Expected Sliced Transport Plans

The optimal transport (OT) problem has gained significant traction in modern machine learning for its ability to: (1) provide versatile metrics, such as Wasserstein distances and their variants, and (2) determine optimal couplings between probability measures. To reduce the computational complexity of OT solvers, methods like entropic regularization and sliced optimal transport have been proposed. The sliced OT framework improves efficiency by comparing one-dimensional projections (slices) of high-dimensional distributions. However, despite their computational efficiency, sliced-Wasserstein approaches lack a transportation plan between the input measures, limiting their use in scenarios requiring explicit coupling. In this paper, we address two key questions: Can a transportation plan be constructed between two probability measures using the sliced transport framework? If so, can this plan be used to define a metric between the measures? We propose a "lifting" operation to extend one-dimensional optimal transport plans back to the original space of the measures. By computing the expectation of these lifted plans, we derive a new transportation plan, termed expected sliced transport (EST) plans. We prove that using the EST plan to weight the sum of the individual Euclidean costs for moving from one point to another results in a valid metric between the input discrete probability measures. We demonstrate the connection between our approach and the recently proposed min-SWGG, along with illustrative numerical examples that support our theoretical findings.

NeuroBOLT: Resting-state EEG-to-fMRI Synthesis with Multi-dimensional Feature Mapping

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an indispensable tool in modern neuroscience, providing a non-invasive window into whole-brain dynamics at millimeter-scale spatial resolution. However, fMRI is constrained by issues such as high operation costs and immobility. With the rapid advancements in cross-modality synthesis and brain decoding, the use of deep neural networks has emerged as a promising solution for inferring whole-brain, high-resolution fMRI features directly from electroencephalography (EEG), a more widely accessible and portable neuroimaging modality. Nonetheless, the complex projection from neural activity to fMRI hemodynamic responses and the spatial ambiguity of EEG pose substantial challenges both in modeling and interpretability. Relatively few studies to date have developed approaches for EEG-fMRI translation, and although they have made significant strides, the inference of fMRI signals in a given study has been limited to a small set of brain areas and to a single condition (i.e., either resting-state or a specific task). The capability to predict fMRI signals in other brain areas, as well as to generalize across conditions, remain critical gaps in the field. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel and generalizable framework: NeuroBOLT, i.e., Neuro-to-BOLD Transformer, which leverages multi-dimensional representation learning from temporal, spatial, and spectral domains to translate raw EEG data to the corresponding fMRI activity signals across the brain. Our experiments demonstrate that NeuroBOLT effectively reconstructs resting-state fMRI signals from primary sensory, high-level cognitive areas, and deep subcortical brain regions, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and significantly advancing the integration of these two modalities.

MCNC: Manifold Constrained Network Compression

The outstanding performance of large foundational models across diverse tasks-from computer vision to speech and natural language processing-has significantly increased their demand. However, storing and transmitting these models pose significant challenges due to their massive size (e.g., 350GB for GPT-3). Recent literature has focused on compressing the original weights or reducing the number of parameters required for fine-tuning these models. These compression methods typically involve constraining the parameter space, for example, through low-rank reparametrization (e.g., LoRA) or quantization (e.g., QLoRA) during model training. In this paper, we present MCNC as a novel model compression method that constrains the parameter space to low-dimensional pre-defined and frozen nonlinear manifolds, which effectively cover this space. Given the prevalence of good solutions in over-parameterized deep neural networks, we show that by constraining the parameter space to our proposed manifold, we can identify high-quality solutions while achieving unprecedented compression rates across a wide variety of tasks. Through extensive experiments in computer vision and natural language processing tasks, we demonstrate that our method, MCNC, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of compression, accuracy, and/or model reconstruction time.

Statistical Context Detection for Deep Lifelong Reinforcement Learning

Context detection involves labeling segments of an online stream of data as belonging to different tasks. Task labels are used in lifelong learning algorithms to perform consolidation or other procedures that prevent catastrophic forgetting. Inferring task labels from online experiences remains a challenging problem. Most approaches assume finite and low-dimension observation spaces or a preliminary training phase during which task labels are learned. Moreover, changes in the transition or reward functions can be detected only in combination with a policy, and therefore are more difficult to detect than changes in the input distribution. This paper presents an approach to learning both policies and labels in an online deep reinforcement learning setting. The key idea is to use distance metrics, obtained via optimal transport methods, i.e., Wasserstein distance, on suitable latent action-reward spaces to measure distances between sets of data points from past and current streams. Such distances can then be used for statistical tests based on an adapted Kolmogorov-Smirnov calculation to assign labels to sequences of experiences. A rollback procedure is introduced to learn multiple policies by ensuring that only the appropriate data is used to train the corresponding policy. The combination of task detection and policy deployment allows for the optimization of lifelong reinforcement learning agents without an oracle that provides task labels. The approach is tested using two benchmarks and the results show promising performance when compared with related context detection algorithms. The results suggest that optimal transport statistical methods provide an explainable and justifiable procedure for online context detection and reward optimization in lifelong reinforcement learning.

Physics informed cell representations for variational formulation of multiscale problems

With the rapid advancement of graphical processing units, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are emerging as a promising tool for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). However, PINNs are not well suited for solving PDEs with multiscale features, particularly suffering from slow convergence and poor accuracy. To address this limitation of PINNs, this article proposes physics-informed cell representations for resolving multiscale Poisson problems using a model architecture consisting of multilevel multiresolution grids coupled with a multilayer perceptron (MLP). The grid parameters (i.e., the level-dependent feature vectors) and the MLP parameters (i.e., the weights and biases) are determined using gradient-descent based optimization. The variational (weak) form based loss function accelerates computation by allowing the linear interpolation of feature vectors within grid cells. This cell-based MLP model also facilitates the use of a decoupled training scheme for Dirichlet boundary conditions and a parameter-sharing scheme for periodic boundary conditions, delivering superior accuracy compared to conventional PINNs. Furthermore, the numerical examples highlight improved speed and accuracy in solving PDEs with nonlinear or high-frequency boundary conditions and provide insights into hyperparameter selection. In essence, by cell-based MLP model along with the parallel tiny-cuda-nn library, our implementation improves convergence speed and numerical accuracy.

Zero-shot Prompt-based Video Encoder for Surgical Gesture Recognition

Purpose: Surgical video is an important data stream for gesture recognition. Thus, robust visual encoders for those data-streams is similarly important. Methods: Leveraging the Bridge-Prompt framework, we fine-tune a pre-trained vision-text model (CLIP) for gesture recognition in surgical videos. This can utilize extensive outside video data such as text, but also make use of label meta-data and weakly supervised contrastive losses. Results: Our experiments show that prompt-based video encoder outperforms standard encoders in surgical gesture recognition tasks. Notably, it displays strong performance in zero-shot scenarios, where gestures/tasks that were not provided during the encoder training phase are included in the prediction phase. Additionally, we measure the benefit of inclusion text descriptions in the feature extractor training schema. Conclusion: Bridge-Prompt and similar pre-trained+fine-tuned video encoder models present significant visual representation for surgical robotics, especially in gesture recognition tasks. Given the diverse range of surgical tasks (gestures), the ability of these models to zero-shot transfer without the need for any task (gesture) specific retraining makes them invaluable.

One Category One Prompt: Dataset Distillation using Diffusion Models

The extensive amounts of data required for training deep neural networks pose significant challenges on storage and transmission fronts. Dataset distillation has emerged as a promising technique to condense the information of massive datasets into a much smaller yet representative set of synthetic samples. However, traditional dataset distillation approaches often struggle to scale effectively with high-resolution images and more complex architectures due to the limitations in bi-level optimization. Recently, several works have proposed exploiting knowledge distillation with decoupled optimization schemes to scale up dataset distillation. Although these methods effectively address the scalability issue, they rely on extensive image augmentations requiring the storage of soft labels for augmented images. In this paper, we introduce Dataset Distillation using Diffusion Models (D3M) as a novel paradigm for dataset distillation, leveraging recent advancements in generative text-to-image foundation models. Our approach utilizes textual inversion, a technique for fine-tuning text-to-image generative models, to create concise and informative representations for large datasets. By employing these learned text prompts, we can efficiently store and infer new samples for introducing data variability within a fixed memory budget. We show the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments across various computer vision benchmark datasets with different memory budgets.

Efficient Solvers for Partial Gromov-Wasserstein

The partial Gromov-Wasserstein (PGW) problem facilitates the comparison of measures with unequal masses residing in potentially distinct metric spaces, thereby enabling unbalanced and partial matching across these spaces. In this paper, we demonstrate that the PGW problem can be transformed into a variant of the Gromov-Wasserstein problem, akin to the conversion of the partial optimal transport problem into an optimal transport problem. This transformation leads to two new solvers, mathematically and computationally equivalent, based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, that provide efficient solutions to the PGW problem. We further establish that the PGW problem constitutes a metric for metric measure spaces. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed solvers in terms of computation time and performance on shape-matching and positive-unlabeled learning problems, comparing them against existing baselines.

Stereographic Spherical Sliced Wasserstein Distances

Comparing spherical probability distributions is of great interest in various fields, including geology, medical domains, computer vision, and deep representation learning. The utility of optimal transport-based distances, such as the Wasserstein distance, for comparing probability measures has spurred active research in developing computationally efficient variations of these distances for spherical probability measures. This paper introduces a high-speed and highly parallelizable distance for comparing spherical measures using the stereographic projection and the generalized Radon transform, which we refer to as the Stereographic Spherical Sliced Wasserstein (S3W) distance. We carefully address the distance distortion caused by the stereographic projection and provide an extensive theoretical analysis of our proposed metric and its rotationally invariant variation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed metrics and compare them with recent baselines in terms of both speed and accuracy through a wide range of numerical studies, including gradient flows and self-supervised learning.

BrainWash: A Poisoning Attack to Forget in Continual Learning

Continual learning has gained substantial attention within the deep learning community, offering promising solutions to the challenging problem of sequential learning. Yet, a largely unexplored facet of this paradigm is its susceptibility to adversarial attacks, especially with the aim of inducing forgetting. In this paper, we introduce "BrainWash," a novel data poisoning method tailored to impose forgetting on a continual learner. By adding the BrainWash noise to a variety of baselines, we demonstrate how a trained continual learner can be induced to forget its previously learned tasks catastrophically, even when using these continual learning baselines. An important feature of our approach is that the attacker requires no access to previous tasks' data and is armed merely with the model's current parameters and the data belonging to the most recent task. Our extensive experiments highlight the efficacy of BrainWash, showcasing degradation in performance across various regularization-based continual learning methods.