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Shali Jiang 0001

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3 papers

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

BINOCULARS for efficient, nonmyopic sequential experimental design

Shali Jiang 0001
Henry Chai
Javier González 0002
Roman Garnett

Finite-horizon sequential experimental design (SED) arises naturally in many contexts, including hyperparameter tuning in machine learning among more traditional settings. Computing the optimal policy for such problems requires solving Bellman equations, which are generally intractable. Most existing work resorts to severely myopic approximations by limiting the decision horizon to only a single time-step, which can underweight exploration in favor of exploitation. We present BINOCULARS: Batch-Informed NOnmyopic Choices, Using Long-horizons for Adaptive, Rapid SED, a general framework for deriving efficient, nonmyopic approximations to the optimal experimental policy. Our key idea is simple and surprisingly effective: we first compute a one-step optimal batch of experiments, then select a single point from this batch to evaluate. We realize BINOCULARS for Bayesian optimization and Bayesian quadrature – two notable example problems with radically different objectives – and demonstrate that BINOCULARS significantly outperforms significantly outperforms myopic alternatives in real-world scenarios.

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ICML Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Efficient Nonmyopic Active Search

Shali Jiang 0001
Gustavo Malkomes
Geoff Converse
Alyssa Shofner
Benjamin Moseley
Roman Garnett

Active search is an active learning setting with the goal of identifying as many members of a given class as possible under a labeling budget. In this work, we first establish a theoretical hardness of active search, proving that no polynomial-time policy can achieve a constant factor approximation ratio with respect to the expected utility of the optimal policy. We also propose a novel, computationally efficient active search policy achieving exceptional performance on several real-world tasks. Our policy is nonmyopic, always considering the entire remaining search budget. It also automatically and dynamically balances exploration and exploitation consistent with the remaining budget, without relying on a parameter to control this tradeoff. We conduct experiments on diverse datasets from several domains: drug discovery, materials science, and a citation network. Our efficient nonmyopic policy recovers significantly more valuable points with the same budget than several alternatives from the literature, including myopic approximations to the optimal policy.

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ICML Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Efficient Approximation of Cross-Validation for Kernel Methods using Bouligand Influence Function

Yong Liu 0018
Shali Jiang 0001
Shizhong Liao

Model selection is one of the key issues both in recent research and application of kernel methods. Cross-validation is a commonly employed and widely accepted model selection criterion. However, it requires multiple times of training the algorithm under consideration, which is computationally intensive. In this paper, we present a novel strategy for approximating the cross-validation based on the Bouligand influence function (BIF), which only requires the solution of the algorithm once. The BIF measures the impact of an infinitesimal small amount of contamination of the original distribution. We first establish the link between the concept of BIF and the concept of cross-validation. The BIF is related to the first order term of a Taylor expansion. Then, we calculate the BIF and higher order BIFs, and apply these theoretical results to approximate the cross-validation error in practice. Experimental results demonstrate that our approximate cross-validation criterion is sound and efficient.

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