Min Xiang

Min Xiang, Shirin Enshaeifar, Alexander E. Stott et al.

Recent developments in quaternion-valued widely linear processing have established that the exploitation of complete second-order statistics requires consideration of both the standard covariance and the three complementary covariance matrices. Although such matrices have a tremendous amount of structure and their decomposition is a powerful tool in a variety of applications, the non-commutative nature of the quaternion product has been prohibitive to the development of quaternion uncorrelating transforms. To this end, we introduce novel techniques for a simultaneous decomposition of the covariance and complementary covariance matrices in the quaternion domain, whereby the quaternion version of the Takagi factorisation is explored to diagonalise symmetric quaternion-valued matrices. This gives new insights into the quaternion uncorrelating transform (QUT) and forms a basis for the proposed quaternion approximate uncorrelating transform (QAUT) which simultaneously diagonalises all four covariance matrices associated with improper quaternion signals. The effectiveness of the proposed uncorrelating transforms is validated by simulations on both synthetic and real-world quaternion-valued signals.

Danilo P. Mandic, Sayed Pouria Talebi, Clive Cheong Took et al.

From their inception, quaternions and their division algebra have proven to be advantageous in modelling rotation/orientation in three-dimensional spaces and have seen use from the initial formulation of electromagnetic filed theory through to forming the basis of quantum filed theory. Despite their impressive versatility in modelling real-world phenomena, adaptive information processing techniques specifically designed for quaternion-valued signals have only recently come to the attention of the machine learning, signal processing, and control communities. The most important development in this direction is introduction of the HR-calculus, which provides the required mathematical foundation for deriving adaptive information processing techniques directly in the quaternion domain. In this article, the foundations of the HR-calculus are revised and the required tools for deriving adaptive learning techniques suitable for dealing with quaternion-valued signals, such as the gradient operator, chain and product derivative rules, and Taylor series expansion are presented. This serves to establish the most important applications of adaptive information processing in the quaternion domain for both single-node and multi-node formulations. The article is supported by Supplementary Material, which will be referred to as SM.

Shengxi Li, Zeyang Yu, Min Xiang et al.

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have become a preferred tool for tasks involving complicated distributions. To stabilise the training and reduce the mode collapse of GANs, one of their main variants employs the integral probability metric (IPM) as the loss function. This provides extensive IPM-GANs with theoretical support for basically comparing moments in an embedded domain of the \textit{critic}. We generalise this by comparing the distributions rather than their moments via a powerful tool, i.e., the characteristic function (CF), which uniquely and universally comprising all the information about a distribution. For rigour, we first establish the physical meaning of the phase and amplitude in CF, and show that this provides a feasible way of balancing the accuracy and diversity of generation. We then develop an efficient sampling strategy to calculate the CFs. Within this framework, we further prove an equivalence between the embedded and data domains when a reciprocal exists, where we naturally develop the GAN in an auto-encoder structure, in a way of comparing everything in the embedded space (a semantically meaningful manifold). This efficient structure uses only two modules, together with a simple training strategy, to achieve bi-directionally generating clear images, which is referred to as the reciprocal CF GAN (RCF-GAN). Experimental results demonstrate the superior performances of the proposed RCF-GAN in terms of both generation and reconstruction.

Shengxi Li, Zeyang Yu, Min Xiang et al.

We address the estimation problem for general finite mixture models, with a particular focus on the elliptical mixture models (EMMs). Compared to the widely adopted Kullback-Leibler divergence, we show that the Wasserstein distance provides a more desirable optimisation space. We thus provide a stable solution to the EMMs that is both robust to initialisations and reaches a superior optimum by adaptively optimising along a manifold of an approximate Wasserstein distance. To this end, we first provide a unifying account of computable and identifiable EMMs, which serves as a basis to rigorously address the underpinning optimisation problem. Due to a probability constraint, solving this problem is extremely cumbersome and unstable, especially under the Wasserstein distance. To relieve this issue, we introduce an efficient optimisation method on a statistical manifold defined under an approximate Wasserstein distance, which allows for explicit metrics and computable operations, thus significantly stabilising and improving the EMM estimation. We further propose an adaptive method to accelerate the convergence. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed EMM solver.