Diverse Particle Selection for Robust High-Dimensional Inference

12noon lunch and discussion for students, grad students and postdocs Perspectives in Machine LearningRich graphical models for real-world scene understanding encode the shape and pose of objects via high-dimensional, continuous variables. We describe a particle-based max-product inference algorithm which maintains a diverse set of posterior mode hypotheses, and is robust to initialization. At each iteration, the set of particle hypotheses is augmented via stochastic proposals, and then reduced via an optimization algorithm that minimizes distortions in max-product messages. Our particle selection metric is submodular, and thus efficient greedy algorithms have rigorous optimality guarantees. By avoiding the stochastic resampling steps underlying standard particle filters, we also avoid common degeneracies where particles collapse onto a single hypothesis. Our approach significantly outperforms previous particle-based algorithms in the estimation of human pose from single images, and the prediction of protein side-chain conformations.Erik B. Sudderth is an Assistant Professor in the Brown University Department of Computer Science. His research interests include probabilistic graphical models; nonparametric Bayesian methods; and applications of statistical machine learning in computer vision and the sciences. He received an NSF CAREER award, and was named one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine.