Approximating a target probability distribution can be cast as an optimization problem where the objective functional measures the dissimilarity to the target. This optimization can be addressed by approximating Wasserstein and related gradient flows. In practice, these are simulated by interacting particle systems, whose stationary states define an empirical measure approximating the target distribution. This approach has been popularized recently to design sampling algorithms, e.g. Stein Variational Gradient Descent, or by minimizing the Maximum Mean or Kernel Stein Discrepancy. However, little is known about quantization properties of these approaches, i.e. how well is the target approximated by a finite number particles. We investigate this question theoretically and numerically. In particular, we prove general upper bounds on the quantization error of MMD and KSD at rates which significantly outperform quantization by i.i.d. samples. We conduct experiments which show that the particle systems at study achieve fast rates in practice, and notably outperform greedy algorithms, such as kernel herding. We compare different gradient flows and highlight their quantization rates. Furthermore we introduce a Normalized Stein Variational Gradient Descent and argue in favor of adaptive kernels, which exhibit faster convergence. Finally we compare the Gaussian and Laplace kernels and argue that the Laplace kernel provides a more robust quantization.

We propose a new framework, called Poisson learning, for graph based semi-supervised learning at very low label rates. Poisson learning is motivated by the need to address the degeneracy of Laplacian semi-supervised learning in this regime. The method replaces the assignment of label values at training points with the placement of sources and sinks, and solves the resulting Poisson equation on the graph. The outcomes are provably more stable and informative than those of Laplacian learning. Poisson learning is efficient and simple to implement, and we present numerical experiments showing the method is superior to other recent approaches to semi-supervised learning at low label rates on MNIST, FashionMNIST, and Cifar-10. We also propose a graph-cut enhancement of Poisson learning, called Poisson MBO, that gives higher accuracy and can incorporate prior knowledge of relative class sizes.

Angle-preserving or conformal surface parameterization has proven to be a powerful tool across applications ranging from geometry processing, to digital manufacturing, to machine learning, yet conformal maps can still suffer from severe area distortion. Cone singularities provide a way to mitigate this distortion, but finding the best configuration of cones is notoriously difficult. This paper develops a strategy that is globally optimal in the sense that it minimizes total area distortion among all possible cone configurations (number, placement, and size) that have no more than a fixed total cone angle. A key insight is that, for the purpose of optimization, one should not work directly with curvature measures (which naturally represent cone configurations), but can instead apply Fenchel-Rockafellar duality to obtain a formulation involving only ordinary functions. The result is a convex optimization problem, which can be solved via a sequence of sparse linear systems easily built from the usual cotangent Laplacian. The method supports user-defined notions of importance, constraints on cone angles ( e.g. , positive, or within a given range), and sophisticated boundary conditions ( e.g. , convex, or polygonal). We compare our approach to previous techniques on a variety of challenging models, often achieving dramatically lower distortion, and demonstrating that global optimality leads to extreme robustness in the presence of noise or poor discretization.

This paper establishes the consistency of a family of graph-cut- based algorithms for clustering of data clouds. We consider point clouds obtained as samples of a ground-truth measure. We investigate approaches to clustering based on minimizing objective functionals defined on proximity graphs of the given sample. Our focus is on functionals based on graph cuts like the Cheeger and ratio cuts. We show that minimizers of these cuts converge as the sample size increases to a minimizer of a corresponding continuum cut (which partitions the ground truth measure). Moreover, we obtain sharp conditions on how the connectivity radius can be scaled with respect to the number of sample points for the consistency to hold. We provide results for two-way and for multiway cuts. Furthermore we provide numerical experiments that illustrate the results and explore the optimality of scaling in dimension two.

Nuclear morphology and structure as visualized from histopathology microscopy images can yield important diagnostic clues in some benign and malignant tissue lesions. Precise quantitative information about nuclear structure and morphology, however, is currently not available for many diagnostic challenges. This is due, in part, to the lack of methods to quantify these differences from image data. We describe a method to characterize and contrast the distribution of nuclear structure in different tissue classes (normal, benign, cancer, etc.). The approach is based on quantifying chromatin morphology in different groups of cells using the optimal transportation (Kantorovich-Wasserstein) metric in combination with the Fisher discriminant analysis and multidimensional scaling techniques. We show that the optimal transportation metric is able to measure relevant biological information as it enables automatic determination of the class (e.g., normal versus cancer) of a set of nuclei. We show that the classification accuracies obtained using this metric are, on average, as good or better than those obtained utilizing a set of previously described numerical features. We apply our methods to two diagnostic challenges for surgical pathology: one in the liver and one in the thyroid. Results automatically computed using this technique show potentially biologically relevant differences in nuclear structure in liver and thyroid cancers.