Understanding Learning with Sliced-Wasserstein Requires Rethinking Informative Slices

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Tran, Huy, Bai, Yikun, Shahbazi, Ashkan, Hershey, John R., Kolouri, Soheil
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Tran, Huy
Bai, Yikun
Shahbazi, Ashkan
Hershey, John R.
Kolouri, Soheil
author_facet Tran, Huy
Bai, Yikun
Shahbazi, Ashkan
Hershey, John R.
Kolouri, Soheil
contents The practical applications of Wasserstein distances (WDs) are constrained by their sample and computational complexities. Sliced-Wasserstein distances (SWDs) provide a workaround by projecting distributions onto one-dimensional subspaces, leveraging the more efficient, closed-form WDs for one-dimensional distributions. However, in high dimensions, most random projections become uninformative due to the concentration of measure phenomenon. Although several SWD variants have been proposed to focus on \textit{informative} slices, they often introduce additional complexity, numerical instability, and compromise desirable theoretical (metric) properties of SWD. Amidst the growing literature that focuses on directly modifying the slicing distribution, which often face challenges, we revisit the classical Sliced-Wasserstein and propose instead to rescale the 1D Wasserstein to make all slices equally informative. Importantly, we show that with an appropriate data assumption and notion of \textit{slice informativeness}, rescaling for all individual slices simplifies to \textbf{a single global scaling factor} on the SWD. This, in turn, translates to the standard learning rate search for gradient-based learning in common machine learning workflows. We perform extensive experiments across various machine learning tasks showing that the classical SWD, when properly configured, can often match or surpass the performance of more complex variants. We then answer the following question: "Is Sliced-Wasserstein all you need for common learning tasks?"
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10651
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Learning with Sliced-Wasserstein Requires Rethinking Informative Slices
Tran, Huy
Bai, Yikun
Shahbazi, Ashkan
Hershey, John R.
Kolouri, Soheil
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Applications
Computation
The practical applications of Wasserstein distances (WDs) are constrained by their sample and computational complexities. Sliced-Wasserstein distances (SWDs) provide a workaround by projecting distributions onto one-dimensional subspaces, leveraging the more efficient, closed-form WDs for one-dimensional distributions. However, in high dimensions, most random projections become uninformative due to the concentration of measure phenomenon. Although several SWD variants have been proposed to focus on \textit{informative} slices, they often introduce additional complexity, numerical instability, and compromise desirable theoretical (metric) properties of SWD. Amidst the growing literature that focuses on directly modifying the slicing distribution, which often face challenges, we revisit the classical Sliced-Wasserstein and propose instead to rescale the 1D Wasserstein to make all slices equally informative. Importantly, we show that with an appropriate data assumption and notion of \textit{slice informativeness}, rescaling for all individual slices simplifies to \textbf{a single global scaling factor} on the SWD. This, in turn, translates to the standard learning rate search for gradient-based learning in common machine learning workflows. We perform extensive experiments across various machine learning tasks showing that the classical SWD, when properly configured, can often match or surpass the performance of more complex variants. We then answer the following question: "Is Sliced-Wasserstein all you need for common learning tasks?"
title Understanding Learning with Sliced-Wasserstein Requires Rethinking Informative Slices
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Applications
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10651