02/14/2022
By Ian Chen

Title: Understanding Latent Correlation-Based Multiview Learning and Self-Supervision: An Identifiability Perspective

Location: Via Zoom (Passcode: cstalks)
Time: 1:30-2:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 18, 2022

Abstract: Multiple views of data, both naturally acquired (e.g., image and audio) and artificially produced (e.g., via adding different noise to data samples), have proven useful in enhancing representation learning. Natural views are often handled by multiview analysis tools, e.g., (deep) canonical correlation analysis [(D)CCA], while the artificial ones are frequently used in self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigms, e.g., BYOL and Barlow Twins. Both types of approaches often involve learning neural feature extractors such that the embeddings of data exhibit high cross-view correlations. Although intuitive, the effectiveness of correlation-based neural embedding is mostly empirically validated. This work aims to understand latent correlation maximization-based deep multiview learning from a latent component identification viewpoint. An intuitive generative model of multiview data is adopted, where the views are different nonlinear mixtures of shared and private components. Since the shared components are view/distortion-invariant, representing the data using such components is believed to reveal the identity of the samples effectively and robustly. Under this model, latent correlation maximization is shown to guarantee the extraction of the shared components across views (up to certain ambiguities). In addition, it is further shown that the private information in each view can be provably disentangled from the shared using proper regularization design. A finite sample analysis, which has been rare in nonlinear mixture identifiability study, is also presented. The theoretical results and newly designed regularization are tested on a series of tasks.

Bio: Xiao Fu received the B.Eng. and MSc. degrees from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China, in 2005 and 2010, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, in 2014. He was a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, from 2014 to 2017. Since 2017, he has been an Assistant Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA. His research interests include the broad area of signal processing and machine learning.

Fu received a Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP 2014, and was a recipient of the Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award at University of Minnesota in 2016. His coauthored papers received Best Student Paper Awards from IEEE CAMSAP 2015 and IEEE MLSP 2019, respectively. He serves as a member of the Sensor Array and Multichannel Technical Committee (SAM-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He is also a member of the Signal Processing for Multisensor Systems Technical Area Committee (SPMuS- TAC) of EURASIP. He is the Treasurer of the IEEE SPS Oregon Chapter. He serves as an Editor of Signal Processing. He was a tutorial speaker at ICASSP 2017 and SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra 2021.

The colloquia will also be recorded. Please feel free to ask for access to all our events.