in a novel way in order to truly scale submodular maximization to massive machine learning problems. To showcase its practicality, we empirically evaluated the performance of our algorithm on a video summarization application and observed that it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by up to fifty-fold while maintaining practically the same utility. We also evaluated the scalability of our algorithm on a large dataset of Uber pick up locations.

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