Despite the potential of neural scene representations to effectively compress 3D scalar fields at high reconstruction quality, the computational complexity of the training and data reconstruction step using scene representation networks limits their use in practical applications. In this paper, we analyze whether scene representation networks can be modified to reduce these limitations and whether these architectures can also be used for temporal reconstruction tasks. We propose a novel design of scene representation networks using GPU tensor cores to integrate the reconstruction seamlessly into on-chip raytracing kernels. Furthermore, we investigate the use of image-guided network training as an alternative to classical data-driven approaches, and we explore the potential strengths and weaknesses of this alternative regarding quality and speed. As an alternative to spatial super-resolution approaches for time-varying fields, we propose a solution that builds upon latent-space interpolation to enable random access reconstruction at arbitrary granularity. We summarize our findings in the form of an assessment of the strengths and limitations of scene representation networks for scientific visualization tasks and outline promising future research directions in this field.
We propose a novel neural representation for videos (NeRV) which encodes videos in neural networks. Unlike conventional representations that treat videos as frame sequences, we represent videos as neural networks taking frame index as input. Given a frame index, NeRV outputs the corresponding RGB image. Video encoding in NeRV is simply fitting a neural network to video frames and decoding process is a simple feedforward operation. As an image-wise implicit representation, NeRV output the whole image and shows great efficiency compared to pixel-wise implicit representation, improving the encoding speed by 25x to 70x, the decoding speed by 38x to 132x, while achieving better video quality. With such a representation, we can treat videos as neural networks, simplifying several video-related tasks. For example, conventional video compression methods are restricted by a long and complex pipeline, specifically designed for the task. In contrast, with NeRV, we can use any neural network compression method as a proxy for video compression, and achieve comparable performance to traditional frame-based video compression approaches (H.264, HEVC \etc). Besides compression, we demonstrate the generalization of NeRV for video denoising. The source code and pre-trained model can be found at //github.com/haochen-rye/NeRV.git.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have limited expressive power, failing to represent many graph classes correctly. While more expressive graph representation learning (GRL) alternatives can distinguish some of these classes, they are significantly harder to implement, may not scale well, and have not been shown to outperform well-tuned GNNs in real-world tasks. Thus, devising simple, scalable, and expressive GRL architectures that also achieve real-world improvements remains an open challenge. In this work, we show the extent to which graph reconstruction -- reconstructing a graph from its subgraphs -- can mitigate the theoretical and practical problems currently faced by GRL architectures. First, we leverage graph reconstruction to build two new classes of expressive graph representations. Secondly, we show how graph reconstruction boosts the expressive power of any GNN architecture while being a (provably) powerful inductive bias for invariances to vertex removals. Empirically, we show how reconstruction can boost GNN's expressive power -- while maintaining its invariance to permutations of the vertices -- by solving seven graph property tasks not solvable by the original GNN. Further, we demonstrate how it boosts state-of-the-art GNN's performance across nine real-world benchmark datasets.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have recently gained a surge of interest within the computer vision community for its power to synthesize photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes. One limitation of NeRF, however, is its requirement of accurate camera poses to learn the scene representations. In this paper, we propose Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields (BARF) for training NeRF from imperfect (or even unknown) camera poses -- the joint problem of learning neural 3D representations and registering camera frames. We establish a theoretical connection to classical image alignment and show that coarse-to-fine registration is also applicable to NeRF. Furthermore, we show that na\"ively applying positional encoding in NeRF has a negative impact on registration with a synthesis-based objective. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that BARF can effectively optimize the neural scene representations and resolve large camera pose misalignment at the same time. This enables view synthesis and localization of video sequences from unknown camera poses, opening up new avenues for visual localization systems (e.g. SLAM) and potential applications for dense 3D mapping and reconstruction.
Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. Compared to static models which have fixed computational graphs and parameters at the inference stage, dynamic networks can adapt their structures or parameters to different inputs, leading to notable advantages in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency, adaptiveness, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively review this rapidly developing area by dividing dynamic networks into three main categories: 1) instance-wise dynamic models that process each instance with data-dependent architectures or parameters; 2) spatial-wise dynamic networks that conduct adaptive computation with respect to different spatial locations of image data and 3) temporal-wise dynamic models that perform adaptive inference along the temporal dimension for sequential data such as videos and texts. The important research problems of dynamic networks, e.g., architecture design, decision making scheme, optimization technique and applications, are reviewed systematically. Finally, we discuss the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.
Graph neural networks provide a powerful toolkit for embedding real-world graphs into low-dimensional spaces according to specific tasks. Up to now, there have been several surveys on this topic. However, they usually lay emphasis on different angles so that the readers can not see a panorama of the graph neural networks. This survey aims to overcome this limitation, and provide a comprehensive review on the graph neural networks. First of all, we provide a novel taxonomy for the graph neural networks, and then refer to up to 400 relevant literatures to show the panorama of the graph neural networks. All of them are classified into the corresponding categories. In order to drive the graph neural networks into a new stage, we summarize four future research directions so as to overcome the facing challenges. It is expected that more and more scholars can understand and exploit the graph neural networks, and use them in their research community.
We introduce PyTorch Geometric, a library for deep learning on irregularly structured input data such as graphs, point clouds and manifolds, built upon PyTorch. In addition to general graph data structures and processing methods, it contains a variety of recently published methods from the domains of relational learning and 3D data processing. PyTorch Geometric achieves high data throughput by leveraging sparse GPU acceleration, by providing dedicated CUDA kernels and by introducing efficient mini-batch handling for input examples of different size. In this work, we present the library in detail and perform a comprehensive comparative study of the implemented methods in homogeneous evaluation scenarios.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.
Deep Learning has enabled remarkable progress over the last years on a variety of tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. One crucial aspect for this progress are novel neural architectures. Currently employed architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Because of this, there is growing interest in automated neural architecture search methods. We provide an overview of existing work in this field of research and categorize them according to three dimensions: search space, search strategy, and performance estimation strategy.
Image foreground extraction is a classical problem in image processing and vision, with a large range of applications. In this dissertation, we focus on the extraction of text and graphics in mixed-content images, and design novel approaches for various aspects of this problem. We first propose a sparse decomposition framework, which models the background by a subspace containing smooth basis vectors, and foreground as a sparse and connected component. We then formulate an optimization framework to solve this problem, by adding suitable regularizations to the cost function to promote the desired characteristics of each component. We present two techniques to solve the proposed optimization problem, one based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and the other one based on robust regression. Promising results are obtained for screen content image segmentation using the proposed algorithm. We then propose a robust subspace learning algorithm for the representation of the background component using training images that could contain both background and foreground components, as well as noise. With the learnt subspace for the background, we can further improve the segmentation results, compared to using a fixed subspace. Lastly, we investigate a different class of signal/image decomposition problem, where only one signal component is active at each signal element. In this case, besides estimating each component, we need to find their supports, which can be specified by a binary mask. We propose a mixed-integer programming problem, that jointly estimates the two components and their supports through an alternating optimization scheme. We show the application of this algorithm on various problems, including image segmentation, video motion segmentation, and also separation of text from textured images.