Convolution kernels are the basic structural component of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In the last years there has been a growing interest in fisheye cameras for many applications. However, the radially symmetric projection model of these cameras produces high distortions that affect the performance of CNNs, especially when the field of view is very large. In this work, we tackle this problem by proposing a method that leverages the calibration of cameras to deform the convolution kernel accordingly and adapt to the distortion. That way, the receptive field of the convolution is similar to standard convolutions in perspective images, allowing us to take advantage of pre-trained networks in large perspective datasets. We show how, with just a brief fine-tuning stage in a small dataset, we improve the performance of the network for the calibrated fisheye with respect to standard convolutions in depth estimation and semantic segmentation.
In recent years, power analysis has become widely used in applied sciences, with the increasing importance of the replicability issue. When distribution-free methods, such as Partial Least Squares (PLS)-based approaches, are considered, formulating power analysis turns out to be challenging. In this study, we introduce the methodological framework of a new procedure for performing power analysis when PLS-based methods are used. Data are simulated by the Monte Carlo method, assuming the null hypothesis of no effect is false and exploiting the latent structure estimated by PLS in the pilot data. In this way, the complex correlation data structure is explicitly considered in power analysis and sample size estimation. The paper offers insights into selecting statistical tests for the power analysis procedure, comparing accuracy-based tests and those based on continuous parameters estimated by PLS. Simulated and real datasets are investigated to show how the method works in practice.
As language models (LMs) become more capable, it is increasingly important to align them with human preferences. However, the dominant paradigm for training Preference Models (PMs) for that purpose suffers from fundamental limitations, such as lack of transparency and scalability, along with susceptibility to overfitting the preference dataset. We propose Compositional Preference Models (CPMs), a novel PM framework that decomposes one global preference assessment into several interpretable features, obtains scalar scores for these features from a prompted LM, and aggregates these scores using a logistic regression classifier. Through these simple steps, CPMs allow to control which properties of the preference data are used to train the preference model and to build it based on features that are believed to underlie the human preference judgment. Our experiments show that CPMs not only improve generalization and are more robust to overoptimization than standard PMs, but also that best-of-n samples obtained using CPMs tend to be preferred over samples obtained using conventional PMs. Overall, our approach demonstrates the benefits of endowing PMs with priors about which features determine human preferences while relying on LM capabilities to extract those features in a scalable and robust way.
This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the Koopman operator defined on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and its spectra. We propose an estimation method, what we call Jet Dynamic Mode Decomposition (JetDMD), leveraging the intrinsic structure of RKHS and the geometric notion known as jets to enhance the estimation of the Koopman operator. This method refines the traditional Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) in accuracy, especially in the numerical estimation of eigenvalues. This paper proves JetDMD's superiority through explicit error bounds and convergence rate for special positive definite kernels, offering a solid theoretical foundation for its performance. We also delve into the spectral analysis of the Koopman operator, proposing the notion of extended Koopman operator within a framework of rigged Hilbert space. This notion leads to a deeper understanding of estimated Koopman eigenfunctions and capturing them outside the original function space. Through the theory of rigged Hilbert space, our study provides a principled methodology to analyze the estimated spectrum and eigenfunctions of Koopman operators, and enables eigendecomposition within a rigged RKHS. We also propose a new effective method for reconstructing the dynamical system from temporally-sampled trajectory data of the dynamical system with solid theoretical guarantee. We conduct several numerical simulations using the van der Pol oscillator, the Duffing oscillator, the H\'enon map, and the Lorenz attractor, and illustrate the performance of JetDMD with clear numerical computations of eigenvalues and accurate predictions of the dynamical systems.
In the past five years, the use of generative and foundational AI systems has greatly improved the decoding of brain activity. Visual perception, in particular, can now be decoded from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with remarkable fidelity. This neuroimaging technique, however, suffers from a limited temporal resolution ($\approx$0.5 Hz) and thus fundamentally constrains its real-time usage. Here, we propose an alternative approach based on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging device capable of measuring brain activity with high temporal resolution ($\approx$5,000 Hz). For this, we develop an MEG decoding model trained with both contrastive and regression objectives and consisting of three modules: i) pretrained embeddings obtained from the image, ii) an MEG module trained end-to-end and iii) a pretrained image generator. Our results are threefold: Firstly, our MEG decoder shows a 7X improvement of image-retrieval over classic linear decoders. Second, late brain responses to images are best decoded with DINOv2, a recent foundational image model. Third, image retrievals and generations both suggest that high-level visual features can be decoded from MEG signals, although the same approach applied to 7T fMRI also recovers better low-level features. Overall, these results, while preliminary, provide an important step towards the decoding -- in real-time -- of the visual processes continuously unfolding within the human brain.
Confidence intervals based on the central limit theorem (CLT) are a cornerstone of classical statistics. Despite being only asymptotically valid, they are ubiquitous because they permit statistical inference under weak assumptions and can often be applied to problems even when nonasymptotic inference is impossible. This paper introduces time-uniform analogues of such asymptotic confidence intervals, adding to the literature on confidence sequences (CS) -- sequences of confidence intervals that are uniformly valid over time -- which provide valid inference at arbitrary stopping times and incur no penalties for "peeking" at the data, unlike classical confidence intervals which require the sample size to be fixed in advance. Existing CSs in the literature are nonasymptotic, enjoying finite-sample guarantees but not the aforementioned broad applicability of asymptotic confidence intervals. This work provides a definition for "asymptotic CSs" and a general recipe for deriving them. Asymptotic CSs forgo nonasymptotic validity for CLT-like versatility and (asymptotic) time-uniform guarantees. While the CLT approximates the distribution of a sample average by that of a Gaussian for a fixed sample size, we use strong invariance principles (stemming from the seminal 1960s work of Strassen) to uniformly approximate the entire sample average process by an implicit Gaussian process. As an illustration, we derive asymptotic CSs for the average treatment effect in observational studies (for which nonasymptotic bounds are essentially impossible to derive even in the fixed-time regime) as well as randomized experiments, enabling causal inference in sequential environments.
Studying the function spaces defined by neural networks helps to understand the corresponding learning models and their inductive bias. While in some limits neural networks correspond to function spaces that are reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, these regimes do not capture the properties of the networks used in practice. In contrast, in this paper we show that deep neural networks define suitable reproducing kernel Banach spaces. These spaces are equipped with norms that enforce a form of sparsity, enabling them to adapt to potential latent structures within the input data and their representations. In particular, leveraging the theory of reproducing kernel Banach spaces, combined with variational results, we derive representer theorems that justify the finite architectures commonly employed in applications. Our study extends analogous results for shallow networks and can be seen as a step towards considering more practically plausible neural architectures.
This paper explores the residual based a posteriori error estimations for the generalized Burgers-Huxley equation (GBHE) featuring weakly singular kernels. Initially, we present a reliable and efficient error estimator for both the stationary GBHE and the semi-discrete GBHE with memory, utilizing the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DGFEM) in spatial dimensions. Additionally, employing backward Euler and Crank Nicolson discretization in the temporal domain and DGFEM in spatial dimensions, we introduce an estimator for the fully discrete GBHE, taking into account the influence of past history. The paper also establishes optimal $L^2$ error estimates for both the stationary GBHE and GBHE. Ultimately, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed error estimator through numerical results, demonstrating its efficacy in an adaptive refinement strategy.
Software testing is essential for the reliable development of complex software systems. A key step in software testing is fault localization, which uses test data to pinpoint failure-inducing combinations for further diagnosis. Existing fault localization methods, however, are largely deterministic, and thus do not provide a principled approach for assessing probabilistic risk of potential root causes, or for integrating domain and/or structural knowledge from test engineers. To address this, we propose a novel Bayesian fault localization framework called BayesFLo, which leverages a flexible Bayesian model on potential root cause combinations. A key feature of BayesFLo is its integration of the principles of combination hierarchy and heredity, which capture the structured nature of failure-inducing combinations. A critical challenge, however, is the sheer number of potential root cause scenarios to consider, which renders the computation of posterior root cause probabilities infeasible even for small software systems. We thus develop new algorithms for efficient computation of such probabilities, leveraging recent tools from integer programming and graph representations. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of BayesFLo over state-of-the-art fault localization methods, in a suite of numerical experiments and in two motivating case studies on the JMP XGBoost interface.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.