Unlike matrix completion, no algorithm for the tensor completion problem has so far been shown to achieve the information-theoretic sample complexity rate. This paper develops a new algorithm for the special case of completion for nonnegative tensors. We prove that our algorithm converges in a linear (in numerical tolerance) number of oracle steps, while achieving the information-theoretic rate. Our approach is to define a new norm for nonnegative tensors using the gauge of a specific 0-1 polytope that we construct. Because the norm is defined using a 0-1 polytope, this means we can use integer linear programming to solve linear separation problems over the polytope. We combine this insight with a variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to construct our numerical algorithm, and we demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability through experiments.
We propose a novel approach to estimating the precision matrix of multivariate Gaussian data that relies on decomposing them into a low-rank and a diagonal component. Such decompositions are very popular for modeling large covariance matrices as they admit a latent factor based representation that allows easy inference. The same is however not true for precision matrices due to the lack of computationally convenient representations which restricts inference to low-to-moderate dimensional problems. We address this remarkable gap in the literature by building on a latent variable representation for such decomposition for precision matrices. The construction leads to an efficient Gibbs sampler that scales very well to high-dimensional problems far beyond the limits of the current state-of-the-art. The ability to efficiently explore the full posterior space also allows the model uncertainty to be easily assessed. The decomposition crucially additionally allows us to adapt sparsity inducing priors to shrink the insignificant entries of the precision matrix toward zero, making the approach adaptable to high-dimensional small-sample-size sparse settings. Exact zeros in the matrix encoding the underlying conditional independence graph are then determined via a novel posterior false discovery rate control procedure. A near minimax optimal posterior concentration rate for estimating precision matrices is attained by our method under mild regularity assumptions. We evaluate the method's empirical performance through synthetic experiments and illustrate its practical utility in data sets from two different application domains.
Chance constraints provide a principled framework to mitigate the risk of high-impact extreme events by modifying the controllable properties of a system. The low probability and rare occurrence of such events, however, impose severe sampling and computational requirements on classical solution methods that render them impractical. This work proposes a novel sampling-free method for solving rare chance constrained optimization problems affected by uncertainties that follow general Gaussian mixture distributions. By integrating modern developments in large deviation theory with tools from convex analysis and bilevel optimization, we propose tractable formulations that can be solved by off-the-shelf solvers. Our formulations enjoy several advantages compared to classical methods: their size and complexity is independent of event rarity, they do not require linearity or convexity assumptions on system constraints, and under easily verifiable conditions, serve as safe conservative approximations or asymptotically exact reformulations of the true problem. Computational experiments on linear, nonlinear and PDE-constrained problems from applications in portfolio management, structural engineering and fluid dynamics illustrate the broad applicability of our method and its advantages over classical sampling-based approaches in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
In this work we take a Category Theoretic perspective on the relationship between probabilistic modeling and function approximation. We begin by defining two extensions of function composition to stochastic process subordination: one based on the co-Kleisli category under the comonad (Omega x -) and one based on the parameterization of a category with a Lawvere theory. We show how these extensions relate to the category Stoch and other Markov Categories. Next, we apply the Para construction to extend stochastic processes to parameterized statistical models and we define a way to compose the likelihood functions of these models. We conclude with a demonstration of how the Maximum Likelihood Estimation procedure defines an identity-on-objects functor from the category of statistical models to the category of Learners. Code to accompany this paper can be found at //github.com/dshieble/Categorical_Stochastic_Processes_and_Likelihood
Hottopixx, proposed by Bittorf et al. at NIPS 2012, is an algorithm for solving nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problems under the separability assumption. Separable NMFs have important applications, such as topic extraction from documents and unmixing of hyperspectral images. In such applications, the robustness of the algorithm to noise is the key to the success. Hottopixx has been shown to be robust to noise, and its robustness can be further enhanced through postprocessing. However, there is a drawback. Hottopixx and its postprocessing require us to estimate the noise level involved in the matrix we want to factorize before running, since they use it as part of the input data. The noise-level estimation is not an easy task. In this paper, we overcome this drawback. We present a refinement of Hottopixx and its postprocessing that runs without prior knowledge of the noise level. We show that the refinement has almost the same robustness to noise as the original algorithm.
We derive conditions for the existence of fixed points of nonnegative neural networks, an important research objective to understand the behavior of neural networks in modern applications involving autoencoders and loop unrolling techniques, among others. In particular, we show that neural networks with nonnegative inputs and nonnegative parameters can be recognized as monotonic and (weakly) scalable functions within the framework of nonlinear Perron-Frobenius theory. This fact enables us to derive conditions for the existence of a nonempty fixed point set of the nonnegative neural networks, and these conditions are weaker than those obtained recently using arguments in convex analysis, which are typically based on the assumption of nonexpansivity of the activation functions. Furthermore, we prove that the shape of the fixed point set of monotonic and weakly scalable neural networks is often an interval, which degenerates to a point for the case of scalable networks. The chief results of this paper are verified in numerical simulations, where we consider an autoencoder-type network that first compresses angular power spectra in massive MIMO systems, and, second, reconstruct the input spectra from the compressed signals.
Online Tensor Factorization (OTF) is a fundamental tool in learning low-dimensional interpretable features from streaming multi-modal data. While various algorithmic and theoretical aspects of OTF have been investigated recently, a general convergence guarantee to stationary points of the objective function without any incoherence or sparsity assumptions is still lacking even for the i.i.d. case. In this work, we introduce a novel algorithm that learns a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) basis from a given stream of tensor-valued data under general constraints, including nonnegativity constraints that induce interpretability of the learned CP basis. We prove that our algorithm converges almost surely to the set of stationary points of the objective function under the hypothesis that the sequence of data tensors is generated by an underlying Markov chain. Our setting covers the classical i.i.d. case as well as a wide range of application contexts including data streams generated by independent or MCMC sampling. Our result closes a gap between OTF and Online Matrix Factorization in global convergence analysis \commHL{for CP-decompositions}. Experimentally, we show that our algorithm converges much faster than standard algorithms for nonnegative tensor factorization tasks on both synthetic and real-world data. Also, we demonstrate the utility of our algorithm on a diverse set of examples from an image, video, and time-series data, illustrating how one may learn qualitatively different CP-dictionaries from the same tensor data by exploiting the tensor structure in multiple ways.
The low-rank canonical polyadic tensor decomposition is useful in data analysis and can be computed by solving a sequence of overdetermined least squares subproblems. Motivated by consideration of sparse tensors, we propose sketching each subproblem using leverage scores to select a subset of the rows, with probabilistic guarantees on the solution accuracy. We randomly sample rows proportional to leverage score upper bounds that can be efficiently computed using the special Khatri-Rao subproblem structure inherent in tensor decomposition. Crucially, for a $(d+1)$-way tensor, the number of rows in the sketched system is $O(r^d/\epsilon)$ for a decomposition of rank $r$ and $\epsilon$-accuracy in the least squares solve, independent of both the size and the number of nonzeros in the tensor. Along the way, we provide a practical solution to the generic matrix sketching problem of sampling overabundance for high-leverage-score rows, proposing to include such rows deterministically and combine repeated samples in the sketched system; we conjecture that this can lead to improved theoretical bounds. Numerical results on real-world large-scale tensors show the method is significantly faster than deterministic methods at nearly the same level of accuracy.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective function, and (2) the Lipschitz continuity of local individual functions. Under the local regularity assumption, we provide the first optimal first-order decentralized algorithm called multi-step primal-dual (MSPD) and its corresponding optimal convergence rate. A notable aspect of this result is that, for non-smooth functions, while the dominant term of the error is in $O(1/\sqrt{t})$, the structure of the communication network only impacts a second-order term in $O(1/t)$, where $t$ is time. In other words, the error due to limits in communication resources decreases at a fast rate even in the case of non-strongly-convex objective functions. Under the global regularity assumption, we provide a simple yet efficient algorithm called distributed randomized smoothing (DRS) based on a local smoothing of the objective function, and show that DRS is within a $d^{1/4}$ multiplicative factor of the optimal convergence rate, where $d$ is the underlying dimension.
We introduce negative binomial matrix factorization (NBMF), a matrix factorization technique specially designed for analyzing over-dispersed count data. It can be viewed as an extension of Poisson matrix factorization (PF) perturbed by a multiplicative term which models exposure. This term brings a degree of freedom for controlling the dispersion, making NBMF more robust to outliers. We show that NBMF allows to skip traditional pre-processing stages, such as binarization, which lead to loss of information. Two estimation approaches are presented: maximum likelihood and variational Bayes inference. We test our model with a recommendation task and show its ability to predict user tastes with better precision than PF.