A Mean-Field Theory for Learning the Sch\"{o}nberg Measure of Radial Basis Functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mean-field theoretical framework for learning the Schönberg measure of radial basis functions using a projected particle Langevin method, providing convergence guarantees and practical applications in image retrieval and classification.

Contribution

It develops a novel mean-field analysis of a Langevin-based optimization method for learning radial basis functions, including PDE characterization and steady-state analysis.

Findings

Convergence of empirical measure to a reflected Itô diffusion law.

Derivation of a McKean-Vlasov PDE with Robin boundary conditions.

Successful application to image retrieval and classification tasks.

Abstract

We develop and analyze a projected particle Langevin optimization method to learn the distribution in the Sch\"{o}nberg integral representation of the radial basis functions from training samples. More specifically, we characterize a distributionally robust optimization method with respect to the Wasserstein distance to optimize the distribution in the Sch\"{o}nberg integral representation. To provide theoretical performance guarantees, we analyze the scaling limits of a projected particle online (stochastic) optimization method in the mean-field regime. In particular, we prove that in the scaling limits, the empirical measure of the Langevin particles converges to the law of a reflected It\^{o} diffusion-drift process. Moreover, the drift is also a function of the law of the underlying process. Using It\^{o} lemma for semi-martingales and Grisanov's change of measure for the Wiener processes, we then derive a Mckean-Vlasov type partial differential equation (PDE) with Robin boundary conditions that describes the evolution of the empirical measure of the projected Langevin particles in the mean-field regime. In addition, we establish the existence and uniqueness of the steady-state solutions of the derived PDE in the weak sense. We apply our learning approach to train radial kernels in the kernel locally sensitive hash (LSH) functions, where the training data-set is generated via a $k$-mean clustering method on a small subset of data-base. We subsequently apply our kernel LSH with a trained kernel for image retrieval task on MNIST data-set, and demonstrate the efficacy of our kernel learning approach. We also apply our kernel learning approach in conjunction with the kernel support vector machines (SVMs) for classification of benchmark data-sets.