Ben Taskar

A determinantal point process (DPP) is a probabilistic model of set diversity compactly parameterized by a positive semi-definite kernel matrix. To fit a DPP to a given task, we would like to learn the entries of its kernel matrix by…

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are well-suited for modeling repulsion and have proven useful in many applications where diversity is desired. While DPPs have many appealing properties, such as efficient sampling, learning the…

We consider the problem of fully unsupervised learning of grammatical (part-of-speech) categories from unlabeled text. The standard maximum-likelihood hidden Markov model for this task performs poorly, because of its weak inductive bias and…

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are random point processes well-suited for modeling repulsion. In machine learning, the focus of DPP-based models has been on diverse subset selection from a discrete and finite base set. This discrete…

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) are elegant probabilistic models of repulsion that arise in quantum physics and random matrix theory. In contrast to traditional structured models like Markov random fields, which become intractable and…

In many supervised learning tasks, the entities to be labeled are related to each other in complex ways and their labels are not independent. For example, in hypertext classification, the labels of linked pages are highly correlated. A…

Structured prediction tasks pose a fundamental trade-off between the need for model complexity to increase predictive power and the limited computational resources for inference in the exponentially-sized output spaces such models require.…

We present the mixture-of-parents maximum entropy Markov model (MoP-MEMM), a class of directed graphical models extending MEMMs. The MoP-MEMM allows tractable incorporation of long-range dependencies between nodes by restricting the…

In many machine learning problems, labeled training data is limited but unlabeled data is ample. Some of these problems have instances that can be factored into multiple views, each of which is nearly sufficent in determining the correct…

Determinantal point processes (DPPs), which arise in random matrix theory and quantum physics, are natural models for subset selection problems where diversity is preferred. Among many remarkable properties, DPPs offer tractable algorithms…