Probabilistic diffusion models enjoy increasing popularity in the deep learning community. They generate convincing samples from a learned distribution of input images with a wide field of practical applications. Originally, these approaches were motivated from drift-diffusion processes, but these origins find less attention in recent, practice-oriented publications. We investigate probabilistic diffusion models from the viewpoint of scale-space research and show that they fulfil generalised scale-space properties on evolving probability distributions. Moreover, we discuss similarities and differences between interpretations of the physical core concept of drift-diffusion in the deep learning and model-based world. To this end, we examine relations of probabilistic diffusion to osmosis filters.
The concepts of Bayesian prediction, model comparison, and model selection have developed significantly over the last decade. As a result, the Bayesian community has witnessed a rapid growth in theoretical and applied contributions to building and selecting predictive models. Projection predictive inference in particular has shown promise to this end, finding application across a broad range of fields. It is less prone to over-fitting than na\"ive selection based purely on cross-validation or information criteria performance metrics, and has been known to out-perform other methods in terms of predictive performance. We survey the core concept and contemporary contributions to projection predictive inference, and present a safe, efficient, and modular workflow for prediction-oriented model selection therein. We also provide an interpretation of the projected posteriors achieved by projection predictive inference in terms of their limitations in causal settings.
We consider the problem of sequentially optimizing a time-varying objective function using time-varying Bayesian optimization (TVBO). Here, the key challenge is the exploration-exploitation trade-off under time variations. Current approaches to TVBO require prior knowledge of a constant rate of change. However, in practice, the rate of change is usually unknown. We propose an event-triggered algorithm, ET-GP-UCB, that treats the optimization problem as static until it detects changes in the objective function online and then resets the dataset. This allows the algorithm to adapt to realized temporal changes without the need for prior knowledge. The event-trigger is based on probabilistic uniform error bounds used in Gaussian process regression. We provide regret bounds for ET-GP-UCB and show in numerical experiments that it outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on synthetic and real-world data. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that ET-GP-UCB is readily applicable to various settings without tuning hyperparameters.
We present a framework for safety-critical optimal control of physical systems based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). The technology of control barrier functions (CBFs), encoding desired safety constraints, is used in combination with DDPMs to plan actions by iteratively denoising trajectories through a CBF-based guided sampling procedure. At the same time, the generated trajectories are also guided to maximize a future cumulative reward representing a specific task to be optimally executed. The proposed scheme can be seen as an offline and model-based reinforcement learning algorithm resembling in its functionalities a model-predictive control optimization scheme with receding horizon in which the selected actions lead to optimal and safe trajectories.
Building upon the exact methods presented in our earlier work [J. Complexity, 2022], we introduce a heuristic approach for the star discrepancy subset selection problem. The heuristic gradually improves the current-best subset by replacing one of its elements at a time. While we prove that the heuristic does not necessarily return an optimal solution, we obtain very promising results for all tested dimensions. For example, for moderate point set sizes $30 \leq n \leq 240$ in dimension 6, we obtain point sets with $L_{\infty}$ star discrepancy up to 35% better than that of the first $n$ points of the Sobol' sequence. Our heuristic works in all dimensions, the main limitation being the precision of the discrepancy calculation algorithms. We also provide a comparison with a recent energy functional introduced by Steinerberger [J. Complexity, 2019], showing that our heuristic performs better on all tested instances.
Autonomous individuals establish a structural complex system through pairwise connections and interactions. Notably, the evolution reflects the dynamic nature of each complex system since it recodes a series of temporal changes from the past, the present into the future. Different systems follow distinct evolutionary trajectories, which can serve as distinguishing traits for system classification. However, modeling a complex system's evolution is challenging for the graph model because the graph is typically a snapshot of the static status of a system, and thereby hard to manifest the long-term evolutionary traits of a system entirely. To address this challenge, we suggest utilizing a heat-driven method to generate temporal graph augmentation. This approach incorporates the physics-based heat kernel and DropNode technique to transform each static graph into a sequence of temporal ones. This approach effectively describes the evolutional behaviours of the system, including the retention or disappearance of elements at each time point based on the distributed heat on each node. Additionally, we propose a dynamic time-wrapping distance GDTW to quantitatively measure the distance between pairwise evolutionary systems through optimal matching. The resulting approach, called the Evolution Kernel method, has been successfully applied to classification problems in real-world structural graph datasets. The results yield significant improvements in supervised classification accuracy over a series of baseline methods.
The AI community is increasingly focused on merging logic with deep learning to create Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) paradigms and assist neural approaches with symbolic knowledge. A significant trend in the literature involves integrating axioms and facts in loss functions by grounding logical symbols with neural networks and operators with fuzzy semantics. Logic Tensor Networks (LTN) is one of the main representatives in this category, known for its simplicity, efficiency, and versatility. However, it has been previously shown that not all fuzzy operators perform equally when applied in a differentiable setting. Researchers have proposed several configurations of operators, trading off between effectiveness, numerical stability, and generalization to different formulas. This paper presents a configuration of fuzzy operators for grounding formulas end-to-end in the logarithm space. Our goal is to develop a configuration that is more effective than previous proposals, able to handle any formula, and numerically stable. To achieve this, we propose semantics that are best suited for the logarithm space and introduce novel simplifications and improvements that are crucial for optimization via gradient-descent. We use LTN as the framework for our experiments, but the conclusions of our work apply to any similar NeSy framework. Our findings, both formal and empirical, show that the proposed configuration outperforms the state-of-the-art and that each of our modifications is essential in achieving these results.
Optimal design is a critical yet challenging task within many applications. This challenge arises from the need for extensive trial and error, often done through simulations or running field experiments. Fortunately, sequential optimal design, also referred to as Bayesian optimization when using surrogates with a Bayesian flavor, has played a key role in accelerating the design process through efficient sequential sampling strategies. However, a key opportunity exists nowadays. The increased connectivity of edge devices sets forth a new collaborative paradigm for Bayesian optimization. A paradigm whereby different clients collaboratively borrow strength from each other by effectively distributing their experimentation efforts to improve and fast-track their optimal design process. To this end, we bring the notion of consensus to Bayesian optimization, where clients agree (i.e., reach a consensus) on their next-to-sample designs. Our approach provides a generic and flexible framework that can incorporate different collaboration mechanisms. In lieu of this, we propose transitional collaborative mechanisms where clients initially rely more on each other to maneuver through the early stages with scant data, then, at the late stages, focus on their own objectives to get client-specific solutions. Theoretically, we show the sub-linear growth in regret for our proposed framework. Empirically, through simulated datasets and a real-world collaborative material discovery experiment, we show that our framework can effectively accelerate and improve the optimal design process and benefit all participants.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
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.