Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) is an emerging technology in medical imaging which employs near-infra-red light to estimate the distribution of optical coefficients in biological tissues for diagnostic purposes. The DOT approach involves the solution of a severely ill-posed inverse problem, for which regularization techniques are mandatory in order to achieve reasonable results. Traditionally, regularization techniques put a variance prior on the desired solution/gradient via regularization parameters, whose choice requires a fine tuning. In this work we explore deep learning techniques in a fully data-driven approach, able of reconstructing the generating signal (absorption coefficient) in an automated way. We base our approach on the so-called learned Singular Value Decomposition, which has been proposed for general inverse problems, and we tailor it to the DOT application. We test our approach on a 2D synthetic dataset, with increasing levels of noise on the measure.
Recent self-supervised methods for image representation learning are based on maximizing the agreement between embedding vectors from different views of the same image. A trivial solution is obtained when the encoder outputs constant vectors. This collapse problem is often avoided through implicit biases in the learning architecture, that often lack a clear justification or interpretation. In this paper, we introduce VICReg (Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization), a method that explicitly avoids the collapse problem with a simple regularization term on the variance of the embeddings along each dimension individually. VICReg combines the variance term with a decorrelation mechanism based on redundancy reduction and covariance regularization, and achieves results on par with the state of the art on several downstream tasks. In addition, we show that incorporating our new variance term into other methods helps stabilize the training and leads to performance improvements.
In optical diffraction tomography (ODT), the three-dimensional scattering potential of a microscopic object rotating around its center is recovered by a series of illuminations with coherent light. Reconstruction algorithms such as the filtered backpropagation require knowledge of the complex-valued wave at the measurement plane, whereas often only intensities, i.e., phaseless measurements, are available in practice. We propose a new reconstruction approach for ODT with unknown phase information based on three key ingredients. First, the light propagation is modeled using Born's approximation enabling us to use the Fourier diffraction theorem. Second, we stabilize the inversion of the non-uniform discrete Fourier transform via total variation regularization utilizing a primal-dual iteration, which also yields a novel numerical inversion formula for ODT with known phase. The third ingredient is a hybrid input-output scheme. We achieved convincing numerical results, which indicate that ODT with phaseless data is possible. The so-obtained 2D and 3D reconstructions are even comparable to the ones with known phase.
This paper proposed a method to judge whether the point is inside or outside of the simple convex polygon by the intersection of the vertical line. It determined the point to an area enclosed by two straight lines, then convert the problem of determining whether a point is inside or outside of a convex polygon into the problem of determining whether a point is inside or outside of a quadrilateral. After that, use the ray method to judge it. The complexity of this algorithm is O(1) to O(n). As the experimental results show, the algorithm has fewer intersections and greatly improves the efficiency of the judgment.
Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative rewards. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative rewards. We parameterize the policy controlling actions by neural networks and propose a novel policy gradient algorithm called Quantile-Based Policy Optimization (QPO) and its variant Quantile-Based Proximal Policy Optimization (QPPO) to solve deep RL problems with quantile objectives. QPO uses two coupled iterations running at different time scales for simultaneously estimating quantiles and policy parameters and is shown to converge to the global optimal policy under certain conditions. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform the existing baseline algorithms under the quantile criterion.
Reinforcement learning (RL) applications, where an agent can simply learn optimal behaviors by interacting with the environment, are quickly gaining tremendous success in a wide variety of applications from controlling simple pendulums to complex data centers. However, setting the right hyperparameters can have a huge impact on the deployed solution performance and reliability in the inference models, produced via RL, used for decision-making. Hyperparameter search itself is a laborious process that requires many iterations and computationally expensive to find the best settings that produce the best neural network architectures. In comparison to other neural network architectures, deep RL has not witnessed much hyperparameter tuning, due to its algorithm complexity and simulation platforms needed. In this paper, we propose a distributed variable-length genetic algorithm framework to systematically tune hyperparameters for various RL applications, improving training time and robustness of the architecture, via evolution. We demonstrate the scalability of our approach on many RL problems (from simple gyms to complex applications) and compared with Bayesian approach. Our results show that with more generations, optimal solutions that require fewer training episodes and are computationally cheap while being more robust for deployment. Our results are imperative to advance deep reinforcement learning controllers for real-world problems.
We introduce an algebraic multiscale method for two--dimensional problems. The method uses the generalized multiscale finite element method based on the quadrilateral nonconforming finite element spaces. Differently from the one--dimensional algebraic multiscale method, we apply the dimension reduction techniques to construct multiscale basis functions. Also moment functions are considered to impose continuity between local basis functions. Some representative numerical results are presented.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
Recent work has shown that a variety of semantics emerge in the latent space of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) when being trained to synthesize images. However, it is difficult to use these learned semantics for real image editing. A common practice of feeding a real image to a trained GAN generator is to invert it back to a latent code. However, existing inversion methods typically focus on reconstructing the target image by pixel values yet fail to land the inverted code in the semantic domain of the original latent space. As a result, the reconstructed image cannot well support semantic editing through varying the inverted code. To solve this problem, we propose an in-domain GAN inversion approach, which not only faithfully reconstructs the input image but also ensures the inverted code to be semantically meaningful for editing. We first learn a novel domain-guided encoder to project a given image to the native latent space of GANs. We then propose domain-regularized optimization by involving the encoder as a regularizer to fine-tune the code produced by the encoder and better recover the target image. Extensive experiments suggest that our inversion method achieves satisfying real image reconstruction and more importantly facilitates various image editing tasks, significantly outperforming start-of-the-arts.
In information retrieval (IR) and related tasks, term weighting approaches typically consider the frequency of the term in the document and in the collection in order to compute a score reflecting the importance of the term for the document. In tasks characterized by the presence of training data (such as text classification) it seems logical that the term weighting function should take into account the distribution (as estimated from training data) of the term across the classes of interest. Although `supervised term weighting' approaches that use this intuition have been described before, they have failed to show consistent improvements. In this article we analyse the possible reasons for this failure, and call consolidated assumptions into question. Following this criticism we propose a novel supervised term weighting approach that, instead of relying on any predefined formula, learns a term weighting function optimised on the training set of interest; we dub this approach \emph{Learning to Weight} (LTW). The experiments that we run on several well-known benchmarks, and using different learning methods, show that our method outperforms previous term weighting approaches in text classification.
There is growing interest in object detection in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous robots and vehicles. To enable such innovative systems, we need faster object detection. In this work, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy and speed with domain-specific approximations, i.e. category-aware image size scaling and proposals scaling, for two state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection meta-architectures. We study the effectiveness of applying approximation both statically and dynamically to understand the potential and the applicability of them. By conducting experiments on the ImageNet VID dataset, we show that domain-specific approximation has great potential to improve the speed of the system without deteriorating the accuracy of object detectors, i.e. up to 7.5x speedup for dynamic domain-specific approximation. To this end, we present our insights toward harvesting domain-specific approximation as well as devise a proof-of-concept runtime, AutoFocus, that exploits dynamic domain-specific approximation.