Average case analysis of Lasso under ultra-sparse conditions

We analyze the performance of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) for the linear model when the number of regressors $N$ grows larger keeping the true support size $d$ finite, i.e., the ultra-sparse case. The result is based on a novel treatment of the non-rigorous replica method in statistical physics, which has been applied only to problem settings where $N$ ,$d$ and the number of observations $M$ tend to infinity at the same rate. Our analysis makes it possible to assess the average performance of Lasso with Gaussian sensing matrices without assumptions on the scaling of $N$ and $M$, the noise distribution, and the profile of the true signal. Under mild conditions on the noise distribution, the analysis also offers a lower bound on the sample complexity necessary for partial and perfect support recovery when $M$ diverges as $M = O(\log N)$. The obtained bound for perfect support recovery is a generalization of that given in previous literature, which only considers the case of Gaussian noise and diverging $d$. Extensive numerical experiments strongly support our analysis.

QCM-SGM+: Improved Quantized Compressed Sensing With Score-Based Generative Models for General Sensing Matrices

In realistic compressed sensing (CS) scenarios, the obtained measurements usually have to be quantized to a finite number of bits before transmission and/or storage, thus posing a challenge in recovery, especially for extremely coarse quantization such as 1-bit sign measurements. Recently Meng & Kabashima proposed an efficient quantized compressed sensing algorithm called QCS-SGM using the score-based generative models as an implicit prior. Thanks to the power of score-based generative models in capturing the rich structure of the prior, QCS-SGM achieves remarkably better performances than previous quantized CS methods. However, QCS-SGM is restricted to (approximately) row-orthogonal sensing matrices since otherwise the likelihood score becomes intractable. To address this challenging problem, in this paper we propose an improved version of QCS-SGM, which we call QCS-SGM+, which also works well for general matrices. The key idea is a Bayesian inference perspective of the likelihood score computation, whereby an expectation propagation algorithm is proposed to approximately compute the likelihood score. Experiments on a variety of baseline datasets demonstrate that the proposed QCS-SGM+ outperforms QCS-SGM by a large margin when sensing matrices are far from row-orthogonal.

Diffusion Model Based Posterior Sampling for Noisy Linear Inverse Problems

We consider the ubiquitous linear inverse problems with additive Gaussian noise and propose an unsupervised general-purpose sampling approach called diffusion model based posterior sampling (DMPS) to reconstruct the unknown signal from noisy linear measurements. Specifically, the prior of the unknown signal is implicitly modeled by one pre-trained diffusion model (DM). In posterior sampling, to address the intractability of exact noise-perturbed likelihood score, a simple yet effective noise-perturbed pseudo-likelihood score is introduced under the uninformative prior assumption. While DMPS applies to any kind of DM with proper modifications, we focus on the ablated diffusion model (ADM) as one specific example and evaluate its efficacy on a variety of linear inverse problems such as image super-resolution, denoising, deblurring, colorization. Experimental results demonstrate that, for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples, DMPS achieves highly competitive or even better performances on various tasks while being 3 times faster than the leading competitor. The code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/mengxiangming/dmps.

A Unitary Transform Based Generalized Approximate Message Passing

We consider the problem of recovering an unknown signal ${\mathbf x}\in {\mathbb R}^n$ from general nonlinear measurements obtained through a generalized linear model (GLM), i.e., ${\mathbf y}= f\left({\mathbf A}{\mathbf x}+{\mathbf w}\right)$, where $f(\cdot)$ is a componentwise nonlinear function. Based on the unitary transform approximate message passing (UAMP) and expectation propagation, a unitary transform based generalized approximate message passing (GUAMP) algorithm is proposed for general measurement matrices $\bf{A}$, in particular highly correlated matrices. Experimental results on quantized compressed sensing demonstrate that the proposed GUAMP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GAMP and GVAMP under correlated matrices $\bf{A}$.

Exact Solutions of a Deep Linear Network

This work finds the exact solutions to a deep linear network with weight decay and stochastic neurons, a fundamental model for understanding the landscape of neural networks. Our result implies that weight decay strongly interacts with the model architecture and can create bad minima in a network with more than $1$ hidden layer, qualitatively different for a network with only $1$ hidden layer. As an application, we also analyze stochastic nets and show that their prediction variance vanishes to zero as the stochasticity, the width, or the depth tends to infinity.

Stochastic Neural Networks with Infinite Width are Deterministic

This work theoretically studies stochastic neural networks, a main type of neural network in use. Specifically, we prove that as the width of an optimized stochastic neural network tends to infinity, its predictive variance on the training set decreases to zero. Two common examples that our theory applies to are neural networks with dropout and variational autoencoders. Our result helps better understand how stochasticity affects the learning of neural networks and thus design better architectures for practical problems.

On Model Selection Consistency of Lasso for High-Dimensional Ising Models on Tree-like Graphs

We consider the problem of high-dimensional Ising model selection using neighborhood-based least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso). It is rigorously proved that under some mild coherence conditions on the population covariance matrix of the Ising model, consistent model selection can be achieved with sample sizes $n=\Omega{(d^3\log{p})}$ for any tree-like graph in the paramagnetic phase, where $p$ is the number of variables and $d$ is the maximum node degree. When the same conditions are imposed directly on the sample covariance matrices, it is shown that a reduced sample size $n=\Omega{(d^2\log{p})}$ suffices. The obtained sufficient conditions for consistent model selection with Lasso are the same in the scaling of the sample complexity as that of $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression. Given the popularity and efficiency of Lasso, our rigorous analysis provides a theoretical backing for its practical use in Ising model selection.

Ising Model Selection Using $\ell_{1}$-Regularized Linear Regression

We theoretically investigate the performance of $\ell_{1}$-regularized linear regression ($\ell_1$-LinR) for the problem of Ising model selection using the replica method from statistical mechanics. The regular random graph is considered under paramagnetic assumption. Our results show that despite model misspecification, the $\ell_1$-LinR estimator can successfully recover the graph structure of the Ising model with $N$ variables using $M=\mathcal{O}\left(\log N\right)$ samples, which is of the same order as that of $\ell_{1}$-regularized logistic regression. Moreover, we provide a computationally efficient method to accurately predict the non-asymptotic performance of the $\ell_1$-LinR estimator with moderate $M$ and $N$. Simulations show an excellent agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental results, which supports our findings.

Unitary Approximate Message Passing for Sparse Bayesian Learning

Sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) can be implemented with low complexity based on the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm. However, it is vulnerable to 'difficult' measurement matrices, which may cause AMP to diverge. Damped AMP has been used for SBL to alleviate the problem at the cost of reducing convergence speed. In this work, we propose a new SBL algorithm based on structured variational inference, leveraging AMP with a unitary transformation (UAMP). Both single measurement vector and multiple measurement vector problems are investigated. It is shown that, compared to state-of-the-art AMP-based SBL algorithms, the proposed UAMPSBL is more robust and efficient, leading to remarkably better performance.

Structure Learning in Inverse Ising Problems Using $\ell_2$-Regularized Linear Estimator

Inferring interaction parameters from observed data is a ubiquitous requirement in various fields of science and engineering. Recent studies have shown that the pseudolikelihood (PL) method is highly effective in meeting this requirement even though the maximum likelihood method is computationally intractable when used directly. To the best of our knowledge, most existing studies assume that the postulated model used in the inference stage covers the true model that generates the data. However, such an assumption does not necessarily hold in practical situations. From this perspective, we discuss the utility of the PL method in model mismatch cases. Specifically, we examine the inference performance of the PL method when $\ell_2$-regularized (ridge) linear regression is applied to data generated from sparse Boltzmann machines of Ising spins using methods of statistical mechanics. Our analysis indicates that despite the model mismatch, one can perfectly identify the network topology using naive linear regression without regularization when the dataset size $M$ is greater than the number of Ising spins, $N$. Further, even when $M < N$, perfect identification is possible using a two-stage estimator with much better quantitative performance compared to naive usage of the PL method. Results of extensive numerical experiments support our findings.