HydraGAN A Multi-head, Multi-objective Approach to Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data generation overcomes limitations of real-world machine learning. Traditional methods are valuable for augmenting costly datasets but only optimize one criterion: realism. In this paper, we tackle the problem of generating synthetic data that optimize multiple criteria. This goal is necessary when real data are replaced by synthetic for privacy preservation. We introduce HydraGAN, a new approach to synthetic data generation that introduces multiple generator and discriminator agents into the system. The multi-agent GAN optimizes the goal of privacy-preservation as well as data realism. To facilitate multi-agent training, we adapt game-theoretic principles to offer equilibrium guarantees. We observe that HydraGAN outperforms baseline methods for three datasets for multiple criteria of maximizing data realism, maximizing model accuracy, and minimizing re-identification risk.

A Survey of Techniques All Classifiers Can Learn from Deep Networks: Models, Optimizations, and Regularization

Deep neural networks have introduced novel and useful tools to the machine learning community. Other types of classifiers can potentially make use of these tools as well to improve their performance and generality. This paper reviews the current state of the art for deep learning classifier technologies that are being used outside of deep neural networks. Non-network classifiers can employ many components found in deep neural network architectures. In this paper, we review the feature learning, optimization, and regularization methods that form a core of deep network technologies. We then survey non-neural network learning algorithms that make innovative use of these methods to improve classification. Because many opportunities and challenges still exist, we discuss directions that can be pursued to expand the area of deep learning for a variety of classification algorithms.