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Shota Saito

Shota Saito contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

11 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Mixture Autoregressive Image Generative Model on Quadtree Regions for Gaussian Noise Removal via Variational Bayes and Gradient Methods

This paper addresses the problem of image denoising for grayscale images. We propose a probabilistic image generative model that combines a quadtree region-partitioning model with a mixture autoregressive model, and propose a framework that reduces MAP (maximum a posteriori)-estimation-based denoising to the maximization of a variational lower bound. To maximize this lower bound, we develop an algorithm that alternately applies variational Bayes and gradient methods. We particularly demonstrate that the gradient-based update rule can be computed analytically without numerical computation or approximation. We carried out some experiments to verify that the proposed algorithm actually removes image noise and to identify directions for future improvement.

preprint2026arXiv

CatCMA with Margin for Single- and Multi-Objective Mixed-Variable Black-Box Optimization

This study focuses on mixed-variable black-box optimization (MV-BBO), addressing continuous, integer, and categorical variables. Many real-world MV-BBO problems involve dependencies among these different types of variables, requiring efficient methods to optimize them simultaneously. Recently, stochastic optimization methods leveraging the mechanism of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy have shown promising results in mixed-integer or mixed-category optimization. However, such methods cannot handle the three types of variables simultaneously. In this study, we propose CatCMA with Margin (CatCMAwM), a stochastic optimization method for MV-BBO that jointly optimizes continuous, integer, and categorical variables. CatCMAwM is developed by incorporating novel integer handling into CatCMA, a mixed-category black-box optimization method employing a joint distribution of multivariate Gaussian and categorical distributions. The proposed integer handling is carefully designed by reviewing existing integer handling and following the design principles of CatCMA. Furthermore, we extend CatCMAwM to multi-objective MV-BBO by instantiating it within the Sofomore framework, obtaining a multi-objective optimizer termed COMO-CatCMA with Margin (COMO-CatCMAwM). Numerical experiments on single-objective MV-BBO problems show that CatCMAwM effectively handles the three types of variables, outperforming state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization methods and baselines that simply incorporate existing integer handlings into CatCMA. Moreover, on bi-objective MV-BBO benchmarks, COMO-CatCMAwM achieves competitive or superior hypervolume compared to representative baselines.

preprint2026arXiv

Soft Bayesian Context Tree Models for Real-Valued Time Series

This paper proposes the soft Bayesian context tree model (Soft-BCT), which is a novel BCT model for real-valued time series. The Soft-BCT considers soft (probabilistic) splits of the context space, instead of hard (deterministic) splits of the context space as in the previous BCT for real-valued time series. A learning algorithm of the Soft-BCT is proposed based on the variational inference. For some real-world datasets, the Soft-BCT demonstrates almost the same or superior performance to the previous BCT.

preprint2023arXiv

CMA-ES with Margin: Lower-Bounding Marginal Probability for Mixed-Integer Black-Box Optimization

This study targets the mixed-integer black-box optimization (MI-BBO) problem where continuous and integer variables should be optimized simultaneously. The CMA-ES, our focus in this study, is a population-based stochastic search method that samples solution candidates from a multivariate Gaussian distribution (MGD), which shows excellent performance in continuous BBO. The parameters of MGD, mean and (co)variance, are updated based on the evaluation value of candidate solutions in the CMA-ES. If the CMA-ES is applied to the MI-BBO with straightforward discretization, however, the variance corresponding to the integer variables becomes much smaller than the granularity of the discretization before reaching the optimal solution, which leads to the stagnation of the optimization. In particular, when binary variables are included in the problem, this stagnation more likely occurs because the granularity of the discretization becomes wider, and the existing modification to the CMA-ES does not address this stagnation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a simple modification of the CMA-ES based on lower-bounding the marginal probabilities associated with the generation of integer variables in the MGD. The numerical experiments on the MI-BBO benchmark problems demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

Direct Observation and Quantitative Measurement of OH Radical Desorption During the Ultraviolet Photolysis of Liquid Nonanoic Acid

Ultraviolet (UV) photolysis of fatty acid surfactants which cover the surfaces of atmospheric liquid aerosols and are found in the oceans such as nonanoic acid (NA) has recently been suggested as a source of hydroxyl (OH) radicals in the troposphere. We used laser-induced fluorescence to directly observe OH radicals desorbed from the surface of neat liquid NA as a primary photoproduct following 213 nm irradiation. The upper limit of photoreaction cross section for the OH radical desorption was estimated to be 9.0(4.1) $\times$ 10$^{-22}$ cm$^2$, which is only 1.2$\pm$0.8% of the photoreaction cross section established for the photolysis of gas-phase acetic acid monomers. Vibrational sum-frequency generation spectroscopy for liquid NA revealed the hydrogen-bonded, cyclic, dimer structure of the NA molecules at the liquid surface. This dimerization can inhibit the formation of OH radicals and lead the present low photochemical reactivity of liquid NA.

preprint2022arXiv

Efficient Search of Multiple Neural Architectures with Different Complexities via Importance Sampling

Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to automate architecture design processes and improve the performance of deep neural networks. Platform-aware NAS methods consider both performance and complexity and can find well-performing architectures with low computational resources. Although ordinary NAS methods result in tremendous computational costs owing to the repetition of model training, one-shot NAS, which trains the weights of a supernetwork containing all candidate architectures only once during the search process, has been reported to result in a lower search cost. This study focuses on the architecture complexity-aware one-shot NAS that optimizes the objective function composed of the weighted sum of two metrics, such as the predictive performance and number of parameters. In existing methods, the architecture search process must be run multiple times with different coefficients of the weighted sum to obtain multiple architectures with different complexities. This study aims at reducing the search cost associated with finding multiple architectures. The proposed method uses multiple distributions to generate architectures with different complexities and updates each distribution using the samples obtained from multiple distributions based on importance sampling. The proposed method allows us to obtain multiple architectures with different complexities in a single architecture search, resulting in reducing the search cost. The proposed method is applied to the architecture search of convolutional neural networks on the CIAFR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Consequently, compared with baseline methods, the proposed method finds multiple architectures with varying complexities while requiring less computational effort.

preprint2022arXiv

Hypergraph Modeling via Spectral Embedding Connection: Hypergraph Cut, Weighted Kernel $k$-means, and Heat Kernel

We propose a theoretical framework of multi-way similarity to model real-valued data into hypergraphs for clustering via spectral embedding. For graph cut based spectral clustering, it is common to model real-valued data into graph by modeling pairwise similarities using kernel function. This is because the kernel function has a theoretical connection to the graph cut. For problems where using multi-way similarities are more suitable than pairwise ones, it is natural to model as a hypergraph, which is generalization of a graph. However, although the hypergraph cut is well-studied, there is not yet established a hypergraph cut based framework to model multi-way similarity. In this paper, we formulate multi-way similarities by exploiting the theoretical foundation of kernel function. We show a theoretical connection between our formulation and hypergraph cut in two ways, generalizing both weighted kernel $k$-means and the heat kernel, by which we justify our formulation. We also provide a fast algorithm for spectral clustering. Our algorithm empirically shows better performance than existing graph and other heuristic modeling methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Neural Architecture Search for Improving Latency-Accuracy Trade-off in Split Computing

This paper proposes a neural architecture search (NAS) method for split computing. Split computing is an emerging machine-learning inference technique that addresses the privacy and latency challenges of deploying deep learning in IoT systems. In split computing, neural network models are separated and cooperatively processed using edge servers and IoT devices via networks. Thus, the architecture of the neural network model significantly impacts the communication payload size, model accuracy, and computational load. In this paper, we address the challenge of optimizing neural network architecture for split computing. To this end, we proposed NASC, which jointly explores optimal model architecture and a split point to achieve higher accuracy while meeting latency requirements (i.e., smaller total latency of computation and communication than a certain threshold). NASC employs a one-shot NAS that does not require repeating model training for a computationally efficient architecture search. Our performance evaluation using hardware (HW)-NAS-Bench of benchmark data demonstrates that the proposed NASC can improve the ``communication latency and model accuracy" trade-off, i.e., reduce the latency by approximately 40-60% from the baseline, with slight accuracy degradation.

preprint2022arXiv

Probability Distribution on Rooted Trees

The hierarchical and recursive expressive capability of rooted trees is applicable to represent statistical models in various areas, such as data compression, image processing, and machine learning. On the other hand, such hierarchical expressive capability causes a problem in tree selection to avoid overfitting. One unified approach to solve this is a Bayesian approach, on which the rooted tree is regarded as a random variable and a direct loss function can be assumed on the selected model or the predicted value for a new data point. However, all the previous studies on this approach are based on the probability distribution on full trees, to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we propose a generalized probability distribution for any rooted trees in which only the maximum number of child nodes and the maximum depth are fixed. Furthermore, we derive recursive methods to evaluate the characteristics of the probability distribution without any approximations.

preprint2019arXiv

Controlling Model Complexity in Probabilistic Model-Based Dynamic Optimization of Neural Network Structures

A method of simultaneously optimizing both the structure of neural networks and the connection weights in a single training loop can reduce the enormous computational cost of neural architecture search. We focus on the probabilistic model-based dynamic neural network structure optimization that considers the probability distribution of structure parameters and simultaneously optimizes both the distribution parameters and connection weights based on gradient methods. Since the existing algorithm searches for the structures that only minimize the training loss, this method might find overly complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the introduction of a penalty term to control the model complexity of obtained structures. We formulate a penalty term using the number of weights or units and derive its analytical natural gradient. The proposed method minimizes the objective function injected the penalty term based on the stochastic gradient descent. We apply the proposed method in the unit selection of a fully-connected neural network and the connection selection of a convolutional neural network. The experimental results show that the proposed method can control model complexity while maintaining performance.

preprint2017arXiv

Hypergraph $p$-Laplacian: A Differential Geometry View

The graph Laplacian plays key roles in information processing of relational data, and has analogies with the Laplacian in differential geometry. In this paper, we generalize the analogy between graph Laplacian and differential geometry to the hypergraph setting, and propose a novel hypergraph $p$-Laplacian. Unlike the existing two-node graph Laplacians, this generalization makes it possible to analyze hypergraphs, where the edges are allowed to connect any number of nodes. Moreover, we propose a semi-supervised learning method based on the proposed hypergraph $p$-Laplacian, and formalize them as the analogue to the Dirichlet problem, which often appears in physics. We further explore theoretical connections to normalized hypergraph cut on a hypergraph, and propose normalized cut corresponding to hypergraph $p$-Laplacian. The proposed $p$-Laplacian is shown to outperform standard hypergraph Laplacians in the experiment on a hypergraph semi-supervised learning and normalized cut setting.