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Researcher profile

Ivan Dokmanić

Ivan Dokmanić contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine Learningeess.SPeess.IVArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionEmerging TechnologiesInformation Theorymath.FAmath.MGmath.STNeural and Evolutionary ComputingSocial and Information Networks

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Published work

11 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Function graph transformers universally approximate operators between function spaces

We study the approximation of nonlinear operators between function spaces by transformers. Our approach is to lift functions to measures supported on their graphs and leverage a recently introduced measure-theoretic view of transformers. A function $h$ is represented by its graph measure $γ_h$, with finite tokens $\{(x_j,h(x_j))\}_{j=1}^N$ being its empirical approximations. We show that this framework elegantly models discretization refinement via convergence of measures and provides a natural setting for operator learning. Within this framework, we introduce function graph transformers, a graph-preserving subclass of measure-theoretic transformers that maps graph measures to graph measures, which is to say that outputs remain single-valued functions. Crucially, this additional structure does not reduce generality: we prove that the resulting graph-preserving maps can be approximated by finite compositions of standard softmax self-attention layers and pointwise MLPs, yielding universal approximation results for broad classes of nonlinear operators. Unlike existing theoretical approaches to operator learning with transformers, the measure-theoretic framework also accommodates regularized negative-order Sobolev inputs for which discretization invariance is particularly challenging, as well as query points on different output domains. Overall, function graph transformers provide a continuum viewpoint and mathematical toolkit for transformer-based operator learning, clarifying the roles of positional encodings, graph structure, regularization, and ensuring consistency across discretizations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

On Observation Time for Recovering Latent Hawkes Networks

Dynamics of interacting systems in engineering, society, and nature often evolve over latent networks that govern which entities can interact. We study the problem of inferring these networks from event-based observations, which arise naturally in finance, seismology, and neuroscience. While there is substantial algorithmic work addressing this important problem, theoretical results are scarce. In this paper we ask the following fundamental question: what is the minimum time that one must observe the dynamics in order to exactly recover the underlying network, as a function of the number $d$ of interacting entities? For a class of stationary Hawkes processes with sparse, weak interactions, we prove that an observation time of order $\log d$ is sufficient and necessary. For the upper bound we construct a two-stage estimator that uses clipped and binned event data for screening, followed by a least-squares refinement, and apply concentration bounds derived from the Poisson cluster representation. For the lower bound we combine Fano's inequality with Jacod's Girsanov formula for point processes on a suitable subclass of networks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning Multiscale Convolutional Dictionaries for Image Reconstruction

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been tremendously successful in solving imaging inverse problems. To understand their success, an effective strategy is to construct simpler and mathematically more tractable convolutional sparse coding (CSC) models that share essential ingredients with CNNs. Existing CSC methods, however, underperform leading CNNs in challenging inverse problems. We hypothesize that the performance gap may be attributed in part to how they process images at different spatial scales: While many CNNs use multiscale feature representations, existing CSC models mostly rely on single-scale dictionaries. To close the performance gap, we thus propose a multiscale convolutional dictionary structure. The proposed dictionary structure is derived from the U-Net, arguably the most versatile and widely used CNN for image-to-image learning problems. We show that incorporating the proposed multiscale dictionary in an otherwise standard CSC framework yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art CNNs across a range of challenging inverse problems including CT and MRI reconstruction. Our work thus demonstrates the effectiveness and scalability of the multiscale CSC approach in solving challenging inverse problems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Neural Link Prediction with Walk Pooling

Graph neural networks achieve high accuracy in link prediction by jointly leveraging graph topology and node attributes. Topology, however, is represented indirectly; state-of-the-art methods based on subgraph classification label nodes with distance to the target link, so that, although topological information is present, it is tempered by pooling. This makes it challenging to leverage features like loops and motifs associated with network formation mechanisms. We propose a link prediction algorithm based on a new pooling scheme called WalkPool. WalkPool combines the expressivity of topological heuristics with the feature-learning ability of neural networks. It summarizes a putative link by random walk probabilities of adjacent paths. Instead of extracting transition probabilities from the original graph, it computes the transition matrix of a "predictive" latent graph by applying attention to learned features; this may be interpreted as feature-sensitive topology fingerprinting. WalkPool can leverage unsupervised node features or be combined with GNNs and trained end-to-end. It outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all common link prediction benchmarks, both homophilic and heterophilic, with and without node attributes. Applying WalkPool to a set of unsupervised GNNs significantly improves prediction accuracy, suggesting that it may be used as a general-purpose graph pooling scheme.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Universal Approximation Under Constraints is Possible with Transformers

Many practical problems need the output of a machine learning model to satisfy a set of constraints, $K$. Nevertheless, there is no known guarantee that classical neural network architectures can exactly encode constraints while simultaneously achieving universality. We provide a quantitative constrained universal approximation theorem which guarantees that for any non-convex compact set $K$ and any continuous function $f:\mathbb{R}^n\rightarrow K$, there is a probabilistic transformer $\hat{F}$ whose randomized outputs all lie in $K$ and whose expected output uniformly approximates $f$. Our second main result is a "deep neural version" of Berge's Maximum Theorem (1963). The result guarantees that given an objective function $L$, a constraint set $K$, and a family of soft constraint sets, there is a probabilistic transformer $\hat{F}$ that approximately minimizes $L$ and whose outputs belong to $K$; moreover, $\hat{F}$ approximately satisfies the soft constraints. Our results imply the first universal approximation theorem for classical transformers with exact convex constraint satisfaction. They also yield that a chart-free universal approximation theorem for Riemannian manifold-valued functions subject to suitable geodesically convex constraints.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Universal Joint Approximation of Manifolds and Densities by Simple Injective Flows

We study approximation of probability measures supported on $n$-dimensional manifolds embedded in $\mathbb{R}^m$ by injective flows -- neural networks composed of invertible flows and injective layers. We show that in general, injective flows between $\mathbb{R}^n$ and $\mathbb{R}^m$ universally approximate measures supported on images of extendable embeddings, which are a subset of standard embeddings: when the embedding dimension m is small, topological obstructions may preclude certain manifolds as admissible targets. When the embedding dimension is sufficiently large, $m \ge 3n+1$, we use an argument from algebraic topology known as the clean trick to prove that the topological obstructions vanish and injective flows universally approximate any differentiable embedding. Along the way we show that the studied injective flows admit efficient projections on the range, and that their optimality can be established "in reverse," resolving a conjecture made in Brehmer and Cranmer 2020.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Total Least Squares Phase Retrieval

We address the phase retrieval problem with errors in the sensing vectors. A number of recent methods for phase retrieval are based on least squares (LS) formulations which assume errors in the quadratic measurements. We extend this approach to handle errors in the sensing vectors by adopting the total least squares (TLS) framework that is used in linear inverse problems with operator errors. We show how gradient descent and the specific geometry of the phase retrieval problem can be used to obtain a simple and efficient TLS solution. Additionally, we derive the gradients of the TLS and LS solutions with respect to the sensing vectors and measurements which enables us to calculate the solution errors. By analyzing these error expressions we determine conditions under which each method should outperform the other. We run simulations to demonstrate that our method can lead to more accurate solutions. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by performing phase retrieval experiments on real optical hardware which naturally contains both sensing vector and measurement errors.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

3D unknown view tomography via rotation invariants

In this paper, we study the problem of reconstructing a 3D point source model from a set of 2D projections at unknown view angles. Our method obviates the need to recover the projection angles by extracting a set of rotation-invariant features from the noisy projection data. From the features, we reconstruct the density map through a constrained nonconvex optimization. We show that the features have geometric interpretations in the form of radial and pairwise distances of the model. We further perform an ablation study to examine the effect of various parameters on the quality of the estimated features from the projection data. Our results showcase the potential of the proposed method in reconstructing point source models in various noise regimes.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Don't take it lightly: Phasing optical random projections with unknown operators

In this paper we tackle the problem of recovering the phase of complex linear measurements when only magnitude information is available and we control the input. We are motivated by the recent development of dedicated optics-based hardware for rapid random projections which leverages the propagation of light in random media. A signal of interest $\mathbfξ \in \mathbb{R}^N$ is mixed by a random scattering medium to compute the projection $\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{A} \mathbfξ$, with $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{C}^{M \times N}$ being a realization of a standard complex Gaussian iid random matrix. Such optics-based matrix multiplications can be much faster and energy-efficient than their CPU or GPU counterparts, yet two difficulties must be resolved: only the intensity ${|\mathbf{y}|}^2$ can be recorded by the camera, and the transmission matrix $\mathbf{A}$ is unknown. We show that even without knowing $\mathbf{A}$, we can recover the unknown phase of $\mathbf{y}$ for some equivalent transmission matrix with the same distribution as $\mathbf{A}$. Our method is based on two observations: first, conjugating or changing the phase of any row of $\mathbf{A}$ does not change its distribution; and second, since we control the input we can interfere $\mathbfξ$ with arbitrary reference signals. We show how to leverage these observations to cast the measurement phase retrieval problem as a Euclidean distance geometry problem. We demonstrate appealing properties of the proposed algorithm in both numerical simulations and real hardware experiments. Not only does our algorithm accurately recover the missing phase, but it mitigates the effects of quantization and the sensitivity threshold, thus improving the measured magnitudes.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Fast Optical System Identification by Numerical Interferometry

We propose a numerical interferometry method for identification of optical multiply-scattering systems when only intensity can be measured. Our method simplifies the calibration of optical transmission matrices from a quadratic to a linear inverse problem by first recovering the phase of the measurements. We show that by carefully designing the probing signals, measurement phase retrieval amounts to a distance geometry problem---a multilateration---in the complex plane. Since multilateration can be formulated as a small linear system which is the same for entire rows of the transmission matrix, the phases can be retrieved very efficiently. To speed up the subsequent estimation of transmission matrices, we design calibration signals so as to take advantage of the fast Fourier transform, achieving a numerical complexity almost linear in the number of transmission matrix entries. We run experiments on real optical hardware and use the numerically computed transmission matrix to recover an unseen image behind a scattering medium. Where the previous state-of-the-art method reports hours to compute the transmission matrix on a GPU, our method takes only a few minutes on a CPU.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Hyperbolic Distance Matrices

Hyperbolic space is a natural setting for mining and visualizing data with hierarchical structure. In order to compute a hyperbolic embedding from comparison or similarity information, one has to solve a hyperbolic distance geometry problem. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to compute hyperbolic embeddings from an arbitrary mix of noisy metric and non-metric data. Our algorithms are based on semidefinite programming and the notion of a hyperbolic distance matrix, in many ways parallel to its famous Euclidean counterpart. A central ingredient we put forward is a semidefinite characterization of the hyperbolic Gramian -- a matrix of Lorentzian inner products. This characterization allows us to formulate a semidefinite relaxation to efficiently compute hyperbolic embeddings in two stages: first, we complete and denoise the observed hyperbolic distance matrix; second, we propose a spectral factorization method to estimate the embedded points from the hyperbolic distance matrix. We show through numerical experiments how the flexibility to mix metric and non-metric constraints allows us to efficiently compute embeddings from arbitrary data.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access