skip to main content


Title: AE-OT: A new generative Model Based on Extended Semi-discrete Optimal Transport
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have attracted huge attention due to its capability to generate visual realistic images. However, most of the existing models suffer from the mode collapse or mode mixture problems. In this work, we give a theoretic explanation of the both problems by Figalli’s regularity theory of optimal transportation maps. Basically, the generator compute the transportation maps between the white noise distributions and the data distributions, which are in general discontinuous. However, DNNs can only represent continuous maps. This intrinsic conflict induces mode collapse and mode mixture. In order to tackle the both problems, we explicitly separate the manifold embedding and the optimal transportation; the first part is carried out using an autoencoder to map the images onto the latent space; the second part is accomplished using a GPU-based convex optimization to find the discontinuous transportation maps. Composing the extended OT map and the decoder, we can finally generate new images from the white noise. This AE-OT model avoids representing discontinuous maps by DNNs, therefore effectively prevents mode collapse and mode mixture.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1737812
NSF-PAR ID:
10185286
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ICLR 2020
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Though generative adversarial networks (GANs) are prominent models to generate realistic and crisp images, they are unstable to train and suffer from the mode collapse problem. The problems of GANs come from approximating the intrinsic discontinuous distribution transform map with continuous DNNs. The recently proposed AE-OT model addresses the discontinuity problem by explicitly computing the discontinuous optimal transform map in the latent space of the autoencoder. Though have no mode collapse, the generated images by AE-OT are blurry. In this paper, we propose the AE-OT-GAN model to utilize the advantages of the both models: generate high quality images and at the same time overcome the mode collapse problems. Specifically, we firstly embed the low dimensional image manifold into the latent space by autoencoder (AE). Then the extended semi-discrete optimal transport (SDOT) map is used to generate new latent codes. Finally, our GAN model is trained to generate high quality images from the latent distribution induced by the extended SDOT map. The distribution transform map from this dataset related latent distribution to the data distribution will be continuous, and thus can be well approximated by the continuous DNNs. Additionally, the paired data between the latent codes and the real images gives us further restriction about the generator and stabilizes the training process. Experiments on simple MNIST dataset and complex datasets like CIFAR10 and CelebA show the advantages of the proposed method. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    An optimal transportation map finds the most economical way to transport one probability measure to the other. It has been applied in a broad range of applications in vision, deep learning and medical images. By Brenier theory, computing the optimal transport map is equivalent to solving a Monge-Amp\`ere equation. Due to the highly non-linear nature, the computation of optimal transportation maps in large scale is very challenging. This work proposes a simple but powerful method, the FFT-OT algorithm, to tackle this difficulty based on three key ideas. First, solving Monge-Amp\`ere equation is converted to a fixed point problem; Second, the obliqueness property of optimal transportation maps are reformulated as Neumann boundary conditions on rectangular domains; Third, FFT is applied in each iteration to solve a Poisson equation in order to improve the efficiency. Experiments on surfaces captured from 3D scanning and reconstructed from medical imaging are conducted, and compared with other existing methods. Our experimental results show that the proposed FFT-OT algorithm is simple, general and scalable with high efficiency and accuracy. 
    more » « less
  3. Obtaining solutions to optimal transportation (OT) problems is typically intractable when marginal spaces are continuous. Recent research has focused on approximating continuous solutions with discretization methods based on i.i.d. sampling, and this has shown convergence as the sample size increases. However, obtaining OT solutions with large sample sizes requires intensive computation effort, which can be prohibitive in practice. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for calculating discretizations with a given number of weighted points for marginal distributions by minimizing the (entropy-regularized) Wasserstein distance and providing bounds on the performance. The results suggest that our plans are comparable to those obtained with much larger numbers of i.i.d. samples and are more efficient than existing alternatives. Moreover, we propose a local, parallelizable version of such discretizations for applications, which we demonstrate by approximating adorable images.

     
    more » « less
  4. We consider the problem of estimating the optimal transport map between two probability distributions, P and Q in Rd, on the basis of i.i.d. samples. All existing statistical analyses of this problem require the assumption that the transport map is Lipschitz, a strong requirement that, in particular, excludes any examples where the transport map is discontinuous. As a first step towards developing estimation procedures for discontinuous maps, we consider the important special case where the data distribution Q is a discrete measure supported on a finite number of points in Rd. We study a computationally efficient estimator initially proposed by Pooladian and Niles-Weed (2021), based on entropic optimal transport, and show in the semi-discrete setting that it converges at the minimax-optimal rate n−1/2, independent of dimension. Other standard map estimation techniques both lack finite-sample guarantees in this setting and provably suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We confirm these results in numerical experiments, and provide experiments for other settings, not covered by our theory, which indicate that the entropic estimator is a promising methodology for other discontinuous transport map estimation problems. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Abstract Background Cryo-EM data generated by electron tomography (ET) contains images for individual protein particles in different orientations and tilted angles. Individual cryo-EM particles can be aligned to reconstruct a 3D density map of a protein structure. However, low contrast and high noise in particle images make it challenging to build 3D density maps at intermediate to high resolution (1–3 Å). To overcome this problem, we propose a fully automated cryo-EM 3D density map reconstruction approach based on deep learning particle picking. Results A perfect 2D particle mask is fully automatically generated for every single particle. Then, it uses a computer vision image alignment algorithm (image registration) to fully automatically align the particle masks. It calculates the difference of the particle image orientation angles to align the original particle image. Finally, it reconstructs a localized 3D density map between every two single-particle images that have the largest number of corresponding features. The localized 3D density maps are then averaged to reconstruct a final 3D density map. The constructed 3D density map results illustrate the potential to determine the structures of the molecules using a few samples of good particles. Also, using the localized particle samples (with no background) to generate the localized 3D density maps can improve the process of the resolution evaluation in experimental maps of cryo-EM. Tested on two widely used datasets, Auto3DCryoMap is able to reconstruct good 3D density maps using only a few thousand protein particle images, which is much smaller than hundreds of thousands of particles required by the existing methods. Conclusions We design a fully automated approach for cryo-EM 3D density maps reconstruction (Auto3DCryoMap). Instead of increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by using 2D class averaging, our approach uses 2D particle masks to produce locally aligned particle images. Auto3DCryoMap is able to accurately align structural particle shapes. Also, it is able to construct a decent 3D density map from only a few thousand aligned particle images while the existing tools require hundreds of thousands of particle images. Finally, by using the pre-processed particle images,Auto3DCryoMap reconstructs a better 3D density map than using the original particle images. 
    more » « less