Efficient computation of optimal transport distance between distributions is of growing importance in data science. Sinkhorn-based methods are currently the state-of-the-art for such computations, but require $O(n^2)$ computations. In addition, Sinkhorn-based methods commonly use an Euclidean ground distance between datapoints. However, with the prevalence of manifold structured scientific data, it is often desirable to consider geodesic ground distance. Here, we tackle both issues by proposing Geodesic Sinkhorn -- based on diffusing a heat kernel on a manifold graph. Notably, Geodesic Sinkhorn requires only $O(n\log n)$ computation, as we approximate the heat kernel with Chebyshev polynomials based on the sparse graph Laplacian. We apply our method to the computation of barycenters of several distributions of high dimensional single cell data from patient samples undergoing chemotherapy. In particular, we define the barycentric distance as the distance between two such barycenters. Using this definition, we identify an optimal transport distance and path associated with the effect of treatment on cellular data.
In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex multimodal and correlated posteriors in high-dimensional spaces. Our approach introduces novel bounds for approximate inference using implicit distributions by locally linearising the neural sampler. This is distinct from existing methods that rely on additional discriminator networks and unstable adversarial objectives. Furthermore, we present a new sampler architecture that, for the first time, enables implicit distributions over tens of millions of latent variables, addressing computational concerns by using differentiable numerical approximations. We empirically show that our method is capable of recovering correlations across layers in large Bayesian neural networks, a property that is crucial for a network's performance but notoriously challenging to achieve. To the best of our knowledge, no other method has been shown to accomplish this task for such large models. Through experiments in downstream tasks, we demonstrate that our expressive posteriors outperform state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification methods, validating the effectiveness of our training algorithm and the quality of the learned implicit approximation.
We introduce Residue Hyperdimensional Computing, a computing framework that unifies residue number systems with an algebra defined over random, high-dimensional vectors. We show how residue numbers can be represented as high-dimensional vectors in a manner that allows algebraic operations to be performed with component-wise, parallelizable operations on the vector elements. The resulting framework, when combined with an efficient method for factorizing high-dimensional vectors, can represent and operate on numerical values over a large dynamic range using vastly fewer resources than previous methods, and it exhibits impressive robustness to noise. We demonstrate the potential for this framework to solve computationally difficult problems in visual perception and combinatorial optimization, showing improvement over baseline methods. More broadly, the framework provides a possible account for the computational operations of grid cells in the brain, and it suggests new machine learning architectures for representing and manipulating numerical data.
This paper establishes the nearly optimal rate of approximation for deep neural networks (DNNs) when applied to Korobov functions, effectively overcoming the curse of dimensionality. The approximation results presented in this paper are measured with respect to $L_p$ norms and $H^1$ norms. Our achieved approximation rate demonstrates a remarkable "super-convergence" rate, outperforming traditional methods and any continuous function approximator. These results are non-asymptotic, providing error bounds that consider both the width and depth of the networks simultaneously.
The field of causal discovery develops model selection methods to infer cause-effect relations among a set of random variables. For this purpose, different modelling assumptions have been proposed to render cause-effect relations identifiable. One prominent assumption is that the joint distribution of the observed variables follows a linear non-Gaussian structural equation model. In this paper, we develop novel goodness-of-fit tests that assess the validity of this assumption in the basic setting without latent confounders as well as in extension to linear models that incorporate latent confounders. Our approach involves testing algebraic relations among second and higher moments that hold as a consequence of the linearity of the structural equations. Specifically, we show that the linearity implies rank constraints on matrices and tensors derived from moments. For a practical implementation of our tests, we consider a multiplier bootstrap method that uses incomplete U-statistics to estimate subdeterminants, as well as asymptotic approximations to the null distribution of singular values. The methods are illustrated, in particular, for the T\"ubingen collection of benchmark data sets on cause-effect pairs.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increased interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. For years, great progress has been achieved. This paper presents the first review for recent advances in domain generalization. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. Next, we thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. Then, we categorize recent algorithms into three classes and present them in detail: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, each of which contains several popular algorithms. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets and applications. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.