Learning embeddings: efficient algorithms and applications

Learning to embed data into a space where similar points are together and dissimilar points are far apart is a challenging machine learning problem. In this dissertation we study two learning scenarios that arise in the context of learning embeddings and one scenario in efficiently estimating an empirical expectation. We present novel algorithmic solutions and demonstrate their applications on a wide range of data-sets. The first scenario deals with learning from small data with large number of classes. This setting is common in computer vision problems such as person re-identification and face verification. To address this problem we present a new algorithm called Weighted Approximate Rank Component Analysis (WARCA), which is scalable, robust, non-linear and is independent of the number of classes. We empirically demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on 9 standard person re-identification data-sets where we obtain state of the art performance in terms of accuracy as well as computational speed. The second scenario we consider is learning embeddings from sequences. When it comes to learning from sequences, recurrent neural networks have proved to be an effective algorithm. However there are many problems with existing recurrent neural networks which makes them data hungry (high sample complexity) and difficult to train. We present a new recurrent neural network called Kronecker Recurrent Units (KRU), which addresses the issues of existing recurrent neural networks through Kronecker matrices. We show its performance on 7 applications, ranging from problems in computer vision, language modeling, music modeling and speech recognition. Most of the machine learning algorithms are formulated as minimizing an empirical expectation over a finite collection of samples. In this thesis we also investigate the problem of efficiently estimating a weighted average over large data-sets. We present a new data-structure called Importance Sampling Tree (IST), which permits fast estimation of weighted average without looking at all the samples. We show successfully the evaluation of our data-structure in the training of neural networks in order to efficiently find informative samples.