Robust Community Detection in Graphs

Background/foreground separation is one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision, especially for video data. Robust PCA (RPCA) and its tensor extension, namely, Robust Tensor PCA (RTPCA), provide an effective framework for background/foreground separation by decomposing the data into low-rank and sparse components, which contain the background and the foreground (moving objects), respectively. However, in real-world applications, the video data is contaminated with noise. For example, in metal additive manufacturing (AM), the processed X-ray video to study melt pool dynamics is very noisy. RPCA and RTPCA are not able to separate the background, foreground, and noise simultaneously. As a result, the noise will contaminate the background or the foreground or both. There is a need to remove the noise from the background and foreground. To achieve the three components decomposition, a smooth sparse Robust Tensor Decomposition (SS-RTD) model is proposed to decompose the data into static background, smooth foreground, and noise, respectively. Specifically, the static background is modeled by the low-rank tucker decomposition, the smooth foreground (moving objects) is modeled by the spatio-temporal continuity, which is enforced by the total variation regularization, and the noise is modeled by the sparsity, which is enforced by the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> norm. An efficient algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is implemented to solve the proposed model. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for background/foreground separation in noisy cases. Note to Practitioners—This work is motivated by melt pool detection in metal additive manufacturing where the processed X-ray video from the monitoring system is very noisy. The objective is to recover the background with porosity defects and the foreground with melt pool in the presence of noise. Existing methods fail to separate the noise from the background and foreground since RPCA and RTPCA have only two components, which cannot explain the three components in the data. This paper puts forward a smooth sparse Robust Tensor Decomposition by decomposing the tensor data into low-rank, smooth, and sparse components, respectively. It is a highly effective method for background/foreground separation in noisy case. In the case studies on simulated video and X-ray data, the proposed method can handle non-additive noise, and even the case of high noise-ratio. In the proposed algorithm, there is only one tuning parameter <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda $ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Based on the case studies, our method achieves satisfying performance by taking any <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda \in [{0.2,1}]$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with anisotropic total variation regularization. With this observation, practitioners can apply the proposed method without extensive parameter tuning work. Furthermore, the proposed method is also applicable to other popular industrial applications. Practitioners can use the proposed SS-RTD for degradation processes monitoring, where the degradation image contains the static background, anomaly, and random disturbance, respectively.

In this study, a modified robust principal component analysis (RPCA) clutter filtering method is applied for efficient microvessel imaging by decomposing the acquired ultrasound signal into low-rank and sparse components. A combination strategy based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and randomized spatial downsampling is applied to accelerate the computation. A parallel processing is further developed. The proposed method is applied to in vivo data of brain and spinal cord in rats. The results illustrated that comparing with the classical SVD method, it enables to enhance the clutter removal and noise filtering, which demonstrates the potentials of the proposed method in ultrafast ultrasound microvasculature imaging.

RPCA (Robust Principal Component Analysis) recovers sparse and low rank components from the original observation data, RPCA commonly uses ADM (Alternate Direction Method) for solving, the efficiency of algorithm depends on the nuclear norm optimization solution, that is SVD. And the application of RPCA in computer vision, image and video and so on, large amounts of data, such as images and video, make it difficult for large-scale data SVD. In this paper, we used the random matrix algorithm to improve the SVD, respectively the Count Sketch algorithm, the Prototype Randomized k-SVD algorithm and the Faster Randomized k-SVD algorithm, The main idea is to reduce the size of the original large-scale data matrix and sample randomly. Using the random projection algorithm to obtain an approximation of the original matrix, and operate QR decomposition of the approximate matrix, get the unitary matrix corresponding to the approximate matrix, and do the corresponding SVD, finally we can get the results which is similar to the original matrix calculation. Obtaining approximation of the original data matrix. But the cost time and space have been greatly optimized. Simulation experiments based on single image and video foreground detection show that the proposed methods can greatly improve the efficiency of RPCA iterative optimization.

Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is one of imaging methods using X-ray image for clear visualization of the vessel information during intervention with a catheter. In order to obtain a fine DSA image, patients have to hold their breathing. However, steady breath hold is a burden for the patients and is sometimes difficult for elder patients. We propose a blood vessel enhancement method with consecutive digital angiographic images acquired under the natural breathing. Robust principal component analysis (RPCA) is used to enhance blood vessel information from consecutive angiographic images acquired under the natural breathing. RPCA can separate the consecutive images into a low-rank component and a sparse component. The information of contrast media is included in the sparse component. We implemented it on GPU and applied the proposed method to 13 sets of angiographic images and confirmed that it enables to generate satisfactory enhanced angiographic images.

We propose a joint registration and segmentation method for cardiac perfusion images using robust PCA (RPCA) to decompose the time series into a low rank and sparse component. Registration maximizes the smoothness of the intensity signal in the low rank component. Segmentation minimizes the sparse component's pixel intensity difference with other pixels having the same label. B-splines are used to combine the registration and segmentation costs. Tests on real patient datasets show the improved registration and segmentation accuracy over conventional methods that perform them separately.

Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) MRI requires the acquisition of multiple saturation-weighted images and can last several minutes. Misalignments among these images, which are often due to the inevitable motion of the subject, will corrupt CEST contrast maps and result in large quantification errors. Therefore, the registration of the CEST series is critical. However, registration is challenging since common intensity-based registration algorithms may fail to differentiate CEST signals from motion artifacts. Herein, we studied how different patterns of motion affect CEST quantification and proposed a cascaded two-step registration scheme by utilizing features extracted from the entire Z-spectral image series instead of direct registration to a single image. The proposed approach is conducted in two stages: during the first coarse registration, the Z-spectral image series is decomposed by robust principal component analysis (RPCA) to separate CEST contrast from motion. The recomposed image series using only the low-rank component, which contains minimized motion, are averaged to generate a reference for the alignment of the image series. To further remove residual misalignments, the coarse registration is followed by a refinement stage, which uses PCA iteratively to generate motionless synthetic reference series with the first few principal components (PCs) that correspond to CEST contrast. In the end, the quality check is performed to exclude the images with unsuccessful registration. The proposed registration scheme (RPCA + PCA_R) was assessed by both phantom experiments and in vivo data of tumor-bearing mouse brain, with simulated random rigid motion in different patterns applied to the acquired static Z-spectral image series. For comparison, previous correction schemes using an explicit image [either S0 or Ssat(∆ω)] as registration reference were also performed, named as S0_R and Ssat_R respectively. To illustrate the advantage of combination of RPCA and PCA, registration was also exploited using either only the RPCA-based method (RPCA_R) or only the PCA-based one (PCA_R). Compared with the above four methods, RPCA + PCA_R allowed for more accurate correction of the corrupted Z-spectral images, exhibiting smaller MTRasym(∆ω) error maps and lower residual Z-spectra referring to the static data. Among all the five correction methods, the corrected Z-spectral image series by RPCA + PCA_R and the resulting MTRasym(∆ω) maps achieved the highest correlation coefficients (CC) with respect to the static ones. The registration scheme of RPCA + PCA_R provides robust motion correction between two specific Z-spectral images and among an entire image series, through extraction of the static component from the entire Z-spectra set and inclusion of a PCA-based refinement step. Therefore, this method can help improve CEST acquisition and quantification.

Recently, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) based methods have been used for hyperspectral images (HSIs) restoration to simultaneously remove several types of noise, including Gaussian noise, impulse noise, stripes, and so on. However, most of these RPCA methods formulate the optimization problem with a convex l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> -norm penalty, which over-penalizes large entries of vectors, and results in a biased solution. In this paper, a novel nonconvex sparsity regularizer (NonSR) for measuring the clean HSI low rank structure and noise sparsity structure is proposed, which can effectively approximate rank function and noise sparsity instead of the convex l <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> -norm. By embedding the sparsity regularizer into the RPCA framework, we formulate a new model, which enhance the capability in simultaneously removing several types of noise. In addition, an iterative algorithm based on the alternative direction multiplier method (ADMM) is developed to effectively solve the proposed model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed NonSR method outperforms state-of-the-art HSIs restoration techniques.

Sparse and low rank matrix decomposition is a method that has recently been developed for estimating different components of hyperspectral data. The rank component is capable of preserving global data structures of data, while a sparse component can select the discriminative information by preserving details. In order to take advantage of both, we present a novel decision fusion based on joint low rank and sparse component (DFJLRS) method for hyperspectral imagery in this paper. First, we analyzed the effects of different components on classification results. Then a novel method adopts a decision fusion strategy which combines a SVM classifier with the information provided by joint sparse and low rank components. With combination of the advantages, the proposed method is both representative and discriminative. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using several hyperspectral images when compared with traditional counterparts.

&lt;p dir="ltr"&gt;One of the most critical features of real-world networks is their community structure, as it reveals the internal organization of nodes. Finding such partitions is an interesting and essential task from both theoretical and practical perspectives. As a result, there is a growing demand for effective community detection algorithms. However, testing and designing such algorithms is demanding and challenging: one of the biggest problems is the lack of proper datasets and the fact that some have disputable ground-truth labeling, to say the least. One way to avoid this problem is to use artificial benchmarks with a built-in community structure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p dir="ltr"&gt;In this work, we propose ABCDe—a multi-threaded implementation of the ABCD (Artificial Benchmark for Community Detection) graph generator. We test its performance and compare it with the previously available sequential version of the ABCD model and the parallel implementation of the standard and widely used LFR generator. We also investigate various theoretical asymptotic properties of the ABCD and ABCDe models. In particular, we analyze the modularity function, arguably the most important graph property in the context of community detection. By doing so, we show that models from the ABCD family are proper tools for designing new algorithms, not only those suited specifically for the community detection task.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p dir="ltr"&gt;Finally, we introduce a new approach to community detection in graphs. The idea is to initialize one of the popular heuristic-based community detection algorithms, such as Louvain or Leiden, with a partition obtained by embedding the graph nodes into a high-dimensional real vector space and then running a clustering algorithm on this latent representation. This procedure significantly improves the results and reduces the inherent volatility of such algorithms. Proper embedding filters out unnecessary information while retaining the proximity of nodes belonging to the same community.&lt;/p&gt;

In this paper, we present an augmented Lagrangian alternating direction algorithm for symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization. The convergence of the algorithm is also proved in detail and strictly. Then we present a modified overlapping community detection method which is based on the presented symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization algorithm. We apply the modified community detection method to several real world networks. The obtained results show the capability of our method in detecting overlapping communities, hubs and outliers. We find that our experimental results have better quality than several competing methods for identifying communities.

Community detection in graphs can be viewed as the estimation of a partition map that remains stable under admissible perturbations of graph topology and node attributes. While modern graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong empirical accuracy, they often exhibit severe assignment drift under minor perturbations, leading to illusory community structures. In this work, we propose DISPEL-GNN, a stability-aware graph learning framework that integrates spectral operator regularization, Bayesian uncertainty modeling, and risk-aware dynamic attention for perturbation-bounded community detection. The model explicitly constrains graph operators through uniform spectral norm bounds, high-frequency energy suppression, and commutator alignment while dynamically modulating message passing based on node-level spectral risk and epistemic uncertainty. We further formalize instability via assignment of drift functional and establish perturbation bounds linking drift to operator norms and spectral gaps, complemented by a PAC-Bayesian generalization guarantee. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks including Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed, Cora-Full, and DBLP demonstrate that DISPEL-GNN consistently reduces assignment drift by 18–35% under feature noise and edge perturbations while improving clustering quality with up to +3.0 NMI and +0.04 ARI compared to strong baselines such as GAT and Bayesian GNNs. The normalized mutual information (NMI), adjusted Rand index (ARI), and PAC-Bayesian (PAC) constraints serve as evaluative and theoretical instruments in this study. Additional studies on synthetic graphs with controlled spectral gaps confirm that the proposed method maintains stable community assignments in low-gap regimes where classical spectral and GNN-based methods degrade sharply. These results establish DISPEL-GNN as a mathematically grounded and practically effective framework for robust and interpretable community detection. A metric-wise dominance analysis shows that DISPEL-GNN achieves metric-wise dominance across most accuracy and robustness criteria, with minor tradeoffs in modularity on selected datasets. These results indicate that explicitly modeling stability and uncertainty provides a principled pathway toward reliable and interpretable community detection in noisy graph environments.

Previous researches show that the approaches based on the total variability space (TVS) followed by Gaussian probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (GPLDA) work effectively for dealing with convolutional noise (such as channel noise) and can bring some degree of gains in term of accuracy under additive noisy environment as well. However they meet difficulty while many types of noises are unseen and non-stationary in real world. To address this issue, we introduce the robust principal component analysis (RPCA) into the TVS modeled speaker verification system, called RPCA-TVS, which regards the noise spectrum as the low-rank component and the speech spectrum as the sparse component in short-time Fourier transform (SFT) domain. The highlighting of this paper is to improve the robustness of speaker verification under additive noisy environment, especially in non-stationary and unseen noise conditions. For evaluating the performance, we designed and generated an additive noisy corpus, based on the TIMIT and NUST603-2014 database, using the NaFT tools with 12 types of noise samples deriving from NOISEX-92 and FREESOUND. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RPCA-TVS can achieve better performance than the competing methods at various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. Especially, RPCA-TVS reduces the equal error rate (EER) by 5.12 % in average than the multi-condition system under additive noise conditions at SNR = 8 dB.

Dynamic cerebral perfusion computed tomography (DCPCT) has the ability to evaluate the hemodynamic information throughout the brain. However, due to multiple 3-D image volume acquisitions protocol, DCPCT scanning imposes high radiation dose on the patients with growing concerns. To address this issue, in this paper, based on the robust principal component analysis (RPCA, or equivalently the low-rank and sparsity decomposition) model and the DCPCT imaging procedure, we propose a new DCPCT image reconstruction algorithm to improve low-dose DCPCT and perfusion maps quality via using a powerful measure, called Kronecker-basis-representation tensor sparsity regularization, for measuring low-rankness extent of a tensor. For simplicity, the first proposed model is termed tensor-based RPCA (T-RPCA). Specifically, the T-RPCA model views the DCPCT sequential images as a mixture of low-rank, sparse, and noise components to describe the maximum temporal coherence of spatial structure among phases in a tensor framework intrinsically. Moreover, the low-rank component corresponds to the "background" part with spatial-temporal correlations, e.g., static anatomical contribution, which is stationary over time about structure, and the sparse component represents the time-varying component with spatial-temporal continuity, e.g., dynamic perfusion enhanced information, which is approximately sparse over time. Furthermore, an improved nonlocal patch-based T-RPCA (NL-T-RPCA) model which describes the 3-D block groups of the "background" in a tensor is also proposed. The NL-T-RPCA model utilizes the intrinsic characteristics underlying the DCPCT images, i.e., nonlocal self-similarity and global correlation. Two efficient algorithms using alternating direction method of multipliers are developed to solve the proposed T-RPCA and NL-T-RPCA models, respectively. Extensive experiments with a digital brain perfusion phantom, preclinical monkey data, and clinical patient data clearly demonstrate that the two proposed models can achieve more gains than the existing popular algorithms in terms of both quantitative and visual quality evaluations from low-dose acquisitions, especially as low as 20 mAs.

Ground penetrating radar measurements are dominated by the strong return from the ground interface and volume scattering from distributed subsurface in-homogeneities. Buried object detection performance can be improved if these clutter sources can be reduced relative to the scattering from the buried objects of interest. This paper applies two recently developed methods of separating a signal into a low-rank component (representing the background) and a sparse component (the buried object), robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), to the problem of separating subsurface scattering anomalies from a slowly varying background. The algorithms are described and an example application to field-collected impulse GPR data is shown. The target-to-clutter ratio is significantly improved in the sparse component compare to that in the original data suggesting that these techniques are viable methods of suppressing surface clutter and distributed volumetric clutter.

Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis (TRPCA) aims at recovering the low-rank and sparse components from target tensor, which has extensive applications in multi-dimensional data recovery. However, most of the existing methods only exploit the global low-rank of image data, which result in missing local details in the recovered data. To restore the data more accurately, we propose a new TRPCA method which simultaneously combines the model-based method and data-driven approaches to preserve the global structure and fine local information. Specially, we pick the tensor nuclear norm to characterize the global correlation and a convolutional neural network(CNN) denoiser which reserves the local detail. Then, a flexible alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is designed to deal with the proposed optimization model. Extensive experiments on various types of tensor data illustrate that our model enhances performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.