Li Wang

Yingting Liu, Chaochao Chen, Jamie Cui et al.

K-means is one of the most widely used clustering models in practice. Due to the problem of data isolation and the requirement for high model performance, how to jointly build practical and secure K-means for multiple parties has become an important topic for many applications in the industry. Existing work on this is mainly of two types. The first type has efficiency advantages, but information leakage raises potential privacy risks. The second type is provable secure but is inefficient and even helpless for the large-scale data sparsity scenario. In this paper, we propose a new framework for efficient sparsity-aware K-means with three characteristics. First, our framework is divided into a data-independent offline phase and a much faster online phase, and the offline phase allows to pre-compute almost all cryptographic operations. Second, we take advantage of the vectorization techniques in both online and offline phases. Third, we adopt a sparse matrix multiplication for the data sparsity scenario to improve efficiency further. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three synthetic datasets and deploy our model in a real-world fraud detection task. Our experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art solution, our model achieves competitive performance in terms of both running time and communication size, especially on sparse datasets.

Li Wang, Xiaohua Zhang, Longfei Li et al.

Spectral unmixing is a significant challenge in hyperspectral image processing. Existing unmixing methods utilize prior knowledge about the abundance distribution to solve the regularization optimization problem, where the difficulty lies in choosing appropriate prior knowledge and solving the complex regularization optimization problem. To solve these problems, we propose a hyperspectral conditional generative adversarial network (HyperGAN) method as a generic unmixing framework, based on the following assumption: the unmixing process from pixel to abundance can be regarded as a transformation of two modalities with an internal specific relationship. The proposed HyperGAN is composed of a generator and discriminator, the former completes the modal conversion from mixed hyperspectral pixel patch to the abundance of corresponding endmember of the central pixel and the latter is used to distinguish whether the distribution and structure of generated abundance are the same as the true ones. We propose hyperspectral image (HSI) Patch Transformer as the main component of the generator, which utilize adaptive attention score to capture the internal pixels correlation of the HSI patch and leverage the spatial-spectral information in a fine-grained way to achieve optimization of the unmixing process. Experiments on synthetic data and real hyperspectral data achieve impressive results compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

Li Wang, Lei-Hong Zhang, Ren-Cang Li

A trace ratio optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold is investigated from the perspectives of both theory and numerical computations. At least three special cases of the problem have arisen from Fisher linear discriminant analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and unbalanced Procrustes problem, respectively. Necessary conditions in the form of nonlinear eigenvalue problem with eigenvector dependency are established and a numerical method based on the self-consistent field (SCF) iteration is designed and proved to be always convergent. As an application to multi-view subspace learning, a new framework and its instantiated concrete models are proposed and demonstrated on real world data sets. Numerical results show that the efficiency of the proposed numerical methods and effectiveness of the new multi-view subspace learning models.

Li Wang, Lei-Hong Zhang, Chungen Shen et al.

Multi-view datasets are increasingly collected in many real-world applications, and we have seen better learning performance by existing multi-view learning methods than by conventional single-view learning methods applied to each view individually. But, most of these multi-view learning methods are built on the assumption that at each instance no view is missing and all data points from all views must be perfectly paired. Hence they cannot handle unpaired data but ignore them completely from their learning process. However, unpaired data can be more abundant in reality than paired ones and simply ignoring all unpaired data incur tremendous waste in resources. In this paper, we focus on learning uncorrelated features by semi-paired subspace learning, motivated by many existing works that show great successes of learning uncorrelated features. Specifically, we propose a generalized uncorrelated multi-view subspace learning framework, which can naturally integrate many proven learning criteria on the semi-paired data. To showcase the flexibility of the framework, we instantiate five new semi-paired models for both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. We also design a successive alternating approximation (SAA) method to solve the resulting optimization problem and the method can be combined with the powerful Krylov subspace projection technique if needed. Extensive experimental results on multi-view feature extraction and multi-modality classification show that our proposed models perform competitively to or better than the baselines.

Li Wang, Leihong Zhang, Chungen Shen et al.

We propose a unified framework for multi-view subspace learning to learn individual orthogonal projections for all views. The framework integrates the correlations within multiple views, supervised discriminant capacity, and distance preservation in a concise and compact way. It not only includes several existing models as special cases, but also inspires new novel models. To demonstrate its versatility to handle different learning scenarios, we showcase three new multi-view discriminant analysis models and two new multi-view multi-label classification ones under this framework. An efficient numerical method based on successive approximations via eigenvectors is presented to solve the associated optimization problem. The method is built upon an iterative Krylov subspace method which can easily scale up for high-dimensional datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted on various real-world datasets for multi-view discriminant analysis and multi-view multi-label classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models are consistently competitive to and often better than the compared methods that do not learn orthogonal projections.

Li Wang, Ren-Cang Li, Wen-Wei

We establish a family of subspace-based learning method for multi-view learning using the least squares as the fundamental basis. Specifically, we investigate orthonormalized partial least squares (OPLS) and study its important properties for both multivariate regression and classification. Building on the least squares reformulation of OPLS, we propose a unified multi-view learning framework to learn a classifier over a common latent space shared by all views. The regularization technique is further leveraged to unleash the power of the proposed framework by providing three generic types of regularizers on its inherent ingredients including model parameters, decision values and latent projected points. We instantiate a set of regularizers in terms of various priors. The proposed framework with proper choices of regularizers not only can recast existing methods, but also inspire new models. To further improve the performance of the proposed framework on complex real problems, we propose to learn nonlinear transformations parameterized by deep networks. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare various methods on nine data sets with different numbers of views in terms of both feature extraction and cross-modal retrieval.

Hok Shing Wong, Li Wang, Raymond Chan et al.

We present Deep Tensor Canonical Correlation Analysis (DTCCA), a method to learn complex nonlinear transformations of multiple views (more than two) of data such that the resulting representations are linearly correlated in high order. The high-order correlation of given multiple views is modeled by covariance tensor, which is different from most CCA formulations relying solely on the pairwise correlations. Parameters of transformations of each view are jointly learned by maximizing the high-order canonical correlation. To solve the resulting problem, we reformulate it as the best sum of rank-1 approximation, which can be efficiently solved by existing tensor decomposition method. DTCCA is a nonlinear extension of tensor CCA (TCCA) via deep networks. The transformations of DTCCA are parametric functions, which are very different from implicit mapping in the form of kernel function. Comparing with kernel TCCA, DTCCA not only can deal with arbitrary dimensions of the input data, but also does not need to maintain the training data for computing representations of any given data point. Hence, DTCCA as a unified model can efficiently overcome the scalable issue of TCCA for either high-dimensional multi-view data or a large amount of views, and it also naturally extends TCCA for learning nonlinear representation. Extensive experiments on three multi-view data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Leihong Zhang, Li Wang, Zhaojun Bai et al.

We propose an efficient algorithm for solving orthogonal canonical correlation analysis (OCCA) in the form of trace-fractional structure and orthogonal linear projections. Even though orthogonality has been widely used and proved to be a useful criterion for pattern recognition and feature extraction, existing methods for solving OCCA problem are either numerical unstable by relying on a deflation scheme, or less efficient by directly using generic optimization methods. In this paper, we propose an alternating numerical scheme whose core is the sub-maximization problem in the trace-fractional form with an orthogonal constraint. A customized self-consistent-field (SCF) iteration for this sub-maximization problem is devised. It is proved that the SCF iteration is globally convergent to a KKT point and that the alternating numerical scheme always converges. We further formulate a new trace-fractional maximization problem for orthogonal multiset CCA (OMCCA) and then propose an efficient algorithm with an either Jacobi-style or Gauss-Seidel-style updating scheme based on the same SCF iteration. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms against existing methods including two real world applications: multi-label classification and multi-view feature extraction. Experimental results show that our methods not only perform competitively to or better than baselines but also are more efficient.

Feng Liu, Li Wang, Yifei Lou et al.

Brain source imaging is an important method for noninvasively characterizing brain activity using Electroencephalogram (EEG) or Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings. Traditional EEG/MEG Source Imaging (ESI) methods usually assume that either source activity at different time points is unrelated, or that similar spatiotemporal patterns exist across an entire study period. The former assumption makes ESI analyses sensitive to noise, while the latter renders ESI analyses unable to account for time-varying patterns of activity. To effectively deal with noise while maintaining flexibility and continuity among brain activation patterns, we propose a novel probabilistic ESI model based on a hierarchical graph prior. Under our method, a spanning tree constraint ensures that activity patterns have spatiotemporal continuity. An efficient algorithm based on alternating convex search is presented to solve the proposed model and is provably convergent. Comprehensive numerical studies using synthetic data on a real brain model are conducted under different levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from both sensor and source spaces. We also examine the EEG/MEG data in a real application, in which our ESI reconstructions are neurologically plausible. All the results demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed algorithm over the benchmark methods in terms of source localization performance, especially at high noise levels.

Li Wang

We propose a novel probabilistic dimensionality reduction framework that can naturally integrate the generative model and the locality information of data. Based on this framework, we present a new model, which is able to learn a smooth skeleton of embedding points in a low-dimensional space from high-dimensional noisy data. The formulation of the new model can be equivalently interpreted as two coupled learning problem, i.e., structure learning and the learning of projection matrix. This interpretation motivates the learning of the embedding points that can directly form an explicit graph structure. We develop a new method to learn the embedding points that form a spanning tree, which is further extended to obtain a discriminative and compact feature representation for clustering problems. Unlike traditional clustering methods, we assume that centers of clusters should be close to each other if they are connected in a learned graph, and other cluster centers should be distant. This can greatly facilitate data visualization and scientific discovery in downstream analysis. Extensive experiments are performed that demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to obtain discriminative feature representations, and correctly recover the intrinsic structures of various real-world datasets.

Qi Mao, Li Wang, Ivor W. Tsang et al.

Many scientific datasets are of high dimension, and the analysis usually requires visual manipulation by retaining the most important structures of data. Principal curve is a widely used approach for this purpose. However, many existing methods work only for data with structures that are not self-intersected, which is quite restrictive for real applications. A few methods can overcome the above problem, but they either require complicated human-made rules for a specific task with lack of convergence guarantee and adaption flexibility to different tasks, or cannot obtain explicit structures of data. To address these issues, we develop a new regularized principal graph learning framework that captures the local information of the underlying graph structure based on reversed graph embedding. As showcases, models that can learn a spanning tree or a weighted undirected $\ell_1$ graph are proposed, and a new learning algorithm is developed that learns a set of principal points and a graph structure from data, simultaneously. The new algorithm is simple with guaranteed convergence. We then extend the proposed framework to deal with large-scale data. Experimental results on various synthetic and six real world datasets show that the proposed method compares favorably with baselines and can uncover the underlying structure correctly.

Mingkui Tan, Ivor W. Tsang, Li Wang

In this paper, we present a new adaptive feature scaling scheme for ultrahigh-dimensional feature selection on Big Data. To solve this problem effectively, we first reformulate it as a convex semi-infinite programming (SIP) problem and then propose an efficient \emph{feature generating paradigm}. In contrast with traditional gradient-based approaches that conduct optimization on all input features, the proposed method iteratively activates a group of features and solves a sequence of multiple kernel learning (MKL) subproblems of much reduced scale. To further speed up the training, we propose to solve the MKL subproblems in their primal forms through a modified accelerated proximal gradient approach. Due to such an optimization scheme, some efficient cache techniques are also developed. The feature generating paradigm can guarantee that the solution converges globally under mild conditions and achieve lower feature selection bias. Moreover, the proposed method can tackle two challenging tasks in feature selection: 1) group-based feature selection with complex structures and 2) nonlinear feature selection with explicit feature mappings. Comprehensive experiments on a wide range of synthetic and real-world datasets containing tens of million data points with $O(10^{14})$ features demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method over state-of-the-art feature selection methods in terms of generalization performance and training efficiency.