John Blitzer

Bio: John Blitzer is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Web search query & Parsing. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 47 publications receiving 13646 citations. Previous affiliations of John Blitzer include PARC & Microsoft.

Distance Metric Learning for Large Margin Nearest Neighbor Classification

Abstract: We show how to learn a Mahanalobis distance metric for k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification by semidefinite programming. The metric is trained with the goal that the k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are separated by a large margin. On seven data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in this way lead to significant improvements in kNN classification—for example, achieving a test error rate of 1.3% on the MNIST handwritten digits. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the learning problem reduces to a convex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our framework requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification.

A theory of learning from different domains

Abstract: Discriminative learning methods for classification perform well when training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. Often, however, we have plentiful labeled training data from a source domain but wish to learn a classifier which performs well on a target domain with a different distribution and little or no labeled training data. In this work we investigate two questions. First, under what conditions can a classifier trained from source data be expected to perform well on target data? Second, given a small amount of labeled target data, how should we combine it during training with the large amount of labeled source data to achieve the lowest target error at test time? We address the first question by bounding a classifier's target error in terms of its source error and the divergence between the two domains. We give a classifier-induced divergence measure that can be estimated from finite, unlabeled samples from the domains. Under the assumption that there exists some hypothesis that performs well in both domains, we show that this quantity together with the empirical source error characterize the target error of a source-trained classifier. We answer the second question by bounding the target error of a model which minimizes a convex combination of the empirical source and target errors. Previous theoretical work has considered minimizing just the source error, just the target error, or weighting instances from the two domains equally. We show how to choose the optimal combination of source and target error as a function of the divergence, the sample sizes of both domains, and the complexity of the hypothesis class. The resulting bound generalizes the previously studied cases and is always at least as tight as a bound which considers minimizing only the target error or an equal weighting of source and target errors.

Biographies, Bollywood, Boom-boxes and Blenders: Domain Adaptation for Sentiment Classification

Abstract: Automatic sentiment classification has been extensively studied and applied in recent years. However, sentiment is expressed differently in different domains, and annotating corpora for every possible domain of interest is impractical. We investigate domain adaptation for sentiment classifiers, focusing on online reviews for different types of products. First, we extend to sentiment classification the recently-proposed structural correspondence learning (SCL) algorithm, reducing the relative error due to adaptation between domains by an average of 30% over the original SCL algorithm and 46% over a supervised baseline. Second, we identify a measure of domain similarity that correlates well with the potential for adaptation of a classifier from one domain to another. This measure could for instance be used to select a small set of domains to annotate whose trained classifiers would transfer well to many other domains.

Analysis of Representations for Domain Adaptation

Abstract: Discriminative learning methods for classification perform well when training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. In many situations, though, we have labeled training data for a source domain, and we wish to learn a classifier which performs well on a target domain with a different distribution. Under what conditions can we adapt a classifier trained on the source domain for use in the target domain? Intuitively, a good feature representation is a crucial factor in the success of domain adaptation. We formalize this intuition theoretically with a generalization bound for domain adaption. Our theory illustrates the tradeoffs inherent in designing a representation for domain adaptation and gives a new justification for a recently proposed model. It also points toward a promising new model for domain adaptation: one which explicitly minimizes the difference between the source and target domains, while at the same time maximizing the margin of the training set.

Domain Adaptation with Structural Correspondence Learning

Abstract: Discriminative learning methods are widely used in natural language processing. These methods work best when their training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. For many NLP tasks, however, we are confronted with new domains in which labeled data is scarce or non-existent. In such cases, we seek to adapt existing models from a resource-rich source domain to a resource-poor target domain. We introduce structural correspondence learning to automatically induce correspondences among features from different domains. We test our technique on part of speech tagging and show performance gains for varying amounts of source and target training data, as well as improvements in target domain parsing accuracy using our improved tagger.

Going deeper with convolutions

Abstract: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5% (7.7% point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models (Peters et al., 2018a; Radford et al., 2018), BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5 (7.7 point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

A Survey on Transfer Learning

Abstract: A major assumption in many machine learning and data mining algorithms is that the training and future data must be in the same feature space and have the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption may not hold. For example, we sometimes have a classification task in one domain of interest, but we only have sufficient training data in another domain of interest, where the latter data may be in a different feature space or follow a different data distribution. In such cases, knowledge transfer, if done successfully, would greatly improve the performance of learning by avoiding much expensive data-labeling efforts. In recent years, transfer learning has emerged as a new learning framework to address this problem. This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on transfer learning for classification, regression, and clustering problems. In this survey, we discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift. We also explore some potential future issues in transfer learning research.

"Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

Abstract: Despite widespread adoption, machine learning models remain mostly black boxes. Understanding the reasons behind predictions is, however, quite important in assessing trust, which is fundamental if one plans to take action based on a prediction, or when choosing whether to deploy a new model. Such understanding also provides insights into the model, which can be used to transform an untrustworthy model or prediction into a trustworthy one. In this work, we propose LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally varound the prediction. We also propose a method to explain models by presenting representative individual predictions and their explanations in a non-redundant way, framing the task as a submodular optimization problem. We demonstrate the flexibility of these methods by explaining different models for text (e.g. random forests) and image classification (e.g. neural networks). We show the utility of explanations via novel experiments, both simulated and with human subjects, on various scenarios that require trust: deciding if one should trust a prediction, choosing between models, improving an untrustworthy classifier, and identifying why a classifier should not be trusted.