In this article, we introduce the novel concept of the second maximum of a Gaussian random field on a Riemannian submanifold. This second maximum serves as a powerful tool for characterizing the distribution of the maximum. By utilizing an ad-hoc Kac Rice formula, we derive the explicit form of the maximum's distribution, conditioned on the second maximum and some regressed component of the Riemannian Hessian. This approach results in an exact test, based on the evaluation of spacing between these maxima, which we refer to as the spacing test. We investigate the applicability of this test in detecting sparse alternatives within Gaussian symmetric tensors, continuous sparse deconvolution, and two-layered neural networks with smooth rectifiers. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments, which illustrate the calibration and power of the proposed tests. More generally, this test can be applied to any Gaussian random field on a Riemannian manifold, and we provide a general framework for the application of the spacing test in continuous sparse kernel regression. Furthermore, when the variance-covariance function of the Gaussian random field is known up to a scaling factor, we derive an exact Studentized version of our test, coined the $t$-spacing test. This test is perfectly calibrated under the null hypothesis and has high power for detecting sparse alternatives.

Sky-image-based solar forecasting using deep learning has been recognized as a promising approach in reducing the uncertainty in solar power generation. However, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of massive and diversified sky image samples. In this study, we present a comprehensive survey of open-source ground-based sky image datasets for very short-term solar forecasting (i.e., forecasting horizon less than 30 minutes), as well as related research areas which can potentially help improve solar forecasting methods, including cloud segmentation, cloud classification and cloud motion prediction. We first identify 72 open-source sky image datasets that satisfy the needs of machine/deep learning. Then a database of information about various aspects of the identified datasets is constructed. To evaluate each surveyed datasets, we further develop a multi-criteria ranking system based on 8 dimensions of the datasets which could have important impacts on usage of the data. Finally, we provide insights on the usage of these datasets for different applications. We hope this paper can provide an overview for researchers who are looking for datasets for very short-term solar forecasting and related areas.

In this work we address the problem of solving ill-posed inverse problems in imaging where the prior is a variational autoencoder (VAE). Specifically we consider the decoupled case where the prior is trained once and can be reused for many different log-concave degradation models without retraining. Whereas previous MAP-based approaches to this problem lead to highly non-convex optimization algorithms, our approach computes the joint (space-latent) MAP that naturally leads to alternate optimization algorithms and to the use of a stochastic encoder to accelerate computations. The resulting technique (JPMAP) performs Joint Posterior Maximization using an Autoencoding Prior. We show theoretical and experimental evidence that the proposed objective function is quite close to bi-convex. Indeed it satisfies a weak bi-convexity property which is sufficient to guarantee that our optimization scheme converges to a stationary point. We also highlight the importance of correctly training the VAE using a denoising criterion, in order to ensure that the encoder generalizes well to out-of-distribution images, without affecting the quality of the generative model. This simple modification is key to providing robustness to the whole procedure. Finally we show how our joint MAP methodology relates to more common MAP approaches, and we propose a continuation scheme that makes use of our JPMAP algorithm to provide more robust MAP estimates. Experimental results also show the higher quality of the solutions obtained by our JPMAP approach with respect to other non-convex MAP approaches which more often get stuck in spurious local optima.

In this paper we address the problem of solving ill-posed inverse problems in imaging where the prior is a neural generative model. Specifically we consider the decoupled case where the prior is trained once and can be reused for many different log-concave degradation models without retraining. Whereas previous MAP-based approaches to this problem lead to highly non-convex optimization algorithms, our approach computes the joint (space-latent) MAP that naturally leads to alternate optimization algorithms and to the use of a stochastic encoder to accelerate computations. The resulting technique is called JPMAP because it performs Joint Posterior Maximization using an Autoencoding Prior. We show theoretical and experimental evidence that the proposed objective function is quite close to bi-convex. Indeed it satisfies a weak bi-convexity property which is sufficient to guarantee that our optimization scheme converges to a stationary point. Experimental results also show the higher quality of the solutions obtained by our JPMAP approach with respect to other non-convex MAP approaches which more often get stuck in spurious local optima.