No Arabic abstract
We propose a novel approach to the problem of multilevel clustering, which aims to simultaneously partition data in each group and discover grouping patterns among groups in a potentially large hierarchically structured corpus of data. Our method involves a joint optimization formulation over several spaces of discrete probability measures, which are endowed with Wasserstein distance metrics. We propose several variants of this problem, which admit fast optimization algorithms, by exploiting the connection to the problem of finding Wasserstein barycenters. Consistency properties are established for the estimates of both local and global clusters. Finally, experimental results with both synthetic and real data are presented to demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of the proposed approach.
Momentum methods such as Polyaks heavy ball (HB) method, Nesterovs accelerated gradient (AG) as well as accelerated projected gradient (APG) method have been commonly used in machine learning practice, but their performance is quite sensitive to noise in the gradients. We study these methods under a first-order stochastic oracle model where noisy estimates of the gradients are available. For strongly convex problems, we show that the distribution of the iterates of AG converges with the accelerated $O(sqrt{kappa}log(1/varepsilon))$ linear rate to a ball of radius $varepsilon$ centered at a unique invariant distribution in the 1-Wasserstein metric where $kappa$ is the condition number as long as the noise variance is smaller than an explicit upper bound we can provide. Our analysis also certifies linear convergence rates as a function of the stepsize, momentum parameter and the noise variance; recovering the accelerated rates in the noiseless case and quantifying the level of noise that can be tolerated to achieve a given performance. In the special case of strongly convex quadratic objectives, we can show accelerated linear rates in the $p$-Wasserstein metric for any $pgeq 1$ with improved sensitivity to noise for both AG and HB through a non-asymptotic analysis under some additional assumptions on the noise structure. Our analysis for HB and AG also leads to improved non-asymptotic convergence bounds in suboptimality for both deterministic and stochastic settings which is of independent interest. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first linear convergence results for stochastic momentum methods under the stochastic oracle model. We also extend our results to the APG method and weakly convex functions showing accelerated rates when the noise magnitude is sufficiently small.
Much of the data being created on the web contains interactions between users and items. Stochastic blockmodels, and other methods for community detection and clustering of bipartite graphs, can infer latent user communities and latent item clusters from this interaction data. These methods, however, typically ignore the items contents and the information they provide about item clusters, despite the tendency of items in the same latent cluster to share commonalities in content. We introduce content-augmented stochastic blockmodels (CASB), which use item content together with user-item interaction data to enhance the user communities and item clusters learned. Comparisons to several state-of-the-art benchmark methods, on datasets arising from scientists interacting with scientific articles, show that content-augmented stochastic blockmodels provide highly accurate clusters with respect to metrics representative of the underlying community structure.
Existing approaches to depth or disparity estimation output a distribution over a set of pre-defined discrete values. This leads to inaccurate results when the true depth or disparity does not match any of these values. The fact that this distribution is usually learned indirectly through a regression loss causes further problems in ambiguous regions around object boundaries. We address these issues using a new neural network architecture that is capable of outputting arbitrary depth values, and a new loss function that is derived from the Wasserstein distance between the true and the predicted distributions. We validate our approach on a variety of tasks, including stereo disparity and depth estimation, and the downstream 3D object detection. Our approach drastically reduces the error in ambiguous regions, especially around object boundaries that greatly affect the localization of objects in 3D, achieving the state-of-the-art in 3D object detection for autonomous driving. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Div99/W-Stereo-Disp.
This paper considers a canonical clustering problem where one receives unlabeled samples drawn from a balanced mixture of two elliptical distributions and aims for a classifier to estimate the labels. Many popular methods including PCA and k-means require individual components of the mixture to be somewhat spherical, and perform poorly when they are stretched. To overcome this issue, we propose a non-convex program seeking for an affine transform to turn the data into a one-dimensional point cloud concentrating around -1 and 1, after which clustering becomes easy. Our theoretical contributions are two-fold: (1) we show that the non-convex loss function exhibits desirable landscape properties as long as the sample size exceeds some constant multiple of the dimension, and (2) we leverage this to prove that an efficient first-order algorithm achieves near-optimal statistical precision even without good initialization. We also propose a general methodology for multi-class clustering tasks with flexible choices of feature transforms and loss objectives.
We propose a balanced coarsening scheme for multilevel hypergraph partitioning. In addition, an initial partitioning algorithm is designed to improve the quality of k-way hypergraph partitioning. By assigning vertex weights through the LPT algorithm, we generate a prior hypergraph under a relaxed balance constraint. With the prior hypergraph, we have defined the Wasserstein discrepancy to coordinate the optimal transport of coarsening process. And the optimal transport matrix is solved by Sinkhorn algorithm. Our coarsening scheme fully takes into account the minimization of connectivity metric (objective function). For the initial partitioning stage, we define a normalized cut function induced by Fiedler vector, which is theoretically proved to be a concave function. Thereby, a three-point algorithm is designed to find the best cut under the balance constraint.