7,137 research outputs found
Implicit sampling for path integral control, Monte Carlo localization, and SLAM
The applicability and usefulness of implicit sampling in stochastic optimal
control, stochastic localization, and simultaneous localization and mapping
(SLAM), is explored; implicit sampling is a recently-developed
variationally-enhanced sampling method. The theory is illustrated with
examples, and it is found that implicit sampling is significantly more
efficient than current Monte Carlo methods in test problems for all three
applications
Exploring Algorithmic Limits of Matrix Rank Minimization under Affine Constraints
Many applications require recovering a matrix of minimal rank within an
affine constraint set, with matrix completion a notable special case. Because
the problem is NP-hard in general, it is common to replace the matrix rank with
the nuclear norm, which acts as a convenient convex surrogate. While elegant
theoretical conditions elucidate when this replacement is likely to be
successful, they are highly restrictive and convex algorithms fail when the
ambient rank is too high or when the constraint set is poorly structured.
Non-convex alternatives fare somewhat better when carefully tuned; however,
convergence to locally optimal solutions remains a continuing source of
failure. Against this backdrop we derive a deceptively simple and
parameter-free probabilistic PCA-like algorithm that is capable, over a wide
battery of empirical tests, of successful recovery even at the theoretical
limit where the number of measurements equal the degrees of freedom in the
unknown low-rank matrix. Somewhat surprisingly, this is possible even when the
affine constraint set is highly ill-conditioned. While proving general recovery
guarantees remains evasive for non-convex algorithms, Bayesian-inspired or
otherwise, we nonetheless show conditions whereby the underlying cost function
has a unique stationary point located at the global optimum; no existing cost
function we are aware of satisfies this same property. We conclude with a
simple computer vision application involving image rectification and a standard
collaborative filtering benchmark
Self-Paced Learning: an Implicit Regularization Perspective
Self-paced learning (SPL) mimics the cognitive mechanism of humans and
animals that gradually learns from easy to hard samples. One key issue in SPL
is to obtain better weighting strategy that is determined by minimizer
function. Existing methods usually pursue this by artificially designing the
explicit form of SPL regularizer. In this paper, we focus on the minimizer
function, and study a group of new regularizer, named self-paced implicit
regularizer that is deduced from robust loss function. Based on the convex
conjugacy theory, the minimizer function for self-paced implicit regularizer
can be directly learned from the latent loss function, while the analytic form
of the regularizer can be even known. A general framework (named SPL-IR) for
SPL is developed accordingly. We demonstrate that the learning procedure of
SPL-IR is associated with latent robust loss functions, thus can provide some
theoretical inspirations for its working mechanism. We further analyze the
relation between SPL-IR and half-quadratic optimization. Finally, we implement
SPL-IR to both supervised and unsupervised tasks, and experimental results
corroborate our ideas and demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of
implicit regularizers.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Implicit particle methods and their connection with variational data assimilation
The implicit particle filter is a sequential Monte Carlo method for data
assimilation that guides the particles to the high-probability regions via a
sequence of steps that includes minimizations. We present a new and more
general derivation of this approach and extend the method to particle smoothing
as well as to data assimilation for perfect models. We show that the
minimizations required by implicit particle methods are similar to the ones one
encounters in variational data assimilation and explore the connection of
implicit particle methods with variational data assimilation. In particular, we
argue that existing variational codes can be converted into implicit particle
methods at a low cost, often yielding better estimates, that are also equipped
with quantitative measures of the uncertainty. A detailed example is presented
Robust and Efficient Recovery of Rigid Motion from Subspace Constraints Solved using Recursive Identification of Nonlinear Implicit Systems
The problem of estimating rigid motion from projections may be characterized using a nonlinear dynamical system, composed of the rigid motion transformation and the perspective map. The time derivative of the output of such a system, which is also called the "motion field", is bilinear in the motion parameters, and may be used to specify a subspace constraint on either the direction of translation or the inverse depth of the observed points. Estimating motion may then be formulated as an optimization task constrained on such a subspace. Heeger and Jepson [5], who first introduced this constraint, solve the optimization task using an extensive search over the possible directions of translation.
We reformulate the optimization problem in a systems theoretic framework as the the identification of a dynamic system in exterior differential form with parameters on a differentiable manifold, and use techniques which pertain to nonlinear estimation and identification theory to perform the optimization task in a principled manner. The general technique for addressing such identification problems [14] has been used successfully in addressing other problems in computational vision [13, 12].
The application of the general method [14] results in a recursive and pseudo-optimal solution of the motion problem, which has robustness properties far superior to other existing techniques we have implemented.
By releasing the constraint that the visible points lie in front of the observer, we may explain some psychophysical effects on the nonrigid percept of rigidly moving shapes.
Experiments on real and synthetic image sequences show very promising results in terms of robustness, accuracy and computational efficiency
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