A new loss function for VAEs improves image quality and efficiency.
problem Training VAEs to generate realistic images requires a loss function that reflects human perception.
method Based on Watson's perceptual model, the loss function computes a weighted distance in frequency space, accounts for luminance and contrast masking, and is extended to color images.
result VAEs trained with the new loss function generated high-quality, less blurry images with fewer artifacts and less computational resources.
This paper models stock prices using a Janardan Galton Watson process.
problem Modeling stock price fluctuations and predicting market trends.
method Extends Janardan Galton Watson process to model stock prices, considering initial close price and number of offspring.
result The model predicts return values and probability of market extinction.
Barrieu, Rouault, and Yor [J. Appl. Probab. 41 (2004)] determined asymptotics for the logarithm of the distribution function of the Hartman-Watson distribution. We determine the asymptotics of the density. This refinement can be applied to the pricing of Asian options in the Black-Scholes model.
This note provides an error bound for the Hartman-Watson integral's leading term.
problem Bounding the error of the leading term of the Hartman-Watson integral.
method Asymptotic expansion analysis focusing on the regime rt=ρ constant. result The error term is bounded uniformly as ∣ϑ(t,ρ)∣≤701t. New method defends against unseen threat models using perceptual adversarial training.
problem Lack of precise mathematical characterization of human perception in adversarial attacks.
method Adversarial training against the set of all imperceptible adversarial examples approximated by deep neural networks.
result Perceptual Adversarial Training (PAT) achieves state-of-the-art robustness against multiple diverse adversarial attacks.
A new method TNW-CATE estimates treatment effects using neural networks.
problem Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with limited controls and many treatments.
method Trainable Nadaraya-Watson regression with shared parameters neural network.
result TNW-CATE outperforms traditional methods in various simulation experiments.
New insights into simple kernel smoothing reveal surprising asymptotics.
problem Understanding precise asymptotics of Nadaraya-Watson kernel smoothing.
method Using ideas from the random energy model in statistical physics.
result Sharp asymptotics for the NW predictor on the sphere.
Paper provides an upper bound for bias of Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression.
problem Estimating bias of Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression for finite bandwidths.
method Proposes an upper bound for bias under Lipschitz assumptions, extending to discontinuous derivatives and multidimensional domains.
result Upper bound on bias for finite bandwidths, tighter than previous infinitesimal bandwidth analysis.
New insights into Nadaraya-Watson interpolators show varied generalization behaviors.
problem Understanding generalization of interpolating predictors, especially in noisy data.
method Revisiting Nadaraya-Watson estimator with a single hyperparameter.
result Multiple overfitting behaviors exist, ranging from catastrophic to tempered.
We show that any exceptional non-trivial Dehn surgery on a twist knot, except the trefoil, yields a 3-manifold whose fundamental group is left-orderable. This is a generalization of a result of Clay, Lidman and Watson, and also gives a new supporting evidence for a conjecture of Boyer, Gordon and Watson.
New SSIM measure improves adversarial attacks' perceptual quality.
problem Lack of perceptual quality in traditional adversarial attacks.
method Replaced Lp norms with SSIM measure for better quality. result SSIM-constrained attacks achieve better quality and similar success rate.
We study the secondary structure of RNA determined by Watson-Crick pairing without pseudo-knots using Milnor invariants of links. We focus on the first non-trivial invariant, which we call the Heisenberg invariant. The Heisenberg invariant, which is an integer, can be interpreted in terms of the Heisenberg group as wel…
Perceptual Kalman filters maintain human-perceptual quality while processing data.
problem Maintaining human-perceptual quality in signal processing under temporal constraints.
method An optimal causal filtering approach under a perfect perceptual-quality constraint.
result Adding perceptual quality constraints introduces a dilemma that requires sacrificing MSE for temporal consistency.
In order to design haptic icons or build a haptic vocabulary, we require a set of easily distinguishable haptic signals to avoid perceptual ambiguity, which in turn requires a way to accurately estimate the perceptual (dis)similarity of such signals. In this work, we present a novel method to learn such a perceptual me…
Introduces PCG for better counterfactual explanations in vision models.
problem Ambiguity in latent-space optimization methods for counterfactual explanations.
method Constructs counterfactuals by tracing geodesics under a perceptually Riemannian metric.
result PCG outperforms baselines and reveals hidden failure modes.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a sharp analysis on the asymptotic behavior of the Durbin-Watson statistic. We focus our attention on the first-order autoregressive process where the driven noise is also given by a first-order autoregressive process. We establish the almost sure convergence and the asymptotic n…
Authors derive the first two terms of the Hartman-Watson distribution's expansion for small t.
problem The Hartman-Watson distribution's integral density is difficult to evaluate numerically for small t.
method Saddle point methods and numerical estimates of the integrand.
result Obtained the first two terms of the to0 expansion of the Hartman-Watson distribution. We prove that the link of a complex normal surface singularity is an L--space if and only if the singularity is rational. This via a recent result of Hanselman, J. Rasmussen, S. D. Rasmussen and Watson (proving the conjecture of Boyer, Gordon and Watson), shows that a singularity link is not rational if and only if its…
Boyer, Gordon, and Watson have conjectured that an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only if its fundamental group is not left-orderable. Since large classes of L-spaces can be produced from Dehn surgery on knots in the 3-sphere, it is natural to ask what conditions on the knot group are suffi…
Study finds a small correction to Asian option volatility.
problem Implied volatility of Asian options at short maturity.
method Large deviations property and asymptotic expansion for the Hartman-Watson distribution.
result Subleading correction to Asian option volatility is derived.
Study shows perceptual boost of visual attention varies with task difficulty and size.
problem Understanding how task-dependent the perceptual boost of visual attention is in natural settings.
method Designed and trained neural networks on various visual tasks, comparing results to baseline.
result Perceptual boost of attention is stronger with more difficult tasks and weaker with larger task sets.
Improved local feature attributions using neighbourhood reference distributions.
problem Misleading results from global population in local model behaviour.
method Formulation of neighbourhood reference distributions and self-normalised importance sampling.
result Neighbourhood Shapley values provide meaningful sparse feature attributions.
For a standard convolutional neural network, optimizing over the input pixels to maximize the score of some target class will generally produce a grainy-looking version of the original image. However, Santurkar et al. (2019) demonstrated that for adversarially-trained neural networks, this optimization produces images …
Recent work has shown that additive threat models, which only permit the addition of bounded noise to the pixels of an image, are insufficient for fully capturing the space of imperceivable adversarial examples. For example, small rotations and spatial transformations can fool classifiers, remain imperceivable to human…
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web publishers and ad networks. We demonstrate that this may not be the case. We describe att…
Improved image generation with private data using perceptual features.
problem Difficulty in training generative models with differential privacy.
method Use pre-trained perceptual features to learn private data distribution.
result Generative models can generate high-quality images with low privacy budget (ϵ≈2). Paper presents a new video generation model using diffusion probabilistic methods.
problem Generating high-quality video sequences.
method Denoising diffusion probabilistic models, autoregressive, end-to-end optimization.
result Significant improvements in perceptual quality and probabilistic frame forecasting.
Humans perceive the seemingly chaotic world in a structured and compositional way with the prerequisite of being able to segregate conceptual entities from the complex visual scenes. The mechanism of grouping basic visual elements of scenes into conceptual entities is termed as perceptual grouping. In this work, we pro…
A new perceptual adjustment query for metric learning reduces complexity in high-dimensional data.
problem Metric learning in high-dimensional data with limited human feedback.
method Inverted measurement scheme and two-stage estimator for PAQs.
result Sample complexity guarantees for the two-stage estimator of metric learning from PAQs.
Metric functions for phoneme perception capture the similarity structure among phonemes in a given language and therefore play a central role in phonology and psycho-linguistics. Various phenomena depend on phoneme similarity, such as spoken word recognition or serial recall from verbal working memory. This study prese…
New method disentangles perceptual uncertainty and behavioral costs in partially observable systems.
problem Tackles inverse optimal control for non-linear partially observable systems.
method Probabilistic approach using maximum causal entropy formulations and local linearization.
result Disentangles perceptual factors and behavioral costs in sequential decision-making.
In order to efficiently transmit and store speech signals, speech codecs create a minimally redundant representation of the input signal which is then decoded at the receiver with the best possible perceptual quality. In this work we demonstrate that a neural network architecture based on VQ-VAE with a WaveNet decoder …
Generative models use kernel smoothing for conditioning on small example sets.
problem Improving generative models' performance with limited conditioning examples.
method Showed that cross-attention conditioning is equivalent to kernel smoothing, specifically a Nadaraya--Watson kernel smoother.
result The approach predicts and confirms three failure regimes for kernel-based conditioning.
Paper introduces adversarial lossy compression for video artifacts reduction.
problem Unpleasant reconstruction artifacts in standard video coding schemes at low bit-rates.
method Adversarial lossy video compression model minimizing an adversarial distortion objective.
result Reduction of perceptual artifacts and detail reconstruction under extreme compression.
The paper introduces a method to quantify uncertainty in neural networks without parametric assumptions.
problem Uncertainty quantification for neural network predictions.
method Nonparametric estimation of conditional label distribution using Nadaraya-Watson kernel.
result The method effectively disentangles aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties.
Study on predicting graph labels at nodes using local averaging and distance estimation.
problem Predicting graph labels at nodes given observations at other nodes.
method Local averaging and distance estimation methods for graph regression.
result Alternative methods can achieve standard nonparametric rates even when graph neighborhoods are too large or small.
It has been recently conjectured by Boyer-Gordon-Watson that a closed, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold M is a Heegaard Floer L-space if and only if π1(M) is not left-orderable. In this article, we study this conjecture from the point of view of lattice cohomology, an invariant introduced by Némethi which is…
New method compresses facial videos using GANs and latent space optimization.
problem Efficiently compressing facial videos at low bit rates.
method Leverages StyleGAN for latent space representation and compression, learns optimal compression through entropy model and perceptual loss.
result Significantly reduces perceptual distortion at low bit rates compared to state-of-the-art codecs.
Stochastic encoders outperform deterministic ones in 'perfect perceptual quality'.
problem Understanding when stochastic encoders outperform deterministic ones.
method Provided a toy example to illustrate performance.
result Stochastic encoders can significantly outperform deterministic ones in 'perfect perceptual quality'.
Estimates time-series drifts from i.i.d. data using a direct Nadaraya-Watson plug-in method.
problem Nonparametric estimation of Schrödinger bridge drifts from single time interval data.
method Direct Nadaraya-Watson plug-in estimator based on kernelized numerator and denominator terms.
result Uniform non-asymptotic bound, CLT under undersmoothing, and adaptive bandwidth selector.
Conventional SVM-based image coding methods are founded on independently restricting the distortion in every image coefficient at some particular image representation. Geometrically, this implies allowing arbitrary signal distortions in an n-dimensional rectangle defined by the ε-insensitivity zone in eac…
Using an invariant defined by Rasmussen, we extend an argument given by Hedden and Watson which further restricts which Alexander polynomials can be realized by L-space knots.
We introduce autoregressive implicit quantile networks (AIQN), a fundamentally different approach to generative modeling than those commonly used, that implicitly captures the distribution using quantile regression. AIQN is able to achieve superior perceptual quality and improvements in evaluation metrics, without incu…
We treat the problem of estimation of orientation parameters whose values are invariant to transformations from a spherical symmetry group. Previous work has shown that any such group-invariant distribution must satisfy a restricted finite mixture representation, which allows the orientation parameter to be estimated u…
Lossy compression algorithms are typically designed and analyzed through the lens of Shannon's rate-distortion theory, where the goal is to achieve the lowest possible distortion (e.g., low MSE or high SSIM) at any given bit rate. However, in recent years, it has become increasingly accepted that "low distortion" is no…
Traditionally, the vision community has devised algorithms to estimate the distance between an original image and images that have been subject to perturbations. Inspiration was usually taken from the human visual perceptual system and how the system processes different perturbations in order to replicate to what exten…
Boyer, Gordon, and Watson have conjectured that an irreducible rational homology 3-sphere is an L-space if and only if its fundamental group is not left-orderable. Since Dehn surgeries on knots in S3 can produce large families of L-spaces, it is natural to examine the conjecture on these 3-manifolds. Greene, Lewalle…
This paper presents a novel CNN-based approach for synthesizing high-resolution LiDAR point cloud data. Our approach generates semantically and perceptually realistic results with guidance from specialized loss-functions. First, we utilize a modified per-point loss that addresses missing LiDAR point measurements. Secon…