Sketching for Large-Scale Learning of Mixture Models

Learning parameters from voluminous data can be prohibitive in terms of memory and computational requirements. We propose a "compressive learning" framework where we estimate model parameters from a sketch of the training data. This sketch is a collection of generalized moments of the underlying probability distribution of the data. It can be computed in a single pass on the training set, and is easily computable on streams or distributed datasets. The proposed framework shares similarities with compressive sensing, which aims at drastically reducing the dimension of high-dimensional signals while preserving the ability to reconstruct them. To perform the estimation task, we derive an iterative algorithm analogous to sparse reconstruction algorithms in the context of linear inverse problems. We exemplify our framework with the compressive estimation of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), providing heuristics on the choice of the sketching procedure and theoretical guarantees of reconstruction. We experimentally show on synthetic data that the proposed algorithm yields results comparable to the classical Expectation-Maximization (EM) technique while requiring significantly less memory and fewer computations when the number of database elements is large. We further demonstrate the potential of the approach on real large-scale data (over 10 8 training samples) for the task of model-based speaker verification. Finally, we draw some connections between the proposed framework and approximate Hilbert space embedding of probability distributions using random features. We show that the proposed sketching operator can be seen as an innovative method to design translation-invariant kernels adapted to the analysis of GMMs. We also use this theoretical framework to derive information preservation guarantees, in the spirit of infinite-dimensional compressive sensing

Non-rigid Shape Matching Using Geometry and Photometry

International audienceIn this paper, we tackle the problem of finding correspondences between three-dimensional reconstructions of a deformable surface at different time steps. We suppose that (i) the mechanical underlying model imposes time-constant geodesic distances between points on the surface; and that (ii) images of the real surface are available. This is for instance the case in spatio-temporal shape from videos (e.g. multi-view stereo, visual hulls, etc.) when the surface is supposed approximatively unstretchable. These assumptions allow to exploit both geometry and photometry. In particular we propose an energy based formulation of the problem, extending the work of Bronstein et of. [1]. On the one hand, we show that photometry (i) improves accuracy in case of locally elastic deformations or noisy surfaces and (ii) allows to still find the right solution when [1] fails because of ambiguities (e.g. symmetries). On the other hand, using geometry makes it possible to match shapes that have undergone large motion, which is not possible with usual photometric methods. Numerical experiments prove the efficiency of our method on synthetic and real data

What functions can Graph Neural Networks compute on random graphs? The role of Positional Encoding

We aim to deepen the theoretical understanding of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs, with a focus on their expressive power. Existing analyses relate this notion to the graph isomorphism problem, which is mostly relevant for graphs of small sizes, or studied graph classification or regression tasks, while prediction tasks on nodes are far more relevant on large graphs. Recently, several works showed that, on very general random graphs models, GNNs converge to certains functions as the number of nodes grows. In this paper, we provide a more complete and intuitive description of the function space generated by equivariant GNNs for node-tasks, through general notions of convergence that encompass several previous examples. We emphasize the role of input node features, and study the impact of node Positional Encodings (PEs), a recent line of work that has been shown to yield state-of-the-art results in practice. Through the study of several examples of PEs on large random graphs, we extend previously known universality results to significantly more general models. Our theoretical results hint at some normalization tricks, which is shown numerically to have a positive impact on GNN generalization on synthetic and real data. Our proofs contain new concentration inequalities of independent interest

Stability of Entropic Wasserstein Barycenters and application to random geometric graphs

As interest in graph data has grown in recent years, the computation of various geometric tools has become essential. In some area such as mesh processing, they often rely on the computation of geodesics and shortest paths in discretized manifolds. A recent example of such a tool is the computation of Wasserstein barycenters (WB), a very general notion of barycenters derived from the theory of Optimal Transport, and their entropic-regularized variant. In this paper, we examine how WBs on discretized meshes relate to the geometry of the underlying manifold. We first provide a generic stability result with respect to the input cost matrices. We then apply this result to random geometric graphs on manifolds, whose shortest paths converge to geodesics, hence proving the consistency of WBs computed on discretized shapes

Convergence of Message Passing Graph Neural Networks with Generic Aggregation On Large Random Graphs

We study the convergence of message passing graph neural networks on random graph models to their continuous counterpart as the number of nodes tends to infinity. Until now, this convergence was only known for architectures with aggregation functions in the form of degree-normalized means. We extend such results to a very large class of aggregation functions, that encompasses all classically used message passing graph neural networks, such as attention-based mesage passing or max convolutional message passing on top of (degree-normalized) convolutional message passing. Under mild assumptions, we give non asymptotic bounds with high probability to quantify this convergence. Our main result is based on the McDiarmid inequality. Interestingly, we treat the case where the aggregation is a coordinate-wise maximum separately, at it necessitates a very different proof technique and yields a qualitatively different convergence rate

The geometry of off-the-grid compressed sensing

International audienceThis paper presents a sharp geometric analysis of the recovery performance of sparse regularization. More specifically, we analyze the BLASSO method which estimates a sparse measure (sum of Dirac masses) from randomized sub-sampled measurements. This is a "continuous", often called off-the-grid, extension of the compressed sensing problem, where the $\ell^1$ norm is replaced by the total variation of measures. This extension is appealing from a numerical perspective because it avoids to discretize the the space by some grid. But more importantly, it makes explicit the geometry of the problem since the positions of the Diracs can now freely move over the parameter space. On a methodological level, our contribution is to propose the Fisher geodesic distance on this parameter space as the canonical metric to analyze super-resolution in a way which is invariant to reparameterization of this space. Switching to the Fisher metric allows us to take into account measurement operators which are not translation invariant, which is crucial for applications such as Laplace inversion in imaging, Gaussian mixtures estimation and training of multilayer perceptrons with one hidden layer. On a theoretical level, our main contribution shows that if the Fisher distance between spikes is larger than a Rayleigh separation constant, then the BLASSO recovers in a stable way a stream of Diracs, provided that the number of measurements is proportional (up to log factors) to the number of Diracs. We measure the stability using an optimal transport distance constructed on top of the Fisher geodesic distance. Our result is (up to log factor) sharp and does not require any randomness assumption on the amplitudes of the underlying measure. Our proof technique relies on an infinite-dimensional extension of the so-called "golfing scheme" which operates over the space of measures and is of general interest

Not too little, not too much: a theoretical analysis of graph (over)smoothing

International audienceWe analyze graph smoothing with \emph{mean aggregation}, where each node successively receives the average of the features of its neighbors. Indeed, it has quickly been observed that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generally follow some variant of Message-Passing (MP) with repeated aggregation, may be subject to the \emph{oversmoothing} phenomenon: by performing too many rounds of MP, the node features tend to converge to a non-informative limit. In the case of mean aggregation, for connected graphs, the node features become constant across the whole graph. At the other end of the spectrum, it is intuitively obvious that \emph{some} MP rounds are necessary, but existing analyses do not exhibit both phenomena at once: beneficial ``finite'' smoothing and oversmoothing in the limit. In this paper, we consider simplified linear GNNs, and rigorously analyze two examples for which a finite number of mean aggregation steps provably improves the learning performance, before oversmoothing kicks in. We consider a latent space random graph model, where node features are partial observations of the latent variables and the graph contains pairwise relationships between them. We show that graph smoothing restores some of the lost information, up to a certain point, by two phenomenon: graph smoothing shrinks non-principal directions in the data faster than principal ones, which is useful for regression, and shrinks nodes within communities faster than they collapse together, which improves classification

Apprentissage de modèles de mélange à large échelle par Sketching

Learning parameters from voluminous data can be prohibitive in terms of memory and computational requirements. Furthermore, new challenges arise from modern database architectures, such as the requirements for learning methods to be amenable to streaming, parallel and distributed computing. In this context, an increasingly popular approach is to first compress the database into a representation called a linear sketch, that satisfies all the mentioned requirements, then learn the desired information using only this sketch, which can be significantly faster than using the full data if the sketch is small. In this thesis, we introduce a generic methodology to fit a mixture of probability distributions on the data, using only a sketch of the database. The sketch is defined by combining two notions from the reproducing kernel literature, namely kernel mean embedding and Random Features expansions. It is seen to correspond to linear measurements of the underlying probability distribution of the data, and the estimation problem is thus analyzed under the lens of Compressive Sensing (CS), in which a (traditionally finite-dimensional) signal is randomly measured and recovered. We extend CS results to our infinite-dimensional framework, give generic conditions for successful estimation and apply them analysis to many problems, with a focus on mixture models estimation. We base our method on the construction of random sketching operators such that some Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) condition holds in the Banach space of finite signed measures with high probability. In a second part we introduce a flexible heuristic greedy algorithm to estimate mixture models from a sketch. We apply it on synthetic and real data on three problems: the estimation of centroids from a sketch, for which it is seen to be significantly faster than k-means, Gaussian Mixture Model estimation, for which it is more efficient than Expectation-Maximization, and the estimation of mixtures of multivariate stable distributions, for which, to our knowledge, it is the only algorithm capable of performing such a task.Les bases de données modernes sont de très grande taille, parfois divisées et distribuées sur plusieurs lieux de stockage, ou encore sous forme de flux de données : ceci soulève de nouveaux défis majeurs pour les méthodes d’apprentissage statistique. Une des méthodes récentes capable de s’adapter à ces situations consiste à d’abord compresser les données en une structure appelée sketch linéaire, puis ensuite de réaliser la tâche d’apprentissage en utilisant uniquement ce sketch, ce qui est extrêmement rapide si celui-ci est de petite taille. Dans cette thèse, nous définissons une telle méthode pour estimer un modèle de mélange de distributions de probabilités à partir des données, en utilisant uniquement un sketch de celles-ci. Ce sketch est défini en s’inspirant de plusieurs notions venant du domaine des méthodes à noyaux : le plongement par noyau moyen et les approximations aléatoires de noyaux. Défini comme tel, le sketch correspond à des mesures linéaires de la distribution de probabilité sous-jacente aux données. Ainsi nous analysons le problème en utilisant des outils venant du domaine de l’acquisition comprimée, dans lequel un signal est mesuré aléatoirement sans perte d’information, sous certaines conditions. Nous étendons certains résultats de l’acquisition comprimée à la dimension infinie, donnons des conditions génériques garantissant le succès de notre méthode d’estimation de modèles de mélanges, et les appliquons à plusieurs problèmes, dont notamment celui d’estimer des mélanges de distributions stables multivariées, pour lequel il n’existait à ce jour aucun estimateur. Notre analyse est basée sur la construction d’opérateurs de sketch construits aléatoirement, qui satisfont une Propriété d’Isométrie Restreinte dans l’espace de Banach des mesures finies signées avec forte probabilité. Dans une second partie, nous introduisons un algorithme glouton capable heuristiquement d’estimer un modèle de mélange depuis un sketch linéaire. Cet algorithme est appliqué sur données simulées et réelles à trois problèmes : l’estimation de centres significatifs dans les données, pour lequel on constate que la méthode de sketch est significativement plus rapide qu’un algorithme de k-moyennes classique, l’estimation de mélanges de Gaussiennes, pour lequel elle est plus rapide qu’un algorithme d’Espérance-Maximisation, et enfin l’estimation de mélange de distributions stables multivariées, pour lequel il n’existait à ce jour, à notre connaissance, aucun algorithme capable de réaliser une telle tâche