Roser Homs, Olga Kuznetsova, Bernadette J. Stolzstat.ML cs.LG math.AG math.ST
Gaussian graphical models (GGMs) are essential tools for interpretable structure learning. However, in high-dimensional, small-sample regimes, the available data is often insufficient for the maximum likelihood estimator to exist. Colored Gaussian graphical models (CGGMs) mitigate this limitation by imposing symmetry constraints through graph coloring, which reduces the required sample size. This minimal number of observations needed to guarantee that the estimator exists almost surely is defined as the maximum likelihood threshold (MLT). Here, we address the computation of the MLT for CGGMs by focusing on its geometric formulation: finding the minimum rank of a sample covariance matrix such that its projection lies almost surely within the interior of the cone of sufficient statistics. We establish a unified theoretical framework, extending results from uncolored to colored models and introducing new symbolic algorithms. Furthermore, we present a computational study integrating sampling with topological data analysis (TDA) to investigate the local geometry of the cone of sufficient statistics. Our results demonstrate the potential of TDA to overcome the computational bottlenecks of traditional symbolic algebraic methods, particularly Groebner basis computations, in analyzing the likelihood geometry of CGGMs.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has so far rarely been applied to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, and existing MoE designs leave the alignment between experts and the structure of the data to emerge on its own. We propose an architecture search framework that makes this alignment an explicit search variable: the assignment of data clusters to experts is optimised jointly with the per-expert architectures. We cast the joint problem as a cluster-aware likelihood maximisation, show that it coincides with the incomplete-data maximum likelihood of a latent-variable mixture, and solve it by a generalised Expectation-Maximisation procedure whose otherwise intractable expert-quality term is supplied by an adaptively refined surrogate. We prove that the iterates converge whenever the surrogate errors are summable, and that at every limit point no candidate the search produces improves the true objective. On a heterogeneous image-classification mixture the method recovers the underlying domain partition on 95% of clusters without ever observing domain labels, and on that benchmark and a four-domain time-series forecasting one alike it outperforms the MoE and NAS baselines that likewise use no label information.
Learning-based wireless localizers often fail to utilize geometric information about the propagation environment, limiting their ability to exploit non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation and generalize across scenes. To bridge this gap, we propose GLocFM, a Geometry-aware Localization Foundation Model, which jointly exploits WiFi measurements and scene geometry represented as a 3D point cloud. We formulate localization as a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation problem, where the goal is to find a transmitter position that maximizes the likelihood of the wireless observations conditioned on the scene geometry. The likelihood of a candidate transmitter position is calculated by a learned scoring function that matches the observed delay--angle-of-arrival (AoA) spectrum against the spectrum predicted for that candidate. A hierarchical scene encoder extracts propagation-relevant features to produce geometric priors for LoS and one-bounce reflection paths. For scenarios with imperfect synchronization, we further introduce a time-of-flight (ToF)-robust GLocFM model to handle unknown ToF offsets. GLocFM is trained on a multi-modal synthetic indoor localization dataset comprising 221 diverse scenes whose associated wireless signals are generated using Sionna RT. On both synthetic and the NeRF$^{2}$ dataset based on real measurements, GLocFM reduces mean 3D localization error relative to one of the state-of-the-art localization baselines by 49.5\% and 48.8\%, respectively. Ablations across different number of receiver, bandwidths, and array sizes further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.
Matthew R. Ziemann, Casey J. Pellizzari, Tyler J. Hardy +1eess.IV cs.CV physics.optics
Speckle fundamentally limits coherent imaging by introducing multiplicative, spatially correlated noise that obscures scene structure. Removing speckle noise from dynamic scenes--that do not benefit from conventional speckle averaging--is particularly challenging. We introduce a training-free framework that combines a spatiotemporal implicit neural representation with an aperture-aware maximum-likelihood formulation to recover dynamic, speckle-free imagery directly from noisy observations. The coherent likelihood explicitly models the aperture-dependent spatial covariance of speckle, enabling adaptation to arbitrary pupil geometries without retraining. A matrix-free implementation based on FFT-accelerated operators, stochastic approximations, and conjugate gradients makes optimization practical for realistic image sizes. Meanwhile, a blind holdout criterion provides automatic early stopping without clean reference data. Simulated and laboratory results demonstrate improved spatial fidelity, temporal consistency, and robustness to varying speckle statistics relative to classical, unsupervised, and supervised baselines.
Georgios I. Orfanidis, Dimitris A. Pados, George Sklivanitis +1cs.LG eess.SP
Motivated by sensing modalities in modern autonomous systems that involve hardware-constrained spatial sampling over large arrays with limited coherence time, we develop a novel framework for rapid super-resolution multi-signal direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation based on Hankel-structured sensing and data matrix decomposition of arbitrary rank, under both the $L_2$ and $L_1$-norm formulation. The resulting $L_2$-norm estimator is shown to be maximum-likelihood optimal in white Gaussian noise. The $L_1$-norm estimator is shown to be maximum-likelihood optimal in independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) isotropic Laplace noise, offering broad robustness to impulsive interference and corrupted measurements commonly encountered in practice. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed methods exhibit powerful super-resolution capabilities, requiring significantly lower SNR and achieving substantially higher resolution probability than recent competing approaches.