We study the cluster recovery problem in the semi-supervised active clustering framework. Given a finite set of input points, and an oracle revealing whether any two points lie in the same cluster, our goal is to recover all clusters exactly using as few queries as possible. To this end, we relax the spherical $k$-means cluster assumption of Ashtiani et al.\ to allow for arbitrary ellipsoidal clusters with margin. This removes the assumption that the clustering is center-based (i.e., defined through an optimization problem), and includes all those cases where spherical clusters are individually transformed by any combination of rotations, axis scalings, and point deletions. We show that, even in this much more general setting, it is still possible to recover the latent clustering exactly using a number of queries that scales only logarithmically with the number of input points. More precisely, we design an algorithm that, given $n$ points to be partitioned into $k$ clusters, uses $O(k^3 \ln k \ln n)$ oracle queries and $\widetilde{O}(kn + k^3)$ time to recover the clustering with zero misclassification error. The $O(\cdot)$ notation hides an exponential dependence on the dimensionality of the clusters, which we show to be necessary thus characterizing the query complexity of the problem. Our algorithm is simple, easy to implement, and can also learn the clusters using low-stretch separators, a class of ellipsoids with additional theoretical guarantees. Experiments on large synthetic datasets confirm that we can reconstruct clusterings exactly and efficiently.

Recent advances in image clustering typically focus on learning better deep representations. In contrast, we present an orthogonal approach that does not rely on abstract features but instead learns to predict transformations and performs clustering directly in image space. This learning process naturally fits in the gradient-based training of K-means and Gaussian mixture model, without requiring any additional loss or hyper-parameters. It leads us to two new deep transformation-invariant clustering frameworks, which jointly learn prototypes and transformations. More specifically, we use deep learning modules that enable us to resolve invariance to spatial, color and morphological transformations. Our approach is conceptually simple and comes with several advantages, including the possibility to easily adapt the desired invariance to the task and a strong interpretability of both cluster centers and assignments to clusters. We demonstrate that our novel approach yields competitive and highly promising results on standard image clustering benchmarks. Finally, we showcase its robustness and the advantages of its improved interpretability by visualizing clustering results over real photograph collections.

In this paper, we study one challenging issue in multi-view data clustering. To be specific, for two data matrices $\mathbf{X}^{(1)}$ and $\mathbf{X}^{(2)}$ corresponding to two views, we do not assume that $\mathbf{X}^{(1)}$ and $\mathbf{X}^{(2)}$ are fully aligned in row-wise. Instead, we assume that only a small portion of the matrices has established the correspondence in advance. Such a partially view-aligned problem (PVP) could lead to the intensive labor of capturing or establishing the aligned multi-view data, which has less been touched so far to the best of our knowledge. To solve this practical and challenging problem, we propose a novel multi-view clustering method termed partially view-aligned clustering (PVC). To be specific, PVC proposes to use a differentiable surrogate of the non-differentiable Hungarian algorithm and recasts it as a pluggable module. As a result, the category-level correspondence of the unaligned data could be established in a latent space learned by a neural network, while learning a common space across different views using the ``aligned'' data. Extensive experimental results show promising results of our method in clustering partially view-aligned data.

Clustering, a fundamental activity in unsupervised learning, is notoriously difficult when the feature space is high-dimensional. Fortunately, in many realistic scenarios, only a handful of features are relevant in distinguishing clusters. This has motivated the development of sparse clustering techniques that typically rely on k-means within outer algorithms of high computational complexity. Current techniques also require careful tuning of shrinkage parameters, further limiting their scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for sparse k-means clustering that is intuitive, simple to implement, and competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms. We show that our algorithm enjoys consistency and convergence guarantees. Our core method readily generalizes to several task-specific algorithms such as clustering on subsets of attributes and in partially observed data settings. We showcase these contributions thoroughly via simulated experiments and real data benchmarks, including a case study on protein expression in trisomic mice.

A popular model of preference in the context of recommendation systems is the so-called ideal point model. In this model, a user is represented as a vector u together with a collection of items x1 ... xN in a common low-dimensional space. The vector u represents the user's "ideal point," or the ideal combination of features that represents a hypothesized most preferred item. The underlying assumption in this model is that a smaller distance between u and an item xj indicates a stronger preference for xj. In the vast majority of the existing work on learning ideal point models, the underlying distance has been assumed to be Euclidean. However, this eliminates any possibility of interactions between features and a user's underlying preferences. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning an ideal point representation of a user's preferences when the distance metric is an unknown Mahalanobis metric. Specifically, we present a novel approach to estimate the user's ideal point u and the Mahalanobis metric from paired comparisons of the form "item xi is preferred to item xj.'' This can be viewed as a special case of a more general metric learning problem where the location of some points are unknown a priori. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets to exhibit the effectiveness of our algorithm.

We address the question of characterizing and finding optimal representations for supervised learning. Traditionally, this question has been tackled using the Information Bottleneck, which compresses the inputs while retaining information about the targets, in a decoder-agnostic fashion. In machine learning, however, our goal is not compression but rather generalization, which is intimately linked to the predictive family or decoder of interest (e.g. linear classifier). We propose the Decodable Information Bottleneck (DIB) that considers information retention and compression from the perspective of the desired predictive family. As a result, DIB gives rise to representations that are optimal in terms of expected test performance and can be estimated with guarantees. Empirically, we show that the framework can be used to enforce a small generalization gap on downstream classifiers and to predict the generalization ability of neural networks.

Statistical analysis of a graph often starts with embedding, the process of representing its nodes as points in space. How to choose the embedding dimension is a nuanced decision in practice, but in theory a notion of true dimension is often available. In spectral embedding, this dimension may be very high. However, this paper shows that existing random graph models, including graphon and other latent position models, predict the data should live near a much lower-dimensional set. One may therefore circumvent the curse of dimensionality by employing methods which exploit hidden manifold structure.

Visual and audio modalities are highly correlated, yet they contain different information. Their strong correlation makes it possible to predict the semantics of one from the other with good accuracy. Their intrinsic differences make cross-modal prediction a potentially more rewarding pretext task for self-supervised learning of video and audio representations compared to within-modality learning. Based on this intuition, we propose Cross-Modal Deep Clustering (XDC), a novel self-supervised method that leverages unsupervised clustering in one modality (e.g., audio) as a supervisory signal for the other modality (e.g., video). This cross-modal supervision helps XDC utilize the semantic correlation and the differences between the two modalities. Our experiments show that XDC outperforms single-modality clustering and other multi-modal variants. XDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among self-supervised methods on multiple video and audio benchmarks. Most importantly, our video model pretrained on large-scale unlabeled data significantly outperforms the same model pretrained with full-supervision on ImageNet and Kinetics for action recognition on HMDB51 and UCF101. To the best of our knowledge, XDC is the first self-supervised learning method that outperforms large-scale fully-supervised pretraining for action recognition on the same architecture.

Conformal inference, cross-validation+, and the jackknife+ are hold-out methods that can be combined with virtually any machine learning algorithm to construct prediction sets with guaranteed marginal coverage. In this paper, we develop specialized versions of these techniques for categorical and unordered response labels that, in addition to providing marginal coverage, are also fully adaptive to complex data distributions, in the sense that they perform favorably in terms of approximate conditional coverage compared to alternative methods. The heart of our contribution is a novel conformity score, which we explicitly demonstrate to be powerful and intuitive for classification problems, but whose underlying principle is potentially far more general. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the practical value of our theoretical guarantees, as well as the statistical advantages of the proposed methods over the existing alternatives.

Ranking and selection tasks appear in different contexts with specific desiderata, such as the maximizaton of average relevance on the top of the list, the requirement of diverse rankings, or, relatedly, the focus on providing at least one relevant items to as many users as possible. This paper addresses the question of which of these tasks are asymptotically solved by sorting by decreasing order of expected utility, for some suitable notion of utility, or, equivalently, \emph{when is square loss regression consistent for ranking \emph{via} score-and-sort?}. We provide an answer to this question in the form of a structural characterization of ranking losses for which a suitable regression is consistent. This result has two fundamental corollaries. First, whenever there exists a consistent approach based on convex risk minimization, there also is a consistent approach based on regression. Second, when regression is not consistent, there are data distributions for which consistent surrogate approaches necessarily have non-trivial local minima, and optimal scoring function are necessarily discontinuous, even when the underlying data distribution is regular. In addition to providing a better understanding of surrogate approaches for ranking, these results illustrate the intrinsic difficulty of solving general ranking problems with the score-and-sort approach.