We introduce the notion of semantic image quality for applications where image quality relies on semantic requirements. Working in fetal ultrasound, where ranking is challenging and annotations are noisy, we design a robust coarse-to-fine model that ranks images based on their semantic image quality and endow our predicted rankings with an uncertainty estimate. To annotate rankings on training data, we design an efficient ranking annotation scheme based on the merge sort algorithm. Finally, we compare our ranking algorithm to a number of state-of-the-art ranking algorithms on a challenging fetal ultrasound quality assessment task, showing the superior performance of our method on the majority of rank correlation metrics.
The paper presents a new approach of stability evaluation of the approximate Riemann solvers based on the direct Lyapunov method. The present methodology offers a detailed understanding of the origins of numerical shock instability in the approximate Riemann solvers. The pressure perturbation feeding the density and transverse momentum perturbations is identified as the cause of the numerical shock instabilities in the complete approximate Riemann solvers, while the magnitude of the numerical shock instabilities are found to be proportional to the magnitude of the pressure perturbations. A shock-stable HLLEM scheme is proposed based on the insights obtained from this analysis about the origins of numerical shock instability in the approximate Riemann solvers. A set of numerical test cases are solved to show that the proposed scheme is free from numerical shock instability problems of the original HLLEM scheme at high Mach numbers.
Experiments studying get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts estimate the causal effect of various mobilization efforts on voter turnout. However, there is often substantial noncompliance in these studies. A usual approach is to use an instrumental variable (IV) analysis to estimate impacts for compliers, here being those actually contacted by the investigators. Unfortunately, popular IV estimators can be unstable in studies with a small fraction of compliers. We explore post-stratifying the data (e.g., taking a weighted average of IV estimates within each stratum) using variables that predict complier status (and, potentially, the outcome) to mitigate this. We present the benefits of post-stratification in terms of bias, variance, and improved standard error estimates, and provide a finite-sample asymptotic variance formula. We also compare the performance of different IV approaches and discuss the advantages of our design-based post-stratification approach over incorporating compliance-predictive covariates into the two-stage least squares estimator. In the end, we show that covariates predictive of compliance can increase precision, but only if one is willing to make a bias-variance trade-off by down-weighting or dropping strata with few compliers. By contrast, standard approaches such as two-stage least squares fail to use such information. We finally examine the benefits of our approach in two GOTV applications.
Unsupervised person re-identification aims to retrieve images of a specified person without identity labels. Many recent unsupervised Re-ID approaches adopt clustering-based methods to measure cross-camera feature similarity to roughly divide images into clusters. They ignore the feature distribution discrepancy induced by camera domain gap, resulting in the unavoidable performance degradation. Camera information is usually available, and the feature distribution in the single camera usually focuses more on the appearance of the individual and has less intra-identity variance. Inspired by the observation, we introduce a \textbf{C}amera-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{L}abel \textbf{R}efinement~(CALR) framework that reduces camera discrepancy by clustering intra-camera similarity. Specifically, we employ intra-camera training to obtain reliable local pseudo labels within each camera, and then refine global labels generated by inter-camera clustering and train the discriminative model using more reliable global pseudo labels in a self-paced manner. Meanwhile, we develop a camera-alignment module to align feature distributions under different cameras, which could help deal with the camera variance further. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches. The code is accessible at //github.com/leeBooMla/CALR.
Text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) is a compelling topic in the cross-modal community, which aims to retrieve the target person based on a textual query. Although numerous TIReID methods have been proposed and achieved promising performance, they implicitly assume the training image-text pairs are correctly aligned, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. In practice, the image-text pairs inevitably exist under-correlated or even false-correlated, a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC), due to the low quality of the images and annotation errors. To address this problem, we propose a novel Robust Dual Embedding method (RDE) that can learn robust visual-semantic associations even with NC. Specifically, RDE consists of two main components: 1) A Confident Consensus Division (CCD) module that leverages the dual-grained decisions of dual embedding modules to obtain a consensus set of clean training data, which enables the model to learn correct and reliable visual-semantic associations. 2) A Triplet Alignment Loss (TAL) relaxes the conventional Triplet Ranking loss with the hardest negative samples to a log-exponential upper bound over all negative ones, thus preventing the model collapse under NC and can also focus on hard-negative samples for promising performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReID, to evaluate the performance and robustness of our RDE. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results both with and without synthetic noisy correspondences on all three datasets. Code is available at //github.com/QinYang79/RDE.
We introduce a 2-dimensional stochastic dominance (2DSD) index to characterize both strict and almost stochastic dominance. Based on this index, we derive an estimator for the minimum violation ratio (MVR), also known as the critical parameter, of the almost stochastic ordering condition between two variables. We determine the asymptotic properties of the empirical 2DSD index and MVR for the most frequently used stochastic orders. We also provide conditions under which the bootstrap estimators of these quantities are strongly consistent. As an application, we develop consistent bootstrap testing procedures for almost stochastic dominance. The performance of the tests is checked via simulations and the analysis of real data.
Text clustering is an important approach for organising the growing amount of digital content, helping to structure and find hidden patterns in uncategorised data. In this research, we investigated how different textual embeddings - particularly those used in large language models (LLMs) - and clustering algorithms affect how text datasets are clustered. A series of experiments were conducted to assess how embeddings influence clustering results, the role played by dimensionality reduction through summarisation, and embedding size adjustment. Results reveal that LLM embeddings excel at capturing the nuances of structured language, while BERT leads the lightweight options in performance. In addition, we find that increasing embedding dimensionality and summarisation techniques do not uniformly improve clustering efficiency, suggesting that these strategies require careful analysis to use in real-life models. These results highlight a complex balance between the need for nuanced text representation and computational feasibility in text clustering applications. This study extends traditional text clustering frameworks by incorporating embeddings from LLMs, thereby paving the way for improved methodologies and opening new avenues for future research in various types of textual analysis.
Due to their flexibility to represent almost any kind of relational data, graph-based models have enjoyed a tremendous success over the past decades. While graphs are inherently only combinatorial objects, however, many prominent analysis tools are based on the algebraic representation of graphs via matrices such as the graph Laplacian, or on associated graph embeddings. Such embeddings associate to each node a set of coordinates in a vector space, a representation which can then be employed for learning tasks such as the classification or alignment of the nodes of the graph. As the geometric picture provided by embedding methods enables the use of a multitude of methods developed for vector space data, embeddings have thus gained interest both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective. Inspired by trace-optimization problems, often encountered in the analysis of graph-based data, here we present a method to derive ellipsoidal embeddings of the nodes of a graph, in which each node is assigned a set of coordinates on the surface of a hyperellipsoid. Our method may be seen as an alternative to popular spectral embedding techniques, to which it shares certain similarities we discuss. To illustrate the utility of the embedding we conduct a case study in which analyse synthetic and real world networks with modular structure, and compare the results obtained with known methods in the literature.
Deep learning techniques have received much attention in the area of image denoising. However, there are substantial differences in the various types of deep learning methods dealing with image denoising. Specifically, discriminative learning based on deep learning can ably address the issue of Gaussian noise. Optimization models based on deep learning are effective in estimating the real noise. However, there has thus far been little related research to summarize the different deep learning techniques for image denoising. In this paper, we offer a comparative study of deep techniques in image denoising. We first classify the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for additive white noisy images; the deep CNNs for real noisy images; the deep CNNs for blind denoising and the deep CNNs for hybrid noisy images, which represents the combination of noisy, blurred and low-resolution images. Then, we analyze the motivations and principles of the different types of deep learning methods. Next, we compare the state-of-the-art methods on public denoising datasets in terms of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Finally, we point out some potential challenges and directions of future research.
Degradation of image quality due to the presence of haze is a very common phenomenon. Existing DehazeNet [3], MSCNN [11] tackled the drawbacks of hand crafted haze relevant features. However, these methods have the problem of color distortion in gloomy (poor illumination) environment. In this paper, a cardinal (red, green and blue) color fusion network for single image haze removal is proposed. In first stage, network fusses color information present in hazy images and generates multi-channel depth maps. The second stage estimates the scene transmission map from generated dark channels using multi channel multi scale convolutional neural network (McMs-CNN) to recover the original scene. To train the proposed network, we have used two standard datasets namely: ImageNet [5] and D-HAZY [1]. Performance evaluation of the proposed approach has been carried out using structural similarity index (SSIM), mean square error (MSE) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Performance analysis shows that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for single image dehazing.
Person re-identification (\textit{re-id}) refers to matching pedestrians across disjoint yet non-overlapping camera views. The most effective way to match these pedestrians undertaking significant visual variations is to seek reliably invariant features that can describe the person of interest faithfully. Most of existing methods are presented in a supervised manner to produce discriminative features by relying on labeled paired images in correspondence. However, annotating pair-wise images is prohibitively expensive in labors, and thus not practical in large-scale networked cameras. Moreover, seeking comparable representations across camera views demands a flexible model to address the complex distributions of images. In this work, we study the co-occurrence statistic patterns between pairs of images, and propose to crossing Generative Adversarial Network (Cross-GAN) for learning a joint distribution for cross-image representations in a unsupervised manner. Given a pair of person images, the proposed model consists of the variational auto-encoder to encode the pair into respective latent variables, a proposed cross-view alignment to reduce the view disparity, and an adversarial layer to seek the joint distribution of latent representations. The learned latent representations are well-aligned to reflect the co-occurrence patterns of paired images. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against challenging datasets, and our results show the importance of joint invariant features in improving matching rates of person re-id with comparison to semi/unsupervised state-of-the-arts.