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Title: Parametric Manifold Learning Via Sparse Multidimensional Scaling

Paper content:
We propose a metric-learning framework for computing distance-preserving maps that generate low-dimensional embeddings for a certain class of manifolds.
We employ Siamese networks to solve the problem of least squares multidimensional scaling for generating mappings that preserve geodesic distances on the manifold.
In contrast to previous parametric manifold learning methods we show a substantial reduction in training effort enabled by the computation of geodesic distances in a farthest point sampling strategy.
Additionally, the use of a network to model the distance-preserving map reduces the complexity of the multidimensional scaling problem and leads to an improved non-local generalization of the manifold compared to analogous non-parametric counterparts.
We demonstrate our claims on point-cloud data and on image manifolds and show a numerical analysis of our technique to facilitate a greater understanding of the representational power of neural networks in modeling manifold data.
The characterization of distance preserving maps is of fundamental interest to the problem of nonlinear dimensionality reduction and manifold learning.
For the purpose of achieving a coherent global representation, it is often desirable to embed the high-dimensional data into a space of low dimensionality while preserving the metric structure of the data manifold.
The intrinsic nature of the geodesic distance makes such a representation depend only on the geometry of the manifold and not on how it is embedded in ambient space.
In the context of dimensionality reduction this property makes the resultant embedding meaningful.The success of deep learning has shown that neural networks can be trained as powerful function approximators of complex attributes governing various visual and auditory phenomena.
The availability of large amounts of data and computational power, coupled with parallel streaming architectures and improved optimization techniques, have all led to computational frameworks that efficiently exploit their representational power.
However, a study of their behavior under geometric constraints is an interesting question which has been relatively unexplored.In this paper, we use the computational infrastructure of neural networks to model maps that preserve geodesic distances on data manifolds.
We revisit the classical geometric framework of multidimensional scaling to find a configuration of points that satisfy pairwise distance constraints.
We show that instead of optimizing over the individual coordinates of the points, we can optimize over the function that generates these points by modeling this map as a neural network.
This makes the complexity of the problem depend on the number of parameters of the network rather than the number of data points, and thus significantly reduces the memory and computational complexities, a property that comes into practical play when the number of data points is large.
Additionally, the choice of modeling the isometric map with a parametric model provides a straightforward out-of-sample extension, which is a simple forward pass of the network.We exploit efficient sampling techniques that progressively select landmark points on the manifold by maximizing the spread of their pairwise geodesic distances.
We demonstrate that a small amount of these landmark points are sufficient to train a network to generate faithful low-dimensional embeddings of manifolds.
Figure 1 provides a visualization of the proposed approach.
In the interest of gauging their effectiveness in representing manifolds, we perform a numerical analysis to measure the quality of embedding generated by neural networks and associate an order of accuracy to a given Figure 1 : Learning to unfurl a ribbon: A three dimensional Helical Ribbon and its two dimensional embedding learned using a two-layer MLP.
The network was trained using estimated pairwise geodesic distances between only 100 points (marked in black) out of the total 8192 samples.architecture.
Finally, we demonstrate that parametric models provide better non-local generalization as compared to extrapolation formulas of their non-parametric counter parts.We advocate strengthening the link between axiomatic computation and parametric learning methodologies.
Existing MDS frameworks use a geometrically meaningful objective in a cumbersome non-parametric framework.
At the other end, learning based methods such as DrLim BID18 use a computationally desirable infrastructure yet a geometrically suboptimal objective requiring too many examples for satisfactory manifold learning.
The proposed approach can be interpreted as taking the middle path by using a computationally desirable method of a parametric neural network optimized by the geometrically meaningful cost of multidimensional scaling.
In the interest of obtaining a better understanding of neural network behavior, we advocate using learning methodologies for solving geometric problems with data by allowing a limited infusion of axiomatic computation to the learning process.
In this paper we demonstrate such a scheme by combining parametric modeling with neural networks and the geometric framework of multidimensional scaling.
The result of this union leads to reduction in training effort and improved local and nonlocal generalization abilities.
As future work, we intend to further explore methods that leverage learning methodologies for improving the largely axiomatic setups of numerical algorithms.

assistant: text: Parametric Manifold Learning with Neural Networks in a Geometric Framework