triangle inequality
Implicit Regularization in Perturbed Deep Matrix Factorization: Spectral Conditions and Stability
This paper studies the stability of low-rank implicit regularization in perturbed deep matrix factorization, where the target matrix is corrupted by a noise matrix. We first derive sufficient spectral conditions under which gradient descent exhibits a low-rank phase in the noiseless setting. These conditions show how the target spectrum, initialization, and step size jointly determine the existence of a nonempty low-rank interval. We then analyze the perturbed gradient descent dynamics, proving convergence guarantees and quantifying how the perturbation affects iteration complexity and eigenvalue recovery. Finally, we show that the low-rank phase persists under perturbation, with explicit dependence on the perturbation size. Numerical experiments support the theoretical findings.
Optimizing Computational-Statistical Runtime for Wasserstein Distance Estimation
Jacobs, Peter Matthew, Phillips, Jeff M.
Squared Wasserstein distance is a frequently used tool to measure discrepancy between probability distributions. This distance is typically computed between empirical measures of size $n$ from two underlying random samples. Unfortunately, even in lower dimensional Euclidean space problems $\left( d \in \{2,3\} \right)$, algorithms for Wasserstein distance computation with approximate or exact precision guarantees scale poorly in the runtime as a function of $n$ and the desired precision. In response, we consider the computational-statistical runtime, where the goal is to estimate from samples the Wasserstein distance between potentially smooth measures up to $ฮต$-additive error in expectation with respect to the sampling; we allow $O(1)$ computational cost for collecting a sample. Towards this, we develop a Sample-Sketch-Solve paradigm where we introduce a regular cartesian grid sketch of the samples. We show that (especially under $ฮฑ$-Hรถlder smooth distributions) this can compress the data without increasing asymptotic error, and also regularizes the structure which enables faster exact algorithms. Ultimately, we approximate $W_2^2(P,Q)$ within $ฮต$ error in $ฮต^{-\max(2,\frac{d+1+o(1)}{1+ฮฑ})}$ time for $0 < ฮฑ< 1$ Hรถlder smooth distributions $P,Q$ on $(0,1)^{d}$; an optimal $ฮ(ฮต^{-2})$ for $ฮฑ> 1/2$ when $d=2$ and nearly optimal as $ฮฑ\to 1$ when $d = 3$.
Multiscale Euclidean Network Trajectories: Second-Moment Geometry, Attribution, and Change Points
A central challenge in dynamic network analysis is to represent temporal evolution in a way that is both geometrically meaningful and statistically identifiable. One approach embeds a sequence of network snapshots as trajectories in a Euclidean space and relates these trajectories to node embeddings. In multilayer and unfolded spectral constructions, however, node embeddings and their underlying latent positions are identifiable only up to general linear transformations. Although this ambiguity preserves edge probabilities, it can distort geometry and invalidate distance based temporal comparisons at both the trajectory and node-levels. We develop Multiscale Euclidean Network Trajectories (MENT), a framework for multiscale temporal trajectories based on second-moment geometry. By imposing an isotropic normalization on the anchor latent positions, we reduce the relevant ambiguity to orthogonal transformations and prevent distortion of the second-moment geometry. In this canonical representation, we define a trace variation distance and mode-wise variation distances along orthogonal directions, and use multidimensional scaling to obtain low-dimensional trajectories of time points at both global and mode-wise levels. The resulting trajectories support interpretation and inference. They admit mode-wise decompositions, support attribution of global and mode-wise temporal changes to nodes, and enable change point detection through 1D trajectories. We prove consistency of the proposed unfolded spectral embedding and of the induced temporal trajectories. Experiments on two synthetic and two real dynamic networks illustrate stable and interpretable recovery of temporal structure and show strong performance against existing change point detection baselines.
Adaptive Estimation and Inference in Semi-parametric Heterogeneous Clustered Multitask Learning via Neyman Orthogonality
Chen, Hanxiao, Mukherjee, Debarghya
We study clustered multitask learning in a semiparametric setting where tasks share a latent cluster structure in their target parameters but exhibit heterogeneous, potentially infinite-dimensional nuisance components. Such heterogeneity poses a major challenge for existing multitask learning methods, which typically rely on aligned feature spaces or homogeneous task structures. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive fused orthogonal estimator that integrates Neyman-orthogonal losses with data-driven pairwise fusion penalties. Our framework leverages task-specific pilot estimates to calibrate the fusion penalties and combines adaptive aggregation with orthogonalization to mitigate the impact of nuisance-parameter estimation error. Theoretically, we show that the proposed estimator achieves exact recovery of the latent clustering with high probability and attains pooled parametric convergence rates proportional to cluster size. Moreover, we establish asymptotic normality and show that, asymptotically, our estimator matches the performance of an oracle procedure that knows the true clustering in advance. Empirically, we show that the proposed method consistently outperforms strong baselines in various simulation setups. A real-world application to U.S. residential energy consumption demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in uncovering meaningful regional clustering in electricity price elasticity, showcasing the efficacy of our method.
An Adaptive Algorithm for Learning with Unknown Distribution Drift Alessio Mazzetto Brown University Eli Upfal Brown University
We develop and analyze a general technique for learning with an unknown distribution drift. Given a sequence of independent observations from the last T steps of a drifting distribution, our algorithm agnostically learns a family of functions with respect to the current distribution at time T. Unlike previous work, our technique does not require prior knowledge about the magnitude of the drift.
Appendix Impact
The SC stands for the spectral complexity defined in [4]. We use the empirical estimation of k-variance and Lipschitz constant defined in section 5 to calculate kV-Margin and kV-GN-Margin. B.2 Variance of Empirical Estimation In Table 1, we show the average scores over 4 random sampled subsets. We now show the standard deviation in Table 4. Overall, the standard deviation of the estimation is fairly small, consistent to the observation in Theorem 7.