arXiv subjects

James Requeima

Publications and source records attributed to James Requeima.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Convolutional Conditional Neural Processes

We introduce the Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP), a new member of the Neural Process family that models translation equivariance in the data. Translation equivariance is an important inductive bias for many learning problems including time series modelling, spatial data, and images. The model embeds data sets into an infinite-dimensional function space as opposed to a finite-dimensional vector space. To formalize this notion, we extend the theory of neural representations of sets to include functional representations, and demonstrate that any translation-equivariant embedding can be represented using a convolutional deep set. We evaluate ConvCNPs in several settings, demonstrating that they achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing NPs. We demonstrate that building in translation equivariance enables zero-shot generalization to challenging, out-of-domain tasks.

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arXiv2020

Fast and Flexible Multi-Task Classification Using Conditional Neural Adaptive Processes

The goal of this paper is to design image classification systems that, after an initial multi-task training phase, can automatically adapt to new tasks encountered at test time. We introduce a conditional neural process based approach to the multi-task classification setting for this purpose, and establish connections to the meta-learning and few-shot learning literature. The resulting approach, called CNAPs, comprises a classifier whose parameters are modulated by an adaptation network that takes the current task's dataset as input. We demonstrate that CNAPs achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging Meta-Dataset benchmark indicating high-quality transfer-learning. We show that the approach is robust, avoiding both over-fitting in low-shot regimes and under-fitting in high-shot regimes. Timing experiments reveal that CNAPs is computationally efficient at test-time as it does not involve gradient based adaptation. Finally, we show that trained models are immediately deployable to continual learning and active learning where they can outperform existing approaches that do not leverage transfer learning.

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arXiv2019

The Gaussian Process Autoregressive Regression Model (GPAR)

Multi-output regression models must exploit dependencies between outputs to maximise predictive performance. The application of Gaussian processes (GPs) to this setting typically yields models that are computationally demanding and have limited representational power. We present the Gaussian Process Autoregressive Regression (GPAR) model, a scalable multi-output GP model that is able to capture nonlinear, possibly input-varying, dependencies between outputs in a simple and tractable way: the product rule is used to decompose the joint distribution over the outputs into a set of conditionals, each of which is modelled by a standard GP. GPAR's efficacy is demonstrated on a variety of synthetic and real-world problems, outperforming existing GP models and achieving state-of-the-art performance on established benchmarks.

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arXiv2017

Parallel and Distributed Thompson Sampling for Large-scale Accelerated Exploration of Chemical Space

Chemical space is so large that brute force searches for new interesting molecules are infeasible. High-throughput virtual screening via computer cluster simulations can speed up the discovery process by collecting very large amounts of data in parallel, e.g., up to hundreds or thousands of parallel measurements. Bayesian optimization (BO) can produce additional acceleration by sequentially identifying the most useful simulations or experiments to be performed next. However, current BO methods cannot scale to the large numbers of parallel measurements and the massive libraries of molecules currently used in high-throughput screening. Here, we propose a scalable solution based on a parallel and distributed implementation of Thompson sampling (PDTS). We show that, in small scale problems, PDTS performs similarly as parallel expected improvement (EI), a batch version of the most widely used BO heuristic. Additionally, in settings where parallel EI does not scale, PDTS outperforms other scalable baselines such as a greedy search, $ε$-greedy approaches and a random search method. These results show that PDTS is a successful solution for large-scale parallel BO.

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arXiv2015

Multi-scaling of wholesale electricity prices

We empirically analyze the most volatile component of the electricity price time series from two North-American wholesale electricity markets. We show that these time series exhibit fluctuations which are not described by a Brownian Motion, as they show multi-scaling, high Hurst exponents and sharp price movements. We use the generalized Hurst exponent (GHE, $H(q)$) to show that although these time-series have strong cyclical components, the fluctuations exhibit persistent behaviour, i.e., $H(q)>0.5$. We investigate the effectiveness of the GHE as a predictive tool in a simple linear forecasting model, and study the forecast error as a function of $H(q)$, with $q=1$ and $q=2$. Our results suggest that the GHE can be used as prediction tool for these time series when the Hurst exponent is dynamically evaluated on rolling time windows of size $\approx 50 - 100$ hours. These results are also compared to the case in which the cyclical components have been subtracted from the time series, showing the importance of cyclicality in the prediction power of the Hurst exponent.

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