2,177 research outputs found
New Guarantees for Blind Compressed Sensing
Blind Compressed Sensing (BCS) is an extension of Compressed Sensing (CS)
where the optimal sparsifying dictionary is assumed to be unknown and subject
to estimation (in addition to the CS sparse coefficients). Since the emergence
of BCS, dictionary learning, a.k.a. sparse coding, has been studied as a matrix
factorization problem where its sample complexity, uniqueness and
identifiability have been addressed thoroughly. However, in spite of the strong
connections between BCS and sparse coding, recent results from the sparse
coding problem area have not been exploited within the context of BCS. In
particular, prior BCS efforts have focused on learning constrained and complete
dictionaries that limit the scope and utility of these efforts. In this paper,
we develop new theoretical bounds for perfect recovery for the general
unconstrained BCS problem. These unconstrained BCS bounds cover the case of
overcomplete dictionaries, and hence, they go well beyond the existing BCS
theory. Our perfect recovery results integrate the combinatorial theories of
sparse coding with some of the recent results from low-rank matrix recovery. In
particular, we propose an efficient CS measurement scheme that results in
practical recovery bounds for BCS. Moreover, we discuss the performance of BCS
under polynomial-time sparse coding algorithms.Comment: To appear in the 53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication,
Control and Computing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA,
201
Simple, Efficient, and Neural Algorithms for Sparse Coding
Sparse coding is a basic task in many fields including signal processing,
neuroscience and machine learning where the goal is to learn a basis that
enables a sparse representation of a given set of data, if one exists. Its
standard formulation is as a non-convex optimization problem which is solved in
practice by heuristics based on alternating minimization. Re- cent work has
resulted in several algorithms for sparse coding with provable guarantees, but
somewhat surprisingly these are outperformed by the simple alternating
minimization heuristics. Here we give a general framework for understanding
alternating minimization which we leverage to analyze existing heuristics and
to design new ones also with provable guarantees. Some of these algorithms seem
implementable on simple neural architectures, which was the original motivation
of Olshausen and Field (1997a) in introducing sparse coding. We also give the
first efficient algorithm for sparse coding that works almost up to the
information theoretic limit for sparse recovery on incoherent dictionaries. All
previous algorithms that approached or surpassed this limit run in time
exponential in some natural parameter. Finally, our algorithms improve upon the
sample complexity of existing approaches. We believe that our analysis
framework will have applications in other settings where simple iterative
algorithms are used.Comment: 37 pages, 1 figur
An Incidence Geometry approach to Dictionary Learning
We study the Dictionary Learning (aka Sparse Coding) problem of obtaining a
sparse representation of data points, by learning \emph{dictionary vectors}
upon which the data points can be written as sparse linear combinations. We
view this problem from a geometry perspective as the spanning set of a subspace
arrangement, and focus on understanding the case when the underlying hypergraph
of the subspace arrangement is specified. For this Fitted Dictionary Learning
problem, we completely characterize the combinatorics of the associated
subspace arrangements (i.e.\ their underlying hypergraphs). Specifically, a
combinatorial rigidity-type theorem is proven for a type of geometric incidence
system. The theorem characterizes the hypergraphs of subspace arrangements that
generically yield (a) at least one dictionary (b) a locally unique dictionary
(i.e.\ at most a finite number of isolated dictionaries) of the specified size.
We are unaware of prior application of combinatorial rigidity techniques in the
setting of Dictionary Learning, or even in machine learning. We also provide a
systematic classification of problems related to Dictionary Learning together
with various algorithms, their assumptions and performance
Distributed Dictionary Learning
The paper studies distributed Dictionary Learning (DL) problems where the
learning task is distributed over a multi-agent network with time-varying
(nonsymmetric) connectivity. This formulation is relevant, for instance, in
big-data scenarios where massive amounts of data are collected/stored in
different spatial locations and it is unfeasible to aggregate and/or process
all the data in a fusion center, due to resource limitations, communication
overhead or privacy considerations. We develop a general distributed
algorithmic framework for the (nonconvex) DL problem and establish its
asymptotic convergence. The new method hinges on Successive Convex
Approximation (SCA) techniques coupled with i) a gradient tracking mechanism
instrumental to locally estimate the missing global information; and ii) a
consensus step, as a mechanism to distribute the computations among the agents.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed algorithm with
provable convergence for the DL problem and, more in general, bi-convex
optimization problems over (time-varying) directed graphs
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