Here are the t-SNE and LargeVis cost functions and gradients, making it a bit easier to see how they are related.

A bit of nomenclature first:

• $$v_{ij}$$ are input affinities. A large affinity means that the data points are similar in the input space, so you’d probably like to see them close together in the output configuration. In all the methods mentioned below, some sort of row-normalization has been applied, so that the rows sum to a constant, followed by symmetrization, so that $$v_{ij} = v_{ji}$$.
• $$p_{ij}$$ are the matrix-normalized input affinities, so that $$\sum_{ij} p_{ij} = 1$$, which is achieved by just dividing each $$v_{ij}$$ by $$\sum_{ij} v_{ij}$$. They are therefore also symmetric, so that $$p_{ij} = p_{ji}$$. They are often interpreted as joint probabilities. Probabilities of what exactly? It’s not totally obvious. Let’s say it’s the probability of observing an edge between the two vertices $$i$$ and $$j$$ in the graph representing the neigborhood relationship of your input data. These are dependent only on the input data (and the choice of perplexity) and so are constant with respect to optimizing the output coordinates. If you decide to think of the problem in terms of graph laplacians and $$p_{ij}$$ as “just” a normalized affinity, I won’t blame you.
• $$w_{ij}$$ are the output configuration weights, aka un-normalized affinities or similarities.
• $$q_{ij}$$ are the output probabilities, where $$q_{ij} = w_{ij} / Z$$ and $$Z$$ is the sum of all the weights: $$Z = \sum_{kl} w_{kl}$$. Note that for the methods that make use of $$q_{ij}$$ in their cost function, they are generated by being matrix-normalized like $$p_{ij}$$, but aren’t explicitly row-normalized or symmetrized as we do with $$p_{ij}$$. As we shall see in the next bullet point, the form of the functions that generate the $$w_{ij}$$ don’t require symmetrization.
• $$w_{ij}$$ in both t-SNE and LargeVis is defined as the Student’s t-distribution with one degree of freedom (or the Cauchy distribution, if you prefer), $$w_{ij} = 1 / \left(1 + d_{ij}^2 \right)$$. $$d_{ij}$$ is the Euclidean distance between point $$i$$ and $$j$$ in the output coordinates. These functions therefore result in the $$w_{ij}$$ values being symmetric by default. UMAP uses a similar weight function, which will be described in its own section.
• $$\mathbf{y_{i}}$$ is the vector of coordinates of point $$i$$ (with $$N$$ points in total).

If you need more detail (or to be more confused) on how to derive the embedding gradients from their cost functions, see here.

## Cost Functions

### t-SNE

The t-SNE cost function is:

$C_{tSNE} = \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log \frac{p_{ij}}{q_{ij}} = \sum_{ij} \left( p_{ij} \log p_{ij} - p_{ij} \log q_{ij} \right)$ The first term in the sum has no dependence on the output coordinates, so is a constant we’ll just mark as $$C_{P}$$.

Now let’s write out $$q_{ij}$$ as $$w_{ij} / Z$$:

$C_{tSNE} = C_{P} - \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log \left( \frac{w_{ij}}{Z} \right) = Cp - \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log w_{ij} + \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log Z$ Finally, we’ll do some rearranging and re-write $$Z$$ back to a sum of weights:

$C_{tSNE} = Cp - \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log w_{ij} + \log Z \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \\ = Cp - \sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log w_{ij} + \log \sum_{ij} w_{ij}$

Ignoring, the constant term, we can see that the SNE cost function consists of an attractive term, where maximizing the $$w_{ij}$$ (which implies minimizing the distances) would minimize $$-p_{ij} \log w_{ij}$$; and a repulsive term, where minimizing the sum of $$w_{ij}$$ (and hence maximizing the distances), will minimize the log of the sum.

### LargeVis

The LargeVis paper describes partitioning the data into a set of nearest neighbors (we’ll call that $$E$$), which only feel an attractive force; and everything else ($$\bar{E}$$), which only feel repulsive forces. Perplexity calibration and weight definition are carried out as in t-SNE, to give the following (log) likelihood function:

$L_{LV} = \sum_{ \left(i, j\right) \in E} p_{ij} \log w_{ij} +\gamma \sum_{\left(i, j\right) \in \bar{E}} \log \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)$ Likelihood functions are maximized, so the final cost function we’re interested in will be $$-L_{LV}$$, in order that we have a function to minimize. Otherwise, it gets a bit confusing keeping track of the signs of the gradients compared to the other methods in smallvis.

To use the LargeVis cost function in smallvis, we need to make some small modifications.

LargeVis doesn’t actually prevent repulsive terms being applied to nearest neighbors. Again due to the SGD sampling implementation, the proportion of nearest neighbors involved in repulsive terms is extremely small so it doesn’t matter for the LargeVis reference implementation.

However, I have experimented with restricting the repulsion to only the non-neighbors in smallvis, but this leads to some horrible results involving lots of very small well-separated clusters. On reflection it seems like this would be the expected outcome of not allowing neighbors to repel each other: neighboring points that happen to be initialized close to each other will feel a strong mutual force that results in them reducing their distances to zero, which will overwhelm any longer range attraction from more distant neighbors.

That leaves the attractive part of the cost function. The partitioning works here and the non-neighbors are excluded from contributing to the attractive part of the cost, but that term is weighted by $$p_{ij}$$ anyway, so the perplexity calibration guarantees that even if you did calculate probabilities for all pairs of points, those that weren’t part of the neighborhood would contribute negligibly to that component of the cost function.

Taken together, you could therefore ignore the partitioning scheme, as long as you were prepared to calculate the complete O(N^2) matrices, which is exactly what smallvis does.

Based on the above discussion, and wanting a cost function to minimize, the smallvis version of the LargeVis cost function is:

$C_{LV} = -\sum_{ij} p_{ij} \log w_{ij} -\gamma \sum_{ij} \log \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)$ In this form, the attractive terms of both t-SNE and LargeVis are very similar.

The derivative of the cost function with respect to the weights is:

$\frac{\partial C_{LV}}{\partial w_{ij}} = -\frac{p_{ij}}{w_{ij}} + \frac{ \gamma}{ \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)}$

### UMAP

Note: the following is based on my examination of the UMAP source code, followed up by some clarification from UMAP creator Leland McInnes, who kindly answered some of my questions (in quite a lot of detail) about the intent of the source code. If any of the following seems wrong or nonsensical, that is a reflection on my understanding of UMAP, rather than UMAP itself.

UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) attempts to model the underlying manifold of a dataset via a fuzzy topological structure.

UMAP treats the input and output data as two fuzzy sets, with strength of membership being equivalent to $$v_{ij}$$ and $$w_{ij}$$, respectively. The cost function for UMAP is the cross entropy of the fuzzy sets:

$C_{UMAP} = \sum_{ij} \left[ v_{ij} \log \left( \frac{v_{ij}}{w_{ij}} \right) + (1 - v_{ij}) \log \left( \frac{1 - v_{ij}}{1 - w_{ij}} \right) \right]$

which can be expanded to:

$C_{UMAP} = \sum_{ij} \left[ v_{ij} \log(v_{ij}) + (1 - v_{ij})\log(1 - v_{ij}) \right] - \sum_{ij} \left[ v_{ij} \log(w_{ij}) \right] - \sum_{ij} \left[ (1 - v_{ij}) \log(1 - w_{ij}) \right]$

Just like with t-SNE, the first term is a constant, which this time we’ll call $$C_{V}$$, leaving:

$C_{UMAP} = C_{V} - \sum_{ij} v_{ij} \log(w_{ij}) - \sum_{ij} (1 - v_{ij}) \log(1 - w_{ij})$

which looks a lot like LargeVis, except instead of a constant $$\gamma$$ term in the repulsion, each pair is weighted according to (one minus) the input weight. Additionally, both the input and output weight terms are defined differently to LargeVis.

The UMAP input weights are given by:

$v_{ij} = \exp \left[ -\left( r_{ij} - \rho_{i} \right) / \sigma_{i} \right]$

where $$r_{ij}$$ are the input distances (not necessarily Euclidean), $$\rho_{i}$$ is the distance to the nearest neighbor (ignoring zero distances where neighbors are duplicates) and $$\sigma_{i}$$ is chosen by a binary search such that $$\sum_{j} v_{ij} = \log_{2} k$$ where $$k$$ is the size of the neighborhood. This is similar in spirit to the perplexity calibration used by t-SNE and LargeVis.

As the use of $$v_{ij}$$ indicates, the input weight are not normalized in UMAP. They are symmetrized, but in a different way to the arithmetic mean approach in t-SNE:

$V_{symm} = V + V^{T} - V \circ V^{T}$ where $$T$$ indicates the transpose and $$\circ$$ is the Hadamard (i.e. entry-wise) product. This effectively carries out a fuzzy set union.

The output weights are given by:

$w_{ij} = 1 / \left(1 + ad_{ij}^{2b}\right)$

where $$a$$ and $$b$$ are determined by a non-linear least squares fit based on a couple of user-selected parameters that control the tightness of the squashing function. By setting $$a = 1$$ and $$b = 1$$ you get the t-SNE style weighting back. The current UMAP defaults result in $$a = 1.929$$ and $$b = 0.7915$$. April 8 2019: I was wrong about this, due to a mis-reading of a related default parameter. The actual UMAP defaults are $$a = 1.577$$ and $$b = 0.895$$. This has very little effect on the visualizations.

To get to the UMAP gradient, we need the derivative of the weight with respect to the squared distance.

$\frac{\partial w_{ij}}{\partial d_{ij}^2} = \frac{-b a d_{ij}^{2\left(b - 1\right)}} {\left(a d_{ij}^2 + 1 \right)^2} = -b a d_{ij}^{2\left( b - 1\right)} w_{ij}^2 = -\frac{b \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)}{d_{ij}^2}w_{ij}$ The derivative of the cost function with respect to the weights is:

$\frac{\partial C_{UMAP}}{\partial w_{ij}} = -\frac{v_{ij}}{w_{ij}} + \frac{ \left( 1 - v_{ij} \right)}{ \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)} = -\frac{v_{ij}}{w_{ij} \left(1 - w_{ij} \right)} + \frac{w_{ij}}{ w_{ij} \left( 1 - w_{ij} \right)}$

Let’s look at some gradients and see how t-SNE, LargeVis and UMAP compare.

### t-SNE

First, t-SNE written slightly differently to how its usually presented, in terms of the un-normalized weights. This will hopefully illuminate the similarities and differences with LargeVis and UMAP:

$\frac{\partial C_{tSNE}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4 \sum_j^N \left( v_{ij} -\frac{\sum_{kl} v_{kl}}{\sum_{kl} w_{kl}} w_{ij} \right) \frac{w_{ij}}{\sum_{kl} v_{kl}} \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$ If you want a bit more detail in how this is derived, see here. Note that the sum $$\sum_{kl}$$ means to sum over all weights and the input weights $$v_{ij}$$ are not matrix-normalized but otherwise have had the other processing carried out on them as is usually done in perplexity-based calibration, i.e.  row-normalization and symmetrization.

#### Digression

Brief aside which will hopefully find a more suitable place to live one day. The input weight processing in the usual t-SNE treatment means that $$\sum_{kl} v_{kl} = N$$. An alternative form for the t-SNE gradient is therefore:

$\frac{\partial C_{tSNE}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = \frac{4}{N} \sum_j^N \left( v_{ij} -\frac{N}{Z} w_{ij} \right) w_{ij} \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$ In practice, because the usual t-SNE initialization starts with short distances, the output weights are all 1 to begin with, so the $$N/Z$$ term is approximately $$1/N$$ initially. Over the course of the optimization the value of $$Z$$ begins to drop and hence $$N/Z$$ increases. For the usual parameter settings in t-SNE, it’s usually less than 1, but for low perplexity values and quite converged results (e.g. allowing max_iter = 50000 at least), $$N/Z$$ can get larger than 1 (e.g. around 4 for the s1k dataset at perplexity = 5). End of digression.

### LargeVis

For LargeVis, the gradient can be written as:

$\frac{\partial C_{LV}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left( p_{ij} -\frac{\gamma}{1 - w_{ij}} w_{ij} \right) w_{ij} \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$

where I’ve tried to retain the structure of the expression that most resembles that of t-SNE, but the following is probably more convenient for the purposes of a stochastic gradient descent optimization:

$\frac{\partial C_{LV}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left( w_{ij} p_{ij} -\frac{\gamma }{d_{ij}^2 + \epsilon}w_{ij} \right) \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$

The $$\epsilon$$ term is needed computationally to avoid division by zero. Results can be quite sensitive to changing this value. In smallvis you can see the effect of it via the lveps parameter. It’s set to 0.1 in LargeVis.

#### Other weight functions

The LargeVis paper tests some other weighting functions, although they don’t do as well as the t-SNE-like function. They are available in the CRAN package though, so here are the gradients for completeness.

The first alternative function allows the scale parameter of the Cauchy distribution to vary (shown here as $$\alpha$$):

$w_{ij} = \frac{1}{1 + \alpha d_{ij}^2} \\ \frac{\partial w_{ij}}{\partial d_{ij}^2} = - \frac{\alpha}{\left(1 + \alpha d_{ij}^2\right)^2} = -\alpha w_{ij}^2 \\ \frac{\partial C_{LV}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left( \alpha w_{ij} p_{ij} -\frac{\gamma}{d_{ij}^2 + \epsilon} w_{ij} \right) \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$ The negative part of the gradient doesn’t contain an $$\alpha$$ term due to cancellation.

The other weight function looked at involves an exponential:

$w_{ij} = \frac{1}{1 + \exp \left(d_{ij}^2\right)} \\ \frac{\partial w_{ij}}{\partial d_{ij}^2} = - \frac{\exp\left(d_{ij}^2\right)}{\left[1 + \exp \left(d_{ij}^2\right)\right]^2} = -\exp \left(d_{ij}^2\right) w_{ij}^2 = -\left(1 - w_{ij}\right) w_{ij}\\ \frac{\partial C_{LV}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left[ \left(1 - w_{ij}\right) p_{ij} - \gamma w_{ij} \right] \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$

Note that section 3 of the paper mentions the above as a possible weight function, but the results in section 4 of the paper claim to actually investigate $$w_{ij} = 1 / \left[1 + \exp \left(-d_{ij}^2\right)\right]$$. I assume that’s a typo, because using the negative squared distance results in the weight increasing with distance.

### UMAP

Likewise, here’s one way to express the UMAP gradient:

$\frac{\partial C_{UMAP}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left( v_{ij} - w_{ij} \right) \frac{b}{d_{ij}^2} \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right) = 4\sum_j^N \left( v_{ij} - w_{ij} \right) b\left(\frac{aw_{ij}}{1 - w_{ij}}\right)^{\frac{1}{b}} \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$ and more explicitly:

$\frac{\partial C_{UMAP}}{\partial \mathbf{y_i}} = 4\sum_j^N \left[ abd_{ij}^{2\left(b - 1\right)} w_{ij} v_{ij} -\frac{b \left(1 - v_{ij}\right) }{d_{ij}^2 + \epsilon} w_{ij} \right] \left(\mathbf{y_i - y_j}\right)$

Again we need a value for $$\epsilon$$, which is 0.001 in the UMAP source.

The t-SNE, LargeVis and UMAP gradients all have a similar form based around the difference between the input and output weights, $$v_{ij} - w_{ij}$$, although LargeVis and t-SNE re-weight the repulsion compared to UMAP.