2,775 research outputs found
Proximal Methods for Hierarchical Sparse Coding
Sparse coding consists in representing signals as sparse linear combinations
of atoms selected from a dictionary. We consider an extension of this framework
where the atoms are further assumed to be embedded in a tree. This is achieved
using a recently introduced tree-structured sparse regularization norm, which
has proven useful in several applications. This norm leads to regularized
problems that are difficult to optimize, and we propose in this paper efficient
algorithms for solving them. More precisely, we show that the proximal operator
associated with this norm is computable exactly via a dual approach that can be
viewed as the composition of elementary proximal operators. Our procedure has a
complexity linear, or close to linear, in the number of atoms, and allows the
use of accelerated gradient techniques to solve the tree-structured sparse
approximation problem at the same computational cost as traditional ones using
the L1-norm. Our method is efficient and scales gracefully to millions of
variables, which we illustrate in two types of applications: first, we consider
fixed hierarchical dictionaries of wavelets to denoise natural images. Then, we
apply our optimization tools in the context of dictionary learning, where
learned dictionary elements naturally organize in a prespecified arborescent
structure, leading to a better performance in reconstruction of natural image
patches. When applied to text documents, our method learns hierarchies of
topics, thus providing a competitive alternative to probabilistic topic models
Convex and Network Flow Optimization for Structured Sparsity
We consider a class of learning problems regularized by a structured
sparsity-inducing norm defined as the sum of l_2- or l_infinity-norms over
groups of variables. Whereas much effort has been put in developing fast
optimization techniques when the groups are disjoint or embedded in a
hierarchy, we address here the case of general overlapping groups. To this end,
we present two different strategies: On the one hand, we show that the proximal
operator associated with a sum of l_infinity-norms can be computed exactly in
polynomial time by solving a quadratic min-cost flow problem, allowing the use
of accelerated proximal gradient methods. On the other hand, we use proximal
splitting techniques, and address an equivalent formulation with
non-overlapping groups, but in higher dimension and with additional
constraints. We propose efficient and scalable algorithms exploiting these two
strategies, which are significantly faster than alternative approaches. We
illustrate these methods with several problems such as CUR matrix
factorization, multi-task learning of tree-structured dictionaries, background
subtraction in video sequences, image denoising with wavelets, and topographic
dictionary learning of natural image patches.Comment: to appear in the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR
Flexible Multi-layer Sparse Approximations of Matrices and Applications
The computational cost of many signal processing and machine learning
techniques is often dominated by the cost of applying certain linear operators
to high-dimensional vectors. This paper introduces an algorithm aimed at
reducing the complexity of applying linear operators in high dimension by
approximately factorizing the corresponding matrix into few sparse factors. The
approach relies on recent advances in non-convex optimization. It is first
explained and analyzed in details and then demonstrated experimentally on
various problems including dictionary learning for image denoising, and the
approximation of large matrices arising in inverse problems
Learning Word Representations with Hierarchical Sparse Coding
We propose a new method for learning word representations using hierarchical
regularization in sparse coding inspired by the linguistic study of word
meanings. We show an efficient learning algorithm based on stochastic proximal
methods that is significantly faster than previous approaches, making it
possible to perform hierarchical sparse coding on a corpus of billions of word
tokens. Experiments on various benchmark tasks---word similarity ranking,
analogies, sentence completion, and sentiment analysis---demonstrate that the
method outperforms or is competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Our word
representations are available at
\url{http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/dyogatam/wordvecs/}
Optimization with Sparsity-Inducing Penalties
Sparse estimation methods are aimed at using or obtaining parsimonious
representations of data or models. They were first dedicated to linear variable
selection but numerous extensions have now emerged such as structured sparsity
or kernel selection. It turns out that many of the related estimation problems
can be cast as convex optimization problems by regularizing the empirical risk
with appropriate non-smooth norms. The goal of this paper is to present from a
general perspective optimization tools and techniques dedicated to such
sparsity-inducing penalties. We cover proximal methods, block-coordinate
descent, reweighted -penalized techniques, working-set and homotopy
methods, as well as non-convex formulations and extensions, and provide an
extensive set of experiments to compare various algorithms from a computational
point of view
Network Flow Algorithms for Structured Sparsity
We consider a class of learning problems that involve a structured
sparsity-inducing norm defined as the sum of -norms over groups of
variables. Whereas a lot of effort has been put in developing fast optimization
methods when the groups are disjoint or embedded in a specific hierarchical
structure, we address here the case of general overlapping groups. To this end,
we show that the corresponding optimization problem is related to network flow
optimization. More precisely, the proximal problem associated with the norm we
consider is dual to a quadratic min-cost flow problem. We propose an efficient
procedure which computes its solution exactly in polynomial time. Our algorithm
scales up to millions of variables, and opens up a whole new range of
applications for structured sparse models. We present several experiments on
image and video data, demonstrating the applicability and scalability of our
approach for various problems.Comment: accepted for publication in Adv. Neural Information Processing
Systems, 201
PADDLE: Proximal Algorithm for Dual Dictionaries LEarning
Recently, considerable research efforts have been devoted to the design of
methods to learn from data overcomplete dictionaries for sparse coding.
However, learned dictionaries require the solution of an optimization problem
for coding new data. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose an
algorithm aimed at learning both a dictionary and its dual: a linear mapping
directly performing the coding. By leveraging on proximal methods, our
algorithm jointly minimizes the reconstruction error of the dictionary and the
coding error of its dual; the sparsity of the representation is induced by an
-based penalty on its coefficients. The results obtained on synthetic
data and real images show that the algorithm is capable of recovering the
expected dictionaries. Furthermore, on a benchmark dataset, we show that the
image features obtained from the dual matrix yield state-of-the-art
classification performance while being much less computational intensive
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