We consider the problem of learning a neural network classifier. Under the information bottleneck (IB) principle, we associate with this classification problem a representation learning problem, which we call "IB learning". We show that IB learning is, in fact, equivalent to a special class of the quantization problem. The classical results in rate-distortion theory then suggest that IB learning can benefit from a "vector quantization" approach, namely, simultaneously learning the representations of multiple input objects. Such an approach assisted with some variational techniques, result in a novel learning framework, "Aggregated Learning", for classification with neural network models. In this framework, several objects are jointly classified by a single neural network. The effectiveness of this framework is verified through extensive experiments on standard image recognition and text classification tasks.

Entity linking, which maps named entity mentions in a document into the proper entities in a given knowledge graph, has been shown to be able to significantly benefit from modeling the entity relatedness through Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Nevertheless, existing GCN entity linking models fail to take into account the fact that the structured graph for a set of entities not only depends on the contextual information of the given document but also adaptively changes on different aggregation layers of the GCN, resulting in insufficiency in terms of capturing the structural information among entities. In this paper, we propose a dynamic GCN architecture to effectively cope with this challenge. The graph structure in our model is dynamically computed and modified during training. Through aggregating knowledge from dynamically linked nodes, our GCN model can collectively identify the entity mappings between the document and the knowledge graph, and efficiently capture the topical coherence among various entity mentions in the entire document. Empirical studies on benchmark entity linking data sets confirm the superior performance of our proposed strategy and the benefits of the dynamic graph structure.

We consider the problem of learning a neural network classifier. Under the information bottleneck (IB) principle, we associate with this classification problem a representation learning problem, which we call "IB learning". We show that IB learning is, in fact, equivalent to a special class of the quantization problem. The classical results in rate-distortion theory then suggest that IB learning can benefit from a "vector quantization" approach, namely, simultaneously learning the representations of multiple input objects. Such an approach assisted with some variational techniques, result in a novel learning framework, "Aggregated Learning", for classification with neural network models. In this framework, several objects are jointly classified by a single neural network. The effectiveness of this framework is verified through extensive experiments on standard image recognition and text classification tasks.