The graph matching problem seeks to find an alignment between the nodes of two graphs that minimizes the number of adjacency disagreements. Solving the graph matching is increasingly important due to it's applications in operations research, computer vision, neuroscience, and more. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms are inefficient in matching very large graphs, though they produce good accuracy. The main computational bottleneck of these algorithms is the linear assignment problem, which must be solved at each iteration. In this paper, we leverage the recent advances in the field of optimal transport to replace the accepted use of linear assignment algorithms. We present GOAT, a modification to the state-of-the-art graph matching approximation algorithm "FAQ" (Vogelstein, 2015), replacing its linear sum assignment step with the "Lightspeed Optimal Transport" method of Cuturi (2013). The modification provides improvements to both speed and empirical matching accuracy. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in matching graphs in simulated and real data examples.
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）
We propose a unified data-driven framework based on inverse optimal transport that can learn adaptive, nonlinear interaction cost function from noisy and incomplete empirical matching matrix and predict new matching in various matching contexts. We emphasize that the discrete optimal transport plays the role of a variational principle which gives rise to an optimization-based framework for modeling the observed empirical matching data. Our formulation leads to a non-convex optimization problem which can be solved efficiently by an alternating optimization method. A key novel aspect of our form…
Bilingual lexicons form a critical component of various natural language processing applications, including unsupervised and semisupervised machine translation and crosslingual information retrieval. We improve bilingual lexicon induction performance across 40 language pairs with a graph-matching method based on optimal transport. The method is especially strong with low amounts of supervision.
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；CSAIL, MIT（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
This paper focuses on the problem of unsupervised alignment of hierarchical data such as ontologies or lexical databases. This is a problem that appears across areas, from natural language processing to bioinformatics, and is typically solved by appeal to outside knowledge bases and label-textual similarity. In contrast, we approach the problem from a purely geometric perspective: given only a vector-space representation of the items in the two hierarchies, we seek to infer correspondences across them. Our work derives from and interweaves hyperbolic-space representations for hierarchical data…
Criteo AI Lab（Criteo人工智能实验室）；Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；INSA de Rouen Normandie（鲁昂国立应用科学学院）；Université Technologique de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）；Université de Rouen Normandie（鲁昂诺曼底大学）；Université de Bretagne Sud（南布列塔尼大学）
We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation under the setting of generalized target shift (joint class-conditional and label shifts). For this framework, we theoretically show that, for good generalization, it is necessary to learn a latent representation in which both marginals and class-conditional distributions are aligned across domains. For this sake, we propose a learning problem that minimizes importance weighted loss in the source domain and a Wasserstein distance between weighted marginals. For a proper weighting, we provide an estimator of target label proportion by blen…
Many-to-Many Matching via Sparsity Controlled Optimal Transport
Qiushi Academy for Advanced Studies, Zhejiang University（浙江大学求是高等研究院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Zhejiang Laboratory（浙江实验室）
Selecting input features of top relevance has become a popular method for building self-explaining models. In this work, we extend this selective rationalization approach to text matching, where the goal is to jointly select and align text pieces, such as tokens or sentences, as a justification for the downstream prediction. Our approach employs optimal transport (OT) to find a minimal cost alignment between the inputs. However, directly applying OT often produces dense and therefore uninterpretable alignments. To overcome this limitation, we introduce novel constrained variants of the OT prob…
Cluster-Aware Matching via Laplacian Optimal Transport
Department of Applied Mathematics, Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学应用数学系）；Department of Statistics, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学统计系）；Department of Statistics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计系）
Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) approaches have been an influential framework for the usage of unlabeled data when there is not a sufficient amount of labeled data available over the course of training. SSL methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently provided successful results on standard benchmark tasks such as image classification. In this work, we consider the general setting of SSL problem where the labeled and unlabeled data come from the same underlying probability distribution. We propose a new approach that adopts an Optimal Transport (OT) technique serving as a…
TRACE: Transport Alignment Conformal Prediction via Diffusion and Flow Matching Models
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science University of Iowa（统计与精算科学系，爱荷华大学）；Departments of Data Science and AI, and Applied Mathematics The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（数据科学与人工智能系、应用数学系，香港理工大学）
Matching on covariates is a well-established framework for estimating causal effects in observational studies. The principal challenge stems from the often high-dimensional structure of the problem. Many methods have been introduced to address this, with different advantages and drawbacks in computational and statistical performance as well as interpretability. This article introduces a natural optimal matching method based on multimarginal unbalanced optimal transport that possesses many useful properties in this regard. It provides interpretable weights based on the distance of matched indiv…
What is a good matching of probability measures? A counterfactual lens on transport maps
Institut Elie Cartan de Lorraine, Université de Lorraine（伊莱·卡坦研究所（洛林）、洛林大学）；Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, Laboratoire de mathématiques d’Orsay（巴黎-萨克雷大学、国家科学研究中心、法国国家信息与自动化技术研究院、奥赛数学实验室）
We develop an encompassing framework for matching, covariate balancing, and doubly-robust methods for causal inference from observational data called generalized optimal matching (GOM). The framework is given by generalizing a new functional-analytical formulation of optimal matching, giving rise to the class of GOM methods, for which we provide a single unified theory to analyze tractability, consistency, and efficiency. Many commonly used existing methods are included in GOM and, using their GOM interpretation, can be extended to optimally and automatically trade off balance for variance and…
This work studies how the introduction of the entropic regularization term in unbalanced Optimal Transport (OT) models may alter their homogeneity with respect to the input measures. We observe that in common settings (including balanced OT and unbalanced OT with Kullback-Leibler divergence to the marginals), although the optimal transport cost itself is not homogeneous, optimal transport plans and the so-called Sinkhorn divergences are indeed homogeneous. However, homogeneity does not hold in more general Unbalanced Regularized Optimal Transport (UROT) models, for instance those using the Tot…
In causal inference, a variety of causal effect estimands have been studied, including the sample, uncensored, target, conditional, optimal subpopulation, and optimal weighted average treatment effects. Ad-hoc methods have been developed for each estimand based on inverse probability weighting (IPW) and on outcome regression modeling, but these may be sensitive to model misspecification, practical violations of positivity, or both. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we formulate the generalized average treatment effect (GATE) to unify these causal estimands as well as their IPW …
