Despite a great deal of research, it is still not well-understood why trained neural networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. In this work we focus on two-layer neural networks trained using data which lie on a low dimensional linear subspace. We show that standard gradient methods lead to non-robust neural networks, namely, networks which have large gradients in directions orthogonal to the data subspace, and are susceptible to small adversarial L2-perturbations in these directions. Moreover, we show that decreasing the initialization scale of the training algorithm, or adding L2 regularization, can make the trained network more robust to adversarial perturbations orthogonal to the data.

Recovering linear subspaces from data is a fundamental and important task in statistics and machine learning. Motivated by heterogeneity in Federated Learning settings, we study a basic formulation of this problem: the principal component analysis (PCA), with a focus on dealing with irregular noise. Our data come from $n$ users with user $i$ contributing data samples from a $d$-dimensional distribution with mean $\mu_i$. Our goal is to recover the linear subspace shared by $\mu_1,\ldots,\mu_n$ using the data points from all users, where every data point from user $i$ is formed by adding an independent mean-zero noise vector to $\mu_i$. If we only have one data point from every user, subspace recovery is information-theoretically impossible when the covariance matrices of the noise vectors can be non-spherical, necessitating additional restrictive assumptions in previous work. We avoid these assumptions by leveraging at least two data points from each user, which allows us to design an efficiently-computable estimator under non-spherical and user-dependent noise. We prove an upper bound for the estimation error of our estimator in general scenarios where the number of data points and amount of noise can vary across users, and prove an information-theoretic error lower bound that not only matches the upper bound up to a constant factor, but also holds even for spherical Gaussian noise. This implies that our estimator does not introduce additional estimation error (up to a constant factor) due to irregularity in the noise. We show additional results for a linear regression problem in a similar setup.

Our key idea is to introduce a novel self-expressive layer between the encoder and the decoder to mimic the "self-expressiveness" property that has proven effective in traditional subspace clustering.

The problem of choosing appropriate values for missing data is often encountered in the data science. We describe a novel method containing both traditional mathematics and machine learning elements for prediction (imputation) of missing data. This method is based on the notion of distance between shifted linear subspaces representing the existing data and candidate sets. The existing data set is represented by the subspace spanned by its first principal components. Solutions for the case of the Euclidean metric are given.

We consider the problem of subspace clustering: given points that lie on or near the union of many low-dimensional linear subspaces, recover the subspaces. To this end, one first identifies sets of points close to the same subspace and uses the sets to estimate the subspaces. As the geometric structure of the clusters (linear subspaces) forbids proper performance of general distance based approaches such as K-means, many model-specific methods have been proposed. In this paper, we provide new simple and efficient algorithms for this problem. Our statistical analysis shows that the algorithms are guaranteed exact (perfect) clustering performance under certain conditions on the number of points and the affinity between subspaces. These conditions are weaker than those considered in the standard statistical literature. Experimental results on synthetic data generated from the standard unions of subspaces model demonstrate our theory. We also show that our algorithm performs competitively against state-of-the-art algorithms on real-world applications such as motion segmentation and face clustering, with much simpler implementation and lower computational cost.

In situations where the solution of a high-fidelity dynamical system needs to be evaluated repeatedly, over a vast pool of parametric configurations and in absence of access to the underlying governing equations, data-driven model reduction techniques are preferable. We propose a novel active learning approach to build a parametric data-driven reduced-order model (ROM) by greedily picking the most important parameter samples from the parameter domain. As a result, during the ROM construction phase, the number of high-fidelity solutions dynamically grow in a principled fashion. The high-fidelity solution snapshots are expressed in several parameter-specific linear subspaces, with the help of proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and the relative distance between these subspaces is used as a guiding mechanism to perform active learning. For successfully achieving this, we provide a distance measure to evaluate the similarity between pairs of linear subspaces with different dimensions, and also show that this distance measure is a metric. The usability of the proposed subspace-distance-enabled active learning (SDE-AL) framework is demonstrated by augmenting two existing non-intrusive reduced-order modeling approaches, and providing their active-learning-driven (ActLearn) extensions, namely, SDE-ActLearn-POD-KSNN, and SDE-ActLearn-POD-NN. Furthermore, we report positive results for two parametric physical models, highlighting the efficiency of the proposed SDE-AL approach.

Over the past decades, there has been a surge of interest in studying low-dimensional structures within high-dimensional data. Statistical factor models $-$ i.e., low-rank plus diagonal covariance structures $-$ offer a powerful framework for modeling such structures. However, traditional methods for fitting statistical factor models, such as principal component analysis (PCA) or maximum likelihood estimation assuming the data is Gaussian, are highly sensitive to heavy tails and outliers in the observed data. In this paper, we propose a novel expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for robustly fitting statistical factor models. Our approach is based on Tyler's M-estimator of the scatter matrix for an elliptical distribution, and consists of solving Tyler's maximum likelihood estimation problem while imposing a structural constraint that enforces the low-rank plus diagonal covariance structure. We present numerical experiments on both synthetic and real examples, demonstrating the robustness of our method for direction-of-arrival estimation in nonuniform noise and subspace recovery.

Deep subspace clustering (DSC) algorithms face several challenges that hinder their widespread adoption across variois application domains. First, clustering quality is typically assessed using only the encoder's output layer, disregarding valuable information present in the intermediate layers. Second, most DSC approaches treat representation learning and subspace clustering as independent tasks, limiting their effectiveness. Third, they assume the availability of a held-out dataset for hyperparameter tuning, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios. Fourth, learning termination is commonly based on clustering error monitoring, requiring external labels. Finally, their performance often depends on post-processing techniques that rely on labeled data. To address this limitations, we introduce a novel single-view DSC approach that: (i) minimizes a layer-wise self expression loss using a joint representation matrix; (ii) optimizes a subspace-structured norm to enhance clustering quality; (iii) employs a multi-stage sequential learning framework, consisting of pre-training and fine-tuning, enabling the use of multiple regularization terms without hyperparameter tuning; (iv) incorporates a relative error-based self-stopping mechanism to terminate training without labels; and (v) retains a fixed number of leading coefficients in the learned representation matrix based on prior knowledge. We evaluate the proposed method on six datasets representing faces, digits, and objects. The results show that our method outperforms most linear SC algorithms with careffulyl tuned hyperparameters while maintaining competitive performance with the best performing linear appoaches.

Recovering linear subspaces from data is a fundamental and important task in statistics and machine learning. Motivated by heterogeneity in Federated Learning settings, we study a basic formulation of this problem: the principal component analysis (PCA), with a focus on dealing with irregular noise. Our data come from n users with user i contributing data samples from a d -dimensional distribution with mean \mu_i . Our goal is to recover the linear subspace shared by \mu_1,\ldots,\mu_n using the data points from all users, where every data point from user i is formed by adding an independent mean-zero noise vector to \mu_i . If we only have one data point from every user, subspace recovery is information-theoretically impossible when the covariance matrices of the noise vectors can be non-spherical, necessitating additional restrictive assumptions in previous work.

We present a framework for designing scores to summarize performance metrics. Our design has two multi-criteria objectives: (1) improving on scores should improve all performance metrics, and (2) achieving pareto-optimal scores should achieve pareto-optimal metrics. We formulate our design to minimize the dimensionality of scores while satisfying the objectives. We give algorithms to design scores, which are provably minimal under mild assumptions on the structure of performance metrics. This framework draws motivation from real-world practices in hospital rating systems, where misaligned scores and performance metrics lead to unintended consequences.