arXiv subjects

Alexander Cloninger

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Cloninger.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Linearized Optimal Transport pyLOT Library: A Toolkit for Machine Learning on Point Clouds

The pyLOT library offers a Python implementation of linearized optimal transport (LOT) techniques and methods to use in downstream tasks. The pipeline embeds probability distributions into a Hilbert space via the Optimal Transport maps from a fixed reference distribution, and this linearization allows downstream tasks to be completed using off the shelf (linear) machine learning algorithms. We provide a case study of performing ML on 3D scans of lemur teeth, where the original questions of classification, clustering, dimension reduction, and data generation reduce to simple linear operations performed on the LOT embedded representations.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

Semi-Supervised Manifold Learning with Complexity Decoupled Chart Autoencoders

Autoencoding is a popular method in representation learning. Conventional autoencoders employ symmetric encoding-decoding procedures and a simple Euclidean latent space to detect hidden low-dimensional structures in an unsupervised way. Some modern approaches to novel data generation such as generative adversarial networks askew this symmetry, but still employ a pair of massive networks--one to generate the image and another to judge the images quality based on priors learned from a training set. This work introduces a chart autoencoder with an asymmetric encoding-decoding process that can incorporate additional semi-supervised information such as class labels. Besides enhancing the capability for handling data with complicated topological and geometric structures, the proposed model can successfully differentiate nearby but disjoint manifolds and intersecting manifolds with only a small amount of supervision. Moreover, this model only requires a low-complexity encoding operation, such as a locally defined linear projection. We discuss the approximation power of such networks and derive a bound that essentially depends on the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold rather than the dimension of ambient space. Next we incorporate bounds for the sampling rate of training data need to faithfully represent a given data manifold. We present numerical experiments that verify that the proposed model can effectively manage data with multi-class nearby but disjoint manifolds of different classes, overlapping manifolds, and manifolds with non-trivial topology. Finally, we conclude with some experiments on computer vision and molecular dynamics problems which showcase the efficacy of our methods on real-world data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Semi-Supervised Laplace Learning on Stiefel Manifolds

Motivated by the need to address the degeneracy of canonical Laplace learning algorithms in low label rates, we propose to reformulate graph-based semi-supervised learning as a nonconvex generalization of a \emph{Trust-Region Subproblem} (TRS). This reformulation is motivated by the well-posedness of Laplacian eigenvectors in the limit of infinite unlabeled data. To solve this problem, we first show that a first-order condition implies the solution of a manifold alignment problem and that solutions to the classical \emph{Orthogonal Procrustes} problem can be used to efficiently find good classifiers that are amenable to further refinement. To tackle refinement, we develop the framework of Sequential Subspace Optimization for graph-based SSL. Next, we address the criticality of selecting supervised samples at low-label rates. We characterize informative samples with a novel measure of centrality derived from the principal eigenvectors of a certain submatrix of the graph Laplacian. We demonstrate that our framework achieves lower classification error compared to recent state-of-the-art and classical semi-supervised learning methods at extremely low, medium, and high label rates.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Training Guarantees of Neural Network Classification Two-Sample Tests by Kernel Analysis

We construct and analyze a neural network two-sample test to determine whether two datasets came from the same distribution (null hypothesis) or not (alternative hypothesis). We perform time-analysis on a neural tangent kernel (NTK) two-sample test. In particular, we derive the theoretical minimum training time needed to ensure the NTK two-sample test detects a deviation-level between the datasets. Similarly, we derive the theoretical maximum training time before the NTK two-sample test detects a deviation-level. By approximating the neural network dynamics with the NTK dynamics, we extend this time-analysis to the realistic neural network two-sample test generated from time-varying training dynamics and finite training samples. A similar extension is done for the neural network two-sample test generated from time-varying training dynamics but trained on the population. To give statistical guarantees, we show that the statistical power associated with the neural network two-sample test goes to 1 as the neural network training samples and test evaluation samples go to infinity. Additionally, we prove that the training times needed to detect the same deviation-level in the null and alternative hypothesis scenarios are well-separated. Finally, we run some experiments showcasing a two-layer neural network two-sample test on a hard two-sample test problem and plot a heatmap of the statistical power of the two-sample test in relation to training time and network complexity.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2024

OTClean: Data Cleaning for Conditional Independence Violations using Optimal Transport

Ensuring Conditional Independence (CI) constraints is pivotal for the development of fair and trustworthy machine learning models. In this paper, we introduce \sys, a framework that harnesses optimal transport theory for data repair under CI constraints. Optimal transport theory provides a rigorous framework for measuring the discrepancy between probability distributions, thereby ensuring control over data utility. We formulate the data repair problem concerning CIs as a Quadratically Constrained Linear Program (QCLP) and propose an alternating method for its solution. However, this approach faces scalability issues due to the computational cost associated with computing optimal transport distances, such as the Wasserstein distance. To overcome these scalability challenges, we reframe our problem as a regularized optimization problem, enabling us to develop an iterative algorithm inspired by Sinkhorn's matrix scaling algorithm, which efficiently addresses high-dimensional and large-scale data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed methods, showcasing their practical utility in real-world data cleaning and preprocessing tasks. Furthermore, we provide comparisons with traditional approaches, highlighting the superiority of our techniques in terms of preserving data utility while ensuring adherence to the desired CI constraints.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Point Cloud Classification via Deep Set Linearized Optimal Transport

We introduce Deep Set Linearized Optimal Transport, an algorithm designed for the efficient simultaneous embedding of point clouds into an $L^2-$space. This embedding preserves specific low-dimensional structures within the Wasserstein space while constructing a classifier to distinguish between various classes of point clouds. Our approach is motivated by the observation that $L^2-$distances between optimal transport maps for distinct point clouds, originating from a shared fixed reference distribution, provide an approximation of the Wasserstein-2 distance between these point clouds, under certain assumptions. To learn approximations of these transport maps, we employ input convex neural networks (ICNNs) and establish that, under specific conditions, Euclidean distances between samples from these ICNNs closely mirror Wasserstein-2 distances between the true distributions. Additionally, we train a discriminator network that attaches weights these samples and creates a permutation invariant classifier to differentiate between different classes of point clouds. We showcase the advantages of our algorithm over the standard deep set approach through experiments on a flow cytometry dataset with a limited number of labeled point clouds.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Random Walks, Conductance, and Resistance for the Connection Graph Laplacian

We investigate the concept of effective resistance in connection graphs, expanding its traditional application from undirected graphs. We propose a robust definition of effective resistance in connection graphs by focusing on the duality of Dirichlet-type and Poisson-type problems on connection graphs. Additionally, we delve into random walks, taking into account both node transitions and vector rotations. This approach introduces novel concepts of effective conductance and resistance matrices for connection graphs, capturing mean rotation matrices corresponding to random walk transitions. Thereby, it provides new theoretical insights for network analysis and optimization.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2023

Effective resistance in metric spaces

Effective resistance (ER) is an attractive way to interrogate the structure of graphs. It is an alternative to computing the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian. One attractive application of ER is to point clouds, i.e. graphs whose vertices correspond to IID samples from a distribution over a metric space. Unfortunately, it was shown that the ER between any two points converges to a trivial quantity that holds no information about the graph's structure as the size of the sample increases to infinity. In this study, we show that this trivial solution can be circumvented by considering a region-based ER between pairs of small regions rather than pairs of points and by scaling the edge weights appropriately with respect to the underlying density in each region. By keeping the regions fixed, we show analytically that the region-based ER converges to a non-trivial limit as the number of points increases to infinity. Namely the ER on a metric space. We support our theoretical findings with numerical experiments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Linearized Wasserstein dimensionality reduction with approximation guarantees

We introduce LOT Wassmap, a computationally feasible algorithm to uncover low-dimensional structures in the Wasserstein space. The algorithm is motivated by the observation that many datasets are naturally interpreted as probability measures rather than points in $\mathbb{R}^n$, and that finding low-dimensional descriptions of such datasets requires manifold learning algorithms in the Wasserstein space. Most available algorithms are based on computing the pairwise Wasserstein distance matrix, which can be computationally challenging for large datasets in high dimensions. Our algorithm leverages approximation schemes such as Sinkhorn distances and linearized optimal transport to speed-up computations, and in particular, avoids computing a pairwise distance matrix. We provide guarantees on the embedding quality under such approximations, including when explicit descriptions of the probability measures are not available and one must deal with finite samples instead. Experiments demonstrate that LOT Wassmap attains correct embeddings and that the quality improves with increased sample size. We also show how LOT Wassmap significantly reduces the computational cost when compared to algorithms that depend on pairwise distance computations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Evaluating Disentanglement in Generative Models Without Knowledge of Latent Factors

Probabilistic generative models provide a flexible and systematic framework for learning the underlying geometry of data. However, model selection in this setting is challenging, particularly when selecting for ill-defined qualities such as disentanglement or interpretability. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a method for ranking generative models based on the training dynamics exhibited during learning. Inspired by recent theoretical characterizations of disentanglement, our method does not require supervision of the underlying latent factors. We evaluate our approach by demonstrating the need for disentanglement metrics which do not require labels\textemdash the underlying generative factors. We additionally demonstrate that our approach correlates with baseline supervised methods for evaluating disentanglement. Finally, we show that our method can be used as an unsupervised indicator for downstream performance on reinforcement learning and fairness-classification problems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Sigma-Delta and Distributed Noise-Shaping Quantization Methods for Random Fourier Features

We propose the use of low bit-depth Sigma-Delta and distributed noise-shaping methods for quantizing the Random Fourier features (RFFs) associated with shift-invariant kernels. We prove that our quantized RFFs -- even in the case of $1$-bit quantization -- allow a high accuracy approximation of the underlying kernels, and the approximation error decays at least polynomially fast as the dimension of the RFFs increases. We also show that the quantized RFFs can be further compressed, yielding an excellent trade-off between memory use and accuracy. Namely, the approximation error now decays exponentially as a function of the bits used. Moreover, we empirically show by testing the performance of our methods on several machine learning tasks that our method compares favorably to other state of the art quantization methods in this context.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Supervised learning of sheared distributions using linearized optimal transport

In this paper we study supervised learning tasks on the space of probability measures. We approach this problem by embedding the space of probability measures into $L^2$ spaces using the optimal transport framework. In the embedding spaces, regular machine learning techniques are used to achieve linear separability. This idea has proved successful in applications and when the classes to be separated are generated by shifts and scalings of a fixed measure. This paper extends the class of elementary transformations suitable for the framework to families of shearings, describing conditions under which two classes of sheared distributions can be linearly separated. We furthermore give necessary bounds on the transformations to achieve a pre-specified separation level, and show how multiple embeddings can be used to allow for larger families of transformations. We demonstrate our results on image classification tasks.

math.ST↗

arXiv2021

LDLE: Low Distortion Local Eigenmaps

We present Low Distortion Local Eigenmaps (LDLE), a manifold learning technique which constructs a set of low distortion local views of a dataset in lower dimension and registers them to obtain a global embedding. The local views are constructed using the global eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian and are registered using Procrustes analysis. The choice of these eigenvectors may vary across the regions. In contrast to existing techniques, LDLE can embed closed and non-orientable manifolds into their intrinsic dimension by tearing them apart. It also provides gluing instruction on the boundary of the torn embedding to help identify the topology of the original manifold. Our experimental results will show that LDLE largely preserved distances up to a constant scale while other techniques produced higher distortion. We also demonstrate that LDLE produces high quality embeddings even when the data is noisy or sparse.

math.SP↗

arXiv2021

Kernel distance measures for time series, random fields and other structured data

This paper introduces kdiff, a novel kernel-based measure for estimating distances between instances of time series, random fields and other forms of structured data. This measure is based on the idea of matching distributions that only overlap over a portion of their region of support. Our proposed measure is inspired by MPdist which has been previously proposed for such datasets and is constructed using Euclidean metrics, whereas kdiff is constructed using non-linear kernel distances. Also, kdiff accounts for both self and cross similarities across the instances and is defined using a lower quantile of the distance distribution. Comparing the cross similarity to self similarity allows for measures of similarity that are more robust to noise and partial occlusions of the relevant signals. Our proposed measure kdiff is a more general form of the well known kernel-based Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) distance estimated over the embeddings. Some theoretical results are provided for separability conditions using kdiff as a distance measure for clustering and classification problems where the embedding distributions can be modeled as two component mixtures. Applications are demonstrated for clustering of synthetic and real-life time series and image data, and the performance of kdiff is compared to competing distance measures for clustering.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

StreaMRAK a Streaming Multi-Resolution Adaptive Kernel Algorithm

Kernel ridge regression (KRR) is a popular scheme for non-linear non-parametric learning. However, existing implementations of KRR require that all the data is stored in the main memory, which severely limits the use of KRR in contexts where data size far exceeds the memory size. Such applications are increasingly common in data mining, bioinformatics, and control. A powerful paradigm for computing on data sets that are too large for memory is the streaming model of computation, where we process one data sample at a time, discarding each sample before moving on to the next one. In this paper, we propose StreaMRAK - a streaming version of KRR. StreaMRAK improves on existing KRR schemes by dividing the problem into several levels of resolution, which allows continual refinement to the predictions. The algorithm reduces the memory requirement by continuously and efficiently integrating new samples into the training model. With a novel sub-sampling scheme, StreaMRAK reduces memory and computational complexities by creating a sketch of the original data, where the sub-sampling density is adapted to the bandwidth of the kernel and the local dimensionality of the data. We present a showcase study on two synthetic problems and the prediction of the trajectory of a double pendulum. The results show that the proposed algorithm is fast and accurate.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Linear Optimal Transport Embedding: Provable Wasserstein classification for certain rigid transformations and perturbations

Discriminating between distributions is an important problem in a number of scientific fields. This motivated the introduction of Linear Optimal Transportation (LOT), which embeds the space of distributions into an $L^2$-space. The transform is defined by computing the optimal transport of each distribution to a fixed reference distribution, and has a number of benefits when it comes to speed of computation and to determining classification boundaries. In this paper, we characterize a number of settings in which LOT embeds families of distributions into a space in which they are linearly separable. This is true in arbitrary dimension, and for families of distributions generated through perturbations of shifts and scalings of a fixed distribution.We also prove conditions under which the $L^2$ distance of the LOT embedding between two distributions in arbitrary dimension is nearly isometric to Wasserstein-2 distance between those distributions. This is of significant computational benefit, as one must only compute $N$ optimal transport maps to define the $N^2$ pairwise distances between $N$ distributions. We demonstrate the benefits of LOT on a number of distribution classification problems.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

A deep network construction that adapts to intrinsic dimensionality beyond the domain

We study the approximation of two-layer compositions $f(x) = g(ϕ(x))$ via deep networks with ReLU activation, where $ϕ$ is a geometrically intuitive, dimensionality reducing feature map. We focus on two intuitive and practically relevant choices for $ϕ$: the projection onto a low-dimensional embedded submanifold and a distance to a collection of low-dimensional sets. We achieve near optimal approximation rates, which depend only on the complexity of the dimensionality reducing map $ϕ$ rather than the ambient dimension. Since $ϕ$ encapsulates all nonlinear features that are material to the function $f$, this suggests that deep nets are faithful to an intrinsic dimension governed by $f$ rather than the complexity of the domain of $f$. In particular, the prevalent assumption of approximating functions on low-dimensional manifolds can be significantly relaxed using functions of type $f(x) = g(ϕ(x))$ with $ϕ$ representing an orthogonal projection onto the same manifold.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Natural Graph Wavelet Packet Dictionaries

We introduce a set of novel multiscale basis transforms for signals on graphs that utilize their "dual" domains by incorporating the "natural" distances between graph Laplacian eigenvectors, rather than simply using the eigenvalue ordering. These basis dictionaries can be seen as generalizations of the classical Shannon wavelet packet dictionary to arbitrary graphs, and do not rely on the frequency interpretation of Laplacian eigenvalues. We describe the algorithms (involving either vector rotations or orthogonalizations) to construct these basis dictionaries, use them to efficiently approximate graph signals through the best basis search, and demonstrate the strengths of these basis dictionaries for graph signals measured on sunflower graphs and street networks.

eess.SP↗