skip to main content

Attention:

The NSF Public Access Repository (PAR) system and access will be unavailable from 11:00 PM ET on Thursday, January 16 until 2:00 AM ET on Friday, January 17 due to maintenance. We apologize for the inconvenience.


This content will become publicly available on June 30, 2025

Title: On Accuracy and Speed of Geodesic Regression: Do Geometric Priors Improve Learning on Small Datasets?
Image datasets in specialized fields of science, such as biomedicine, are typically smaller than traditional machine learning datasets. As such, they present a problem for training many models. To address this challenge, researchers often attempt to incorporate priors, i.e., external knowledge, to help the learning procedure. Geometric priors, for example, offer to restrict the learning process to the manifold to which the data belong. However, learning on manifolds is sometimes computationally intensive to the point of being prohibitive. Here, we ask a provocative question: is machine learning on manifolds really more accurate than its linear counterpart to the extent that it is worth sacrificing significant speedup in computation? We answer this question through an extensive theoretical and experimental study of one of the most common learning methods for manifold-valued data: geodesic regression.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2240158
PAR ID:
10524938
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE Xplore
Date Published:
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We consider the problem of simultaneously clustering and learning a linear representation of data lying close to a union of low-dimensional manifolds, a fundamental task in machine learning and computer vision. When the manifolds are assumed to be linear subspaces, this reduces to the classical problem of subspace clustering, which has been studied extensively over the past two decades. Unfortunately, many real-world datasets such as natural images can not be well approximated by linear subspaces. On the other hand, numerous works have attempted to learn an appropriate transformation of the data, such that data is mapped from a union of general non-linear manifolds to a union of linear subspaces (with points from the same manifold being mapped to the same subspace). However, many existing works have limitations such as assuming knowledge of the membership of samples to clusters, requiring high sampling density, or being shown theoretically to learn trivial representations. In this paper, we propose to optimize the Maximal Coding Rate Reduction metric with respect to both the data representation and a novel doubly stochastic cluster membership, inspired by state-of-the-art subspace clustering results. We give a parameterization of such a representation and membership, allowing efficient mini-batching and one-shot initialization. Experiments on CIFAR-10, -20, -100, and TinyImageNet-200 datasets show that the proposed method is much more accurate and scalable than state-of-the-art deep clustering methods, and further learns a latent linear representation of the data. 
    more » « less
  2. Ranzato, M. ; Beygelzimer, A. ; Dauphin, Y. ; Liang, P.S. ; Wortman Vaughan, J. (Ed.)
    Tractably modelling distributions over manifolds has long been an important goal in the natural sciences. Recent work has focused on developing general machine learning models to learn such distributions. However, for many applications these distributions must respect manifold symmetries—a trait which most previous models disregard. In this paper, we lay the theoretical foundations for learning symmetry-invariant distributions on arbitrary manifolds via equivariant manifold flows. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by learning quantum field theory-motivated invariant SU(n) densities and by correcting meteor impact dataset bias. 
    more » « less
  3. Manifold learning based methods have been widely used for non-linear dimensionality reduction (NLDR). However, in many practical settings, the need to process streaming data is a challenge for such methods, owing to the high computational complexity involved. Moreover, most methods operate under the assumption that the input data is sampled from a single manifold, embedded in a high dimensional space. We propose a method for streaming NLDR when the observed data is either sampled from multiple manifolds or irregularly sampled from a single manifold. We show that existing NLDR methods, such as Isomap, fail in such situations, primarily because they rely on smoothness and continuity of the underlying manifold, which is violated in the scenarios explored in this paper. However, the proposed algorithm is able to learn effectively in presence of multiple, and potentially intersecting, manifolds, while allowing for the input data to arrive as a massive stream. 
    more » « less
  4. 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. 
    more » « less
  5. The scattering transform is a multilayered, wavelet-based transform initially introduced as a mathematical model of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that has played a foundational role in our understanding of these networks’ stability and invariance properties. In subsequent years, there has been widespread interest in extending the success of CNNs to data sets with non- Euclidean structure, such as graphs and manifolds, leading to the emerging field of geometric deep learning. In order to improve our understanding of the architectures used in this new field, several papers have proposed generalizations of the scattering transform for non-Euclidean data structures such as undirected graphs and compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary. Analogous to the original scattering transform, these works prove that these variants of the scattering transform have desirable stability and invariance properties and aim to improve our understanding of the neural networks used in geometric deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a general, unified model for geometric scattering on measure spaces. Our proposed framework includes previous work on compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary and undirected graphs as special cases but also applies to more general settings such as directed graphs, signed graphs, and manifolds with boundary. We propose a new criterion that identifies to which groups a useful representation should be invariant and show that this criterion is sufficient to guarantee that the scattering transform has desirable stability and invariance properties. Additionally, we consider finite measure spaces that are obtained from randomly sampling an unknown manifold. We propose two methods for constructing a data-driven graph on which the associated graph scattering transform approximates the scattering transform on the underlying manifold. Moreover, we use a diffusion-maps based approach to prove quantitative estimates on the rate of convergence of one of these approximations as the number of sample points tends to infinity. Lastly, we showcase the utility of our method on spherical images, a directed graph stochastic block model, and on high-dimensional single-cell data. 
    more » « less