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Multiplicative noise, also known as speckle or pepper noise, commonly affects images produced by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), lasers, or optical lenses. Unlike additive noise, which typically arises from thermal processes or external factors, multiplicative noise is inherent to the system, originating from the fluctuation in diffuse reflections. These fluctuations result in multiple copies of the same signal with varying magnitudes being combined. Consequently, despeckling, or removing multiplicative noise, necessitates different techniques compared to those used for additive noise removal. In this paper, we propose a novel approach using Stochastic Differential Equations based diffusion models to address multiplicative noise. We demonstrate that multiplicative noise can be effectively modeled as a Geometric Brownian Motion process in the logarithmic domain. Utilizing the Fokker-Planck equation, we derive the corresponding reverse process for image denoising. To validate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on two different datasets, comparing our approach to both classical signal processing techniques and contemporary CNN-based noise removal models. Our results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on perception-based metrics such as FID and LPIPS, while maintaining competitive performance on traditional metrics like PSNR and SSIM., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) increasingly becomes important in the decentralized setting, where it enables multiple participants to collaboratively train a global model to perform well on a sequence of tasks without sharing their private data. In FCIL, conventional Federated Learning algorithms such as FedAVG often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, resulting in significant performance declines on earlier tasks. Recent works, based on generative models, produce synthetic images to help mitigate this issue across all classes, but these approaches' testing accuracy on previous classes is still much lower than recent classes, i.e., having better plasticity than stability. To overcome these issues, this paper presents Federated Global Twin Generator (FedGTG), an FCIL framework that exploits privacy-preserving generative-model training on the global side without accessing client data. Specifically, the server trains a data generator and a feature generator to create two types of information from all seen classes, and then it sends the synthetic data to the client side. The clients then use feature-direction-controlling losses to make the local models retain knowledge and learn new tasks well. We extensively analyze the robustness of FedGTG on natural images, as well as its ability to converge to flat local minima and achieve better-predicting confidence (calibration). Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and tiny-ImageNet demonstrate the improvements in accuracy and forgetting measures of FedGTG compared to previous frameworks.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that maintains data privacy by training on decentralized data sources. Similar to centralized machine learning, FL is also susceptible to backdoor attacks, where an attacker can compromise some clients by injecting a backdoor trigger into local models of those clients, leading to the global model's behavior being manipulated as desired by the attacker. Most backdoor attacks in FL assume a predefined target class and require control over a large number of clients or knowledge of benign clients' information. Furthermore, they are not imperceptible and are easily detected by human inspection due to clear artifacts left on the poison data. To overcome these challenges, we propose Venomancer, an effective backdoor attack that is imperceptible and allows target-on-demand. Specifically, imperceptibility is achieved by using a visual loss function to make the poison data visually indistinguishable from the original data. Target-on-demand property allows the attacker to choose arbitrary target classes via conditional adversarial training. Additionally, experiments showed that the method is robust against state-of-the-art defenses such as Norm Clipping, Weak DP, Krum, Multi-Krum, RLR, FedRAD, Deepsight, and RFLBAT. The source code is available at https://github.com/nguyenhongson1902/Venomancer.

This paper presents a novel system, named AHMsys, designed to automate the process of generating 3D Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) models from 2D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings, a key component of Building Information Modeling (BIM). By automatically preprocessing and extracting essential HVAC object information then creating detailed 3D models, our proposed AHMsys significantly reduced the 20 percent work schedule of the BIM process in Akila. This advancement highlights the essential impact of integrating AI technologies in managing the lifecycle of a digital representation of the building.

Both the USA TST 2008 and the ELMO Shortlist 2013 suggested two issues that are connected to fixed points. These problems provide a strong linkage between the various attributes of specific points in a triangle. In this article, we will first investigate various theorems concerning the fixed points that have been presented, and then we will demonstrate how those points are connected to a few triangle centers.

Diverse demonstration datasets have powered significant advances in robot learning, but the dexterity and scale of such data can be limited by the hardware cost, the hardware robustness, and the ease of teleoperation. We introduce ALOHA 2, an enhanced version of ALOHA that has greater performance, ergonomics, and robustness compared to the original design. To accelerate research in large-scale bimanual manipulation, we open source all hardware designs of ALOHA 2 with a detailed tutorial, together with a MuJoCo model of ALOHA 2 with system identification. See the project website at aloha-2.github.io., Comment: Project website: aloha-2.github.io

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, especially in white blood cell cancer diagnosis, is hindered by two primary challenges: the lack of large-scale labeled datasets for white blood cell (WBC) segmentation and outdated segmentation methods. These challenges inhibit the development of more accurate and modern techniques to diagnose cancer relating to white blood cells. To address the first challenge, a semi-supervised learning framework should be devised to efficiently capitalize on the scarcity of the dataset available. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a novel self-training pipeline with the incorporation of FixMatch. Self-training is a technique that utilizes the model trained on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data and then re-train on both of them. FixMatch is a consistency-regularization algorithm to enforce the model's robustness against variations in the input image. We discover that by incorporating FixMatch in the self-training pipeline, the performance improves in the majority of cases. Our performance achieved the best performance with the self-training scheme with consistency on DeepLab-V3 architecture and ResNet-50, reaching 90.69%, 87.37%, and 76.49% on Zheng 1, Zheng 2, and LISC datasets, respectively.

Scientists are adopting new approaches to scale up their activities and goals. Progress in neurotechnologies, artificial intelligence, automation, and tools for collaboration promises new bursts of discoveries. However, compared to other disciplines and the industry, neuroscience laboratories have been slow to adopt key technologies to support collaboration, reproducibility, and automation. Drawing on progress in other fields, we define a roadmap for implementing automated research workflows for diverse research teams. We propose establishing a five-level capability maturity model for operations in neuroscience research. Achieving higher levels of operational maturity requires new technology-enabled methodologies, which we describe as ``SciOps''. The maturity model provides guidelines for evaluating and upgrading operations in multidisciplinary neuroscience teams., Comment: 10 pages, one figure

Pediatric brain and spinal cancers remain the leading cause of cancer-related death in children. Advancements in clinical decision-support in pediatric neuro-oncology utilizing the wealth of radiology imaging data collected through standard care, however, has significantly lagged other domains. Such data is ripe for use with predictive analytics such as artificial intelligence (AI) methods, which require large datasets. To address this unmet need, we provide a multi-institutional, large-scale pediatric dataset of 23,101 multi-parametric MRI exams acquired through routine care for 1,526 brain tumor patients, as part of the Children's Brain Tumor Network. This includes longitudinal MRIs across various cancer diagnoses, with associated patient-level clinical information, digital pathology slides, as well as tissue genotype and omics data. To facilitate downstream analysis, treatment-na\"ive images for 370 subjects were processed and released through the NCI Childhood Cancer Data Initiative via the Cancer Data Service. Through ongoing efforts to continuously build these imaging repositories, our aim is to accelerate discovery and translational AI models with real-world data, to ultimately empower precision medicine for children.

This work presents electronic properties of the kagome metal ScV6Sn6 using de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) oscillations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The torque signal with the applied fields up to 43 T shows clear dHvA oscillations with six major frequencies, five of them are below 400 T (low frequencies) and one is nearly 2800 T (high frequency). The Berry phase calculated using the Landau level fan diagram near the quantum limit is approximately {\pi}, which suggests the non-trivial band topology in ScV6Sn6. To explain the experimental data, we computed the electronic band structure and Fermi surface using DFT in both the pristine and charge density wave (CDW) phases. Our results confirm that the CDW phase is energetically favorable, and the Fermi surface undergoes a severe reconstruction in the CDW state. Furthermore, the angular dependence of the dHvA frequencies are consistent with the DFT calculations. The detailed electronic properties presented here are invaluable for understanding the electronic structure and CDWorder in ScV6Sn6, as well as in other vanadium-based kagome systems., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This system puts together a highly optimized perception subsystem, a high-speed low-latency robot controller, a simulation paradigm that can prevent damage in the real world and also train policies for zero-shot transfer, and automated real world environment resets that enable autonomous training and evaluation on physical robots. We complement a complete system description, including numerous design decisions that are typically not widely disseminated, with a collection of studies that clarify the importance of mitigating various sources of latency, accounting for training and deployment distribution shifts, robustness of the perception system, sensitivity to policy hyper-parameters, and choice of action space. A video demonstrating the components of the system and details of experimental results can be found at https://youtu.be/uFcnWjB42I0., Comment: Published and presented at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS2023)

Partitioning algorithms play a key role in many scientific and engineering disciplines. A partitioning algorithm divides a set into a number of disjoint subsets or partitions. Often, the quality of the resulted partitions is measured by the amount of impurity in each partition, the smaller impurity the higher quality of the partitions. In general, for a given impurity measure specified by a function of the partitions, finding the minimum impurity partitions is an NP-hard problem. Let $M$ be the number of $N$-dimensional elements in a set and $K$ be the number of desired partitions, then an exhaustive search over all the possible partitions to find a minimum partition has the complexity of $O(K^M)$ which quickly becomes impractical for many applications with modest values of $K$ and $M$. Thus, many approximate algorithms with polynomial time complexity have been proposed, but few provide bounded guarantee. In this paper, an upper bound and a lower bound for a class of impurity functions are constructed. Based on these bounds, we propose a low-complexity partitioning algorithm with bounded guarantee based on the maximum likelihood principle. The theoretical analyses on the bounded guarantee of the algorithms are given for two well-known impurity functions Gini index and entropy. When $K \geq N$, the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of lowest approximations and polynomial time complexity $O(NM)$. In addition, a heuristic greedy-merge algorithm having the time complexity of $O((N-K)N^2+NM)$ is proposed for $K

Given a channel having binary input X = (x_1, x_2) having the probability distribution p_X = (p_{x_1}, p_{x_2}) that is corrupted by a continuous noise to produce a continuous output y \in Y = R. For a given conditional distribution p(y|x_1) = \phi_1(y) and p(y|x_2) = \phi_2(y), one wants to quantize the continuous output y back to the final discrete output Z = (z_1, z_2, ..., z_N) with N \leq 2 such that the mutual information between input and quantized-output I(X; Z) is maximized while the probability of the quantized-output p_Z = (p_{z_1}, p_{z_2}, ..., p_{z_N}) has to satisfy a certain constraint. Consider a new variable r_y=p_{x_1}\phi_1(y)/ (p_{x_1}\phi_1(y)+p_{x_2}\phi_2(y)), we show that the optimal quantizer has a structure of convex cells in the new variable r_y. Based on the convex cells property of the optimal quantizers, a fast algorithm is proposed to find the global optimal quantizer in a polynomial time complexity., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2001.01830

While capacities of discrete memoryless channels are well studied, it is still not possible to obtain a closed-form expression for the capacity of an arbitrary discrete memoryless channel. This paper describes an elementary technique based on Karush Kuhn Tucker (KKT) conditions to obtain (1) a good upper bound of a discrete memoryless channel having an invertible positive channel matrix and (2) a closed-form expression for the capacity if the channel matrix satisfies certain conditions related to its singular value and its Gershgorin disk.

We consider a channel with discrete binary input X that is corrupted by a given continuous noise to produce a continuous-valued output Y. A quantizer is then used to quantize the continuous-valued output Y to the final binary output Z. The goal is to design an optimal quantizer Q* and also find the optimal input distribution p*(X) that maximizes the mutual information I(X; Z) between the binary input and the binary quantized output. A linear time complexity searching procedure is proposed. Based on the properties of the optimal quantizer and the optimal input distribution, we reduced the searching range that results in a faster implementation algorithm. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to illustrate our method., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2001.01836

We consider a channel with a binary input X being corrupted by a continuous-valued noise that results in a continuous-valued output Y. An optimal binary quantizer is used to quantize the continuous-valued output Y to the final binary output Z to maximize the mutual information I(X; Z). We show that when the ratio of the channel conditional density r(y) = P(Y=y|X=0)/ P(Y =y|X=1) is a strictly increasing/decreasing function of y, then a quantizer having a single threshold can maximize mutual information. Furthermore, we show that an optimal quantizer (possibly with multiple thresholds) is the one with the thresholding vector whose elements are all the solutions of r(y) = r* for some constant r* > 0. Interestingly, the optimal constant r* is unique. This uniqueness property allows for fast algorithmic implementation such as a bisection algorithm to find the optimal quantizer. Our results also confirm some previous results using alternative elementary proofs. We show some numerical examples of applying our results to channels with additive Gaussian noises.

In this paper, we investigate the quantization of the output of a binary input discrete memoryless channel that maximizing the mutual information between the input and the quantized output under an entropy-constrained of the quantized output. A polynomial time algorithm is introduced that can find the truly global optimal quantizer. These results hold for binary input channels with an arbitrary number of quantized output. Finally, we extend these results to binary input continuous output channels and show a sufficient condition such that a single threshold quantizer is an optimal quantizer. Both theoretical results and numerical results are provided to justify our techniques.

Given an original discrete source X with the distribution p_X that is corrupted by noise to produce the noisy data Y with the given joint distribution p(X, Y). A quantizer/classifier Q : Y -> Z is then used to classify/quantize the data Y to the discrete partitioned output Z with probability distribution p_Z. Next, Z is transmitted over a deterministic channel with a given channel matrix A that produces the final discrete output T. One wants to design the optimal quantizer/classifier Q^* such that the cost function F(X; T) between the input X and the final output T is minimized while the probability of the partitioned output Z satisfies a concave constraint G(p_Z) < C. Our results generalized some famous previous results. First, an iteration linear time complexity algorithm is proposed to find the local optimal quantizer. Second, we show that the optimal partition should produce a hard partition that is equivalent to the cuts by hyper-planes in the probability space of the posterior probability p(X|Y). This result finally provides a polynomial-time algorithm to find the globally optimal quantizer., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

Set partitioning is a key component of many algorithms in machine learning, signal processing, and communications. In general, the problem of finding a partition that minimizes a given impurity (loss function) is NP-hard. As such, there exists a wealth of literature on approximate algorithms and theoretical analyses of the partitioning problem under different settings. In this paper, we formulate and solve a variant of the partition problem called the minimum impurity partition under constraint (MIPUC). MIPUC finds an optimal partition that minimizes a given loss function under a given concave constraint. MIPUC generalizes the recently proposed deterministic information bottleneck problem which finds an optimal partition that maximizes the mutual information between the input and partition output while minimizing the partition output entropy. Our proposed algorithm is developed based on a novel optimality condition, which allows us to find a locally optimal solution efficiently. Moreover, we show that the optimal partition produces a hard partition that is equivalent to the cuts by hyperplanes in the probability space of the posterior probability that finally yields a polynomial time complexity algorithm to find the globally optimal partition. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to validate the proposed algorithm.