351 research outputs found
MDL Denoising Revisited
We refine and extend an earlier MDL denoising criterion for wavelet-based
denoising. We start by showing that the denoising problem can be reformulated
as a clustering problem, where the goal is to obtain separate clusters for
informative and non-informative wavelet coefficients, respectively. This
suggests two refinements, adding a code-length for the model index, and
extending the model in order to account for subband-dependent coefficient
distributions. A third refinement is derivation of soft thresholding inspired
by predictive universal coding with weighted mixtures. We propose a practical
method incorporating all three refinements, which is shown to achieve good
performance and robustness in denoising both artificial and natural signals.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, June 200
An MDL framework for sparse coding and dictionary learning
The power of sparse signal modeling with learned over-complete dictionaries
has been demonstrated in a variety of applications and fields, from signal
processing to statistical inference and machine learning. However, the
statistical properties of these models, such as under-fitting or over-fitting
given sets of data, are still not well characterized in the literature. As a
result, the success of sparse modeling depends on hand-tuning critical
parameters for each data and application. This work aims at addressing this by
providing a practical and objective characterization of sparse models by means
of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle -- a well established
information-theoretic approach to model selection in statistical inference. The
resulting framework derives a family of efficient sparse coding and dictionary
learning algorithms which, by virtue of the MDL principle, are completely
parameter free. Furthermore, such framework allows to incorporate additional
prior information to existing models, such as Markovian dependencies, or to
define completely new problem formulations, including in the matrix analysis
area, in a natural way. These virtues will be demonstrated with parameter-free
algorithms for the classic image denoising and classification problems, and for
low-rank matrix recovery in video applications
Deep AutoRegressive Networks
We introduce a deep, generative autoencoder capable of learning hierarchies
of distributed representations from data. Successive deep stochastic hidden
layers are equipped with autoregressive connections, which enable the model to
be sampled from quickly and exactly via ancestral sampling. We derive an
efficient approximate parameter estimation method based on the minimum
description length (MDL) principle, which can be seen as maximising a
variational lower bound on the log-likelihood, with a feedforward neural
network implementing approximate inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art
generative performance on a number of classic data sets: several UCI data sets,
MNIST and Atari 2600 games.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML), Beijing, China, 201
Second generation sparse models
Sparse data models, where data is assumed to be well represented as a linear combination of a few elements from a learned dictionary, have gained considerable attention in recent years, and their use has led to state-of-the-art results in many applications. The success of these models is largely attributed to two critical features: the use of sparsity as a robust mechanism for regularizing the linear coefficients that represent the data, and the flexibility provided by overcomplete dictionaries that are learned from the data. These features are controlled by two critical hyper-parameters: the desired sparsity of the coefficients, and the size of the dictionaries to be learned. However, lacking theoretical guidelines for selecting these critical parameters, applications based on sparse models often require hand-tuning and cross-validation to select them, for each application, and each data set. This can be both inefficient and ineffective. On the other hand, there are multiple scenarios in which imposing additional constraints to the produced representations, including the sparse codes and the dictionary itself, can result in further improvements. This thesis is about improving and/or extending current sparse models by addressing the two issues discussed above, providing the elements for a new generation of more powerful and flexible sparse models. First, we seek to gain a better understanding of sparse models as data modeling tools, so that critical parameters can be selected automatically, efficiently, and in a principled way. Secondly, we explore new sparse modeling formulations for effectively exploiting the prior information present in different scenarios. In order to achieve these goals, we combine ideas and tools from information theory, statistics, machine learning, and optimization theory. The theoretical contributions are complemented with applications in audio, image and video processing
Recovery from Linear Measurements with Complexity-Matching Universal Signal Estimation
We study the compressed sensing (CS) signal estimation problem where an input
signal is measured via a linear matrix multiplication under additive noise.
While this setup usually assumes sparsity or compressibility in the input
signal during recovery, the signal structure that can be leveraged is often not
known a priori. In this paper, we consider universal CS recovery, where the
statistics of a stationary ergodic signal source are estimated simultaneously
with the signal itself. Inspired by Kolmogorov complexity and minimum
description length, we focus on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation
framework that leverages universal priors to match the complexity of the
source. Our framework can also be applied to general linear inverse problems
where more measurements than in CS might be needed. We provide theoretical
results that support the algorithmic feasibility of universal MAP estimation
using a Markov chain Monte Carlo implementation, which is computationally
challenging. We incorporate some techniques to accelerate the algorithm while
providing comparable and in many cases better reconstruction quality than
existing algorithms. Experimental results show the promise of universality in
CS, particularly for low-complexity sources that do not exhibit standard
sparsity or compressibility.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure
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