We propose a surrogate function for efficient use of score-based priors for Bayesian inverse imaging. Recent work turned score-based diffusion models into probabilistic priors for solving ill-posed imaging problems by appealing to an ODE-based log-probability function. However, evaluating this function is computationally inefficient and inhibits posterior estimation of high-dimensional images. Our proposed surrogate prior is based on the evidence lower-bound of a score-based diffusion model. We demonstrate the surrogate prior on variational inference for efficient approximate posterior sampling of large images. Compared to the exact prior in previous work, our surrogate prior accelerates optimization of the variational image distribution by at least two orders of magnitude. We also find that our principled approach achieves higher-fidelity images than non-Bayesian baselines that involve hyperparameter-tuning at inference. Our work establishes a practical path forward for using score-based diffusion models as general-purpose priors for imaging.
Quadrotors are widely used for surveillance, mapping, and deliveries. In several scenarios the quadrotor operates in pure inertial navigation mode resulting in a navigation solution drift. To handle such situations and bind the navigation drift, the quadrotor dead reckoning (QDR) approach requires flying the quadrotor in a periodic trajectory. Then, using model or learning based approaches the quadrotor position vector can be estimated. We propose to use multiple inertial measurement units (MIMU) to improve the positioning accuracy of the QDR approach. Several methods to utilize MIMU data in a deep learning framework are derived and evaluated. Field experiments were conducted to validate the proposed approach and show its benefits.
Bayesian inference allows expressing the uncertainty of posterior belief under a probabilistic model given prior information and the likelihood of the evidence. Predominantly, the likelihood function is only implicitly established by a simulator posing the need for simulation-based inference (SBI). However, the existing algorithms can yield overconfident posteriors (Hermans *et al.*, 2022) defeating the whole purpose of credibility if the uncertainty quantification is inaccurate. We propose to include a calibration term directly into the training objective of the neural model in selected amortized SBI techniques. By introducing a relaxation of the classical formulation of calibration error we enable end-to-end backpropagation. The proposed method is not tied to any particular neural model and brings moderate computational overhead compared to the profits it introduces. It is directly applicable to existing computational pipelines allowing reliable black-box posterior inference. We empirically show on six benchmark problems that the proposed method achieves competitive or better results in terms of coverage and expected posterior density than the previously existing approaches.
This work presents an algorithm for tracking the shape of multiple entangling Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) from a sequence of RGB-D images. This algorithm runs in real-time and improves on previous single-DLO tracking approaches by enabling tracking of multiple objects. This is achieved using Global-Local Topology Preservation (GLTP). This work uses the geodesic distance in GLTP to define the distance between separate objects and the distance between different parts of the same object. Tracking multiple entangling DLOs is demonstrated experimentally. The source code is publicly released.
All-digital massive multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies is a promising technology for next-generation wireless systems. Low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) can be utilized to reduce the power consumption of all-digital basestation (BS) designs. However, simultaneously transmitting user equipments (UEs) with vastly different BS-side receive powers either drown weak UEs in quantization noise or saturate the ADCs. To address this issue, we propose high dynamic range (HDR) MIMO, a new paradigm that enables simultaneous reception of strong and weak UEs with low-resolution ADCs. HDR MIMO combines an adaptive analog spatial transform with digital equalization: The spatial transform focuses strong UEs on a subset of ADCs in order to mitigate quantization and saturation artifacts; digital equalization is then used for data detection. We demonstrate the efficacy of HDR MIMO in a massive MU-MIMO mmWave scenario that uses Householder reflections as spatial transform.
Explainable recommender systems (RS) have traditionally followed a one-size-fits-all approach, delivering the same explanation level of detail to each user, without considering their individual needs and goals. Further, explanations in RS have so far been presented mostly in a static and non-interactive manner. To fill these research gaps, we aim in this paper to adopt a user-centered, interactive explanation model that provides explanations with different levels of detail and empowers users to interact with, control, and personalize the explanations based on their needs and preferences. We followed a user-centered approach to design interactive explanations with three levels of detail (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and implemented them in the transparent Recommendation and Interest Modeling Application (RIMA). We conducted a qualitative user study (N=14) to investigate the impact of providing interactive explanations with varying level of details on the users' perception of the explainable RS. Our study showed qualitative evidence that fostering interaction and giving users control in deciding which explanation they would like to see can meet the demands of users with different needs, preferences, and goals, and consequently can have positive effects on different crucial aspects in explainable recommendation, including transparency, trust, satisfaction, and user experience.
Translation-based AMR parsers have recently gained popularity due to their simplicity and effectiveness. They predict linearized graphs as free texts, avoiding explicit structure modeling. However, this simplicity neglects structural locality in AMR graphs and introduces unnecessary tokens to represent coreferences. In this paper, we introduce new target forms of AMR parsing and a novel model, CHAP, which is equipped with causal hierarchical attention and the pointer mechanism, enabling the integration of structures into the Transformer decoder. We empirically explore various alternative modeling options. Experiments show that our model outperforms baseline models on four out of five benchmarks in the setting of no additional data.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.
Manually labeling objects by tracing their boundaries is a laborious process. In Polygon-RNN++ the authors proposed Polygon-RNN that produces polygonal annotations in a recurrent manner using a CNN-RNN architecture, allowing interactive correction via humans-in-the-loop. We propose a new framework that alleviates the sequential nature of Polygon-RNN, by predicting all vertices simultaneously using a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Our model is trained end-to-end. It supports object annotation by either polygons or splines, facilitating labeling efficiency for both line-based and curved objects. We show that Curve-GCN outperforms all existing approaches in automatic mode, including the powerful PSP-DeepLab and is significantly more efficient in interactive mode than Polygon-RNN++. Our model runs at 29.3ms in automatic, and 2.6ms in interactive mode, making it 10x and 100x faster than Polygon-RNN++.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.