LGNov 12, 2017
A unified framework for hard and soft clustering with regularized optimal transportJean-Frédéric Diebold, Nicolas Papadakis, Arnaud Dessein et al.
In this paper, we formulate the problem of inferring a Finite Mixture Model from discrete data as an optimal transport problem with entropic regularization of parameter $λ\geq 0$. Our method unifies hard and soft clustering, the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm being exactly recovered for $λ=1$. The family of clustering algorithm we propose rely on the resolution of nonconvex problems using alternating minimization. We study the convergence property of our generalized $λ-$EM algorithms and show that each step in the minimization process has a closed form solution when inferring finite mixture models of exponential families. Experiments highlight the benefits of taking a parameter $λ>1$ to improve the inference performance and $λ\to 0$ for classification.
MLOct 20, 2016
Regularized Optimal Transport and the Rot Mover's DistanceArnaud Dessein, Nicolas Papadakis, Jean-Luc Rouas
This paper presents a unified framework for smooth convex regularization of discrete optimal transport problems. In this context, the regularized optimal transport turns out to be equivalent to a matrix nearness problem with respect to Bregman divergences. Our framework thus naturally generalizes a previously proposed regularization based on the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy related to the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and solved with the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. We call the regularized optimal transport distance the rot mover's distance in reference to the classical earth mover's distance. We develop two generic schemes that we respectively call the alternate scaling algorithm and the non-negative alternate scaling algorithm, to compute efficiently the regularized optimal plans depending on whether the domain of the regularizer lies within the non-negative orthant or not. These schemes are based on Dykstra's algorithm with alternate Bregman projections, and further exploit the Newton-Raphson method when applied to separable divergences. We enhance the separable case with a sparse extension to deal with high data dimensions. We also instantiate our proposed framework and discuss the inherent specificities for well-known regularizers and statistical divergences in the machine learning and information geometry communities. Finally, we demonstrate the merits of our methods with experiments using synthetic data to illustrate the effect of different regularizers and penalties on the solutions, as well as real-world data for a pattern recognition application to audio scene classification.
CVSep 8, 2016
Ear-to-ear Capture of Facial IntrinsicsAlassane Seck, William A. P. Smith, Arnaud Dessein et al.
We present a practical approach to capturing ear-to-ear face models comprising both 3D meshes and intrinsic textures (i.e. diffuse and specular albedo). Our approach is a hybrid of geometric and photometric methods and requires no geometric calibration. Photometric measurements made in a lightstage are used to estimate view dependent high resolution normal maps. We overcome the problem of having a single photometric viewpoint by capturing in multiple poses. We use uncalibrated multiview stereo to estimate a coarse base mesh to which the photometric views are registered. We propose a novel approach to robustly stitching surface normal and intrinsic texture data into a seamless, complete and highly detailed face model. The resulting relightable models provide photorealistic renderings in any view.