Kernel methods are learning algorithms that enjoy solid theoretical foundations while suffering from important computational limitations. Sketching, that consists in looking for solutions among a subspace of reduced dimension, is a widely studied approach to alleviate this numerical burden. However, fast sketching strategies, such as non-adaptive subsampling, significantly degrade the guarantees of the algorithms, while theoretically-accurate sketches, such as the Gaussian one, turn out to remain relatively slow in practice. In this paper, we introduce the $p$-sparsified sketches, that combine the benefits from both approaches to achieve a good tradeoff between statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. To support our method, we derive excess risk bounds for both single and multiple output problems, with generic Lipschitz losses, providing new guarantees for a wide range of applications, from robust regression to multiple quantile regression. We also provide empirical evidences of the superiority of our sketches over recent SOTA approaches.
In the field of 3D perception using 3D LiDAR sensors, ground segmentation is an essential task for various purposes, such as traversable area detection and object recognition. Under these circumstances, several ground segmentation methods have been proposed. However, some limitations are still encountered. First, some ground segmentation methods require fine-tuning of parameters depending on the surroundings, which is excessively laborious and time-consuming. Moreover, even if the parameters are well adjusted, a partial under-segmentation problem can still emerge, which implies ground segmentation failures in some regions. Finally, ground segmentation methods typically fail to estimate an appropriate ground plane when the ground is above another structure, such as a retaining wall. To address these problems, we propose a robust ground segmentation method called Patchwork++, an extension of Patchwork. Patchwork++ exploits adaptive ground likelihood estimation (A-GLE) to calculate appropriate parameters adaptively based on the previous ground segmentation results. Moreover, temporal ground revert (TGR) alleviates a partial under-segmentation problem by using the temporary ground property. Also, region-wise vertical plane fitting (R-VPF) is introduced to segment the ground plane properly even if the ground is elevated with different layers. Finally, we present reflected noise removal (RNR) to eliminate virtual noise points efficiently based on the 3D LiDAR reflection model. We demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative evaluations using a SemanticKITTI dataset. Our code is available at //github.com/url-kaist/patchwork-plusplus
SGD with Momentum (SGDM) is a widely used family of algorithms for large-scale optimization of machine learning problems. Yet, when optimizing generic convex functions, no advantage is known for any SGDM algorithm over plain SGD. Moreover, even the most recent results require changes to the SGDM algorithms, like averaging of the iterates and a projection onto a bounded domain, which are rarely used in practice. In this paper, we focus on the convergence rate of the last iterate of SGDM. For the first time, we prove that for any constant momentum factor, there exists a Lipschitz and convex function for which the last iterate of SGDM suffers from a suboptimal convergence rate of $\Omega(\frac{\ln T}{\sqrt{T}})$ after $T$ iterations. Based on this fact, we study a class of (both adaptive and non-adaptive) Follow-The-Regularized-Leader-based SGDM algorithms with increasing momentum and shrinking updates. For these algorithms, we show that the last iterate has optimal convergence $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}})$ for unconstrained convex stochastic optimization problems without projections onto bounded domains nor knowledge of $T$. Further, we show a variety of results for FTRL-based SGDM when used with adaptive stepsizes. Empirical results are shown as well.
In dynamical systems, it is advantageous to identify regions of flow which can exhibit maximal influence on nearby behaviour. Hyperbolic Lagrangian Coherent Structures have been introduced to obtain two-dimensional surfaces which maximise repulsion or attraction in three-dimensional dynamical systems with arbitrary time-dependence. However, the numerical method to compute them requires obtaining derivatives associated with the system, often performed through the approximation of divided differences, which can lead to significant numerical error and numerical noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for the numerical calculation of hyperbolic Lagrangian Coherent Structures using Differential Algebra called DA-LCS. As a form of automatic forward differentiation, it allows direct computation of the Taylor expansion of the flow, its derivatives, and the eigenvectors of the associated strain tensor, with all derivatives obtained algebraically and to machine precision. It does so without a priori information about the system, such as variational equations or explicit derivatives. We demonstrate that this can provide significant improvements in the accuracy of the Lagrangian Coherent Structures identified compared to finite-differencing methods in a series of test cases drawn from the literature. We also show how DA-LCS uncovers additional dynamical behaviour in a real-world example drawn from astrodynamics.
In this work we introduce KERNELIZED TRANSFORMER, a generic, scalable, data driven framework for learning the kernel function in Transformers. Our framework approximates the Transformer kernel as a dot product between spectral feature maps and learns the kernel by learning the spectral distribution. This not only helps in learning a generic kernel end-to-end, but also reduces the time and space complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear. We show that KERNELIZED TRANSFORMERS achieve performance comparable to existing efficient Transformer architectures, both in terms of accuracy as well as computational efficiency. Our study also demonstrates that the choice of the kernel has a substantial impact on performance, and kernel learning variants are competitive alternatives to fixed kernel Transformers, both in long as well as short sequence tasks.
Cluster-level inference procedures are widely used for brain mapping. These methods compare the size of clusters obtained by thresholding brain maps to an upper bound under the global null hypothesis, computed using Random Field Theory or permutations. However, the guarantees obtained by this type of inference - i.e. at least one voxel is truly activated in the cluster - are not informative with regards to the strength of the signal therein. There is thus a need for methods to assess the amount of signal within clusters; yet such methods have to take into account that clusters are defined based on the data, which creates circularity in the inference scheme. This has motivated the use of post hoc estimates that allow statistically valid estimation of the proportion of activated voxels in clusters. In the context of fMRI data, the All-Resolutions Inference framework introduced in [25] provides post hoc estimates of the proportion of activated voxels. However, this method relies on parametric threshold families, which results in conservative inference. In this paper, we leverage randomization methods to adapt to data characteristics and obtain tighter false discovery control. We obtain Notip, for Non-parametric True Discovery Proportion control: a powerful, non-parametric method that yields statistically valid guarantees on the proportion of activated voxels in data-derived clusters. Numerical experiments demonstrate substantial gains in number of detections compared with state-of-the-art methods on 36 fMRI datasets. The conditions under which the proposed method brings benefits are also discussed.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 87.6% to 93.2% and from 88.0% to 93.8% on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.
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.