Adaptive Skip Interval (ASI)
We introduce a method which enables a recurrent dynamics model to be temporally abstract. Our approach, which we call Adaptive Skip Intervals (ASI), is based on the observation that in many sequential prediction tasks, the exact time at which events occur is irrelevant to the underlying objective. Moreover, in many situations, there exist prediction intervals which result in particularly easy-to-predict transitions. We show that there are prediction tasks for which we gain both computational efficiency and prediction accuracy by allowing the model to make predictions at a sampling rate which it can choose itself. …

Hyperbolic Embedding of ATributed networks (HEAT)
Finding a low dimensional representation of hierarchical, structured data described by a network remains a challenging problem in the machine learning community. An emerging approach is embedding these networks into hyperbolic space because it can naturally represent a network’s hierarchical structure. However, existing hyperbolic embedding approaches cannot deal with attributed networks, in which nodes are annotated with additional attributes. These attributes might provide additional proximity information to constrain the representations of the nodes, which is important to learn high quality hyperbolic embeddings. To fill this gap, we introduce HEAT (Hyperbolic Embedding of ATributed networks), the first method for embedding attributed networks to a hyperbolic space. HEAT consists of 1) a modified random walk algorithm to obtain training samples that capture both topological and attribute similarity; and 2) a learning algorithm for learning hyperboloid embeddings from the obtained training samples. We show that by leveraging node attributes, HEAT can outperform a state-of-the-art Hyperbolic embedding algorithm on several downstream tasks. As a general embedding method, HEAT opens the door to hyperbolic manifold learning on a wide range of attributed and unattributed networks. …

Peek Search
We resolve the fundamental problem of online decoding with ergodic Markov models. Specifically, we provide deterministic and randomized algorithms that are provably near-optimal under latency constraints with respect to the unconstrained offline optimal algorithm. Our algorithms admit efficient implementation via dynamic programs, and extend to (possibly adversarial) non-stationary or time-varying Markov settings as well. Moreover, we establish lower bounds in both deterministic and randomized settings subject to latency requirements, and prove that no online algorithm can perform significantly better than our algorithms. …

mu-Forcing
It has been previously observed that training Variational Recurrent Autoencoders (VRAE) for text generation suffers from serious uninformative latent variables problem. The model would collapse into a plain language model that totally ignore the latent variables and can only generate repeating and dull samples. In this paper, we explore the reason behind this issue and propose an effective regularizer based approach to address it. The proposed method directly injects extra constraints on the posteriors of latent variables into the learning process of VRAE, which can flexibly and stably control the trade-off between the KL term and the reconstruction term, making the model learn dense and meaningful latent representations. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and can make the model learn interpretable latent variables and generate diverse meaningful sentences. Furthermore, the proposed method can perform well without using other strategies, such as KL annealing. …