29 items tagged
Motivation Given the popularity and power of diffusion models, the theoretical formulation of these models are not in unison. Because multiple groups have derived these models from different background, there exist multiple formulations, SDE, ODE, Markov Chain, Non-markov chain etc.
Hippo: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projection Motivation Hidden state in RNN represents a form of memory of the past. For a sequence, a natural way to represent the past sequence is to project it onto an orthonormal basis set. Here depending on the different emphasis of the past, we could define different measures on the time axis and define the basis set based on this measure. Then we can keep track of the projection coefficient on this basis when observing new data points.
[TOC] Motivation S4 sequence model is rising in the sequence modelling field. It dominates on long sequence modelling over RNN, LSTM and transformers. It’s both mathematically elegant and useful, and it’s trending, so why not write about it.
TOC {:toc} Motivation Consider a distribution $p(x)$, we could “convolve” it with a kernel $p(\tilde{x}\mid x)=q(\tilde{x}-x)$. The marginal distribution of $\tilde{x}$ is denoted as $p_\sigma(\tilde{x})$. We want to model the score of this convolved distribution and that of the original distribution $\nabla\log p_\sigma(\tilde{x})$ .
Motivation How to understand EM algorithm from a theoretical perspective? This post tries to understand EM as a form of alternative ascent of a lower bound of likelihood. The Key Trick of EM The key trick we need to remember is the usage of Jensen Inequality on logarithm. So we could swap Expectation and logarithm and obtain a lower bound on likelihood. Generally, we have such inequality, given a positive function $q(z)$ that sums to $1$ (probability density),
TOC {:toc} Motivation Recently, a line of research emerged in generative image models, diffusion models, which showed a competitive performance with GAN [^1]. More recently, a larger scale version of it gave rise to the ground breaking model DALL-E 2 and its precursor GLIDE.
Motivation Here we summarize a few common probabilistic neural population models. Adapted from reading notes and class presentations from Neuro QC316 taught by Jan Drugowitsch. LNP, GLM These are the simplist models of neurons.
TOC {:toc} Motivation Simply put, “kernel trick” is the finding that sometimes only inner product appears in the formulation of some algorithms. because of this, we could substitute the inner product with some fancier kernel function, i.e. inner product in some other spaces. This post is about another usage of kernel trick. Another usage is Kernel (ridge) Regression.
TOC {:toc} Motivation Understand the use of kernel in regression problems. For usage in unsupervised learning / dimension reduction, see notes on Kernel PCA. Kernel in Classification Kernel is usually introduced in SVM classification problems. The rationale is that a linearly non-separable dataset could be separable in a high-dimensional feature space using the mapping $\phi:\mathcal X\to\mathcal F$ .
Motivation There is a resurgent of interest in investigating and developing Hopfield network in recent years. This development is quite exciting in that it connect classic models in physics and machine learning to modern techniques like transformers.
Rationale Hopfield Network can be viewed an energy based model: deriving all properties from it. General RNN has many complex behaviors, but setting symmetric connections can prohibit it! No oscillation is possible in a symmetric matrix.
Motivation Word2Vec is a very famous method that I heard of since the freshman year in college (yeah it comes out in 2013). Recently, some reviewer reminds us of the similarity of the “analogy” learnt by the vector representation of words and the vector analogy of image space in GAN or VAE.
Problem Statement Given a bunch of noisy data, you want a smooth curve going through the cloud. As the points are noisy, there is no need to going through each point.
TOC {:toc} Philosophy The spirit of Variational Inference is to solve Bayesian inference problem with optimization. In the scenario of latent factor It’s not trying to use Bayes rule directly, but to fit this distribution within a class of distributions $q(z;\nu)$, by minimizing the KL-divergence between the 2 models.
Note on Gaussian Process Gaussian Process can be thought of as a Gaussian distribution in function space (or infinite dimension vector). One of its major usage is to tackle nonlinear regression problem and provide mean estimate and errorbar around it.
Note on Bayesian Optimization Related to Gaussain Process model Philosophy Bayesian Optimization applies to black box functions and it employs the active learning philosophy. Use Case and Limitation BO is preferred in such cases
TOC {:toc} Motivation Sometimes the matrix (samples) to be correlated is too large, then you need to compute the correlation when the data is pouring in, i.e. online computing correlation.
Note on MiniMax (Updating) Motivation This is a very traditional way of solving turn based game like chess or tic-tac-toc. It’s climax is Deep Blue AI in playing chess. Note, some people think about GAN training procedure as a min-max game between G and D, which is also interesting.
Note on Laplacian-Beltrami (Diffusion) Operator Motivation Laplacian on graph and on discrete geometry (mesh) are very useful tools. One core intuition, just like Laplacian in $\R^n$ space, it’s related to diffusion and heat equation. Recall the diffusion equation is
Spectral Graph Theory and Segmentation Motivation Spectral Graph Theory is a powerful tool as it sits at the center of multiple representation. Connects to Graph and manifold, and linear algrbra. It’s related to dynamics on graph, related to Markov chain, random walk (diffusion.) Could be applied to any point cloud: images, meshes are suited. Could be used to perform clustering, segmentation etc. Linear Algebra Review There are several ways to see a eigenvalue problem
Motivation Major Reference Zeroth order optimization, or derivative free optimization is also known as the oracle problem. It’s nothing new to optimization community. Interest in ZOO algorithm resurges partly because it could be used in black box adversarial attack, if the softmax probability is given; and it could also be used in optimization of experimental output; and it could also be used for many design problem as the result has a non-analytical relationship with the parameters.
Krylov Subspace, Lancosz Iteration, QR and Conjugate Gradient Motivation In practise, many numerical algorithms include iteratively multiply a matrix, like power method and QR algorithm. All these algorithms have their core connected to a single construct, Krylov subspace and a operation, Lancosz Iteration. So this note motivates to understand this core.
TOC {:toc} Note on Online Regression Algorithm Least Square Problem Classical least square linear regression is $$ \hat \beta_{ls}=\arg\min_\beta\|y-X\beta\|^2_2 $$ With regularizations it becomes a ridge or lasso regression problem
Motivation Sometimes we want to examine the Hessian or Jacobian of a function w.r.t some variables. For that purpose, autogradient algorithm can help us. Autograd mechanism In Essence, Autograd requires a computational graph. (Directed Acyclic Graph) For each computational node (e.g. $z=f(x,y)$), we define a forward computation $(x,y)\mapsto z,\ z=f(x,y)$ mapping bottom to top, and a backward computation mapping the partial derivative to top to the partial derivative to bottom. $\partial_z\mapsto (\partial_x,\partial_y); (gx,gy)=g(gz;x,y)$ .
TOC {:toc} L-BFGS algorithm Motivation L-BFGS is one of the not so simple optimization algorithm that we may encounter in large scale optimization problems. Not so simple means it’s not simply a first order algorithm, and the deviation from that is well motivated by theoretical arguments. So this note target to understand this algorithm
Note on Optimization on Manifold Manifold is locally similar to $\R^n$ flat space, but globally not. Manifold is locally homeomorphic to a Euclidean space of the same dimension. Besides there is Riemann logrithm map that connect the local vector space $T_p$ to the neighbourhood of $p$ on the manifold. Thus, many local optimization algorithm that work on flat $\R^n$ space can work the same on neighborhood of a manifold. The unique thing of working on a manifold is how to transport the local direction information in one neighborhood into another neighborhood.
TOC {:toc} Problem Setting The original problem of non-negative matrix factorization is simple, if the dissimarity $D(A\|HW)$ between original matrix and reconstructed one is L2 distance than, $$ argmin_{H,W} \|A-HW\|_F^2, \\ s.t.\ W\succeq0, H\succeq0 $$The non-negative constraint applies element-wise.
TOC {:toc} Constrained CMA-ES Algorithm Target CMA-ES is originally used in unconstrained optimization. To adapt it into constrained optimization and we have to handle the boundary in some way. So how could it handle this geometric boundary?
TOC {:toc} 最近在阅读1，是以为记。 Objective of Algorithm 目标 Belief Propagation算法想解决的是Markov随机场，Bayes网络等图模型的边缘概率估计，以及求解最可能的状态的问题。 有许多名字称呼这一General的算法，如sum-product, max-product, min-sum, Message Passing等，属于更general的Message Passing算法范畴。 同时这一算法可以说是一种通用框架或者philosophy，因此在不同结构的模型中有许多著名的特例，这些具体算法也有各自的名字(如前向后向算法，Kalman Filter等等) 对于统计学习问题，通常会区分模型与算法，模型设定一些假设，抽象现实的某个方面，建立问题的结构；而算法求解问题(很多时候是转化为优化问题来求解)。在这个post中将要介绍的Belief Propagation算法，属于后者，但为了理解他，我们首先需要理解他对应的模型，即概率图模型。 Graphical Models： What relates graph to probability? 第一次接触概率图模型的人（像我）都会问，概率和图这两者有什么关系呢？ 我们知道图是一种直观的表征事物之间二元关系的方法通常由$(\mathcal V, \mathcal E)$定点和边组成。在概率图模型中，顶点通常代表随机变量，而边代表随机变量之间的关系。