arXiv subjects

Xiao Fu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiao Fu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Stochastic Block-ADMM for Training Deep Networks

In this paper, we propose Stochastic Block-ADMM as an approach to train deep neural networks in batch and online settings. Our method works by splitting neural networks into an arbitrary number of blocks and utilizes auxiliary variables to connect these blocks while optimizing with stochastic gradient descent. This allows training deep networks with non-differentiable constraints where conventional backpropagation is not applicable. An application of this is supervised feature disentangling, where our proposed DeepFacto inserts a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) layer into the network. Since backpropagation only needs to be performed within each block, our approach alleviates vanishing gradients and provides potentials for parallelization. We prove the convergence of our proposed method and justify its capabilities through experiments in supervised and weakly-supervised settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Stochastic Mirror Descent for Low-Rank Tensor Decomposition Under Non-Euclidean Losses

This work considers low-rank canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) under a class of non-Euclidean loss functions that frequently arise in statistical machine learning and signal processing. These loss functions are often used for certain types of tensor data, e.g., count and binary tensors, where the least squares loss is considered unnatural.Compared to the least squares loss, the non-Euclidean losses are generally more challenging to handle. Non-Euclidean CPD has attracted considerable interests and a number of prior works exist. However, pressing computational and theoretical challenges, such as scalability and convergence issues, still remain. This work offers a unified stochastic algorithmic framework for large-scale CPD decomposition under a variety of non-Euclidean loss functions. Our key contribution lies in a tensor fiber sampling strategy-based flexible stochastic mirror descent framework. Leveraging the sampling scheme and the multilinear algebraic structure of low-rank tensors, the proposed lightweight algorithm ensures global convergence to a stationary point under reasonable conditions. Numerical results show that our framework attains promising non-Euclidean CPD performance. The proposed framework also exhibits substantial computational savings compared to state-of-the-art methods.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

StatEcoNet: Statistical Ecology Neural Networks for Species Distribution Modeling

This paper focuses on a core task in computational sustainability and statistical ecology: species distribution modeling (SDM). In SDM, the occurrence pattern of a species on a landscape is predicted by environmental features based on observations at a set of locations. At first, SDM may appear to be a binary classification problem, and one might be inclined to employ classic tools (e.g., logistic regression, support vector machines, neural networks) to tackle it. However, wildlife surveys introduce structured noise (especially under-counting) in the species observations. If unaccounted for, these observation errors systematically bias SDMs. To address the unique challenges of SDM, this paper proposes a framework called StatEcoNet. Specifically, this work employs a graphical generative model in statistical ecology to serve as the skeleton of the proposed computational framework and carefully integrates neural networks under the framework. The advantages of StatEcoNet over related approaches are demonstrated on simulated datasets as well as bird species data. Since SDMs are critical tools for ecological science and natural resource management, StatEcoNet may offer boosted computational and analytical powers to a wide range of applications that have significant social impacts, e.g., the study and conservation of threatened species.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A More Efficient Chinese Named Entity Recognition base on BERT and Syntactic Analysis

We propose a new Named entity recognition (NER) method to effectively make use of the results of Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and parsing while avoiding NER error caused by POS tagging error. This paper first uses Stanford natural language process (NLP) tool to annotate large-scale untagged data so as to reduce the dependence on the tagged data; then a new NLP model, g-BERT model, is designed to compress Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in order to reduce calculation quantity; finally, the model is evaluated based on Chinese NER dataset. The experimental results show that the calculation quantity in g-BERT model is reduced by 60% and performance improves by 2% with Test F1 to 96.5 compared with that in BERT model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Learning to Continuously Optimize Wireless Resource In Episodically Dynamic Environment

There has been a growing interest in developing data-driven and in particular deep neural network (DNN) based methods for modern communication tasks. For a few popular tasks such as power control, beamforming, and MIMO detection, these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance while requiring less computational efforts, less channel state information (CSI), etc. However, it is often challenging for these approaches to learn in a dynamic environment where parameters such as CSIs keep changing. This work develops a methodology that enables data-driven methods to continuously learn and optimize in a dynamic environment. Specifically, we consider an ``episodically dynamic" setting where the environment changes in ``episodes", and in each episode the environment is stationary. We propose to build the notion of continual learning (CL) into the modeling process of learning wireless systems, so that the learning model can incrementally adapt to the new episodes, {\it without forgetting} knowledge learned from the previous episodes. Our design is based on a novel min-max formulation which ensures certain ``fairness" across different data samples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the CL approach by customizing it to two popular DNN based models (one for power control and one for beamforming), and testing using both synthetic and real data sets. These numerical results show that the proposed CL approach is not only able to adapt to the new scenarios quickly and seamlessly, but importantly, it maintains high performance over the previously encountered scenarios as well.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Computing Large-Scale Matrix and Tensor Decomposition with Structured Factors: A Unified Nonconvex Optimization Perspective

The proposed article aims at offering a comprehensive tutorial for the computational aspects of structured matrix and tensor factorization. Unlike existing tutorials that mainly focus on {\it algorithmic procedures} for a small set of problems, e.g., nonnegativity or sparsity-constrained factorization, we take a {\it top-down} approach: we start with general optimization theory (e.g., inexact and accelerated block coordinate descent, stochastic optimization, and Gauss-Newton methods) that covers a wide range of factorization problems with diverse constraints and regularization terms of engineering interest. Then, we go `under the hood' to showcase specific algorithm design under these introduced principles. We pay a particular attention to recent algorithmic developments in structured tensor and matrix factorization (e.g., random sketching and adaptive step size based stochastic optimization and structure-exploiting second-order algorithms), which are the state of the art---yet much less touched upon in the literature compared to {\it block coordinate descent} (BCD)-based methods. We expect that the article to have an educational values in the field of structured factorization and hope to stimulate more research in this important and exciting direction.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Hyperspectral Super-Resolution via Interpretable Block-Term Tensor Modeling

This work revisits coupled tensor decomposition (CTD)-based hyperspectral super-resolution (HSR). HSR aims at fusing a pair of hyperspectral and multispectral images to recover a super-resolution image (SRI). The vast majority of the HSR approaches take a low-rank matrix recovery perspective. The challenge is that theoretical guarantees for recovering the SRI using low-rank matrix models are either elusive or derived under stringent conditions. A couple of recent CTD-based methods ensure recoverability for the SRI under relatively mild conditions, leveraging on algebraic properties of the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) and the Tucker decomposition models, respectively. However, the latent factors of both the CPD and Tucker models have no physical interpretations in the context of spectral image analysis, which makes incorporating prior information challenging---but using priors is often essential for enhancing performance in noisy environments. This work employs an idea that models spectral images as tensors following the block-term decomposition model with multilinear rank-$(L_r, L_r, 1)$ terms (i.e., the LL1 model) and formulates the HSR problem as a coupled LL1 tensor decomposition problem. Similar to the existing CTD approaches, recoverability of the SRI is shown under mild conditions. More importantly, the latent factors of the LL1 model can be interpreted as the key constituents of spectral images, i.e., the endmembers' spectral signatures and abundance maps. This connection allows us to easily incorporate prior information for performance enhancement. A flexible algorithmic framework that can work with a series of structural information is proposed to take advantage of the model interpretability. The effectiveness is showcased using simulated and real data.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Spectrum Cartography via Coupled Block-Term Tensor Decomposition

Spectrum cartography aims at estimating power propagation patterns over a geographical region across multiple frequency bands (i.e., a radio map)---from limited samples taken sparsely over the region. Classic cartography methods are mostly concerned with recovering the aggregate radio frequency (RF) information while ignoring the constituents of the radio map---but fine-grained emitter-level RF information is of great interest. In addition, many existing cartography methods work explicitly or implicitly assume random spatial sampling schemes that may be difficult to implement, due to legal/privacy/security issues. The theoretical aspects (e.g., identifiability of the radio map) of many existing methods are also unclear. In this work, we propose a joint radio map recovery and disaggregation method that is based on coupled block-term tensor decomposition. Our method guarantees identifiability of the individual radio map of \textit{each emitter} (thereby that of the aggregate radio map as well), under realistic conditions. The identifiability result holds under a large variety of geographical sampling patterns, including a number of pragmatic systematic sampling strategies. We also propose effective optimization algorithms to carry out the formulated radio map disaggregation problems. Extensive simulations are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Nonlinear Multiview Analysis: Identifiability and Neural Network-assisted Implementation

Multiview analysis aims at extracting shared latent components from data samples that are acquired in different domains, e.g., image, text, and audio. Classic multiview analysis, e.g., canonical correlation analysis (CCA), tackles this problem via matching the linearly transformed views in a certain latent domain. More recently, powerful nonlinear learning tools such as kernel methods and neural networks are utilized for enhancing the classic CCA. However, unlike linear CCA whose theoretical aspects are clearly understood, nonlinear CCA approaches are largely intuition-driven. In particular, it is unclear under what conditions the shared latent components across the views can be identified---while identifiability plays an essential role in many applications. In this work, we revisit nonlinear multiview analysis and address both the theoretical and computational aspects. Our work leverages a useful nonlinear model, namely, the post-nonlinear model, from the nonlinear mixture separation literature. Combining with multiview data, we take a nonlinear multiview mixture learning viewpoint, which is a natural extension of the classic generative models for linear CCA. From there, we derive a learning criterion. We show that minimizing this criterion leads to identification of the latent shared components up to certain ambiguities, under reasonable conditions. Our derivation and formulation also offer new insights and interpretations to existing deep neural network-based CCA formulations. On the computation side, we propose an effective algorithm with simple and scalable update rules. A series of simulations and real-data experiments corroborate our theoretical analysis.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Block-Randomized Stochastic Proximal Gradient for Low-Rank Tensor Factorization

This work considers the problem of computing the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) of large tensors. Prior works mostly leverage data sparsity to handle this problem, which is not suitable for handling dense tensors that often arise in applications such as medical imaging, computer vision, and remote sensing. Stochastic optimization is known for its low memory cost and per-iteration complexity when handling dense data. However, exisiting stochastic CPD algorithms are not flexible enough to incorporate a variety of constraints/regularizations that are of interest in signal and data analytics. Convergence properties of many such algorithms are also unclear. In this work, we propose a stochastic optimization framework for large-scale CPD with constraints/regularizations. The framework works under a doubly randomized fashion, and can be regarded as a judicious combination of randomized block coordinate descent (BCD) and stochastic proximal gradient (SPG). The algorithm enjoys lightweight updates and small memory footprint. In addition, this framework entails considerable flexibility---many frequently used regularizers and constraints can be readily handled under the proposed scheme. The approach is also supported by convergence analysis. Numerical results on large-scale dense tensors are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Hyperspectral Super-Resolution via Global-Local Low-Rank Matrix Estimation

Hyperspectral super-resolution (HSR) is a problem that aims to estimate an image of high spectral and spatial resolutions from a pair of co-registered multispectral (MS) and hyperspectral (HS) images, which have coarser spectral and spatial resolutions, respectively. In this paper we pursue a low-rank matrix estimation approach for HSR. We assume that the spectral-spatial matrices associated with the whole image and the local areas of the image have low-rank structures. The local low-rank assumption, in particular, has the aim of providing a more flexible model for accounting for local variation effects due to endmember variability. We formulate the HSR problem as a global-local rank-regularized least-squares problem. By leveraging on the recent advances in non-convex large-scale optimization, namely, the smooth Schatten-p approximation and the accelerated majorization-minimization method, we develop an efficient algorithm for the global-local low-rank problem. Numerical experiments on synthetic, semi-real and real data show that the proposed algorithm outperforms a number of benchmark algorithms in terms of recovery performance.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

On Recoverability of Randomly Compressed Tensors with Low CP Rank

Our interest lies in the recoverability properties of compressed tensors under the \textit{canonical polyadic decomposition} (CPD) model. The considered problem is well-motivated in many applications, e.g., hyperspectral image and video compression. Prior work studied this problem under somewhat special assumptions---e.g., the latent factors of the tensor are sparse or drawn from absolutely continuous distributions. We offer an alternative result: We show that if the tensor is compressed by a subgaussian linear mapping, then the tensor is recoverable if the number of measurements is on the same order of magnitude as that of the model parameters---without strong assumptions on the latent factors. Our proof is based on deriving a \textit{restricted isometry property} (R.I.P.) under the CPD model via set covering techniques, and thus exhibits a flavor of classic compressive sensing. The new recoverability result enriches the understanding to the compressed CP tensor recovery problem; it offers theoretical guarantees for recovering tensors whose elements are not necessarily continuous or sparse.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Efficient Green Emission from Edge States in Graphene Perforated by Nitrogen Plasma Treatment

Plasma functionalization of graphene is one of the facile ways to tune its doping level without the need for wet chemicals making graphene photoluminescent. Microscopic corrugations in the two-dimensional structure of bilayer CVD graphene having a quasi-free-suspended top layer, such as graphene ripples, nanodomes, and bubbles, may significantly enhance local reactivity leading to etching effects on exposure to plasma. Here, we discovered that bilayer CVD graphene treated with nitrogen plasma exhibits efficient UV-green-red emission, where the excitation at 250 nm leads to photoluminescence with the peaks at 390, 470, and 620 nm, respectively. By using Raman scattering and spectroscopic ellipsometry, we investigated doping effects induced by oxygen or nitrogen plasma on the optical properties of single- and bilayer CVD graphene. The surface morphology of the samples was studied by atomic force microscopy. It is revealed that the top sheet of bilayer graphene becomes perforated after the treatment by nitrogen plasma. Our comprehensive study indicates that the dominant green emission is associated with the edge defect structure of perforated graphene filled with nitrogen. The discovered efficient emission appearing in nitrogen plasma treated perforated graphene may have a significant potential for the development of advanced optoelectronic materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Hyperspectral Super-resolution: A Coupled Nonnegative Block-term Tensor Decomposition Approach

Hyperspectral super-resolution (HSR) aims at fusing a hyperspectral image (HSI) and a multispectral image (MSI) to produce a super-resolution image (SRI). Recently, a coupled tensor factorization approach was proposed to handle this challenging problem, which admits a series of advantages over the classic matrix factorization-based methods. In particular, modeling the HSI and MSI as low-rank tensors following the {\it canonical polyadic decomposition} (CPD) model, the approach is able to provably identify the SRI, under some mild conditions. However, the latent factors in the CPD model have no physical meaning, which makes utilizing prior information of spectral images as constraints or regularizations difficult---but using such information is often important in practice, especially when the data is noisy. In this work, we propose an alternative coupled tensor decomposition approach, where the HSI and MSI are assumed to follow the {\it block-term decomposition (BTD)} model. Notably, the new method also entails identifiability of the SRI under realistic conditions. More importantly, when modeling a spectral image as a BTD tensor, the latent factors have clear physical meaning, and thus prior knowledge about spectral images can be naturally incorporated. Simulations using real hyperspectral images are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach with nonnegativity constraints.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Link Prediction Under Imperfect Detection: Collaborative Filtering for Ecological Networks

Matrix completion based collaborative filtering is considered scalable and effective for online service link prediction (e.g., movie recommendation) but does not meet the challenges of link prediction in ecological networks. A unique challenge of ecological networks is that the observed data are subject to systematic imperfect detection, due to the difficulty of accurate field sampling. In this work, we propose a new framework customized for ecological bipartite network link prediction. Our approach starts with incorporating the Poisson N-mixture model, a widely used framework in statistical ecology for modeling imperfect detection of a single species in field sampling. Despite its extensive use for single species analysis, this model has never been considered for link prediction between different species, perhaps because of the complex nature of both link prediction and N-mixture model inference. By judiciously combining the Poisson N-mixture model with a probabilistic nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) model in latent space, we propose an intuitive statistical model for the problem of interest. We also offer a scalable and convergence-guaranteed optimization algorithm to handle the associated maximum likelihood identification problem. Experimental results on synthetic data and two real-world ecological networks data are employed to validate our proposed approach.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Crowdsourcing via Pairwise Co-occurrences: Identifiability and Algorithms

The data deluge comes with high demands for data labeling. Crowdsourcing (or, more generally, ensemble learning) techniques aim to produce accurate labels via integrating noisy, non-expert labeling from annotators. The classic Dawid-Skene estimator and its accompanying expectation maximization (EM) algorithm have been widely used, but the theoretical properties are not fully understood. Tensor methods were proposed to guarantee identification of the Dawid-Skene model, but the sample complexity is a hurdle for applying such approaches---since the tensor methods hinge on the availability of third-order statistics that are hard to reliably estimate given limited data. In this paper, we propose a framework using pairwise co-occurrences of the annotator responses, which naturally admits lower sample complexity. We show that the approach can identify the Dawid-Skene model under realistic conditions. We propose an algebraic algorithm reminiscent of convex geometry-based structured matrix factorization to solve the model identification problem efficiently, and an identifiability-enhanced algorithm for handling more challenging and critical scenarios. Experiments show that the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-art algorithms under a variety of scenarios.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Amplitude Retrieval for Channel Estimation of MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs

This letter revisits the channel estimation problem for MIMO systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) through a novel algorithm--Amplitude Retrieval (AR). Unlike the state-of-the-art methods such as those based on one-bit compressive sensing, AR takes a different approach. It accounts for the lost amplitudes of the one-bit quantized measurements, and performs channel estimation and amplitude completion jointly. This way, the direction information of the propagation paths can be estimated via accurate direction finding algorithms in array processing, e.g., maximum likelihood. The upsot is that AR is able to handle off-grid angles and provide more accurate channel estimates. Simulation results are included to showcase the advantages of AR.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Algebraic Channel Estimation Algorithms for FDD Massive MIMO systems

We consider downlink (DL) channel estimation for frequency division duplex based massive MIMO systems under the multipath model. Our goal is to provide fast and accurate channel estimation from a small amount of DL training overhead. Prior art tackles this problem using compressive sensing or classic array processing techniques (e.g., ESPRIT and MUSIC). However, these methods have challenges in some scenarios, e.g., when the number of paths is greater than the number of receive antennas. Tensor factorization methods can also be used to handle such challenging cases, but it is hard to solve the associated optimization problems. In this work, we propose an efficient channel estimation framework to circumvent such difficulties. Specifically, a structural training sequence that imposes a tensor structure on the received signal is proposed. We show that with such a training sequence, the parameters of DL MIMO channels can be provably identified even when the number of paths largely exceeds the number of receive antennas---under very small training overhead. Our approach is a judicious combination of Vandermonde tensor algebra and a carefully designed conjugate-invariant training sequence. Unlike existing tensor-based channel estimation methods that involve hard optimization problems, the proposed approach consists of very lightweight algebraic operations, and thus real-time implementation is within reach. Simulation results are carried out to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

eess.SP↗