We propose an approach to 3D reconstruction via inverse procedural modeling and investigate two variants of this approach. The first option consists in the fitting set of input parameters using a genetic algorithm. We demonstrate the results of our work on tree models, complex objects, with the reconstruction of which most existing methods cannot handle. The second option allows us to significantly improve the precision by using gradients within memetic algorithm, differentiable rendering and also differentiable procedural generators. In our work we see 2 main contributions. First, we propose a method to join differentiable rendering and inverse procedural modeling. This gives us an opportunity to reconstruct 3D model more accurately than existing approaches when a small number of input images are available (even for single image). Second, we join both differentiable and non-differentiable procedural generators in a single framework which allow us to apply inverse procedural modeling to fairly complex generators: when gradient is available, reconstructions is precise, when gradient is not available, reconstruction is approximate, but always high quality without visual artifacts.
Test-negative designs are widely used for post-market evaluation of vaccine effectiveness. Different from classical test-negative designs where only healthcare-seekers with symptoms are included, recent test-negative designs have involved individuals with various reasons for testing, especially in an outbreak setting. While including these data can increase sample size and hence improve precision, concerns have been raised about whether they will introduce bias into the current framework of test-negative designs, thereby demanding a formal statistical examination of this modified design. In this article, using statistical derivations, causal graphs, and numerical simulations, we show that the standard odds ratio estimator may be biased if various reasons for testing are not accounted for. To eliminate this bias, we identify three categories of reasons for testing, including symptoms, disease-unrelated reasons, and case contact tracing, and characterize associated statistical properties and estimands. Based on our characterization, we propose stratified estimators that can incorporate multiple reasons for testing to achieve consistent estimation and improve precision by maximizing the use of data. The performance of our proposed method is demonstrated through simulation studies.
We present a rigorous and precise analysis of the maximum degree and the average degree in a dynamic duplication-divergence graph model introduced by Sol\'e, Pastor-Satorras et al. in which the graph grows according to a duplication-divergence mechanism, i.e. by iteratively creating a copy of some node and then randomly alternating the neighborhood of a new node with probability $p$. This model captures the growth of some real-world processes e.g. biological or social networks. In this paper, we prove that for some $0 < p < 1$ the maximum degree and the average degree of a duplication-divergence graph on $t$ vertices are asymptotically concentrated with high probability around $t^p$ and $\max\{t^{2 p - 1}, 1\}$, respectively, i.e. they are within at most a polylogarithmic factor from these values with probability at least $1 - t^{-A}$ for any constant $A > 0$.
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is known for average optimality (optimizing the long-run average of the rewards obtained over time) and Blackwell optimality (remaining discount optimal for all discount factors sufficiently close to 1). In this paper, we prove several foundational results for RMDPs beyond the discounted return. We show that average optimal policies can be chosen stationary and deterministic for sa-rectangular RMDPs but, perhaps surprisingly, that history-dependent (Markovian) policies strictly outperform stationary policies for average optimality in s-rectangular RMDPs. We also study Blackwell optimality for sa-rectangular RMDPs, where we show that {\em approximate} Blackwell optimal policies always exist, although Blackwell optimal policies may not exist. We also provide a sufficient condition for their existence, which encompasses virtually any examples from the literature. We then discuss the connection between average and Blackwell optimality, and we describe several algorithms to compute the optimal average return. Interestingly, our approach leverages the connections between RMDPs and stochastic games.
Sample selection models represent a common methodology for correcting bias induced by data missing not at random. It is well known that these models are not empirically identifiable without exclusion restrictions. In other words, some variables predictive of missingness do not affect the outcome model of interest. The drive to establish this requirement often leads to the inclusion of irrelevant variables in the model. A recent proposal uses adaptive LASSO to circumvent this problem, but its performance depends on the so-called covariance assumption, which can be violated in small to moderate samples. Additionally, there are no tools yet for post-selection inference for this model. To address these challenges, we propose two families of spike-and-slab priors to conduct Bayesian variable selection in sample selection models. These prior structures allow for constructing a Gibbs sampler with tractable conditionals, which is scalable to the dimensions of practical interest. We illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology through a simulation study and present a comparison against adaptive LASSO and stepwise selection. We also provide two applications using publicly available real data. An implementation and code to reproduce the results in this paper can be found at //github.com/adam-iqbal/selection-spike-slab
Physics informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently been very successfully applied for efficiently approximating inverse problems for PDEs. We focus on a particular class of inverse problems, the so-called data assimilation or unique continuation problems, and prove rigorous estimates on the generalization error of PINNs approximating them. An abstract framework is presented and conditional stability estimates for the underlying inverse problem are employed to derive the estimate on the PINN generalization error, providing rigorous justification for the use of PINNs in this context. The abstract framework is illustrated with examples of four prototypical linear PDEs. Numerical experiments, validating the proposed theory, are also presented.
The prediction accuracy of machine learning methods is steadily increasing, but the calibration of their uncertainty predictions poses a significant challenge. Numerous works focus on obtaining well-calibrated predictive models, but less is known about reliably assessing model calibration. This limits our ability to know when algorithms for improving calibration have a real effect, and when their improvements are merely artifacts due to random noise in finite datasets. In this work, we consider detecting mis-calibration of predictive models using a finite validation dataset as a hypothesis testing problem. The null hypothesis is that the predictive model is calibrated, while the alternative hypothesis is that the deviation from calibration is sufficiently large. We find that detecting mis-calibration is only possible when the conditional probabilities of the classes are sufficiently smooth functions of the predictions. When the conditional class probabilities are H\"older continuous, we propose T-Cal, a minimax optimal test for calibration based on a debiased plug-in estimator of the $\ell_2$-Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We further propose Adaptive T-Cal, a version that is adaptive to unknown smoothness. We verify our theoretical findings with a broad range of experiments, including with several popular deep neural net architectures and several standard post-hoc calibration methods. T-Cal is a practical general-purpose tool, which -- combined with classical tests for discrete-valued predictors -- can be used to test the calibration of virtually any probabilistic classification method.
Many imaging science tasks can be modeled as a discrete linear inverse problem. Solving linear inverse problems is often challenging, with ill-conditioned operators and potentially non-unique solutions. Embedding prior knowledge, such as smoothness, into the solution can overcome these challenges. In this work, we encode prior knowledge using a non-negative patch dictionary, which effectively learns a basis from a training set of natural images. In this dictionary basis, we desire solutions that are non-negative and sparse (i.e., contain many zero entries). With these constraints, standard methods for solving discrete linear inverse problems are not directly applicable. One such approach is the modified residual norm steepest descent (MRNSD), which produces non-negative solutions but does not induce sparsity. In this paper, we provide two methods based on MRNSD that promote sparsity. In our first method, we add an $\ell_1$-regularization term with a new, optimal step size. In our second method, we propose a new non-negative, sparsity-promoting mapping of the solution. We compare the performance of our proposed methods on a number of numerical experiments, including deblurring, image completion, computer tomography, and superresolution. Our results show that these methods effectively solve discrete linear inverse problems with non-negativity and sparsity constraints.
Probabilistic variants of Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods have recently emerged for improving stability and computational performance of classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic Reduced Basis Method (RBM) for the approximation of a family of parameter-dependent functions. It relies on a probabilistic greedy algorithm with an error indicator that can be written as an expectation of some parameter-dependent random variable. Practical algorithms relying on Monte Carlo estimates of this error indicator are discussed. In particular, when using Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bandit algorithm, the resulting procedure is proven to be a weak greedy algorithm with high probability. Intended applications concern the approximation of a parameter-dependent family of functions for which we only have access to (noisy) pointwise evaluations. As a particular application, we consider the approximation of solution manifolds of linear parameter-dependent partial differential equations with a probabilistic interpretation through the Feynman-Kac formula.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.
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.