Many supervised learning problems involve high-dimensional data such as images, text, or graphs. In order to make efficient use of data, it is often useful to leverage certain geometric priors in the problem at hand, such as invariance to translations, permutation subgroups, or stability to small deformations. We study the sample complexity of learning problems where the target function presents such invariance and stability properties, by considering spherical harmonic decompositions of such functions on the sphere. We provide non-parametric rates of convergence for kernel methods, and show improvements in sample complexity by a factor equal to the size of the group when using an invariant kernel over the group, compared to the corresponding non-invariant kernel. These improvements are valid when the sample size is large enough, with an asymptotic behavior that depends on spectral properties of the group. Finally, these gains are extended beyond invariance groups to also cover geometric stability to small deformations, modeled here as subsets (not necessarily subgroups) of permutations.
Koopman operator theory shows how nonlinear dynamical systems can be represented as an infinite-dimensional, linear operator acting on a Hilbert space of observables of the system. However, determining the relevant modes and eigenvalues of this infinite-dimensional operator can be difficult. The extended dynamic mode decomposition (EDMD) is one such method for generating approximations to Koopman spectra and modes, but the EDMD method faces its own set of challenges due to the need of user defined observables. To address this issue, we explore the use of convolutional autoencoder networks to simultaneously find optimal families of observables which also generate both accurate embeddings of the flow into a space of observables and immersions of the observables back into flow coordinates. This network results in a global transformation of the flow and affords future state prediction via EDMD and the decoder network. We call this method deep learning dynamic mode decomposition (DLDMD). The method is tested on canonical nonlinear data sets and is shown to produce results that outperform a standard DMD approach.
Solution of Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) model of dynamical system may not agree with its observed values. Often this discrepancy can be attributed to unmodeled forcings in the evolution rule of the dynamical system. In this article, an approach for data-based model improvement is described which exploits the geometric constraints imposed by the system observations to estimate these unmodeled terms. The nominal model is augmented using these extra forcing terms to make predictions. This approach is applied to navigational satellite orbit prediction to bring down the error to approximately 12% of the error when using the nominal force model for a 2-hour prediction. In another example improved temperature predictions over the nominal heat equation are obtained for one-dimensional conduction.
We give an efficient classical algorithm that recovers the distribution of a non-interacting fermion state over the computational basis. For a system of $n$ non-interacting fermions and $m$ modes, we show that $O(m^2 n^4 \log(m/\delta)/ \varepsilon^4)$ samples and $O(m^4 n^4 \log(m/\delta)/ \varepsilon^4)$ time are sufficient to learn the original distribution to total variation distance $\varepsilon$ with probability $1 - \delta$. Our algorithm empirically estimates the one- and two-mode correlations and uses them to reconstruct a succinct description of the entire distribution efficiently.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures for signals supported on graphs. They are presented here as generalizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in which individual layers contain banks of graph convolutional filters instead of banks of classical convolutional filters. Otherwise, GNNs operate as CNNs. Filters are composed with pointwise nonlinearities and stacked in layers. It is shown that GNN architectures exhibit equivariance to permutation and stability to graph deformations. These properties provide a measure of explanation respecting the good performance of GNNs that can be observed empirically. It is also shown that if graphs converge to a limit object, a graphon, GNNs converge to a corresponding limit object, a graphon neural network. This convergence justifies the transferability of GNNs across networks with different number of nodes.
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weights of homogeneous-structured task-specific networks, requiring a uniform number of classes across tasks. The metric-learning approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks, and they fail if the tasks diverge. We propose to deal with these limitations with meta metric learning. Our meta metric learning approach consists of task-specific learners, that exploit metric learning to handle flexible labels, and a meta learner, that discovers good parameters and gradient decent to specify the metrics in task-specific learners. Thus the proposed model is able to handle unbalanced classes as well as to generate task-specific metrics. We test our approach in the `$k$-shot $N$-way' few-shot learning setting used in previous work and new realistic few-shot setting with diverse multi-domain tasks and flexible label numbers. Experiments show that our approach attains superior performances in both settings.
This paper proposes a model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to synthesise policies for an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), such that a linear time property is satisfied. We convert the given property into a Limit Deterministic Buchi Automaton (LDBA), then construct a synchronized MDP between the automaton and the original MDP. According to the resulting LDBA, a reward function is then defined over the state-action pairs of the product MDP. With this reward function, our algorithm synthesises a policy whose traces satisfies the linear time property: as such, the policy synthesis procedure is "constrained" by the given specification. Additionally, we show that the RL procedure sets up an online value iteration method to calculate the maximum probability of satisfying the given property, at any given state of the MDP - a convergence proof for the procedure is provided. Finally, the performance of the algorithm is evaluated via a set of numerical examples. We observe an improvement of one order of magnitude in the number of iterations required for the synthesis compared to existing approaches.
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.
Deep learning is the mainstream technique for many machine learning tasks, including image recognition, machine translation, speech recognition, and so on. It has outperformed conventional methods in various fields and achieved great successes. Unfortunately, the understanding on how it works remains unclear. It has the central importance to lay down the theoretic foundation for deep learning. In this work, we give a geometric view to understand deep learning: we show that the fundamental principle attributing to the success is the manifold structure in data, namely natural high dimensional data concentrates close to a low-dimensional manifold, deep learning learns the manifold and the probability distribution on it. We further introduce the concepts of rectified linear complexity for deep neural network measuring its learning capability, rectified linear complexity of an embedding manifold describing the difficulty to be learned. Then we show for any deep neural network with fixed architecture, there exists a manifold that cannot be learned by the network. Finally, we propose to apply optimal mass transportation theory to control the probability distribution in the latent space.
Metric learning learns a metric function from training data to calculate the similarity or distance between samples. From the perspective of feature learning, metric learning essentially learns a new feature space by feature transformation (e.g., Mahalanobis distance metric). However, traditional metric learning algorithms are shallow, which just learn one metric space (feature transformation). Can we further learn a better metric space from the learnt metric space? In other words, can we learn metric progressively and nonlinearly like deep learning by just using the existing metric learning algorithms? To this end, we present a hierarchical metric learning scheme and implement an online deep metric learning framework, namely ODML. Specifically, we take one online metric learning algorithm as a metric layer, followed by a nonlinear layer (i.e., ReLU), and then stack these layers modelled after the deep learning. The proposed ODML enjoys some nice properties, indeed can learn metric progressively and performs superiorly on some datasets. Various experiments with different settings have been conducted to verify these properties of the proposed ODML.
Large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) is a metric learner which optimizes the performance of the popular $k$NN classifier. However, its resulting metric relies on pre-selected target neighbors. In this paper, we address the feasibility of LMNN's optimization constraints regarding these target points, and introduce a mathematical measure to evaluate the size of the feasible region of the optimization problem. We enhance the optimization framework of LMNN by a weighting scheme which prefers data triplets which yield a larger feasible region. This increases the chances to obtain a good metric as the solution of LMNN's problem. We evaluate the performance of the resulting feasibility-based LMNN algorithm using synthetic and real datasets. The empirical results show an improved accuracy for different types of datasets in comparison to regular LMNN.