{"id":222592,"date":"2014-12-06T20:46:47","date_gmt":"2014-12-07T02:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=222592"},"modified":"2014-12-06T20:46:47","modified_gmt":"2014-12-07T02:46:47","slug":"vowpal-wabbit-7-8-at-nips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/?p=222592","title":{"rendered":"Vowpal Wabbit 7.8 at NIPS"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just created Vowpal Wabbit 7.8<\/a>, and we are planning to have an increasingly less heretical followup tutorial during the non-“ski break” at the NIPS<\/a> Optimization workshop<\/a>. Please join us if interested. <\/p>\n

I always feel like things are going slow, but in the last year, but there have been many changes overall. Notes for 7.7<\/a> are here. Since then, there are several areas of improvement as well as generalized bug fixes and refactoring. <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Learning to Search<\/b>: Hal<\/a> completely rewrote the learning to search system, enough that the numbers here<\/a> are looking obsolete. Kai-Wei<\/a> has also created several advanced applications for entity-relation and dependency parsing which are promising.\n<\/li>\n
  2. Languages<\/b> Hal also created a good python library, which includes call-backs for learning to search. You can now develop advanced structured prediction solutions in a nice language. Jonathan Morra<\/a> also contributed an initial Java interface.<\/li>\n
  3. Exploration<\/b> The contextual bandit subsystem now allows evaluation of an arbitrary policy, and an exploration library is now factored out into an independent library (principally by Luong<\/a> with help from Sid<\/a> and Sarah<\/a>). This is critical for real applications because randomization must happen at the point of decision. <\/li>\n
  4. Reductions<\/b> The learning reductions subsystem has continued to mature, although the perfectionist in me is still dissatisfied. As a consequence, it’s now pretty easy to program new reductions, and the efficiency of these reductions has generally improved. Several news ones are cooking.<\/li>\n
  5. Online Learning<\/b> Alekh<\/a> added an online SVM implementation based on LaSVM<\/a>. This is known to parallelize well via the para-active approach<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This project has grown quite a bit—there are about 30 different people contributing to VW since the last release, and there is now a VW meetup<\/a> (December 8th!) in the bay area that I wish I could attend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I just created Vowpal Wabbit 7.8, and we are planning to have an increasingly less heretical followup tutorial during the non-“ski break” at the NIPS Optimization workshop. Please join us if interested. I always feel like things are going slow, but in the last year, but there have been many changes overall. Notes for 7.7 … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “Vowpal Wabbit 7.8 at NIPS”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,42,29,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-code","category-machine-learning","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=222592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=222592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=222592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunch.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=222592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}