We present an end-to-end learned algorithm for seeded segmentation. Our method is based on the Random Walker algorithm, where we predict the edge weights of the underlying graph using a convolutional neural network. This can be interpreted as learning context-dependent diffusivities for a linear diffusion process. Besides calculating the exact gradient for optimizing these diffusivities, we also propose simplifications that sparsely sample the gradient and still yield competitive results. The proposed method achieves the currently best results on a seeded version of the CREMI neuron segmentation challenge.
In recent work, Vernaza and Chandraker @cite_15 have proposed a first-order approximation of the derivative for backpropagation. We show in section that this approximation is not well-behaved for the kind of sparse seeds considered here.
@cite_15
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In the first part of this paper we show a similarity between the principle of Structural Risk Minimization Principle (SRM) (Vapnik, 1982) and the idea of Sparse Approximation, as defined in (Chen, Donoho and Saunders, 1995) and Olshausen and Field (1996). Then we focus on two specific (approximate) implementations of SRM and Sparse Approximation, which have been used to solve the problem of function approximation. For SRM we consider the Support Vector Machine technique proposed by V. Vapnik and his team at AT &T Bell Labs, and for Sparse Approximation we consider a modification of the Basis Pursuit De-Noising algorithm proposed by Chen, Donoho and Saunders (1995). We show that, under certain conditions, these two techniques are equivalent: they give the same solution and they require the solution of the same quadratic programming problem. Recently several methods were proposed for sparse optimization which make careful use of second-order information ( in Sparse inverse covariance matrix estimation using quadratic approximation. In: NIPS, 2011; in An improved GLMNET for l1-regularized logistic regression and support vector machines. National Taiwan University, Taipei City, 2011; in Newton-like methods for sparse inverse covariance estimation. In: NIPS, 2012; in A family of second-order methods for convex l1-regularized optimization. Technical report, 2012) to improve local convergence rates. These methods construct a composite quadratic approximation using Hessian information, optimize this approximation using a first-order method, such as coordinate descent and employ a line search to ensure sufficient descent. Here we propose a general framework, which includes slightly modified versions of existing algorithms and also a new algorithm, which uses limited memory BFGS Hessian approximations, and provide a novel global convergence rate analysis, which covers methods that solve subproblems via coordinate descent. The goal of sparse recovery is to recover a k-sparse signal x e Rn from (possibly noisy) linear measurements of the form y = Ax, where A e Rmxn describes the measurement process. Standard results in compressive sensing show that it is possible to recover the signal x from m = O(k log(n k)) measurements, and that this bound is tight. The framework of model-based compressive sensing [BCDH10] overcomes the lower bound and reduces the number of measurements further to O(k) by limiting the supports of x to a subset M of the (nk) possible supports. This has led to many measurement-efficient algorithms for a wide variety of signal models, including block-sparsity and tree-sparsity. Unfortunately, extending the framework to other, more general models has been stymied by the following obstacle: for the framework to apply, one needs an algorithm that, given a signal x, solves the following optimization problem exactly: [EQUATION] (here x[n] denotes the projection of x on coordinates not in Ω). However, an approximation algorithm for this optimization task is not sufficient. Since many problems of this form are not known to have exact polynomial-time algorithms, this requirement poses an obstacle for extending the framework to a richer class of models. In this paper, we remove this obstacle and show how to extend the model-based compressive sensing framework so that it requires only approximate solutions to the aforementioned optimization problems. Interestingly, our extension requires the existence of approximation algorithms for both the maximization and the minimization variants of the optimization problem. Further, we apply our framework to the Constrained Earth Mover's Distance (CEMD) model introduced in [SHI13], obtaining a sparse recovery scheme that uses significantly less than O(k log(n k)) measurements. This is the first non-trivial theoretical bound for this model, since the validation of the approach presented in [SHI13] was purely empirical. The result is obtained by designing a novel approximation algorithm for the maximization version of the problem and proving approximation guarantees for the minimization algorithm described in [SHI13]. We study the recovery of sparse vectors from subsampled random convolutions via @math -minimization. We consider the setup in which both the subsampling locations as well as the generating vector are chosen at random. For a subgaussian generator with independent entries, we improve previously known estimates: if the sparsity @math is small enough, i.e., @math , we show that @math measurements are sufficient to recover @math -sparse vectors in dimension @math with high probability, matching the well-known condition for recovery from standard Gaussian measurements. If @math is larger, then essentially @math measurements are sufficient, again improving over previous estimates. Our results are shown via the so-called robust null space property which is weaker than the standard restricted isometry property. Our method of proof involves a novel combination of small ball estimates with chaining techniques which should be of independent interest.