Achieving aesthetically pleasing photography necessitates attention to multiple factors, including composition and capture conditions, which pose challenges to novices. Prior research has explored the enhancement of photo aesthetics post-capture through 2D manipulation techniques; however, these approaches offer limited search space for aesthetics. We introduce a pioneering method that employs 3D operations to simulate the conditions at the moment of capture retrospectively. Our approach extrapolates the input image and then reconstructs the 3D scene from the extrapolated image, followed by an optimization to identify camera parameters and image aspect ratios that yield the best 3D view with enhanced aesthetics. Comparative qualitative and quantitative assessments reveal that our method surpasses traditional 2D editing techniques with superior aesthetics.
We explore methods to reduce the impact of unobserved confounders on the causal mediation analysis of high-dimensional mediators with spatially smooth structures, such as brain imaging data. The key approach is to incorporate the latent individual effects, which influence the structured mediators, as unobserved confounders in the outcome model, thereby potentially debiasing the mediation effects. We develop BAyesian Structured Mediation analysis with Unobserved confounders (BASMU) framework, and establish its model identifiability conditions. Theoretical analysis is conducted on the asymptotic bias of the Natural Indirect Effect (NIE) and the Natural Direct Effect (NDE) when the unobserved confounders are omitted in mediation analysis. For BASMU, we propose a two-stage estimation algorithm to mitigate the impact of these unobserved confounders on estimating the mediation effect. Extensive simulations demonstrate that BASMU substantially reduces the bias in various scenarios. We apply BASMU to the analysis of fMRI data in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, focusing on four brain regions previously reported to exhibit meaningful mediation effects. Compared with the existing image mediation analysis method, BASMU identifies two to four times more voxels that have significant mediation effects, with the NIE increased by 41%, and the NDE decreased by 26%.
We consider the problem of parameter estimation in a high-dimensional generalized linear model. Spectral methods obtained via the principal eigenvector of a suitable data-dependent matrix provide a simple yet surprisingly effective solution. However, despite their wide use, a rigorous performance characterization, as well as a principled way to preprocess the data, are available only for unstructured (i.i.d.\ Gaussian and Haar orthogonal) designs. In contrast, real-world data matrices are highly structured and exhibit non-trivial correlations. To address the problem, we consider correlated Gaussian designs capturing the anisotropic nature of the features via a covariance matrix $\Sigma$. Our main result is a precise asymptotic characterization of the performance of spectral estimators. This allows us to identify the optimal preprocessing that minimizes the number of samples needed for parameter estimation. Surprisingly, such preprocessing is universal across a broad set of designs, which partly addresses a conjecture on optimal spectral estimators for rotationally invariant models. Our principled approach vastly improves upon previous heuristic methods, including for designs common in computational imaging and genetics. The proposed methodology, based on approximate message passing, is broadly applicable and opens the way to the precise characterization of spiked matrices and of the corresponding spectral methods in a variety of settings.
The use of multiple camera technologies in a combined multimodal monitoring system for plant phenotyping offers promising benefits. Compared to configurations that only utilize a single camera technology, cross-modal patterns can be recorded that allow a more comprehensive assessment of plant phenotypes. However, the effective utilization of cross-modal patterns is dependent on precise image registration to achieve pixel-accurate alignment, a challenge often complicated by parallax and occlusion effects inherent in plant canopy imaging. In this study, we propose a novel multimodal 3D image registration method that addresses these challenges by integrating depth information from a time-of-flight camera into the registration process. By leveraging depth data, our method mitigates parallax effects and thus facilitates more accurate pixel alignment across camera modalities. Additionally, we introduce an automated mechanism to identify and differentiate different types of occlusions, thereby minimizing the introduction of registration errors. To evaluate the efficacy of our approach, we conduct experiments on a diverse image dataset comprising six distinct plant species with varying leaf geometries. Our results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed registration algorithm, showcasing its ability to achieve accurate alignment across different plant types and camera compositions. Compared to previous methods it is not reliant on detecting plant specific image features and can thereby be utilized for a wide variety of applications in plant sciences. The registration approach principally scales to arbitrary numbers of cameras with different resolutions and wavelengths. Overall, our study contributes to advancing the field of plant phenotyping by offering a robust and reliable solution for multimodal image registration.
We explore how much knowing a parametric restriction on propensity scores improves semiparametric efficiency bounds in the potential outcome framework. For stratified propensity scores, considered as a parametric model, we derive explicit formulas for the efficiency gain from knowing how the covariate space is split. Based on these, we find that the efficiency gain decreases as the partition of the stratification becomes finer. For general parametric models, where it is hard to obtain explicit representations of efficiency bounds, we propose a novel framework that enables us to see whether knowing a parametric model is valuable in terms of efficiency even when it is high-dimensional. In addition to the intuitive fact that knowing the parametric model does not help much if it is sufficiently flexible, we discover that the efficiency gain can be nearly zero even though the parametric assumption significantly restricts the space of possible propensity scores.
The success of artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning models in particular, has led to their widespread adoption across various industries due to their ability to process huge amounts of data and learn complex patterns. However, due to their lack of explainability, there are significant concerns regarding their use in critical sectors, such as finance and healthcare, where decision-making transparency is of paramount importance. In this paper, we provide a comparative survey of methods that aim to improve the explainability of deep learning models within the context of finance. We categorize the collection of explainable AI methods according to their corresponding characteristics, and we review the concerns and challenges of adopting explainable AI methods, together with future directions we deemed appropriate and important.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.