Regularization-free Diffeomorphic Temporal Alignment Nets

In time-series analysis, nonlinear temporal misalignment is a major problem that forestalls even simple averaging. An effective learning-based solution for this problem is the Diffeomorphic Temporal Alignment Net (DTAN) (Shapira Weber et al., 2019), that, by relying on a diffeomorphic temporal transformer net and the amortization of the joint-alignment task, eliminates drawbacks of traditional alignment methods. Unfortunately, existing DTAN formulations crucially depend on a regularization term whose optimal hyperparameters are dataset-specific and usually searched via a large number of experiments. Here we propose a regularization-free DTAN that obviates the need to perform such an expensive, and often impractical, search. Concretely, we propose a new well-behaved loss that we call the Inverse Consistency Averaging Error (ICAE), as well as a related new triplet loss. Extensive experiments on 128 UCR datasets show that the proposed method outperforms contemporary methods despite not using a regularization. Moreover, ICAE also gives rise to the first DTAN that supports variable-length signals. Our code is available at https://github.com/BGU-CS-VIL/RF-DTAN.