The Unbalanced Gromov Wasserstein Distance: Conic Formulation and Relaxation

Comparing metric measure spaces (i.e. a metric space endowed with aprobability distribution) is at the heart of many machine learning problems. The most popular distance between such metric measure spaces is theGromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance, which is the solution of a quadratic assignment problem. The GW distance is however limited to the comparison of metric measure spaces endowed with a probability distribution.To alleviate this issue, we introduce two Unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein formulations: a distance and a more tractable upper-bounding relaxation.They both allow the comparison of metric spaces equipped with arbitrary positive measures up to isometries. The first formulation is a positive and definite divergence based on a relaxation of the mass conservation constraint using a novel type of quadratically-homogeneous divergence. This divergence works hand in hand with the entropic regularization approach which is popular to solve large scale optimal transport problems. We show that the underlying non-convex optimization problem can be efficiently tackled using a highly parallelizable and GPU-friendly iterative scheme. The second formulation is a distance between mm-spaces up to isometries based on a conic lifting. Lastly, we provide numerical experiments onsynthetic examples and domain adaptation data with a Positive-Unlabeled learning task to highlight the salient features of the unbalanced divergence and its potential applications in ML

Sinkhorn Divergences for Unbalanced Optimal Transport

Optimal transport induces the Earth Mover's (Wasserstein) distance between probability distributions, a geometric divergence that is relevant to a wide range of problems. Over the last decade, two relaxations of optimal transport have been studied in depth: unbalanced transport, which is robust to the presence of outliers and can be used when distributions don't have the same total mass; entropy-regularized transport, which is robust to sampling noise and lends itself to fast computations using the Sinkhorn algorithm. This paper combines both lines of work to put robust optimal transport on solid ground. Our main contribution is a generalization of the Sinkhorn algorithm to unbalanced transport: our method alternates between the standard Sinkhorn updates and the pointwise application of a contractive function. This implies that entropic transport solvers on grid images, point clouds and sampled distributions can all be modified easily to support unbalanced transport, with a proof of linear convergence that holds in all settings. We then show how to use this method to define pseudo-distances on the full space of positive measures that satisfy key geometric axioms: (unbalanced) Sinkhorn divergences are differentiable, positive, definite, convex, statistically robust and avoid any "entropic bias" towards a shrinkage of the measures' supports

Interpolating between Optimal Transport and MMD using Sinkhorn Divergences

Comparing probability distributions is a fundamental problem in data sciences. Simple norms and divergences such as the total variation and the relative entropy only compare densities in a point-wise manner and fail to capture the geometric nature of the problem. In sharp contrast, Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Optimal Transport distances (OT) are two classes of distances between measures that take into account the geometry of the underlying space and metrize the convergence in law. This paper studies the Sinkhorn divergences, a family of geometric divergences that interpolates between MMD and OT. Relying on a new notion of geometric entropy, we provide theoretical guarantees for these divergences: positivity, convexity and metrization of the convergence in law. On the practical side, we detail a numerical scheme that enables the large scale application of these divergences for machine learning: on the GPU, gradients of the Sinkhorn loss can be computed for batches of a million samples

Faster Unbalanced Optimal Transport: Translation invariant Sinkhorn and 1-D Frank-Wolfe

International audienceUnbalanced optimal transport (UOT) extends optimal transport (OT) to take into account mass variations to compare distributions. This is crucial to make OT successful in ML applications, making it robust to data normalization and outliers. The baseline algorithm is Sinkhorn, but its convergence speed might be significantly slower for UOT than for OT. In this work, we identify the cause for this deficiency, namely the lack of a global normalization of the iterates, which equivalently corresponds to a translation of the dual OT potentials. Our first contribution leverages this idea to develop a provably accelerated Sinkhorn algorithm (coined 'translation invariant Sinkhorn') for UOT, bridging the computational gap with OT. Our second contribution focusses on 1-D UOT and proposes a Frank-Wolfe solver applied to this translation invariant formulation. The linear oracle of each steps amounts to solving a 1-D OT problems, resulting in a linear time complexity per iteration. Our last contribution extends this method to the computation of UOT barycenter of 1-D measures. Numerical simulations showcase the convergence speed improvement brought by these three approaches

Unbalanced minibatch Optimal Transport; applications to Domain Adaptation

International audienceOptimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines

Unbalanced minibatch Optimal Transport; applications to Domain Adaptation

International audienceOptimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines

Interpolating between Optimal Transport and MMD using Sinkhorn Divergences

Comparing probability distributions is a fundamental problem in data sciences. Simple norms and divergences such as the total variation and the relative entropy only compare densities in a point-wise manner and fail to capture the geometric nature of the problem. In sharp contrast, Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Optimal Transport distances (OT) are two classes of distances between measures that take into account the geometry of the underlying space and metrize the convergence in law. This paper studies the Sinkhorn divergences, a family of geometric divergences that interpolates between MMD and OT. Relying on a new notion of geometric entropy, we provide theoretical guarantees for these divergences: positivity, convexity and metrization of the convergence in law. On the practical side, we detail a numerical scheme that enables the large scale application of these divergences for machine learning: on the GPU, gradients of the Sinkhorn loss can be computed for batches of a million samples

Low versus standard calorie and protein feeding in ventilated adults with shock: a randomised, controlled, multicentre, open-label, parallel-group trial (NUTRIREA-3)

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