arXiv research

New K-SVD framework speeds up image denoising with active set algorithm.

This work considers noise removal from images, focusing on the well known K-SVD denoising algorithm. This sparsity-based method was proposed in 2006, and for a short while it was considered as state-of-the-art. However, over the years it has been surpassed by other methods, including the recent deep-learning-based newc…

This paper studies the problem of data-adaptive representations for big, distributed data. It is assumed that a number of geographically-distributed, interconnected sites have massive local data and they are interested in collaboratively learning a low-dimensional geometric structure underlying these data. In contrast …

In this paper we consider the dictionary learning problem for sparse representation. We first show that this problem is NP-hard by polynomial time reduction of the densest cut problem. Then, using successive convex approximation strategies, we propose efficient dictionary learning schemes to solve several practical for…

Clustering is one of the most important unsupervised problems in machine learning and statistics. Among many existing algorithms, kernel k-means has drawn much research attention due to its ability to find non-linear cluster boundaries and its inherent simplicity. There are two main approaches for kernel k-means: SVD o…

We study $k$-SVD that is to obtain the first $k$ singular vectors of a matrix $A$. Recently, a few breakthroughs have been discovered on $k$-SVD: Musco and Musco [1] proved the first gap-free convergence result using the block Krylov method, Shamir [2] discovered the first variance-reduction stochastic method, and Bhoj…

Dictionary learning and component analysis are part of one of the most well-studied and active research fields, at the intersection of signal and image processing, computer vision, and statistical machine learning. In dictionary learning, the current methods of choice are arguably K-SVD and its variants, which learn a …

Traditional dictionary learning methods are based on quadratic convex loss function and thus are sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for robust dictionary learning based on concave losses. We provide results on composition of concave functions, notably regarding super-gradient computati…

We propose a rank-$k$ variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve convex optimization over a trace-norm ball. Our algorithm replaces the top singular-vector computation ($1$-SVD) in Frank-Wolfe with a top-$k$ singular-vector computation ($k$-SVD), which can be done by repeatedly applying $1$-SVD $k$ times. …

Principal components analysis (PCA) is a well-known technique for approximating a tabular data set by a low rank matrix. Here, we extend the idea of PCA to handle arbitrary data sets consisting of numerical, Boolean, categorical, ordinal, and other data types. This framework encompasses many well known techniques in da…

Two algorithms converge to dictionary learning with geometric rate for non-uniform data.

Many applications in signal processing benefit from the sparsity of signals in a certain transform domain or dictionary. Synthesis sparsifying dictionaries that are directly adapted to data have been popular in applications such as image denoising, inpainting, and medical image reconstruction. In this work, we focus in…

Networks are a unifying framework for modeling complex systems and network inference problems are frequently encountered in many fields. Here, I develop and apply a generative approach to network inference (RCweb) for the case when the network is sparse and the latent (not observed) variables affect the observed ones. …

This paper introduces a method for efficiently inferring a high-dimensional distributed quantity from a few observations. The quantity of interest (QoI) is approximated in a basis (dictionary) learned from a training set. The coefficients associated with the approximation of the QoI in the basis are determined by minim…

Many techniques in computer vision, machine learning, and statistics rely on the fact that a signal of interest admits a sparse representation over some dictionary. Dictionaries are either available analytically, or can be learned from a suitable training set. While analytic dictionaries permit to capture the global st…

Dictionary learning and component analysis models are fundamental for learning compact representations that are relevant to a given task (feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, denoising, etc.). The model complexity is encoded by means of specific structure, such as sparsity, low-rankness, or nonnegativity. Unfo…

An $\varepsilon$-coreset for Least-Mean-Squares (LMS) of a matrix $A\in{\mathbb{R}}^{n\times d}$ is a small weighted subset of its rows that approximates the sum of squared distances from its rows to every affine $k$-dimensional subspace of ${\mathbb{R}}^d$, up to a factor of $1\pm\varepsilon$. Such coresets are useful…

Brain networks in fMRI are typically identified using spatial independent component analysis (ICA), yet mathematical constraints such as sparse coding and positivity both provide alternate biologically-plausible frameworks for generating brain networks. Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) would suppress negative BO…

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reaso…