Distributed Low-rank Subspace Segmentation

Vision problems ranging from image clustering to motion segmentation to semi-supervised learning can naturally be framed as subspace segmentation problems, in which one aims to recover multiple low-dimensional subspaces from noisy and corrupted input data. Low-Rank Representation (LRR), a convex formulation of the subspace segmentation problem, is provably and empirically accurate on small problems but does not scale to the massive sizes of modern vision datasets. Moreover, past work aimed at scaling up low-rank matrix factorization is not applicable to LRR given its non-decomposable constraints. In this work, we propose a novel divide-and-conquer algorithm for large-scale subspace segmentation that can cope with LRR's non-decomposable constraints and maintains LRR's strong recovery guarantees. This has immediate implications for the scalability of subspace segmentation, which we demonstrate on a benchmark face recognition dataset and in simulations. We then introduce novel applications of LRR-based subspace segmentation to large-scale semi-supervised learning for multimedia event detection, concept detection, and image tagging. In each case, we obtain state-of-the-art results and order-of-magnitude speed ups

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

Unsupervised Feature Selection with Adaptive Structure Learning

The problem of feature selection has raised considerable interests in the past decade. Traditional unsupervised methods select the features which can faithfully preserve the intrinsic structures of data, where the intrinsic structures are estimated using all the input features of data. However, the estimated intrinsic structures are unreliable/inaccurate when the redundant and noisy features are not removed. Therefore, we face a dilemma here: one need the true structures of data to identify the informative features, and one need the informative features to accurately estimate the true structures of data. To address this, we propose a unified learning framework which performs structure learning and feature selection simultaneously. The structures are adaptively learned from the results of feature selection, and the informative features are reselected to preserve the refined structures of data. By leveraging the interactions between these two essential tasks, we are able to capture accurate structures and select more informative features. Experimental results on many benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state of the art unsupervised feature selection methods