arXiv subjects

Abolfazl Hashemi

Publications and source records attributed to Abolfazl Hashemi.

67 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

On the Benefits of Multiple Gossip Steps in Communication-Constrained Decentralized Optimization

In decentralized optimization, it is common algorithmic practice to have nodes interleave (local) gradient descent iterations with gossip (i.e. averaging over the network) steps. Motivated by the training of large-scale machine learning models, it is also increasingly common to require that messages be {\em lossy compressed} versions of the local parameters. In this paper, we show that, in such compressed decentralized optimization settings, there are benefits to having {\em multiple} gossip steps between subsequent gradient iterations, even when the cost of doing so is appropriately accounted for e.g. by means of reducing the precision of compressed information. In particular, we show that having $O(\log\frac{1}ε)$ gradient iterations {with constant step size} - and $O(\log\frac{1}ε)$ gossip steps between every pair of these iterations - enables convergence to within $ε$ of the optimal value for smooth non-convex objectives satisfying Polyak-Łojasiewicz condition. This result also holds for smooth strongly convex objectives. To our knowledge, this is the first work that derives convergence results for nonconvex optimization under arbitrary communication compression.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Identifying Sparse Low-Dimensional Structures in Markov Chains: A Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Approach

We consider the problem of learning low-dimensional representations for large-scale Markov chains. We formulate the task of representation learning as that of mapping the state space of the model to a low-dimensional state space, called the kernel space. The kernel space contains a set of meta states which are desired to be representative of only a small subset of original states. To promote this structural property, we constrain the number of nonzero entries of the mappings between the state space and the kernel space. By imposing the desired characteristics of the representation, we cast the problem as a constrained nonnegative matrix factorization. To compute the solution, we propose an efficient block coordinate gradient descent and theoretically analyze its convergence properties.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Submodular Observation Selection and Information Gathering for Quadratic Models

We study the problem of selecting most informative subset of a large observation set to enable accurate estimation of unknown parameters. This problem arises in a variety of settings in machine learning and signal processing including feature selection, phase retrieval, and target localization. Since for quadratic measurement models the moment matrix of the optimal estimator is generally unknown, majority of prior work resorts to approximation techniques such as linearization of the observation model to optimize the alphabetical optimality criteria of an approximate moment matrix. Conversely, by exploiting a connection to the classical Van Trees' inequality, we derive new alphabetical optimality criteria without distorting the relational structure of the observation model. We further show that under certain conditions on parameters of the problem these optimality criteria are monotone and (weak) submodular set functions. These results enable us to develop an efficient greedy observation selection algorithm uniquely tailored for quadratic models, and provide theoretical bounds on its achievable utility.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Evolutionary Self-Expressive Models for Subspace Clustering

The problem of organizing data that evolves over time into clusters is encountered in a number of practical settings. We introduce evolutionary subspace clustering, a method whose objective is to cluster a collection of evolving data points that lie on a union of low-dimensional evolving subspaces. To learn the parsimonious representation of the data points at each time step, we propose a non-convex optimization framework that exploits the self-expressiveness property of the evolving data while taking into account representation from the preceding time step. To find an approximate solution to the aforementioned non-convex optimization problem, we develop a scheme based on alternating minimization that both learns the parsimonious representation as well as adaptively tunes and infers a smoothing parameter reflective of the rate of data evolution. The latter addresses a fundamental challenge in evolutionary clustering -- determining if and to what extent one should consider previous clustering solutions when analyzing an evolving data collection. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art static subspace clustering algorithms and existing evolutionary clustering schemes in terms of both accuracy and running time, in a range of scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Near-Optimal Distributed Estimation for a Network of Sensing Units Operating Under Communication Constraints

We study the problem of distributed state estimation in a network of sensing units that can exchange their measurements but the rate of communication between the units is constrained. The units collect noisy, possibly only partial observations of the unknown state; they are assisted by a relay center which can communicate at a higher rate and schedules the exchange of measurements between the units. We consider the task of minimizing the total mean-square estimation error of the network while promoting balance between the individual units' performances. This problem is formulated as the maximization of a monotone objective function subject to a cardinality constraint. By leveraging the notion of weak submodularity, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm for the proposed formulation and show that the greedy algorithm achieves a constant factor approximation of the optimal objective. Our extensive simulation studies illustrate the efficacy of the proposed formulation and the greedy algorithm.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Randomized Greedy Sensor Selection: Leveraging Weak Submodularity

We study the problem of estimating a random process from the observations collected by a network of sensors that operate under resource constraints. When the dynamics of the process and sensor observations are described by a state-space model and the resource are unlimited, the conventional Kalman filter provides the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimates. However, at any given time, restrictions on the available communications bandwidth and computational capabilities and/or power impose a limitation on the number of network nodes whose observations can be used to compute the estimates. We formulate the problem of selecting the most informative subset of the sensors as a combinatorial problem of maximizing a monotone set function under a uniform matroid constraint. For the MMSE estimation criterion we show that the maximum element-wise curvature of the objective function satisfies a certain upper-bound constraint and is, therefore, weak submodular. We develop an efficient randomized greedy algorithm for sensor selection and establish guarantees on the estimator's performance in this setting. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the randomized greedy algorithm compared to state-of-the-art greedy and semidefinite programming relaxation methods.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

A Novel Scheme for Support Identification and Iterative Sampling of Bandlimited Graph Signals

We study the problem of sampling and reconstruction of bandlimited graph signals where the objective is to select a node subset of prescribed cardinality that ensures interpolation of the original signal with the lowest reconstruction error. We propose an efficient iterative selection sampling approach and show that in the noiseless case the original signal is exactly recovered from the set of selected nodes. In the case of noisy measurements, a bound on the reconstruction error of the proposed algorithm is established. We further address the support identification of the bandlimited signal with unknown support and show that under a pragmatic sufficient condition, the proposed framework requires minimal number of samples to perfectly identify the support. The efficacy of the proposed methods are illustrated through numerical simulations on synthetic and real-world graphs.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Sampling Requirements and Accelerated Schemes for Sparse Linear Regression with Orthogonal Least-Squares

We study the problem of inferring a sparse vector from random linear combinations of its components. We propose the Accelerated Orthogonal Least-Squares (AOLS) algorithm that improves performance of the well-known Orthogonal Least-Squares (OLS) algorithm while requiring significantly lower computational costs. While OLS greedily selects columns of the coefficient matrix that correspond to non-zero components of the sparse vector, AOLS employs a novel computationally efficient procedure that speeds up the search by anticipating future selections via choosing $L$ columns in each step, where $L$ is an adjustable hyper-parameter. We analyze the performance of AOLS and establish lower bounds on the probability of exact recovery for both noiseless and noisy random linear measurements. In the noiseless scenario, it is shown that when the coefficients are samples from a Gaussian distribution, AOLS with high probability recovers a $k$-sparse $m$-dimensional sparse vector using ${\cal O}(k\log \frac{m}{k+L-1})$ measurements. Similar result is established for the bounded-noise scenario where an additional condition on the smallest nonzero element of the unknown vector is required. The asymptotic sampling complexity of AOLS is lower than the asymptotic sampling complexity of the existing sparse reconstruction algorithms. In simulations, AOLS is compared to state-of-the-art sparse recovery techniques and shown to provide better performance in terms of accuracy, running time, or both. Finally, we consider an application of AOLS to clustering high-dimensional data lying on the union of low-dimensional subspaces and demonstrate its superiority over existing methods.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

A Randomized Greedy Algorithm for Near-Optimal Sensor Scheduling in Large-Scale Sensor Networks

We study the problem of scheduling sensors in a resource-constrained linear dynamical system, where the objective is to select a small subset of sensors from a large network to perform the state estimation task. We formulate this problem as the maximization of a monotone set function under a matroid constraint. We propose a randomized greedy algorithm that is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods. By introducing the notion of curvature which quantifies how close a function is to being submodular, we analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm and find a bound on the expected mean square error (MSE) of the estimator that uses the selected sensors in terms of the optimal MSE. Moreover, we derive a probabilistic bound on the curvature for the scenario where{\color{black}{ the measurements are i.i.d. random vectors with bounded $\ell_2$ norm.}} Simulation results demonstrate efficacy of the randomized greedy algorithm in a comparison with greedy and semidefinite programming relaxation methods.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2017

Accelerated Sparse Subspace Clustering

State-of-the-art algorithms for sparse subspace clustering perform spectral clustering on a similarity matrix typically obtained by representing each data point as a sparse combination of other points using either basis pursuit (BP) or orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP). BP-based methods are often prohibitive in practice while the performance of OMP-based schemes are unsatisfactory, especially in settings where data points are highly similar. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that exploits an accelerated variant of orthogonal least-squares to efficiently find the underlying subspaces. We show that under certain conditions the proposed algorithm returns a subspace-preserving solution. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method compares favorably with BP-based method in terms of running time while being significantly more accurate than OMP-based schemes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Sampling and Reconstruction of Graph Signals via Weak Submodularity and Semidefinite Relaxation

We study the problem of sampling a bandlimited graph signal in the presence of noise, where the objective is to select a node subset of prescribed cardinality that minimizes the signal reconstruction mean squared error (MSE). To that end, we formulate the task at hand as the minimization of MSE subject to binary constraints, and approximate the resulting NP-hard problem via semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. Moreover, we provide an alternative formulation based on maximizing a monotone weak submodular function and propose a randomized-greedy algorithm to find a sub-optimal subset. We then derive a worst-case performance guarantee on the MSE returned by the randomized greedy algorithm for general non-stationary graph signals. The efficacy of the proposed methods is illustrated through numerical simulations on synthetic and real-world graphs. Notably, the randomized greedy algorithm yields an order-of-magnitude speedup over state-of-the-art greedy sampling schemes, while incurring only a marginal MSE performance loss.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Sparse recovery via Orthogonal Least-Squares under presence of Noise

We consider the Orthogonal Least-Squares (OLS) algorithm for the recovery of a $m$-dimensional $k$-sparse signal from a low number of noisy linear measurements. The Exact Recovery Condition (ERC) in bounded noisy scenario is established for OLS under certain condition on nonzero elements of the signal. The new result also improves the existing guarantees for Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm. In addition, This framework is employed to provide probabilistic guarantees for the case that the coefficient matrix is drawn at random according to Gaussian or Bernoulli distribution where we exploit some concentration properties. It is shown that under certain conditions, OLS recovers the true support in $k$ iterations with high probability. This in turn demonstrates that ${\cal O}\left(k\log m\right)$ measurements is sufficient for exact recovery of sparse signals via OLS.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Sparse Linear Regression via Generalized Orthogonal Least-Squares

Sparse linear regression, which entails finding a sparse solution to an underdetermined system of linear equations, can formally be expressed as an $l_0$-constrained least-squares problem. The Orthogonal Least-Squares (OLS) algorithm sequentially selects the features (i.e., columns of the coefficient matrix) to greedily find an approximate sparse solution. In this paper, a generalization of Orthogonal Least-Squares which relies on a recursive relation between the components of the optimal solution to select L features at each step and solve the resulting overdetermined system of equations is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the generalized OLS algorithm is computationally efficient and achieves performance superior to that of existing greedy algorithms broadly used in the literature.

stat.ML↗