We establish $L^2$-exponential convergence rate for three popular piecewise deterministic Markov processes for sampling: the randomized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method, the zigzag process, and the bouncy particle sampler. Our analysis is based on a variational framework for hypocoercivity, which combines a Poincar\'{e}-type inequality in time-augmented state space and a standard $L^2$ energy estimate. Our analysis provides explicit convergence rate estimates, which are more quantitative than existing results.
We propose two generic methods for improving semi-supervised learning (SSL). The first integrates weight perturbation (WP) into existing "consistency regularization" (CR) based methods. We implement WP by leveraging variational Bayesian inference (VBI). The second method proposes a novel consistency loss called "maximum uncertainty regularization" (MUR). While most consistency losses act on perturbations in the vicinity of each data point, MUR actively searches for "virtual" points situated beyond this region that cause the most uncertain class predictions. This allows MUR to impose smoothness on a wider area in the input-output manifold. Our experiments show clear improvements in classification errors of various CR based methods when they are combined with VBI or MUR or both.
Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training as an optimal control problem with nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention recently, yet the algorithmic development remains relatively limited. In this work, we make an attempt along this line by reformulating the training procedure from the trajectory optimization perspective. We first show that most widely-used algorithms for training DNNs can be linked to the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), a celebrated second-order trajectory optimization algorithm rooted in the Approximate Dynamic Programming. In this vein, we propose a new variant of DDP that can accept batch optimization for training feedforward networks, while integrating naturally with the recent progress in curvature approximation. The resulting algorithm features layer-wise feedback policies which improve convergence rate and reduce sensitivity to hyper-parameter over existing methods. We show that the algorithm is competitive against state-ofthe-art first and second order methods. Our work opens up new avenues for principled algorithmic design built upon the optimal control theory.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
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.
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.
The piecewise constant Mumford-Shah (PCMS) model and the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model are two of the most famous variational models in image segmentation and image restoration, respectively. They have ubiquitous applications in image processing. In this paper, we explore the linkage between these two important models. We prove that for two-phase segmentation problem the optimal solution of the PCMS model can be obtained by thresholding the minimizer of the ROF model. This linkage is still valid for multiphase segmentation under mild assumptions. Thus it opens a new segmentation paradigm: image segmentation can be done via image restoration plus thresholding. This new paradigm, which circumvents the innate non-convex property of the PCMS model, therefore improves the segmentation performance in both efficiency (much faster than state-of-the-art methods based on PCMS model, particularly when the phase number is high) and effectiveness (producing segmentation results with better quality) due to the flexibility of the ROF model in tackling degraded images, such as noisy images, blurry images or images with information loss. As a by-product of the new paradigm, we derive a novel segmentation method, coined thresholded-ROF (T-ROF) method, to illustrate the virtue of manipulating image segmentation through image restoration techniques. The convergence of the T-ROF method under certain conditions is proved, and elaborate experimental results and comparisons are presented.
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.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.
Seam-cutting and seam-driven techniques have been proven effective for handling imperfect image series in image stitching. Generally, seam-driven is to utilize seam-cutting to find a best seam from one or finite alignment hypotheses based on a predefined seam quality metric. However, the quality metrics in most methods are defined to measure the average performance of the pixels on the seam without considering the relevance and variance among them. This may cause that the seam with the minimal measure is not optimal (perception-inconsistent) in human perception. In this paper, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine seam estimation method which applies the evaluation in a different way. For pixels on the seam, we develop a patch-point evaluation algorithm concentrating more on the correlation and variation of them. The evaluations are then used to recalculate the difference map of the overlapping region and reestimate a stitching seam. This evaluation-reestimation procedure iterates until the current seam changes negligibly comparing with the previous seams. Experiments show that our proposed method can finally find a nearly perception-consistent seam after several iterations, which outperforms the conventional seam-cutting and other seam-driven methods.
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a topic model widely used in natural language processing and machine learning. Most approaches to training the model rely on iterative algorithms, which makes it difficult to run LDA on big corpora that are best analyzed in parallel and distributed computational environments. Indeed, current approaches to parallel inference either don't converge to the correct posterior or require storage of large dense matrices in memory. We present a novel sampler that overcomes both problems, and we show that this sampler is faster, both empirically and theoretically, than previous Gibbs samplers for LDA. We do so by employing a novel P\'olya-urn-based approximation in the sparse partially collapsed sampler for LDA. We prove that the approximation error vanishes with data size, making our algorithm asymptotically exact, a property of importance for large-scale topic models. In addition, we show, via an explicit example, that -- contrary to popular belief in the topic modeling literature -- partially collapsed samplers can be more efficient than fully collapsed samplers. We conclude by comparing the performance of our algorithm with that of other approaches on well-known corpora.