9,600 research outputs found
Entropic Wasserstein Gradient Flows
This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows
for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved
useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations
that model for instance porous media or crowd evolutions. These gradient flows
define a suitable notion of weak solutions for these evolutions and they can be
approximated in a stable way using discrete flows. These discrete flows are
implicit Euler time stepping according to the Wasserstein metric. A bottleneck
of these approaches is the high computational load induced by the resolution of
each step. Indeed, this corresponds to the resolution of a convex optimization
problem involving a Wasserstein distance to the previous iterate. Following
several recent works on the approximation of Wasserstein distances, we consider
a discrete flow induced by an entropic regularization of the transportation
coupling. This entropic regularization allows one to trade the initial
Wasserstein fidelity term for a Kulback-Leibler divergence, which is easier to
deal with numerically. We show how KL proximal schemes, and in particular
Dykstra's algorithm, can be used to compute each step of the regularized flow.
The resulting algorithm is both fast, parallelizable and versatile, because it
only requires multiplications by a Gibbs kernel. On Euclidean domains
discretized on an uniform grid, this corresponds to a linear filtering (for
instance a Gaussian filtering when is the squared Euclidean distance) which
can be computed in nearly linear time. On more general domains, such as
(possibly non-convex) shapes or on manifolds discretized by a triangular mesh,
following a recently proposed numerical scheme for optimal transport, this
Gibbs kernel multiplication is approximated by a short-time heat diffusion
Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning
A vast majority of machine learning algorithms train their models and perform
inference by solving optimization problems. In order to capture the learning
and prediction problems accurately, structural constraints such as sparsity or
low rank are frequently imposed or else the objective itself is designed to be
a non-convex function. This is especially true of algorithms that operate in
high-dimensional spaces or that train non-linear models such as tensor models
and deep networks.
The freedom to express the learning problem as a non-convex optimization
problem gives immense modeling power to the algorithm designer, but often such
problems are NP-hard to solve. A popular workaround to this has been to relax
non-convex problems to convex ones and use traditional methods to solve the
(convex) relaxed optimization problems. However this approach may be lossy and
nevertheless presents significant challenges for large scale optimization.
On the other hand, direct approaches to non-convex optimization have met with
resounding success in several domains and remain the methods of choice for the
practitioner, as they frequently outperform relaxation-based techniques -
popular heuristics include projected gradient descent and alternating
minimization. However, these are often poorly understood in terms of their
convergence and other properties.
This monograph presents a selection of recent advances that bridge a
long-standing gap in our understanding of these heuristics. The monograph will
lead the reader through several widely used non-convex optimization techniques,
as well as applications thereof. The goal of this monograph is to both,
introduce the rich literature in this area, as well as equip the reader with
the tools and techniques needed to analyze these simple procedures for
non-convex problems.Comment: The official publication is available from now publishers via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/220000005
Regularized Optimal Transport and the Rot Mover's Distance
This paper presents a unified framework for smooth convex regularization of
discrete optimal transport problems. In this context, the regularized optimal
transport turns out to be equivalent to a matrix nearness problem with respect
to Bregman divergences. Our framework thus naturally generalizes a previously
proposed regularization based on the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy related to the
Kullback-Leibler divergence, and solved with the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. We
call the regularized optimal transport distance the rot mover's distance in
reference to the classical earth mover's distance. We develop two generic
schemes that we respectively call the alternate scaling algorithm and the
non-negative alternate scaling algorithm, to compute efficiently the
regularized optimal plans depending on whether the domain of the regularizer
lies within the non-negative orthant or not. These schemes are based on
Dykstra's algorithm with alternate Bregman projections, and further exploit the
Newton-Raphson method when applied to separable divergences. We enhance the
separable case with a sparse extension to deal with high data dimensions. We
also instantiate our proposed framework and discuss the inherent specificities
for well-known regularizers and statistical divergences in the machine learning
and information geometry communities. Finally, we demonstrate the merits of our
methods with experiments using synthetic data to illustrate the effect of
different regularizers and penalties on the solutions, as well as real-world
data for a pattern recognition application to audio scene classification
Recent Progress in Image Deblurring
This paper comprehensively reviews the recent development of image
deblurring, including non-blind/blind, spatially invariant/variant deblurring
techniques. Indeed, these techniques share the same objective of inferring a
latent sharp image from one or several corresponding blurry images, while the
blind deblurring techniques are also required to derive an accurate blur
kernel. Considering the critical role of image restoration in modern imaging
systems to provide high-quality images under complex environments such as
motion, undesirable lighting conditions, and imperfect system components, image
deblurring has attracted growing attention in recent years. From the viewpoint
of how to handle the ill-posedness which is a crucial issue in deblurring
tasks, existing methods can be grouped into five categories: Bayesian inference
framework, variational methods, sparse representation-based methods,
homography-based modeling, and region-based methods. In spite of achieving a
certain level of development, image deblurring, especially the blind case, is
limited in its success by complex application conditions which make the blur
kernel hard to obtain and be spatially variant. We provide a holistic
understanding and deep insight into image deblurring in this review. An
analysis of the empirical evidence for representative methods, practical
issues, as well as a discussion of promising future directions are also
presented.Comment: 53 pages, 17 figure
Sparse approximations of protein structure from noisy random projections
Single-particle electron microscopy is a modern technique that biophysicists
employ to learn the structure of proteins. It yields data that consist of noisy
random projections of the protein structure in random directions, with the
added complication that the projection angles cannot be observed. In order to
reconstruct a three-dimensional model, the projection directions need to be
estimated by use of an ad-hoc starting estimate of the unknown particle. In
this paper we propose a methodology that does not rely on knowledge of the
projection angles, to construct an objective data-dependent low-resolution
approximation of the unknown structure that can serve as such a starting
estimate. The approach assumes that the protein admits a suitable sparse
representation, and employs discrete -regularization (LASSO) as well as
notions from shape theory to tackle the peculiar challenges involved in the
associated inverse problem. We illustrate the approach by application to the
reconstruction of an E. coli protein component called the Klenow fragment.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS479 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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