ambient space
Detecting Metastable Basins in High Dimensions via Marginal Trajectory Distribution Discrimination
We study the problem of identifying dynamically distinct basins of attraction in high dimensional time-homogeneous Markov processes using only trajectory sampling. This problem is fundamental in the analysis of metastable dynamical systems, where the process rapidly mixes within basins while transitions between basins occur rarely on the timescale of interest, or even when the state space is reducible. Existing approaches typically rely on spatial discretization or spectral analysis of estimated transition operators, which can become unreliable in high dimensional settings or when the underlying basin geometry is highly nonlinear. We propose a discriminative approach to basin identification based on marginal trajectory distribution comparison. We prove a simple risk separation result: if two initial states belong to the same basin, the Bayes-optimal classifier distinguishing their marginal trajectory distributions achieves risk close to 1/2, whereas if they lie in distinct basins, the optimal risk is close to zero. This observation reduces basin detection to a two-sample discrimination problem between marginal trajectory distributions. Motivated by this principle, we develop a neural algorithm that receives a set of candidate basin representatives and iteratively merges them by estimating classification risk with a neural network that approximates the Bayes classifier. We evaluate the method on various metastable systems. These include synthetic systems constructed by embedding low-dimensional dynamics into high dimensional noisy ambient spaces. In these settings, standard spectral and clustering-based methods often fail, while our approach accurately recovers the underlying basin structure. These results display a shortcoming of existing methods and highlight trajectory discrimination as an effective tool for identifying dynamical basins in high dimensional stochastic systems.
Riemannian Diffusion Models
Diffusion models are recent state-of-the-art methods for image generation and likelihood estimation. In this work, we generalize continuous-time diffusion models to arbitrary Riemannian manifolds and derive a variational framework for likelihood estimation. Computationally, we propose new methods for computing the Riemannian divergence which is needed for likelihood estimation. Moreover, in generalizing the Euclidean case, we prove that maximizing this variational lowerbound is equivalent to Riemannian score matching. Empirically, we demonstrate the expressive power of Riemannian diffusion models on a wide spectrum of smooth manifolds, such as spheres, tori, hyperboloids, and orthogonal groups. Our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art likelihoods on all benchmarks.
Re-ExaminingLinearEmbeddingsfor High-DimensionalBayesianOptimization
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach to optimize expensive-toevaluate black-box functions. A significant challenge in BO is to scale to highdimensional parameter spaces whileretaining sample efficiency. Asolution considered in existing literature is to embed the high-dimensional space in a lowerdimensional manifold, often via a random linear embedding.
Low-Rank Plus Sparse Matrix Transfer Learning under Growing Representations and Ambient Dimensions
Chai, Jinhang, Liu, Xuyuan, Chen, Elynn, Yan, Yujun
Learning systems often expand their ambient features or latent representations over time, embedding earlier representations into larger spaces with limited new latent structure. We study transfer learning for structured matrix estimation under simultaneous growth of the ambient dimension and the intrinsic representation, where a well-estimated source task is embedded as a subspace of a higher-dimensional target task. We propose a general transfer framework in which the target parameter decomposes into an embedded source component, low-dimensional low-rank innovations, and sparse edits, and develop an anchored alternating projection estimator that preserves transferred subspaces while estimating only low-dimensional innovations and sparse modifications. We establish deterministic error bounds that separate target noise, representation growth, and source estimation error, yielding strictly improved rates when rank and sparsity increments are small. We demonstrate the generality of the framework by applying it to two canonical problems. For Markov transition matrix estimation from a single trajectory, we derive end-to-end theoretical guarantees under dependent noise. For structured covariance estimation under enlarged dimensions, we provide complementary theoretical analysis in the appendix and empirically validate consistent transfer gains.
Below we address some major concerns
We thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback. We will improve the presentation according to the suggestions. Below we address some major concerns. Q1 [R1]: Does this work generalize to non-Euclidean domains with arbitrary distance measures? Q2 [R1]: In terms of the name, the proposed work is more "geometric" than "topological".
Bilateral Distribution Compression: Reducing Both Data Size and Dimensionality
Broadbent, Dominic, Whiteley, Nick, Allison, Robert, Lovett, Tom
Existing distribution compression methods reduce dataset size by minimising the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between original and compressed sets, but modern datasets are often large in both sample size and dimensionality. We propose Bilateral Distribution Compression (BDC), a two-stage framework that compresses along both axes while preserving the underlying distribution, with overall linear time and memory complexity in dataset size and dimension. Central to BDC is the Decoded MMD (DMMD), which quantifies the discrepancy between the original data and a compressed set decoded from a low-dimensional latent space. BDC proceeds by (i) learning a low-dimensional projection using the Reconstruction MMD (RMMD), and (ii) optimising a latent compressed set with the Encoded MMD (EMMD). We show that this procedure minimises the DMMD, guaranteeing that the compressed set faithfully represents the original distribution. Experiments show that across a variety of scenarios BDC can achieve comparable or superior performance to ambient-space compression at substantially lower cost.
High-Dimensional Statistical Process Control via Manifold Fitting and Learning
Tas, Burak I., del Castillo, Enrique
We address the Statistical Process Control (SPC) of high-dimensional, dynamic industrial processes from two complementary perspectives: manifold fitting and manifold learning, both of which assume data lies on an underlying nonlinear, lower dimensional space. We propose two distinct monitoring frameworks for online or 'phase II' Statistical Process Control (SPC). The first method leverages state-of-the-art techniques in manifold fitting to accurately approximate the manifold where the data resides within the ambient high-dimensional space. It then monitors deviations from this manifold using a novel scalar distribution-free control chart. In contrast, the second method adopts a more traditional approach, akin to those used in linear dimensionality reduction SPC techniques, by first embedding the data into a lower-dimensional space before monitoring the embedded observations. We prove how both methods provide a controllable Type I error probability, after which they are contrasted for their corresponding fault detection ability. Extensive numerical experiments on a synthetic process and on a replicated Tennessee Eastman Process show that the conceptually simpler manifold-fitting approach achieves performance competitive with, and sometimes superior to, the more classical lower-dimensional manifold monitoring methods. In addition, we demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed manifold-fitting approach by successfully detecting surface anomalies in a real image dataset of electrical commutators.