Optimal transport (OT) theory can be informally described using the words of the French mathematician Gaspard Monge (1746-1818): A worker with a shovel in hand has to move a large pile of sand lying on a construction site. The goal of the worker is to erect with all that sand a target pile with a prescribed shape (for example, that of a giant sand castle). Naturally, the worker wishes to minimize her total effort, quantified for instance as the total distance or time spent carrying shovelfuls of sand. Mathematicians interested in OT cast that problem as that of comparing two probability distributions, two different piles of sand of the same volume. They consider all of the many possible ways to morph, transport or reshape the first pile into the second, and associate a "global" cost to every such transport, using the "local" consideration of how much it costs to move a grain of sand from one place to another. Recent years have witnessed the spread of OT in several fields, thanks to the emergence of approximate solvers that can scale to sizes and dimensions that are relevant to data sciences. Thanks to this newfound scalability, OT is being increasingly used to unlock various problems in imaging sciences (such as color or texture processing), computer vision and graphics (for shape manipulation) or machine learning (for regression, classification and density fitting). This short book reviews OT with a bias toward numerical methods and their applications in data sciences, and sheds lights on the theoretical properties of OT that make it particularly useful for some of these applications.

Computational Optimal Transport

This paper introduces SuperGlue, a neural network that matches two sets of local features by jointly finding correspondences and rejecting non-matchable points. Assignments are estimated by solving a differentiable optimal transport problem, whose costs are predicted by a graph neural network. We introduce a flexible context aggregation mechanism based on attention, enabling SuperGlue to reason about the underlying 3D scene and feature assignments jointly. Compared to traditional, hand-designed heuristics, our technique learns priors over geometric transformations and regularities of the 3D world through end-to-end training from image pairs. SuperGlue outperforms other learned approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results on the task of pose estimation in challenging real-world indoor and outdoor environments. The proposed method performs matching in real-time on a modern GPU and can be readily integrated into modern SfM or SLAM systems. The code and trained weights are publicly available at github.com/magicleap/SuperGluePretrainedNetwork.

/pdf/superglue-learning-feature-matching-with-graph-neural-3t2e18buwg.pdf

SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching With Graph Neural Networks

Graph matching plays a central role in solving correspondence problems in computer vision. Graph matching problems that incorporate pair-wise constraints can be cast as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Unfortunately, QAP is NP-hard and many algorithms have been proposed to solve different relaxations. This paper presents factorized graph matching (FGM), a novel framework for interpreting and optimizing graph matching problems. In this work we show that the affinity matrix can be factorized as a Kronecker product of smaller matrices. There are three main benefits of using this factorization in graph matching: (1) There is no need to compute the costly (in space and time) pair-wise affinity matrix; (2) The factorization provides a taxonomy for graph matching and reveals the connection among several methods; (3) Using the factorization we derive a new approximation of the original problem that improves state-of-the-art algorithms in graph matching. Experimental results in synthetic and real databases illustrate the benefits of FGM. The code is available at http://humansensing.cs.cmu.edu/fgm.

/pdf/factorized-graph-matching-17a5oekizi.pdf

Factorized graph matching

This paper presents a new technique for computing the barycenter of a set of distance or kernel matrices. These matrices, which define the interrelationships between points sampled from individual domains, are not required to have the same size or to be in row-by-row correspondence. We compare these matrices using the softassign criterion, which measures the minimum distortion induced by a probabilistic map from the rows of one similarity matrix to the rows of another; this criterion amounts to a regularized version of the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance between metric-measure spaces. The barycenter is then defined as a Frechet mean of the input matrices with respect to this criterion, minimizing a weighted sum of softassign values. We provide a fast iterative algorithm for the resulting nonconvex optimization problem, built upon state-of-the-art tools for regularized optimal transportation. We demonstrate its application to the computation of shape barycenters and to the prediction of energy levels from molecular configurations in quantum chemistry.

/pdf/gromov-wasserstein-averaging-of-kernel-and-distance-matrices-55336z0x90.pdf

Gromov-wasserstein averaging of kernel and distance matrices

Migrating Birds Optimization: A new metaheuristic approach and its performance on quadratic assignment problem

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is very challengeable and interesting problem that can model many real-life problems. In this paper, we will simply discuss the meaning of quadratic assignment problem, solving techniques and we will give a survey of some developments and researches.

Abdel Nasser

Papers

A Survey of the Quadratic Assignment Problem