Mikhail A. Langovoy

Mikhail A. Langovoy

Characterizing the appearance of real-world surfaces is a fundamental problem in multidimensional reflectometry, computer vision and computer graphics. For many applications, appearance is sufficiently well characterized by the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). We treat BRDF measurements as samples of points from high-dimensional non-linear non-convex manifolds. BRDF manifolds form an infinite-dimensional space, but typically the available measurements are very scarce for complicated problems such as BRDF estimation. Therefore, an efficient learning strategy is crucial when performing the measurements. In this paper, we build the foundation of a mathematical framework that allows to develop and apply new techniques within statistical design of experiments and generalized proactive learning, in order to establish more efficient sampling and measurement strategies for BRDF data manifolds.

Mikhail A. Langovoy, Akhilesh Gotmare, Martin Jaggi

We consider learning of fundamental properties of communities in large noisy networks, in the prototypical situation where the nodes or users are split into two classes according to a binary property, e.g., according to their opinions or preferences on a topic. For learning these properties, we propose a nonparametric, unsupervised, and scalable graph scan procedure that is, in addition, robust against a class of powerful adversaries. In our setup, one of the communities can fall under the influence of a knowledgeable adversarial leader, who knows the full network structure, has unlimited computational resources and can completely foresee our planned actions on the network. We prove strong consistency of our results in this setup with minimal assumptions. In particular, the learning procedure estimates the baseline activity of normal users asymptotically correctly with probability 1; the only assumption being the existence of a single implicit community of asymptotically negligible logarithmic size. We provide experiments on real and synthetic data to illustrate the performance of our method, including examples with adversaries.