We extend the DeTurck trick from the classical isotropic curve shortening flow to the anisotropic setting. Here the anisotropic energy density is allowed to depend on space, which allows an interpretation in the context of Finsler metrics, giving rise to e.g.\ geodesic curvature flow in Riemannian manifolds. Assuming that the density is strictly convex and smooth, we introduce a novel weak formulation for anisotropic curve shortening flow. We then derive an optimal $H^1$--error bound for a continuous-in-time semidiscrete finite element approximation that uses piecewise linear elements. In addition, we consider some fully practical fully discrete schemes and prove their unconditional stability. Finally, we present several numerical simulations, including some convergence experiments that confirm the derived error bound, as well as applications to crystalline curvature flow and geodesic curvature flow.
It was recently shown that under smoothness conditions, the squared Wasserstein distance between two distributions could be efficiently computed with appealing statistical error upper bounds. However, rather than the distance itself, the object of interest for applications such as generative modeling is the underlying optimal transport map. Hence, computational and statistical guarantees need to be obtained for the estimated maps themselves. In this paper, we propose the first tractable algorithm for which the statistical $L^2$ error on the maps nearly matches the existing minimax lower-bounds for smooth map estimation. Our method is based on solving the semi-dual formulation of optimal transport with an infinite-dimensional sum-of-squares reformulation, and leads to an algorithm which has dimension-free polynomial rates in the number of samples, with potentially exponentially dimension-dependent constants.
Until recently, applications of neural networks in machine learning have almost exclusively relied on real-valued networks. It was recently observed, however, that complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) exhibit superior performance in applications in which the input is naturally complex-valued, such as MRI fingerprinting. While the mathematical theory of real-valued networks has, by now, reached some level of maturity, this is far from true for complex-valued networks. In this paper, we analyze the expressivity of complex-valued networks by providing explicit quantitative error bounds for approximating $C^n$ functions on compact subsets of $\mathbb{C}^d$ by complex-valued neural networks that employ the modReLU activation function, given by $\sigma(z) = \mathrm{ReLU}(|z| - 1) \, \mathrm{sgn} (z)$, which is one of the most popular complex activation functions used in practice. We show that the derived approximation rates are optimal (up to log factors) in the class of modReLU networks with weights of moderate growth.
This paper proposes a macroscopic model to describe the equilibrium distribution of passenger arrivals for the morning commute problem in a congested urban rail transit system. We use a macroscopic train operation sub-model developed by Seo et al (2017a,b) to express the interaction between the dynamics of passengers and trains in a simplified manner while maintaining their essential physical relations. The equilibrium conditions of the proposed model are derived and a solution method is provided. The characteristics of the equilibrium are then examined through analytical discussion and numerical examples. As an application of the proposed model, we analyze a simple time-dependent timetable optimization problem with equilibrium constraints and reveal that a "capacity increasing paradox" exists such that a higher dispatch frequency can increase the equilibrium cost. Furthermore, insights into the design of the timetable are obtained and the timetable influence on passengers' equilibrium travel costs are evaluated.
We investigate several rank-based change-point procedures for the covariance operator in a sequence of observed functions, called FKWC change-point procedures. Our methods allow the user to test for one change-point, to test for an epidemic period, or to detect an unknown amount of change-points in the data. Our methodology combines functional data depth values with the traditional Kruskal Wallis test statistic. By taking this approach we have no need to estimate the covariance operator, which makes our methods computationally cheap. For example, our procedure can identify multiple change-points in $O(n\log n)$ time. Our procedure is fully non-parametric and is robust to outliers through the use of data depth ranks. We show that when $n$ is large, our methods have simple behaviour under the null hypothesis.We also show that the FKWC change-point procedures are $n^{-1/2}$-consistent. In addition to asymptotic results, we provide a finite sample accuracy result for our at-most-one change-point estimator. In simulation, we compare our methods against several others. We also present an application of our methods to intraday asset returns and f-MRI scans.
In order to avoid the curse of dimensionality, frequently encountered in Big Data analysis, there was a vast development in the field of linear and nonlinear dimension reduction techniques in recent years. These techniques (sometimes referred to as manifold learning) assume that the scattered input data is lying on a lower dimensional manifold, thus the high dimensionality problem can be overcome by learning the lower dimensionality behavior. However, in real life applications, data is often very noisy. In this work, we propose a method to approximate $\mathcal{M}$ a $d$-dimensional $C^{m+1}$ smooth submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^n$ ($d \ll n$) based upon noisy scattered data points (i.e., a data cloud). We assume that the data points are located "near" the lower dimensional manifold and suggest a non-linear moving least-squares projection on an approximating $d$-dimensional manifold. Under some mild assumptions, the resulting approximant is shown to be infinitely smooth and of high approximation order (i.e., $O(h^{m+1})$, where $h$ is the fill distance and $m$ is the degree of the local polynomial approximation). The method presented here assumes no analytic knowledge of the approximated manifold and the approximation algorithm is linear in the large dimension $n$. Furthermore, the approximating manifold can serve as a framework to perform operations directly on the high dimensional data in a computationally efficient manner. This way, the preparatory step of dimension reduction, which induces distortions to the data, can be avoided altogether.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.
Modern CNN-based object detectors rely on bounding box regression and non-maximum suppression to localize objects. While the probabilities for class labels naturally reflect classification confidence, localization confidence is absent. This makes properly localized bounding boxes degenerate during iterative regression or even suppressed during NMS. In the paper we propose IoU-Net learning to predict the IoU between each detected bounding box and the matched ground-truth. The network acquires this confidence of localization, which improves the NMS procedure by preserving accurately localized bounding boxes. Furthermore, an optimization-based bounding box refinement method is proposed, where the predicted IoU is formulated as the objective. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show the effectiveness of IoU-Net, as well as its compatibility with and adaptivity to several state-of-the-art object detectors.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) has become a popular method for scalable Bayesian inference. These methods are based on sampling a discrete-time approximation to a continuous time process, such as the Langevin diffusion. When applied to distributions defined on a constrained space, such as the simplex, the time-discretisation error can dominate when we are near the boundary of the space. We demonstrate that while current SGMCMC methods for the simplex perform well in certain cases, they struggle with sparse simplex spaces; when many of the components are close to zero. However, most popular large-scale applications of Bayesian inference on simplex spaces, such as network or topic models, are sparse. We argue that this poor performance is due to the biases of SGMCMC caused by the discretization error. To get around this, we propose the stochastic CIR process, which removes all discretization error and we prove that samples from the stochastic CIR process are asymptotically unbiased. Use of the stochastic CIR process within a SGMCMC algorithm is shown to give substantially better performance for a topic model and a Dirichlet process mixture model than existing SGMCMC approaches.
This work presents a region-growing image segmentation approach based on superpixel decomposition. From an initial contour-constrained over-segmentation of the input image, the image segmentation is achieved by iteratively merging similar superpixels into regions. This approach raises two key issues: (1) how to compute the similarity between superpixels in order to perform accurate merging and (2) in which order those superpixels must be merged together. In this perspective, we firstly introduce a robust adaptive multi-scale superpixel similarity in which region comparisons are made both at content and common border level. Secondly, we propose a global merging strategy to efficiently guide the region merging process. Such strategy uses an adpative merging criterion to ensure that best region aggregations are given highest priorities. This allows to reach a final segmentation into consistent regions with strong boundary adherence. We perform experiments on the BSDS500 image dataset to highlight to which extent our method compares favorably against other well-known image segmentation algorithms. The obtained results demonstrate the promising potential of the proposed approach.
Discrete random structures are important tools in Bayesian nonparametrics and the resulting models have proven effective in density estimation, clustering, topic modeling and prediction, among others. In this paper, we consider nested processes and study the dependence structures they induce. Dependence ranges between homogeneity, corresponding to full exchangeability, and maximum heterogeneity, corresponding to (unconditional) independence across samples. The popular nested Dirichlet process is shown to degenerate to the fully exchangeable case when there are ties across samples at the observed or latent level. To overcome this drawback, inherent to nesting general discrete random measures, we introduce a novel class of latent nested processes. These are obtained by adding common and group-specific completely random measures and, then, normalising to yield dependent random probability measures. We provide results on the partition distributions induced by latent nested processes, and develop an Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for Bayesian inferences. A test for distributional homogeneity across groups is obtained as a by product. The results and their inferential implications are showcased on synthetic and real data.