No Arabic abstract
Learning a distance function or metric on a given data manifold is of great importance in machine learning and pattern recognition. Many of the previous works first embed the manifold to Euclidean space and then learn the distance function. However, such a scheme might not faithfully preserve the distance function if the original manifold is not Euclidean. Note that the distance function on a manifold can always be well-defined. In this paper, we propose to learn the distance function directly on the manifold without embedding. We first provide a theoretical characterization of the distance function by its gradient field. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose to first learn the gradient field of the distance function and then learn the distance function itself. Specifically, we set the gradient field of a local distance function as an initial vector field. Then we transport it to the whole manifold via heat flow on vector fields. Finally, the geodesic distance function can be obtained by requiring its gradient field to be close to the normalized vector field. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
We show that an invariant surface allows to construct the Jacobi vector field along a geodesic and construct the formula for the normal component of the Jacobi field. If a geodesic is the transversal intersection of two invariant surfaces (such situation we have, for example, if the geodesic is hyperbolic), then we can construct a fundamental solution of the the Jacobi-Hill equation. This is done for quadratically integrable geodesic flows.
In this paper, we propose a parallel and scalable approach for geodesic distance computation on triangle meshes. Our key observation is that the recovery of geodesic distance with the heat method from [Crane et al. 2013] can be reformulated as optimization of its gradients subject to integrability, which can be solved using an efficient first-order method that requires no linear system solving and converges quickly. Afterward, the geodesic distance is efficiently recovered by parallel integration of the optimized gradients in breadth-first order. Moreover, we employ a similar breadth-first strategy to derive a parallel Gauss-Seidel solver for the diffusion step in the heat method. To further lower the memory consumption from gradient optimization on faces, we also propose a formulation that optimizes the projected gradients on edges, which reduces the memory footprint by about 50%. Our approach is trivially parallelizable, with a low memory footprint that grows linearly with respect to the model size. This makes it particularly suitable for handling large models. Experimental results show that it can efficiently compute geodesic distance on meshes with more than 200 million vertices on a desktop PC with 128GB RAM, outperforming the original heat method and other state-of-the-art geodesic distance solvers.
Neural networks notoriously suffer from the problem of catastrophic forgetting, the phenomenon of forgetting the past knowledge when acquiring new knowledge. Overcoming catastrophic forgetting is of significant importance to emulate the process of incremental learning, where the model is capable of learning from sequential experience in an efficient and robust way. State-of-the-art techniques for incremental learning make use of knowledge distillation towards preventing catastrophic forgetting. Therein, one updates the network while ensuring that the networks responses to previously seen concepts remain stable throughout updates. This in practice is done by minimizing the dissimilarity between current and previous responses of the network one way or another. Our work contributes a novel method to the arsenal of distillation techniques. In contrast to the previous state of the art, we propose to firstly construct low-dimensional manifolds for previous and current responses and minimize the dissimilarity between the responses along the geodesic connecting the manifolds. This induces a more formidable knowledge distillation with smooth properties which preserves the past knowledge more efficiently as observed by our comprehensive empirical study.
Effective information analysis generally boils down to properly identifying the structure or geometry of the data, which is often represented by a graph. In some applications, this structure may be partly determined by design constraints or pre-determined sensing arrangements, like in road transportation networks for example. In general though, the data structure is not readily available and becomes pretty difficult to define. In particular, the global smoothness assumptions, that most of the existing works adopt, are often too general and unable to properly capture localized properties of data. In this paper, we go beyond this classical data model and rather propose to represent information as a sparse combination of localized functions that live on a data structure represented by a graph. Based on this model, we focus on the problem of inferring the connectivity that best explains the data samples at different vertices of a graph that is a priori unknown. We concentrate on the case where the observed data is actually the sum of heat diffusion processes, which is a quite common model for data on networks or other irregular structures. We cast a new graph learning problem and solve it with an efficient nonconvex optimization algorithm. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data finally illustrate the benefits of the proposed graph learning framework and confirm that the data structure can be efficiently learned from data observations only. We believe that our algorithm will help solving key questions in diverse application domains such as social and biological network analysis where it is crucial to unveil proper geometry for data understanding and inference.
fMRI is a unique non-invasive approach for understanding the functional organization of the human brain, and task-based fMRI promotes identification of functionally relevant brain regions associated with a given task. Here, we use fMRI (using the Poffenberger Paradigm) data collected in mono- and dizygotic twin pairs to propose a novel approach for assessing similarity in functional networks. In particular, we compared network similarity between pairs of twins in task-relevant and task-orthogonal networks. The proposed method measures the similarity between functional networks using a geodesic distance between graph Laplacians. With method we show that networks are more similar in monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins. Furthermore, the similarity in monozygotic twins is higher for task-relevant, than task-orthogonal networks.