Tal Amir

Tal Amir, Steven J. Gortler, Ilai Avni et al.

Injective multiset functions have a key role in the theoretical study of machine learning on multisets and graphs. Yet, there remains a gap between the provably injective multiset functions considered in theory, which typically rely on polynomial moments, and the multiset functions used in practice, which rely on $\textit{neural moments}$ $\unicode{x2014}$ whose injectivity on multisets has not been studied to date. In this paper, we bridge this gap by showing that moments of neural networks do define injective multiset functions, provided that an analytic non-polynomial activation is used. The number of moments required by our theory is optimal essentially up to a multiplicative factor of two. To prove this result, we state and prove a $\textit{finite witness theorem}$, which is of independent interest. As a corollary to our main theorem, we derive new approximation results for functions on multisets and measures, and new separation results for graph neural networks. We also provide two negative results: (1) moments of piecewise-linear neural networks cannot be injective multiset functions; and (2) even when moment-based multiset functions are injective, they can never be bi-Lipschitz.

Snir Hordan, Tal Amir, Steven J. Gortler et al.

Neural networks for point clouds, which respect their natural invariance to permutation and rigid motion, have enjoyed recent success in modeling geometric phenomena, from molecular dynamics to recommender systems. Yet, to date, no model with polynomial complexity is known to be complete, that is, able to distinguish between any pair of non-isomorphic point clouds. We fill this theoretical gap by showing that point clouds can be completely determined, up to permutation and rigid motion, by applying the 3-WL graph isomorphism test to the point cloud's centralized Gram matrix. Moreover, we formulate an Euclidean variant of the 2-WL test and show that it is also sufficient to achieve completeness. We then show how our complete Euclidean WL tests can be simulated by an Euclidean graph neural network of moderate size and demonstrate their separation capability on highly symmetrical point clouds.

Tal Amir, Shahar Kovalsky, Nadav Dym

The classical $\textit{Procrustes}$ problem is to find a rigid motion (orthogonal transformation and translation) that best aligns two given point-sets in the least-squares sense. The $\textit{Robust Procrustes}$ problem is an important variant, in which a power-1 objective is used instead of least squares to improve robustness to outliers. While the optimal solution of the least-squares problem can be easily computed in closed form, dating back to Schönemann (1966), no such solution is known for the power-1 problem. In this paper we propose a novel convex relaxation for the Robust Procrustes problem. Our relaxation enjoys several theoretical and practical advantages: Theoretically, we prove that our method provides a $\sqrt{2}$-factor approximation to the Robust Procrustes problem, and that, under appropriate assumptions, it exactly recovers the true rigid motion from point correspondences contaminated by outliers. In practice, we find in numerical experiments on both synthetic and real robust Procrustes problems, that our method performs similarly to the standard Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS). However the convexity of our algorithm allows incorporating additional convex penalties, which are not readily amenable to IRLS. This turns out to be a substantial advantage, leading to improved results in high-dimensional problems, including non-rigid shape alignment and semi-supervised interlingual word translation.

Snir Hordan, Tal Amir, Nadav Dym

The $k$-Weisfeiler-Leman ($k$-WL) graph isomorphism test hierarchy is a common method for assessing the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs). Recently, GNNs whose expressive power is equivalent to the $2$-WL test were proven to be universal on weighted graphs which encode $3\mathrm{D}$ point cloud data, yet this result is limited to invariant continuous functions on point clouds. In this paper, we extend this result in three ways: Firstly, we show that PPGN can simulate $2$-WL uniformly on all point clouds with low complexity. Secondly, we show that $2$-WL tests can be extended to point clouds which include both positions and velocities, a scenario often encountered in applications. Finally, we provide a general framework for proving equivariant universality and leverage it to prove that a simple modification of this invariant PPGN architecture can be used to obtain a universal equivariant architecture that can approximate all continuous equivariant functions uniformly. Building on our results, we develop our WeLNet architecture, which sets new state-of-the-art results on the N-Body dynamics task and the GEOM-QM9 molecular conformation generation task.

Tal Amir, Nadav Dym

We present the Fourier Sliced-Wasserstein (FSW) embedding - a novel method to embed multisets and measures over $\mathbb{R}^d$ into Euclidean space. Our proposed embedding approximately preserves the sliced Wasserstein distance on distributions, thereby yielding geometrically meaningful representations that better capture the structure of the input. Moreover, it is injective on measures and bi-Lipschitz on multisets - a significant advantage over prevalent methods based on sum- or max-pooling, which are provably not bi-Lipschitz, and, in many cases, not even injective. The required output dimension for these guarantees is near-optimal: roughly $2 N d$, where $N$ is the maximal input multiset size. Furthermore, we prove that it is impossible to embed distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$ into Euclidean space in a bi-Lipschitz manner. Thus, the metric properties of our embedding are, in a sense, the best possible. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method yields superior multiset representations that improve performance in practical learning tasks. Specifically, we show that (a) a simple combination of the FSW embedding with an MLP achieves state-of-the-art performance in learning the (non-sliced) Wasserstein distance; and (b) replacing max-pooling with the FSW embedding makes PointNet significantly more robust to parameter reduction, with only minor performance degradation even after a 40-fold reduction.

Yaaqov Mishayev, Yonatan Sverdlov, Tal Amir et al.

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are widely used for learning on graphs, but their ability to process long-range information is limited by the phenomenon of oversquashing. This limitation has led some researchers to advocate Graph Transformers as a better alternative, whereas others suggest that it can be mitigated within the MPNN framework, using virtual nodes or other rewiring techniques. In this work, we demonstrate that oversquashing is not limited to long-range tasks, but can also arise in short-range problems. This observation allows us to disentangle two distinct mechanisms underlying oversquashing: (1) the bottleneck phenomenon, which can arise even in low-range settings, and (2) the vanishing gradient phenomenon, which is closely associated with long-range tasks. We further show that the short-range bottleneck effect is not captured by existing explanations for oversquashing, and that adding virtual nodes does not resolve it. In contrast, transformers do succeed in such tasks, positioning them as the more compelling solution to oversquashing, compared to specialized MPNNs.

Tal Amir, Ronen Basri, Boaz Nadler

We present a new approach to solve the sparse approximation or best subset selection problem, namely find a $k$-sparse vector ${\bf x}\in\mathbb{R}^d$ that minimizes the $\ell_2$ residual $\lVert A{\bf x}-{\bf y} \rVert_2$. We consider a regularized approach, whereby this residual is penalized by the non-convex $\textit{trimmed lasso}$, defined as the $\ell_1$-norm of ${\bf x}$ excluding its $k$ largest-magnitude entries. We prove that the trimmed lasso has several appealing theoretical properties, and in particular derive sparse recovery guarantees assuming successful optimization of the penalized objective. Next, we show empirically that directly optimizing this objective can be quite challenging. Instead, we propose a surrogate for the trimmed lasso, called the $\textit{generalized soft-min}$. This penalty smoothly interpolates between the classical lasso and the trimmed lasso, while taking into account all possible $k$-sparse patterns. The generalized soft-min penalty involves summation over $\binom{d}{k}$ terms, yet we derive a polynomial-time algorithm to compute it. This, in turn, yields a practical method for the original sparse approximation problem. Via simulations, we demonstrate its competitive performance compared to current state of the art.

Soumyadip Sengupta, Tal Amir, Meirav Galun et al.

Accurate estimation of camera matrices is an important step in structure from motion algorithms. In this paper we introduce a novel rank constraint on collections of fundamental matrices in multi-view settings. We show that in general, with the selection of proper scale factors, a matrix formed by stacking fundamental matrices between pairs of images has rank 6. Moreover, this matrix forms the symmetric part of a rank 3 matrix whose factors relate directly to the corresponding camera matrices. We use this new characterization to produce better estimations of fundamental matrices by optimizing an L1-cost function using Iterative Re-weighted Least Squares and Alternate Direction Method of Multiplier. We further show that this procedure can improve the recovery of camera locations, particularly in multi-view settings in which fewer images are available.

Meirav Galun, Tal Amir, Tal Hassner et al.

Finding correspondences in wide baseline setups is a challenging problem. Existing approaches have focused largely on developing better feature descriptors for correspondence and on accurate recovery of epipolar line constraints. This paper focuses on the challenging problem of finding correspondences once approximate epipolar constraints are given. We introduce a novel method that integrates a deformation model. Specifically, we formulate the problem as finding the largest number of corresponding points related by a bounded distortion map that obeys the given epipolar constraints. We show that, while the set of bounded distortion maps is not convex, the subset of maps that obey the epipolar line constraints is convex, allowing us to introduce an efficient algorithm for matching. We further utilize a robust cost function for matching and employ majorization-minimization for its optimization. Our experiments indicate that our method finds significantly more accurate maps than existing approaches.