arXiv subjects

Haim Avron

Publications and source records attributed to Haim Avron.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Near Optimal Reconstruction of Spherical Harmonic Expansions

We propose an algorithm for robust recovery of the spherical harmonic expansion of functions defined on the d-dimensional unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ using a near-optimal number of function evaluations. We show that for any $f \in L^2(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$, the number of evaluations of $f$ needed to recover its degree-$q$ spherical harmonic expansion equals the dimension of the space of spherical harmonics of degree at most $q$ up to a logarithmic factor. Moreover, we develop a simple yet efficient algorithm to recover degree-$q$ expansion of $f$ by only evaluating the function on uniformly sampled points on $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$. Our algorithm is based on the connections between spherical harmonics and Gegenbauer polynomials and leverage score sampling methods. Unlike the prior results on fast spherical harmonic transform, our proposed algorithm works efficiently using a nearly optimal number of samples in any dimension d. We further illustrate the empirical performance of our algorithm on numerical examples.

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arXiv2022

Random Gegenbauer Features for Scalable Kernel Methods

We propose efficient random features for approximating a new and rich class of kernel functions that we refer to as Generalized Zonal Kernels (GZK). Our proposed GZK family, generalizes the zonal kernels (i.e., dot-product kernels on the unit sphere) by introducing radial factors in their Gegenbauer series expansion, and includes a wide range of ubiquitous kernel functions such as the entirety of dot-product kernels as well as the Gaussian and the recently introduced Neural Tangent kernels. Interestingly, by exploiting the reproducing property of the Gegenbauer polynomials, we can construct efficient random features for the GZK family based on randomly oriented Gegenbauer kernels. We prove subspace embedding guarantees for our Gegenbauer features which ensures that our features can be used for approximately solving learning problems such as kernel k-means clustering, kernel ridge regression, etc. Empirical results show that our proposed features outperform recent kernel approximation methods.

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arXiv2022

On the Convergence of Inexact Predictor-Corrector Methods for Linear Programming

Interior point methods (IPMs) are a common approach for solving linear programs (LPs) with strong theoretical guarantees and solid empirical performance. The time complexity of these methods is dominated by the cost of solving a linear system of equations at each iteration. In common applications of linear programming, particularly in machine learning and scientific computing, the size of this linear system can become prohibitively large, requiring the use of iterative solvers, which provide an approximate solution to the linear system. However, approximately solving the linear system at each iteration of an IPM invalidates the theoretical guarantees of common IPM analyses. To remedy this, we theoretically and empirically analyze (slightly modified) predictor-corrector IPMs when using approximate linear solvers: our approach guarantees that, when certain conditions are satisfied, the number of IPM iterations does not increase and that the final solution remains feasible. We also provide practical instantiations of approximate linear solvers that satisfy these conditions for special classes of constraint matrices using randomized linear algebra.

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arXiv2021

Scaling Neural Tangent Kernels via Sketching and Random Features

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) characterizes the behavior of infinitely-wide neural networks trained under least squares loss by gradient descent. Recent works also report that NTK regression can outperform finitely-wide neural networks trained on small-scale datasets. However, the computational complexity of kernel methods has limited its use in large-scale learning tasks. To accelerate learning with NTK, we design a near input-sparsity time approximation algorithm for NTK, by sketching the polynomial expansions of arc-cosine kernels: our sketch for the convolutional counterpart of NTK (CNTK) can transform any image using a linear runtime in the number of pixels. Furthermore, we prove a spectral approximation guarantee for the NTK matrix, by combining random features (based on leverage score sampling) of the arc-cosine kernels with a sketching algorithm. We benchmark our methods on various large-scale regression and classification tasks and show that a linear regressor trained on our CNTK features matches the accuracy of exact CNTK on CIFAR-10 dataset while achieving 150x speedup.

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arXiv2021

Dimensionality Reduction of Longitudinal 'Omics Data using Modern Tensor Factorization

Precision medicine is a clinical approach for disease prevention, detection and treatment, which considers each individual's genetic background, environment and lifestyle. The development of this tailored avenue has been driven by the increased availability of omics methods, large cohorts of temporal samples, and their integration with clinical data. Despite the immense progression, existing computational methods for data analysis fail to provide appropriate solutions for this complex, high-dimensional and longitudinal data. In this work we have developed a new method termed TCAM, a dimensionality reduction technique for multi-way data, that overcomes major limitations when doing trajectory analysis of longitudinal omics data. Using real-world data, we show that TCAM outperforms traditional methods, as well as state-of-the-art tensor-based approaches for longitudinal microbiome data analysis. Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of TCAM by applying it to several different omics datasets, and the applicability of it as a drop-in replacement within straightforward ML tasks.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2021

Semi-Infinite Linear Regression and Its Applications

Finite linear least squares is one of the core problems of numerical linear algebra, with countless applications across science and engineering. Consequently, there is a rich and ongoing literature on algorithms for solving linear least squares problems. In this paper, we explore a variant in which the system's matrix has one infinite dimension (i.e., it is a quasimatrix). We call such problems semi-infinite linear regression problems. As we show, the semi-infinite case arises in several applications, such as supervised learning and function approximation, and allows for novel interpretations of existing algorithms. We explore semi-infinite linear regression rigorously and algorithmically. To that end, we give a formal framework for working with quasimatrices, and generalize several algorithms designed for the finite problem to the infinite case. Finally, we suggest the use of various sampling methods for obtaining an approximate solution.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

Randomized Continuous Frames in Time-Frequency Analysis

Recently, a Monte Carlo approach was proposed for processing highly redundant continuous frames. In this paper we present and analyze applications of this new theory. The computational complexity of the Monte Carlo method relies on the continuous frame being so called linear volume discretizable (LVD). The LVD property means that the number of samples in the coefficient space required by the Monte Carlo method is proportional to the resolution of the discrete signal. We show in this paper that the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and the localizing time-frequency transform (LTFT) are LVD. The LTFT is a time-frequency representation based on a 3D time-frequency space with a richer class of time-frequency atoms than classical time-frequency transforms like the short time Fourier transform (STFT) and the CWT. Our analysis proves that performing signal processing with the LTFT has the same asymptotic complexity as signal processing with the STFT and CWT (based on FFT), even though the coefficient space of the LTFT is higher dimensional.

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arXiv2021

Randomized Signal Processing with Continuous Frames

This paper focuses on signal processing tasks in which the signal is transformed from the signal space to a higher dimensional coefficient space (also called phase space) using a continuous frame, processed in the coefficient space, and synthesized to an output signal. We show how to approximate such methods, termed phase space signal processing methods, using a Monte Carlo method. As opposed to standard discretizations of continuous frames, based on sampling discrete frames from the continuous system, the proposed Monte Carlo method is directly a quadrature approximation of the continuous frame. We show that the Monte Carlo method allows working with highly redundant continuous frames, since the number of samples required for a certain accuracy is proportional to the dimension of the signal space, and not to the dimension of the phase space. Moreover, even though the continuous frame is highly redundant, the Monte Carlo samples are spread uniformly, and hence represent the coefficient space more faithfully than standard frame discretizations.

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arXiv2021

Quasi Monte Carlo Time-Frequency Analysis

We study signal processing tasks in which the signal is mapped via some generalized time-frequency transform to a higher dimensional time-frequency space, processed there, and synthesized to an output signal. We show how to approximate such methods using a quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) approach. We consider cases where the time-frequency representation is redundant, having feature axes in addition to the time and frequency axes. The proposed QMC method allows sampling both efficiently and evenly such redundant time-frequency representations. Indeed, 1) the number of samples required for a certain accuracy is log-linear in the resolution of the signal space, and depends only weakly on the dimension of the redundant time-frequency space, and 2) the quasi-random samples have low discrepancy, so they are spread evenly in the redundant time-frequency space. One example of such redundant representation is the localizing time-frequency transform (LTFT), where the time-frequency plane is enhanced by a third axis. This higher dimensional time-frequency space improves the quality of some time-frequency signal processing tasks, like the phase vocoder (an audio signal processing effect). Since the computational complexity of the QMC is log-linear in the resolution of the signal space, this higher dimensional time-frequency space does not degrade the computation complexity of the proposed QMC method. The proposed QMC method is more efficient than standard Monte Carlo methods, since the deterministic QMC sample points are optimally spread in the time-frequency space, while random samples are not.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

Experimental Design for Overparameterized Learning with Application to Single Shot Deep Active Learning

The impressive performance exhibited by modern machine learning models hinges on the ability to train such models on a very large amounts of labeled data. However, since access to large volumes of labeled data is often limited or expensive, it is desirable to alleviate this bottleneck by carefully curating the training set. Optimal experimental design is a well-established paradigm for selecting data point to be labeled so to maximally inform the learning process. Unfortunately, classical theory on optimal experimental design focuses on selecting examples in order to learn underparameterized (and thus, non-interpolative) models, while modern machine learning models such as deep neural networks are overparameterized, and oftentimes are trained to be interpolative. As such, classical experimental design methods are not applicable in many modern learning setups. Indeed, the predictive performance of underparameterized models tends to be variance dominated, so classical experimental design focuses on variance reduction, while the predictive performance of overparameterized models can also be, as is shown in this paper, bias dominated or of mixed nature. In this paper we propose a design strategy that is well suited for overparameterized regression and interpolation, and we demonstrate the applicability of our method in the context of deep learning by proposing a new algorithm for single shot deep active learning.

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arXiv2021

Random Features for the Neural Tangent Kernel

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has discovered connections between deep neural networks and kernel methods with insights of optimization and generalization. Motivated by this, recent works report that NTK can achieve better performances compared to training neural networks on small-scale datasets. However, results under large-scale settings are hardly studied due to the computational limitation of kernel methods. In this work, we propose an efficient feature map construction of the NTK of fully-connected ReLU network which enables us to apply it to large-scale datasets. We combine random features of the arc-cosine kernels with a sketching-based algorithm which can run in linear with respect to both the number of data points and input dimension. We show that dimension of the resulting features is much smaller than other baseline feature map constructions to achieve comparable error bounds both in theory and practice. We additionally utilize the leverage score based sampling for improved bounds of arc-cosine random features and prove a spectral approximation guarantee of the proposed feature map to the NTK matrix of two-layer neural network. We benchmark a variety of machine learning tasks to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. In particular, our algorithm can run tens of magnitude faster than the exact kernel methods for large-scale settings without performance loss.

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arXiv2021

Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks Using the Tensor M-Product

Many irregular domains such as social networks, financial transactions, neuron connections, and natural language constructs are represented using graph structures. In recent years, a variety of graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied for representation learning and prediction on such graphs. In many of the real-world applications, the underlying graph changes over time, however, most of the existing GNNs are inadequate for handling such dynamic graphs. In this paper we propose a novel technique for learning embeddings of dynamic graphs using a tensor algebra framework. Our method extends the popular graph convolutional network (GCN) for learning representations of dynamic graphs using the recently proposed tensor M-product technique. Theoretical results presented establish a connection between the proposed tensor approach and spectral convolution of tensors. The proposed method TM-GCN is consistent with the Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) framework, accounting for both spatial and temporal message passing. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the performance of the proposed method for edge classification and link prediction tasks on dynamic graphs. We also consider an application related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and show how our method can be used for early detection of infected individuals from contact tracing data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Gauss-Legendre Features for Gaussian Process Regression

Gaussian processes provide a powerful probabilistic kernel learning framework, which allows learning high quality nonparametric regression models via methods such as Gaussian process regression. Nevertheless, the learning phase of Gaussian process regression requires massive computations which are not realistic for large datasets. In this paper, we present a Gauss-Legendre quadrature based approach for scaling up Gaussian process regression via a low rank approximation of the kernel matrix. We utilize the structure of the low rank approximation to achieve effective hyperparameter learning, training and prediction. Our method is very much inspired by the well-known random Fourier features approach, which also builds low-rank approximations via numerical integration. However, our method is capable of generating high quality approximation to the kernel using an amount of features which is poly-logarithmic in the number of training points, while similar guarantees will require an amount that is at the very least linear in the number of training points when random Fourier features. Furthermore, the structure of the low-rank approximation that our method builds is subtly different from the one generated by random Fourier features, and this enables much more efficient hyperparameter learning. The utility of our method for learning with low-dimensional datasets is demonstrated using numerical experiments.

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arXiv2020

Polynomial Tensor Sketch for Element-wise Function of Low-Rank Matrix

This paper studies how to sketch element-wise functions of low-rank matrices. Formally, given low-rank matrix A = [Aij] and scalar non-linear function f, we aim for finding an approximated low-rank representation of the (possibly high-rank) matrix [f(Aij)]. To this end, we propose an efficient sketching-based algorithm whose complexity is significantly lower than the number of entries of A, i.e., it runs without accessing all entries of [f(Aij)] explicitly. The main idea underlying our method is to combine a polynomial approximation of f with the existing tensor sketch scheme for approximating monomials of entries of A. To balance the errors of the two approximation components in an optimal manner, we propose a novel regression formula to find polynomial coefficients given A and f. In particular, we utilize a coreset-based regression with a rigorous approximation guarantee. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed scheme under various machine learning tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Speeding up Linear Programming using Randomized Linear Algebra

Linear programming (LP) is an extremely useful tool and has been successfully applied to solve various problems in a wide range of areas, including operations research, engineering, economics, or even more abstract mathematical areas such as combinatorics. It is also used in many machine learning applications, such as $\ell_1$-regularized SVMs, basis pursuit, nonnegative matrix factorization, etc. Interior Point Methods (IPMs) are one of the most popular methods to solve LPs both in theory and in practice. Their underlying complexity is dominated by the cost of solving a system of linear equations at each iteration. In this paper, we consider \emph{infeasible} IPMs for the special case where the number of variables is much larger than the number of constraints. Using tools from Randomized Linear Algebra, we present a preconditioning technique that, when combined with the Conjugate Gradient iterative solver, provably guarantees that infeasible IPM algorithms (suitably modified to account for the error incurred by the approximate solver), converge to a feasible, approximately optimal solution, without increasing their iteration complexity. Our empirical evaluations verify our theoretical results on both real-world and synthetic data.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Tensor-Tensor Products for Optimal Representation and Compression

In this era of big data, data analytics and machine learning, it is imperative to find ways to compress large data sets such that intrinsic features necessary for subsequent analysis are not lost. The traditional workhorse for data dimensionality reduction and feature extraction has been the matrix SVD, which presupposes that the data has been arranged in matrix format. Our main goal in this study is to show that high-dimensional data sets are more compressible when treated as tensors (aka multiway arrays) and compressed via tensor-SVDs under the tensor-tensor product structures in (Kilmer and Martin, 2011; Kernfeld et al., 2015). We begin by proving Eckart Young optimality results for families of tensor-SVDs under two different truncation strategies. As such optimality properties can be proven in both matrix and tensor-based algebras, a fundamental question arises: does the tensor construct subsume the matrix construct in terms of representation efficiency? The answer is yes, as shown when we prove that a tensor-tensor representation of an equal dimensional spanning space can be superior to its matrix counterpart. We then investigate how the compressed representation provided by the truncated tensor-SVD is related both theoretically and in compression performance to its closest tensor-based analogue, truncated HOSVD (De Lathauwer et al., 2000; De Lathauwer and Vandewalle, 2004), thereby showing the potential advantages of our tensor-based algorithms. Finally, we propose new tensor truncated SVD variants, namely multi-way tensor SVDs, provide further approximated representation efficiency and discuss under which conditions they are considered optimal. We conclude with a numerical study demonstrating the utility of the theory.

math.NA↗

arXiv2019

Sketching for Principal Component Regression

Principal component regression (PCR) is a useful method for regularizing linear regression. Although conceptually simple, straightforward implementations of PCR have high computational costs and so are inappropriate when learning with large scale data. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for computing approximate PCR solutions that are, on one hand, high quality approximations to the true PCR solutions (when viewed as minimizer of a constrained optimization problem), and on the other hand entertain rigorous risk bounds (when viewed as statistical estimators). In particular, we propose an input sparsity time algorithms for approximate PCR. We also consider computing an approximate PCR in the streaming model, and kernel PCR. Empirical results demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed methods.

math.NA↗

arXiv2018

A Universal Sampling Method for Reconstructing Signals with Simple Fourier Transforms

Reconstructing continuous signals from a small number of discrete samples is a fundamental problem across science and engineering. In practice, we are often interested in signals with 'simple' Fourier structure, such as bandlimited, multiband, and Fourier sparse signals. More broadly, any prior knowledge about a signal's Fourier power spectrum can constrain its complexity. Intuitively, signals with more highly constrained Fourier structure require fewer samples to reconstruct. We formalize this intuition by showing that, roughly, a continuous signal from a given class can be approximately reconstructed using a number of samples proportional to the *statistical dimension* of the allowed power spectrum of that class. Further, in nearly all settings, this natural measure tightly characterizes the sample complexity of signal reconstruction. Surprisingly, we also show that, up to logarithmic factors, a universal non-uniform sampling strategy can achieve this optimal complexity for *any class of signals*. We present a simple and efficient algorithm for recovering a signal from the samples taken. For bandlimited and sparse signals, our method matches the state-of-the-art. At the same time, it gives the first computationally and sample efficient solution to a broad range of problems, including multiband signal reconstruction and kriging and Gaussian process regression tasks in one dimension. Our work is based on a novel connection between randomized linear algebra and signal reconstruction with constrained Fourier structure. We extend tools based on statistical leverage score sampling and column-based matrix reconstruction to the approximation of continuous linear operators that arise in signal reconstruction. We believe that these extensions are of independent interest and serve as a foundation for tackling a broad range of continuous time problems using randomized methods.

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