arXiv subjects

Deanna Needell

Publications and source records attributed to Deanna Needell.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Stochastic Iterative Methods for Online Rank Aggregation from Pairwise Comparisons

In this paper, we consider large-scale ranking problems where one is given a set of (possibly non-redundant) pairwise comparisons and the underlying ranking explained by those comparisons is desired. We show that stochastic gradient descent approaches can be leveraged to offer convergence to a solution that reveals the underlying ranking while requiring low-memory operations. We introduce several variations of this approach that offer a tradeoff in speed and convergence when the pairwise comparisons are noisy (i.e., some comparisons do not respect the underlying ranking). We prove theoretical results for convergence almost surely and study several regimes including those with full observations, partial observations, and noisy observations. Our empirical results give insights into the number of observations required as well as how much noise in those measurements can be tolerated.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Block Matrix and Tensor Randomized Kaczmarz Methods for Linear Feasibility Problems

The randomized Kaczmarz methods are a popular and effective family of iterative methods for solving large-scale linear systems of equations, which have also been applied to linear feasibility problems. In this work, we propose a new block variant of the randomized Kaczmarz method, B-MRK, for solving linear feasibility problems defined by matrices. We show that B-MRK converges linearly in expectation to the feasible region.Furthermore, we extend the method to solve tensor linear feasibility problems defined under the tensor t-product. A tensor randomized Kaczmarz (TRK) method, TRK-L, is proposed for solving linear feasibility problems that involve mixed equality and inequality constraints. Additionally, we introduce another TRK method, TRK-LB, specifically tailored for cases where the feasible region is defined by linear equality constraints coupled with bound constraints on the variables. We show that both of the TRK methods converge linearly in expectation to the feasible region. Moreover, the effectiveness of our methods is demonstrated through numerical experiments on various Gaussian random data and applications in image deblurring.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Convergence and Complexity Guarantee for Inexact First-order Riemannian Optimization Algorithms

We analyze inexact Riemannian gradient descent (RGD) where Riemannian gradients and retractions are inexactly (and cheaply) computed. Our focus is on understanding when inexact RGD converges and what is the complexity in the general nonconvex and constrained setting. We answer these questions in a general framework of tangential Block Majorization-Minimization (tBMM). We establish that tBMM converges to an $ε$-stationary point within $O(ε^{-2})$ iterations. Under a mild assumption, the results still hold when the subproblem is solved inexactly in each iteration provided the total optimality gap is bounded. Our general analysis applies to a wide range of classical algorithms with Riemannian constraints including inexact RGD and proximal gradient method on Stiefel manifolds. We numerically validate that tBMM shows improved performance over existing methods when applied to various problems, including nonnegative tensor decomposition with Riemannian constraints, regularized nonnegative matrix factorization, and low-rank matrix recovery problems.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Randomized Kaczmarz in Adversarial Distributed Setting

Developing large-scale distributed methods that are robust to the presence of adversarial or corrupted workers is an important part of making such methods practical for real-world problems. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach that is adversary-tolerant for convex optimization problems. By leveraging simple statistics, our method ensures convergence and is capable of adapting to adversarial distributions. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed methods for solving convex problems is shown in simulations with the presence of adversaries. Through simulations, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in the presence of adversaries and its ability to identify adversarial workers with high accuracy and tolerate varying levels of adversary rates.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Kernel Alignment for Unsupervised Feature Selection via Matrix Factorization

By removing irrelevant and redundant features, feature selection aims to find a good representation of the original features. With the prevalence of unlabeled data, unsupervised feature selection has been proven effective in alleviating the so-called curse of dimensionality. Most existing matrix factorization-based unsupervised feature selection methods are built upon subspace learning, but they have limitations in capturing nonlinear structural information among features. It is well-known that kernel techniques can capture nonlinear structural information. In this paper, we construct a model by integrating kernel functions and kernel alignment, which can be equivalently characterized as a matrix factorization problem. However, such an extension raises another issue: the algorithm performance heavily depends on the choice of kernel, which is often unknown a priori. Therefore, we further propose a multiple kernel-based learning method. By doing so, our model can learn both linear and nonlinear similarity information and automatically generate the most appropriate kernel. Experimental analysis on real-world data demonstrates that the two proposed methods outperform other classic and state-of-the-art unsupervised feature selection methods in terms of clustering results and redundancy reduction in almost all datasets tested.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

The Manifold Scattering Transform for High-Dimensional Point Cloud Data

The manifold scattering transform is a deep feature extractor for data defined on a Riemannian manifold. It is one of the first examples of extending convolutional neural network-like operators to general manifolds. The initial work on this model focused primarily on its theoretical stability and invariance properties but did not provide methods for its numerical implementation except in the case of two-dimensional surfaces with predefined meshes. In this work, we present practical schemes, based on the theory of diffusion maps, for implementing the manifold scattering transform to datasets arising in naturalistic systems, such as single cell genetics, where the data is a high-dimensional point cloud modeled as lying on a low-dimensional manifold. We show that our methods are effective for signal classification and manifold classification tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Harnessing the Power of Sample Abundance: Theoretical Guarantees and Algorithms for Accelerated One-Bit Sensing

One-bit quantization with time-varying sampling thresholds (also known as random dithering) has recently found significant utilization potential in statistical signal processing applications due to its relatively low power consumption and low implementation cost. In addition to such advantages, an attractive feature of one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is their superior sampling rates as compared to their conventional multi-bit counterparts. This characteristic endows one-bit signal processing frameworks with what one may refer to as sample abundance. We show that sample abundance plays a pivotal role in many signal recovery and optimization problems that are formulated as (possibly non-convex) quadratic programs with linear feasibility constraints. Of particular interest to our work are low-rank matrix recovery and compressed sensing applications that take advantage of one-bit quantization. We demonstrate that the sample abundance paradigm allows for the transformation of such problems to merely linear feasibility problems by forming large-scale overdetermined linear systems -- thus removing the need for handling costly optimization constraints and objectives. To make the proposed computational cost savings achievable, we offer enhanced randomized Kaczmarz algorithms to solve these highly overdetermined feasibility problems and provide theoretical guarantees in terms of their convergence, sample size requirements, and overall performance. Several numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Iterative Singular Tube Hard Thresholding Algorithms for Tensor Recovery

Due to the explosive growth of large-scale data sets, tensors have been a vital tool to analyze and process high-dimensional data. Different from the matrix case, tensor decomposition has been defined in various formats, which can be further used to define the best low-rank approximation of a tensor to significantly reduce the dimensionality for signal compression and recovery. In this paper, we consider the low-rank tensor recovery problem when the tubal rank of the underlying tensor is given or estimated a priori. We propose a novel class of iterative singular tube hard thresholding algorithms for tensor recovery based on the low-tubal-rank tensor approximation, including basic, accelerated deterministic and stochastic versions. Convergence guarantees are provided along with the special case when the measurements are linear. Numerical experiments on tensor compressive sensing and color image inpainting are conducted to demonstrate convergence and computational efficiency in practice.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

Stratified-NMF for Heterogeneous Data

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is an important technique for obtaining low dimensional representations of datasets. However, classical NMF does not take into account data that is collected at different times or in different locations, which may exhibit heterogeneity. We resolve this problem by solving a modified NMF objective, Stratified-NMF, that simultaneously learns strata-dependent statistics and a shared topics matrix. We develop multiplicative update rules for this novel objective and prove convergence of the objective. Then, we experiment on synthetic data to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the method. Lastly, we apply our method to three real world datasets and empirically investigate their learned features.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Training shallow ReLU networks on noisy data using hinge loss: when do we overfit and is it benign?

We study benign overfitting in two-layer ReLU networks trained using gradient descent and hinge loss on noisy data for binary classification. In particular, we consider linearly separable data for which a relatively small proportion of labels are corrupted or flipped. We identify conditions on the margin of the clean data that give rise to three distinct training outcomes: benign overfitting, in which zero loss is achieved and with high probability test data is classified correctly; overfitting, in which zero loss is achieved but test data is misclassified with probability lower bounded by a constant; and non-overfitting, in which clean points, but not corrupt points, achieve zero loss and again with high probability test data is classified correctly. Our analysis provides a fine-grained description of the dynamics of neurons throughout training and reveals two distinct phases: in the first phase clean points achieve close to zero loss, in the second phase clean points oscillate on the boundary of zero loss while corrupt points either converge towards zero loss or are eventually zeroed by the network. We prove these results using a combinatorial approach that involves bounding the number of clean versus corrupt updates across these phases of training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Testing Positive Semidefiniteness Using Linear Measurements

We study the problem of testing whether a symmetric $d \times d$ input matrix $A$ is symmetric positive semidefinite (PSD), or is $ε$-far from the PSD cone, meaning that $λ_{\min}(A) \leq - ε\|A\|_p$, where $\|A\|_p$ is the Schatten-$p$ norm of $A$. In applications one often needs to quickly tell if an input matrix is PSD, and a small distance from the PSD cone may be tolerable. We consider two well-studied query models for measuring efficiency, namely, the matrix-vector and vector-matrix-vector query models. We first consider one-sided testers, which are testers that correctly classify any PSD input, but may fail on a non-PSD input with a tiny failure probability. Up to logarithmic factors, in the matrix-vector query model we show a tight $\widetildeΘ(1/ε^{p/(2p+1)})$ bound, while in the vector-matrix-vector query model we show a tight $\widetildeΘ(d^{1-1/p}/ε)$ bound, for every $p \geq 1$. We also show a strong separation between one-sided and two-sided testers in the vector-matrix-vector model, where a two-sided tester can fail on both PSD and non-PSD inputs with a tiny failure probability. In particular, for the important case of the Frobenius norm, we show that any one-sided tester requires $\widetildeΩ(\sqrt{d}/ε)$ queries. However we introduce a bilinear sketch for two-sided testing from which we construct a Frobenius norm tester achieving the optimal $\widetilde{O}(1/ε^2)$ queries. We also give a number of additional separations between adaptive and non-adaptive testers. Our techniques have implications beyond testing, providing new methods to approximate the spectrum of a matrix with Frobenius norm error using dimensionality reduction in a way that preserves the signs of eigenvalues.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Robust Tensor CUR Decompositions: Rapid Low-Tucker-Rank Tensor Recovery with Sparse Corruption

We study the tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) problem, a tensorial extension of matrix robust principal component analysis (RPCA), that aims to split the given tensor into an underlying low-rank component and a sparse outlier component. This work proposes a fast algorithm, called Robust Tensor CUR Decompositions (RTCUR), for large-scale non-convex TRPCA problems under the Tucker rank setting. RTCUR is developed within a framework of alternating projections that projects between the set of low-rank tensors and the set of sparse tensors. We utilize the recently developed tensor CUR decomposition to substantially reduce the computational complexity in each projection. In addition, we develop four variants of RTCUR for different application settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness and computational advantages of RTCUR against state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Sparseness-constrained Nonnegative Tensor Factorization for Detecting Topics at Different Time Scales

Temporal data (such as news articles or Twitter feeds) often consists of a mixture of long-lasting trends and popular but short-lasting topics of interest. A truly successful topic modeling strategy should be able to detect both types of topics and clearly locate them in time. In this paper, we first show that nonnegative CANDECOMP/PARAFAC decomposition (NCPD) is able to discover topics of variable persistence automatically. Then, we propose sparseness-constrained NCPD (S-NCPD) and its online variant in order to actively control the length of the learned topics effectively and efficiently. Further, we propose quantitative ways to measure the topic length and demonstrate the ability of S-NCPD (as well as its online variant) to discover short and long-lasting temporal topics in a controlled manner in semi-synthetic and real-world data including news headlines. We also demonstrate that the online variant of S-NCPD reduces the reconstruction error more rapidly than S-NCPD.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Fast and Low-Memory Compressive Sensing Algorithms for Low Tucker-Rank Tensor Approximation from Streamed Measurements

In this paper we consider the problem of recovering a low-rank Tucker approximation to a massive tensor based solely on structured random compressive measurements. Crucially, the proposed random measurement ensembles are both designed to be compactly represented (i.e., low-memory), and can also be efficiently computed in one-pass over the tensor. Thus, the proposed compressive sensing approach may be used to produce a low-rank factorization of a huge tensor that is too large to store in memory with a total memory footprint on the order of the much smaller desired low-rank factorization. In addition, the compressive sensing recovery algorithm itself (which takes the compressive measurements as input, and then outputs a low-rank factorization) also runs in a time which principally depends only on the size of the sought factorization, making its runtime sub-linear in the size of the large tensor one is approximating. Finally, unlike prior works related to (streaming) algorithms for low-rank tensor approximation from such compressive measurements, we present a unified analysis of both Kronecker and Khatri-Rao structured measurement ensembles culminating in error guarantees comparing the error of our recovery algorithm's approximation of the input tensor to the best possible low-rank Tucker approximation error achievable for the tensor by any possible algorithm. We further include an empirical study of the proposed approach that verifies our theoretical findings and explores various trade-offs of parameters of interest.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

A Convergence Rate for Manifold Neural Networks

High-dimensional data arises in numerous applications, and the rapidly developing field of geometric deep learning seeks to develop neural network architectures to analyze such data in non-Euclidean domains, such as graphs and manifolds. Recent work by Z. Wang, L. Ruiz, and A. Ribeiro has introduced a method for constructing manifold neural networks using the spectral decomposition of the Laplace Beltrami operator. Moreover, in this work, the authors provide a numerical scheme for implementing such neural networks when the manifold is unknown and one only has access to finitely many sample points. The authors show that this scheme, which relies upon building a data-driven graph, converges to the continuum limit as the number of sample points tends to infinity. Here, we build upon this result by establishing a rate of convergence that depends on the intrinsic dimension of the manifold but is independent of the ambient dimension. We also discuss how the rate of convergence depends on the depth of the network and the number of filters used in each layer.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Stochastic Natural Thresholding Algorithms

Sparse signal recovery is one of the most fundamental problems in various applications, including medical imaging and remote sensing. Many greedy algorithms based on the family of hard thresholding operators have been developed to solve the sparse signal recovery problem. More recently, Natural Thresholding (NT) has been proposed with improved computational efficiency. This paper proposes and discusses convergence guarantees for stochastic natural thresholding algorithms by extending the NT from the deterministic version with linear measurements to the stochastic version with a general objective function. We also conduct various numerical experiments on linear and nonlinear measurements to demonstrate the performance of StoNT.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Curvature corrected tangent space-based approximation of manifold-valued data

When generalizing schemes for real-valued data approximation or decomposition to data living in Riemannian manifolds, tangent space-based schemes are very attractive for the simple reason that these spaces are linear. An open challenge is to do this in such a way that the generalized scheme is applicable to general Riemannian manifolds, is global-geometry aware and is computationally feasible. Existing schemes have been unable to account for all three of these key factors at the same time. In this work, we take a systematic approach to developing a framework that is able to account for all three factors. First, we will restrict ourselves to the -- still general -- class of symmetric Riemannian manifolds and show how curvature affects general manifold-valued tensor approximation schemes. Next, we show how the latter observations can be used in a general strategy for developing approximation schemes that are also global-geometry aware. Finally, having general applicability and global-geometry awareness taken into account we restrict ourselves once more in a case study on low-rank approximation. Here we show how computational feasibility can be achieved and propose the curvature-corrected truncated higher-order singular value decomposition (CC-tHOSVD), whose performance is subsequently tested in numerical experiments with both synthetic and real data living in symmetric Riemannian manifolds with both positive and negative curvature.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Detecting and Mitigating Indirect Stereotypes in Word Embeddings

Societal biases in the usage of words, including harmful stereotypes, are frequently learned by common word embedding methods. These biases manifest not only between a word and an explicit marker of its stereotype, but also between words that share related stereotypes. This latter phenomenon, sometimes called "indirect bias,'' has resisted prior attempts at debiasing. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Biased Indirect Relationship Modification (BIRM) to mitigate indirect bias in distributional word embeddings by modifying biased relationships between words before embeddings are learned. This is done by considering how the co-occurrence probability of a given pair of words changes in the presence of words marking an attribute of bias, and using this to average out the effect of a bias attribute. To evaluate this method, we perform a series of common tests and demonstrate that measures of bias in the word embeddings are reduced in exchange for minor reduction in the semantic quality of the embeddings. In addition, we conduct novel tests for measuring indirect stereotypes by extending the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) with new test sets for indirect binary gender stereotypes. With these tests, we demonstrate the presence of more subtle stereotypes not addressed by previous work. The proposed method is able to reduce the presence of some of these new stereotypes, serving as a crucial next step towards non-stereotyped word embeddings.

cs.CL↗