- Optimal Structured Principal Subspace Estimation: Metric Entropy and Minimax Rates(arXiv)
Author : T. Tony Cai, Hongzhe Li, Rong Ma
Abstract : Driven by a wide range of applications, many principal subspace estimation problems have been studied individually under different structural constraints. This paper presents a unified framework for the statistical analysis of a general structured principal subspace estimation problem which includes as special cases non-negative PCA/SVD, sparse PCA/SVD, subspace constrained PCA/SVD, and spectral clustering. General minimax lower and upper bounds are established to characterize the interplay between the information-geometric complexity of the structural set for the principal subspaces, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the dimensionality. The results yield interesting phase transition phenomena concerning the rates of convergence as a function of the SNRs and the fundamental limit for consistent estimation. Applying the general results to the specific settings yields the minimax rates of convergence for those problems, including the previous unknown optimal rates for non-negative PCA/SVD, sparse SVD and subspace constrained PCA/SVD.
2. Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy(arXiv)
Author : Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim, Stan Sclaroff, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
Abstract : Contemporary domain adaptation methods are very effective at aligning feature distributions of source and target domains without any target supervision. However, we show that these techniques perform poorly when even a few labeled examples are available in the target. To address this semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) setting, we propose a novel Minimax Entropy (MME) approach that adversarially optimizes an adaptive few-shot model. Our base model consists of a feature encoding network, followed by a classification layer that computes the features’ similarity to estimated prototypes (representatives of each class). Adaptation is achieved by alternately maximizing the conditional entropy of unlabeled target data with respect to the classifier and minimizing it with respect to the feature encoder. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of our method over many baselines, including conventional feature alignment and few-shot methods, setting a new state of the art for SSDA
