No Arabic abstract
Optimal Transport (OT) naturally arises in many machine learning applications, yet the heavy computational burden limits its wide-spread uses. To address the scalability issue, we propose an implicit generative learning-based framework called SPOT (Scalable Push-forward of Optimal Transport). Specifically, we approximate the optimal transport plan by a pushforward of a reference distribution, and cast the optimal transport problem into a minimax problem. We then can solve OT problems efficiently using primal dual stochastic gradient-type algorithms. We also show that we can recover the density of the optimal transport plan using neural ordinary differential equations. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets illustrate that SPOT is robust and has favorable convergence behavior. SPOT also allows us to efficiently sample from the optimal transport plan, which benefits downstream applications such as domain adaptation.
Computing optimal transport maps between high-dimensional and continuous distributions is a challenging problem in optimal transport (OT). Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are powerful generative models which have been successfully applied to learn maps across high-dimensional domains. However, little is known about the nature of the map learned with a GAN objective. To address this problem, we propose a generative adversarial model in which the discriminators objective is the $2$-Wasserstein metric. We show that during training, our generator follows the $W_2$-geodesic between the initial and the target distributions. As a consequence, it reproduces an optimal map at the end of training. We validate our approach empirically in both low-dimensional and high-dimensional continuous settings, and show that it outperforms prior methods on image data.
Decision tree optimization is notoriously difficult from a computational perspective but essential for the field of interpretable machine learning. Despite efforts over the past 40 years, only recently have optimization breakthroughs been made that have allowed practical algorithms to find optimal decision trees. These new techniques have the potential to trigger a paradigm shift where it is possible to construct sparse decision trees to efficiently optimize a variety of objective functions without relying on greedy splitting and pruning heuristics that often lead to suboptimal solutions. The contribution in this work is to provide a general framework for decision tree optimization that addresses the two significant open problems in the area: treatment of imbalanced data and fully optimizing over continuous variables. We present techniques that produce optimal decision trees over a variety of objectives including F-score, AUC, and partial area under the ROC convex hull. We also introduce a scalable algorithm that produces provably optimal results in the presence of continuous variables and speeds up decision tree construction by several orders of magnitude relative to the state-of-the art.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a class of deep generative models which aim to learn a target distribution in an unsupervised fashion. While they were successfully applied to many problems, training a GAN is a notoriously challenging task and requires a significant number of hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture engineering, and a non-trivial amount of tricks. The success in many practical applications coupled with the lack of a measure to quantify the failure modes of GANs resulted in a plethora of proposed losses, regularization and normalization schemes, as well as neural architectures. In this work we take a sober view of the current state of GANs from a practical perspective. We discuss and evaluate common pitfalls and reproducibility issues, open-source our code on Github, and provide pre-trained models on TensorFlow Hub.
Learning generic representations with deep networks requires massive training samples and significant computer resources. To learn a new specific task, an important issue is to transfer the generic teachers representation to a student network. In this paper, we propose to use a metric between representations that is based on a functional view of neurons. We use optimal transport to quantify the match between two representations, yielding a distance that embeds some invariances inherent to the representation of deep networks. This distance defines a regularizer promoting the similarity of the students representation with that of the teacher. Our approach can be used in any learning context where representation transfer is applicable. We experiment here on two standard settings: inductive transfer learning, where the teachers representation is transferred to a student network of same architecture for a new related task, and knowledge distillation, where the teachers representation is transferred to a student of simpler architecture for the same task (model compression). Our approach also lends itself to solving new learning problems; we demonstrate this by showing how to directly transfer the teachers representation to a simpler architecture student for a new related task.