Interesting papers at ICML 2014

This year’s ICML had several papers which I want to read through more carefully and understand better.

1. Chun-Liang Li, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Condensed Filter Tree for Cost-Sensitive Multi-Label Classification. Several tricks accumulate to give a new approach for addressing cost sensitive multilabel classification.
2. Nikos Karampatziakis and Paul Mineiro, Discriminative Features via Generalized Eigenvectors. An efficient, effective eigenvalue solution for supervised learning yields compelling nonlinear performance on several datasets.
3. Nir Ailon, Zohar Karnin, Thorsten Joachims, Reducing Dueling Bandits to Cardinal Bandits. An effective method for reducing dueling bandits to normal bandits that extends to contextual situations.
4. Pedro Pinheiro, Ronan Collobert, Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Scene Labeling. Image parsing remains a challenge, and this is plausibly a step forward.
5. Cicero Dos Santos, Bianca Zadrozny, Learning Character-level Representations for Part-of-Speech Tagging. Word morphology is clearly useful information, and yet almost all ML-for-NLP applications ignore it or hard-code it (by stemming).
6. Alekh Agarwal, Daniel Hsu, Satyen Kale, John Langford, Lihong Li, Robert Schapire, Taming the Monster: A Fast and Simple Algorithm for Contextual Bandits. Statistically efficient interactive learning is now computationally feasible. I wish this one had been done in time for the NIPS tutorial 🙂
7. David Silver, Guy Lever, Nicolas Heess, Thomas Degris, Daan Wierstra, Martin Riedmiller, Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms. A reduction in variance from working out the deterministic limit of policy gradient make policy gradient approaches look much more attractive.

Edit: added one that I forgot.