about
Poincaré Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations (arxiv.org)
4 points by melqdusy on Jun 2, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of flat space, this maps items into a curved space where room grows toward the edges, so a few coordinates capture both similarity and who sits above whom. On data with hierarchies, it beat flat-space embeddings at fitting the data and handling new items.

Abstract

Representation learning has become an invaluable approach for learning from symbolic data such as text and graphs. However, while complex symbolic datasets often exhibit a latent hierarchical structure, state-of-the-art methods typically learn embeddings in Euclidean vector spaces, which do not account for this property. For this purpose, we introduce a new approach for learning hierarchical representations of symbolic data by embedding them into hyperbolic space -- or more precisely into an n-dimensional Poincaré ball. Due to the underlying hyperbolic geometry, this allows us to learn parsimonious representations of symbolic data by simultaneously capturing hierarchy and similarity. We introduce an efficient algorithm to learn the embeddings based on Riemannian optimization and show experimentally that Poincaré embeddings outperform Euclidean embeddings significantly on data with latent hierarchies, both in terms of representation capacity and in terms of generalization ability.

Maximilian Nickel, Douwe Kiela
arXiv:1705.08039 · cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted May 22, 2017 · updated May 26, 2017
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN