Neural datasets often contain measurements of neural activity across multiple trials of a repeated stimulus or behavior. An important problem in the analysis ofsuch datasets istocharacterizesystematic aspects ofneural activity that carry information about the repeated stimulus or behavior of interest, which can be considered "signal", and to separate them from the trial-to-trial fluctuations in activity that are not time-locked to the stimulus, which for purposes of such analyses can be considered "noise". Gaussian Process factor models provide a powerful tool for identifying shared structure in high-dimensional neural data.

High-dimensional data often contain low-dimensional signals obscured by structured background noise, which limits the effectiveness of standard PCA. Motivated by contrastive learning, we address the problem of recovering shared signal subspaces from positive pairs, paired observations sharing the same signal but differing in background. Our baseline, PCA+, uses alignment-only contrastive learning and succeeds when background variation is mild, but fails under strong noise or high-dimensional regimes. To address this, we introduce PCA++, a hard uniformity-constrained contrastive PCA that enforces identity covariance on projected features. PCA++ has a closed-form solution via a generalized eigenproblem, remains stable in high dimensions, and provably regularizes against background interference. We provide exact high-dimensional asymptotics in both fixed-aspect-ratio and growing-spike regimes, showing uniformity's role in robust signal recovery. Empirically, PCA++ outperforms standard PCA and alignment-only PCA+ on simulations, corrupted-MNIST, and single-cell transcriptomics, reliably recovering condition-invariant structure. More broadly, we clarify uniformity's role in contrastive learning, showing that explicit feature dispersion defends against structured noise and enhances robustness.

P-GPFA run on trial-averaged data. We show the first 3 PCs for clarity. These are single unit electrophysiological recordings from monkey V1 as they view 72 drifting sinusoidal stimuli. This pruned our dataset to 65 neurons total. Additionally, we only use the final 35 trials for our analysis.

Subspace representation is a fundamental technique in various fields of machine learning. Analyzing a geometrical relationship among multiple subspaces is essential for understanding subspace series' temporal and/or spatial dynamics. This paper proposes the second-order difference subspace, a higher-order extension of the first-order difference subspace between two subspaces that can analyze the geometrical difference between them. As a preliminary for that, we extend the definition of the first-order difference subspace to the more general setting that two subspaces with different dimensions have an intersection. We then define the second-order difference subspace by combining the concept of first-order difference subspace and principal component subspace (Karcher mean) between two subspaces, motivated by the second-order central difference method. We can understand that the first/second-order difference subspaces correspond to the velocity and acceleration of subspace dynamics from the viewpoint of a geodesic on a Grassmann manifold. We demonstrate the validity and naturalness of our second-order difference subspace by showing numerical results on two applications: temporal shape analysis of a 3D object and time series analysis of a biometric signal.

Localizing more sources than sensors with a sparse linear array (SLA) has long relied on minimizing a distance between two covariance matrices and recent algorithms often utilize semidefinite programming (SDP). Although deep neural network (DNN)-based methods offer new alternatives, they still depend on covariance matrix fitting. In this paper, we develop a novel methodology that estimates the co-array subspaces from a sample covariance for SLAs. Our methodology trains a DNN to learn signal and noise subspace representations that are invariant to the selection of bases. To learn such representations, we propose loss functions that gauge the separation between the desired and the estimated subspace. In particular, we propose losses that measure the length of the shortest path between subspaces viewed on a union of Grassmannians, and prove that it is possible for a DNN to approximate signal subspaces. The computation of learning subspaces of different dimensions is accelerated by a new batch sampling strategy called consistent rank sampling. The methodology is robust to array imperfections due to its geometry-agnostic and data-driven nature. In addition, we propose a fully end-to-end gridless approach that directly learns angles to study the possibility of bypassing subspace methods. Numerical results show that learning such subspace representations is more beneficial than learning covariances or angles. It outperforms conventional SDP-based methods such as the sparse and parametric approach (SPA) and existing DNN-based covariance reconstruction methods for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), snapshots, and source numbers for both perfect and imperfect arrays.

Abstract--This paper proposes a new method for anomaly detection in time-series data by incorporating the concept of difference subspace into the singular spectrum analysis (SSA). The key idea is to monitor slight temporal variations of the difference subspace between two signal subspaces corresponding to the past and present time-series data, as anomaly score. It is a natural generalization of the conventional SSA-based method which measures the minimum angle between the two signal subspaces as the degree of changes. By replacing the minimum angle with the difference subspace, our method boosts the performance while using the SSA-based framework as it can capture the whole structural difference between the two subspaces in its magnitude and direction. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness through performance evaluations on public time-series datasets. They can be roughly divided into two categories: 1) statisticsbased methods [2], [12], [16]-[19] and 2) deep learning based methods [6], [7], [13], [22].

Deep convolutional networks often append additive constant ("bias") terms to their convolution operations, enabling a richer repertoire of functional mappings. Biases are also used to facilitate training, by subtracting mean response over batches of training images (a component of "batch normalization"). Recent state-of-the-art blind denoising methods (e.g., DnCNN) seem to require these terms for their success. Here, however, we show that these networks systematically overfit the noise levels for which they are trained: when deployed at noise levels outside the training range, performance degrades dramatically. In contrast, a bias-free architecture -- obtained by removing the constant terms in every layer of the network, including those used for batch normalization-- generalizes robustly across noise levels, while preserving state-of-the-art performance within the training range. Locally, the bias-free network acts linearly on the noisy image, enabling direct analysis of network behavior via standard linear-algebraic tools. These analyses provide interpretations of network functionality in terms of nonlinear adaptive filtering, and projection onto a union of low-dimensional subspaces, connecting the learning-based method to more traditional denoising methodology.

Signal subspace methods (SSM) are efficient techniques to reduce dimensionality of data and to filter out noise [1]. The fundamental idea under SSM is to project the data on a basis made of two subspaces, one mostly containing the signal and the other the noise. The two subspaces are separated by a thresholding criterion associated with some measures of information. The two most popular methods of signal subspace decomposition are wavelet shrinkage [2] and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [3]. Both techniques have proved to be quite efficient. However, wavelet decomposition depending on signal statistics is not equally adapted to different data, and requires some knowledge on prior distributions or parameters of signals to efficiently choose the thresholds for shrinkage. A significant advantage of the PCA is its adaptability to data. The separation criterion is based on energy which may be seen as a limitation in some cases as illustrated in the next section. In recent years, sparse coding has attracted significant interest in the field of signal denoising [4].

Massive MIMO is a variant of multiuser MIMO where the number of base-station antennas $M$ is very large (typically 100), and generally much larger than the number of spatially multiplexed data streams (typically 10). Unfortunately, the front-end A/D conversion necessary to drive hundreds of antennas, with a signal bandwidth of the order of 10 to 100 MHz, requires very large sampling bit-rate and power consumption. In order to reduce such implementation requirements, Hybrid Digital-Analog architectures have been proposed. In particular, our work in this paper is motivated by one of such schemes named Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing (JSDM), where the downlink precoder (resp., uplink linear receiver) is split into the product of a baseband linear projection (digital) and an RF reconfigurable beamforming network (analog), such that only a reduced number $m \ll M$ of A/D converters and RF modulation/demodulation chains is needed. In JSDM, users are grouped according to the similarity of their channel dominant subspaces, and these groups are separated by the analog beamforming stage, where the multiplexing gain in each group is achieved using the digital precoder. Therefore, it is apparent that extracting the channel subspace information of the $M$-dim channel vectors from snapshots of $m$-dim projections, with $m \ll M$, plays a fundamental role in JSDM implementation. In this paper, we develop novel efficient algorithms that require sampling only $m = O(2\sqrt{M})$ specific array elements according to a coprime sampling scheme, and for a given $p \ll M$, return a $p$-dim beamformer that has a performance comparable with the best p-dim beamformer that can be designed from the full knowledge of the exact channel covariance matrix. We assess the performance of our proposed estimators both analytically and empirically via numerical simulations.