Many data analysis problems can be cast as distance geometry problems in \emph{space forms} -- Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic spaces. Often, absolute distance measurements are often unreliable or simply unavailable and only proxies to absolute distances in the form of similarities are available. Hence we ask the following: Given only \emph{comparisons} of similarities amongst a set of entities, what can be said about the geometry of the underlying space form? To study this question, we introduce the notions of the \textit{ordinal capacity} of a target space form and \emph{ordinal spread} of the similarity measurements. The latter is an indicator of complex patterns in the measurements, while the former quantifies the capacity of a space form to accommodate a set of measurements with a specific ordinal spread profile. We prove that the ordinal capacity of a space form is related to its dimension and the sign of its curvature. This leads to a lower bound on the Euclidean and spherical embedding dimension of what we term similarity graphs. More importantly, we show that the statistical behavior of the ordinal spread random variables defined on a similarity graph can be used to identify its underlying space form. We support our theoretical claims with experiments on weighted trees, single-cell RNA expression data and spherical cartographic measurements.
The problem of finding the unique low dimensional decomposition of a given matrix has been a fundamental and recurrent problem in many areas. In this paper, we study the problem of seeking a unique decomposition of a low rank matrix $Y\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ that admits a sparse representation. Specifically, we consider $Y = A X\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ where the matrix $A\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times r}$ has full column rank, with $r < \min\{n,p\}$, and the matrix $X\in \mathbb{R}^{r\times n}$ is element-wise sparse. We prove that this sparse decomposition of $Y$ can be uniquely identified, up to some intrinsic signed permutation. Our approach relies on solving a nonconvex optimization problem constrained over the unit sphere. Our geometric analysis for the nonconvex optimization landscape shows that any {\em strict} local solution is close to the ground truth solution, and can be recovered by a simple data-driven initialization followed with any second order descent algorithm. At last, we corroborate these theoretical results with numerical experiments.
In this paper, I propose a general algorithm for multiple change point analysis via multivariate distribution-free nonparametric testing based on the concept of ranks that are defined by measure transportation. Multivariate ranks and the usual one-dimensional ranks both share an important property: they are both distribution-free. This finding allows for the creation of nonparametric tests that are distribution-free under the null hypothesis. Here I will consider rank energy statistics in the context of the multiple change point problem. I will estimate the number of change points and each of their locations within a multivariate series of time-ordered observations. This paper will examine the multiple change point question in a broad setting in which the observed distributions and number of change points are unspecified, rather than assume the time series observations follow a parametric model or there is one change point, as many works in this area assume. The objective is to develop techniques for identifying change points while making as few presumptions as possible. This algorithm described here is based upon energy statistics and has the ability to detect any distributional change. Presented are the theoretical properties of this new algorithm and the conditions under which the approximate number of change points and their locations can be estimated. This newly proposed algorithm can be used to analyze various datasets, including financial and microarray data. This algorithm has also been successfully implemented in the R package recp, which is available on CRAN. A section of this paper is dedicated to the execution of this procedure, as well as the use of the recp package.
The generalization error of a classifier is related to the complexity of the set of functions among which the classifier is chosen. Roughly speaking, the more complex the family, the greater the potential disparity between the training error and the population error of the classifier. This principle is embodied in layman's terms by Occam's razor principle, which suggests favoring low-complexity hypotheses over complex ones. We study a family of low-complexity classifiers consisting of thresholding the one-dimensional feature obtained by projecting the data on a random line after embedding it into a higher dimensional space parametrized by monomials of order up to k. More specifically, the extended data is projected n-times and the best classifier among those n (based on its performance on training data) is chosen. We obtain a bound on the generalization error of these low-complexity classifiers. The bound is less than that of any classifier with a non-trivial VC dimension, and thus less than that of a linear classifier. We also show that, given full knowledge of the class conditional densities, the error of the classifiers would converge to the optimal (Bayes) error as k and n go to infinity; if only a training dataset is given, we show that the classifiers will perfectly classify all the training points as k and n go to infinity.
In recent years, Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) has become an indispensable part of the face recognition system to guarantee the stability and reliability of recognition performance in an unconstrained scenario. For this purpose, the FIQA method should consider both the intrinsic property and the recognizability of the face image. Most previous works aim to estimate the sample-wise embedding uncertainty or pair-wise similarity as the quality score, which only considers the information from partial intra-class. However, these methods ignore the valuable information from the inter-class, which is for estimating to the recognizability of face image. In this work, we argue that a high-quality face image should be similar to its intra-class samples and dissimilar to its inter-class samples. Thus, we propose a novel unsupervised FIQA method that incorporates Similarity Distribution Distance for Face Image Quality Assessment (SDD-FIQA). Our method generates quality pseudo-labels by calculating the Wasserstein Distance (WD) between the intra-class similarity distributions and inter-class similarity distributions. With these quality pseudo-labels, we are capable of training a regression network for quality prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SDD-FIQA surpasses the state-of-the-arts by an impressive margin. Meanwhile, our method shows good generalization across different recognition systems.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
This study is to review the approaches used for measuring sentences similarity. Measuring similarity between natural language sentences is a crucial task for many Natural Language Processing applications such as text classification, information retrieval, question answering, and plagiarism detection. This survey classifies approaches of calculating sentences similarity based on the adopted methodology into three categories. Word-to-word based, structure based, and vector-based are the most widely used approaches to find sentences similarity. Each approach measures relatedness between short texts based on a specific perspective. In addition, datasets that are mostly used as benchmarks for evaluating techniques in this field are introduced to provide a complete view on this issue. The approaches that combine more than one perspective give better results. Moreover, structure based similarity that measures similarity between sentences structures needs more investigation.
We show that for the problem of testing if a matrix $A \in F^{n \times n}$ has rank at most $d$, or requires changing an $\epsilon$-fraction of entries to have rank at most $d$, there is a non-adaptive query algorithm making $\widetilde{O}(d^2/\epsilon)$ queries. Our algorithm works for any field $F$. This improves upon the previous $O(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ bound (SODA'03), and bypasses an $\Omega(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound of (KDD'14) which holds if the algorithm is required to read a submatrix. Our algorithm is the first such algorithm which does not read a submatrix, and instead reads a carefully selected non-adaptive pattern of entries in rows and columns of $A$. We complement our algorithm with a matching query complexity lower bound for non-adaptive testers over any field. We also give tight bounds of $\widetilde{\Theta}(d^2)$ queries in the sensing model for which query access comes in the form of $\langle X_i, A\rangle:=tr(X_i^\top A)$; perhaps surprisingly these bounds do not depend on $\epsilon$. We next develop a novel property testing framework for testing numerical properties of a real-valued matrix $A$ more generally, which includes the stable rank, Schatten-$p$ norms, and SVD entropy. Specifically, we propose a bounded entry model, where $A$ is required to have entries bounded by $1$ in absolute value. We give upper and lower bounds for a wide range of problems in this model, and discuss connections to the sensing model above.
Importance sampling is one of the most widely used variance reduction strategies in Monte Carlo rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel importance sampling technique that uses a neural network to learn how to sample from a desired density represented by a set of samples. Our approach considers an existing Monte Carlo rendering algorithm as a black box. During a scene-dependent training phase, we learn to generate samples with a desired density in the primary sample space of the rendering algorithm using maximum likelihood estimation. We leverage a recent neural network architecture that was designed to represent real-valued non-volume preserving ('Real NVP') transformations in high dimensional spaces. We use Real NVP to non-linearly warp primary sample space and obtain desired densities. In addition, Real NVP efficiently computes the determinant of the Jacobian of the warp, which is required to implement the change of integration variables implied by the warp. A main advantage of our approach is that it is agnostic of underlying light transport effects, and can be combined with many existing rendering techniques by treating them as a black box. We show that our approach leads to effective variance reduction in several practical scenarios.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.
In recent years, person re-identification (re-id) catches great attention in both computer vision community and industry. In this paper, we propose a new framework for person re-identification with a triplet-based deep similarity learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The network is trained with triplet input: two of them have the same class labels and the other one is different. It aims to learn the deep feature representation, with which the distance within the same class is decreased, while the distance between the different classes is increased as much as possible. Moreover, we trained the model jointly on six different datasets, which differs from common practice - one model is just trained on one dataset and tested also on the same one. However, the enormous number of possible triplet data among the large number of training samples makes the training impossible. To address this challenge, a double-sampling scheme is proposed to generate triplets of images as effective as possible. The proposed framework is evaluated on several benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that, our method is effective for the task of person re-identification and it is comparable or even outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.