Deep generative modelling is a class of techniques that train deep neural networks to model the distribution of training samples. Research has fragmented into various interconnected approaches, each of which making trade-offs including run-time, diversity, and architectural restrictions. In particular, this compendium covers energy-based models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models, normalizing flows, in addition to numerous hybrid approaches. These techniques are drawn under a single cohesive framework, comparing and contrasting to explain the premises behind each, while reviewing current state-of-the-art advances and implementations.

Recent work showed that there could be a large gap between the classical uniform convergence bound and the actual test error of zero-training-error predictors (interpolators) such as deep neural networks. To better understand this gap, we study the uniform convergence in the nonlinear random feature model and perform a precise theoretical analysis on how uniform convergence depends on the sample size and the number of parameters. We derive and prove analytical expressions for three quantities in this model: 1) classical uniform convergence over norm balls, 2) uniform convergence over interpolators in the norm ball (recently proposed by Zhou et al. (2020)), and 3) the risk of minimum norm interpolator. We show that, in the setting where the classical uniform convergence bound is vacuous (diverges to $\infty$), uniform convergence over the interpolators still gives a non-trivial bound of the test error of interpolating solutions. We also showcase a different setting where classical uniform convergence bound is non-vacuous, but uniform convergence over interpolators can give an improved sample complexity guarantee. Our result provides a first exact comparison between the test errors and uniform convergence bounds for interpolators beyond simple linear models.

Welcome to the fourth edition of the AI Index Report. This year we significantly expanded the amount of data available in the report, worked with a broader set of external organizations to calibrate our data, and deepened our connections with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence. Its mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, and globally sourced data for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI. The report aims to be the most credible and authoritative source for data and insights about AI in the world.

Deformable image registration is fundamental for many medical image analyses. A key obstacle for accurate image registration is the variations in image appearance. Recently, deep learning-based registration methods (DLRs), using deep neural networks, have computational efficiency that is several orders of magnitude greater than traditional optimization-based registration methods (ORs). A major drawback, however, of DLRs is a disregard for the target-pair-specific optimization that is inherent in ORs and instead they rely on a globally optimized network that is trained with a set of training samples to achieve faster registration. Thus, DLRs inherently have degraded ability to adapt to appearance variations and perform poorly, compared to ORs, when image pairs (fixed/moving images) have large differences in appearance. Hence, we propose an Appearance Adjustment Network (AAN) where we leverage anatomy edges, through an anatomy-constrained loss function, to generate an anatomy-preserving appearance transformation. We designed the AAN so that it can be readily inserted into a wide range of DLRs, to reduce the appearance differences between the fixed and moving images. Our AAN and DLR's network can be trained cooperatively in an unsupervised and end-to-end manner. We evaluated our AAN with two widely used DLRs - Voxelmorph (VM) and FAst IMage registration (FAIM) - on three public 3D brain magnetic resonance (MR) image datasets - IBSR18, Mindboggle101, and LPBA40. The results show that DLRs, using the AAN, improved performance and achieved higher results than state-of-the-art ORs.

This paper investigates the problem of impact-time-control and proposes a learning-based computational guidance algorithm to solve this problem. The proposed guidance algorithm is developed based on a general prediction-correction concept: the exact time-to-go under proportional navigation guidance with realistic aerodynamic characteristics is estimated by a deep neural network and a biased command to nullify the impact time error is developed by utilizing the emerging reinforcement learning techniques. The deep neural network is augmented into the reinforcement learning block to resolve the issue of sparse reward that has been observed in typical reinforcement learning formulation. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to support the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a novel, convolutional neural network model to extract highly precise depth maps from missing viewpoints, especially well applicable to generate holographic 3D contents. The depth map is an essential element for phase extraction which is required for synthesis of computer-generated hologram (CGH). The proposed model called the HDD Net uses MSE for the better performance of depth map estimation as loss function, and utilizes the bilinear interpolation in up sampling layer with the Relu as activation function. We design and prepare a total of 8,192 multi-view images, each resolution of 640 by 360 for the deep learning study. The proposed model estimates depth maps through extracting features, up sampling. For quantitative assessment, we compare the estimated depth maps with the ground truths by using the PSNR, ACC, and RMSE. We also compare the CGH patterns made from estimated depth maps with ones made from ground truths. Furthermore, we demonstrate the experimental results to test the quality of estimated depth maps through directly reconstructing holographic 3D image scenes from the CGHs.

Policy gradient methods estimate the gradient of a policy objective solely based on either the likelihood ratio (LR) estimator or the reparameterization (RP) estimator for estimating gradients. Many policy gradient methods based on the LR estimator can be unified under the policy gradient theorem (Sutton et al., 2000). However, such a unifying theorem does not exist for policy gradient methods based on the RP estimator. Moreover, no existing method requires and uses both estimators beyond a trivial interpolation between them. In this paper, we provide a theoretical framework that unifies several existing policy gradient methods based on the RP estimator. Utilizing our framework, we introduce a novel strategy to compute the policy gradient that, for the first time, incorporates both the LR and RP estimators and can be unbiased only when both estimators are present. Based on this strategy, we develop a new on-policy algorithm called the Reward Policy Gradient algorithm, which is the first model-free policy gradient method to utilize reward gradients. Using an idealized environment, we show that policy gradient solely based on the RP estimator for rewards are biased even with true rewards whereas our combined estimator is not. Finally, we show that our method either performs comparably with or outperforms Proximal Policy Optimization -- an LR-based on-policy method -- on several continuous control tasks.

Deep object recognition models have been very successful over benchmark datasets such as ImageNet. How accurate and robust are they to distribution shifts arising from natural and synthetic variations in datasets? Prior research on this problem has primarily focused on ImageNet variations (e.g., ImageNetV2, ImageNet-A). To avoid potential inherited biases in these studies, we take a different approach. Specifically, we reanalyze the ObjectNet dataset recently proposed by Barbu et al. containing objects in daily life situations. They showed a dramatic performance drop of the state of the art object recognition models on this dataset. Due to the importance and implications of their results regarding the generalization ability of deep models, we take a second look at their analysis. We find that applying deep models to the isolated objects, rather than the entire scene as is done in the original paper, results in around 20-30% performance improvement. Relative to the numbers reported in Barbu et al., around 10-15% of the performance loss is recovered, without any test time data augmentation. Despite this gain, however, we conclude that deep models still suffer drastically on the ObjectNet dataset. We also investigate the robustness of models against synthetic image perturbations such as geometric transformations (e.g., scale, rotation, translation), natural image distortions (e.g., impulse noise, blur) as well as adversarial attacks (e.g., FGSM and PGD-5). Our results indicate that limiting the object area as much as possible (i.e., from the entire image to the bounding box to the segmentation mask) leads to consistent improvement in accuracy and robustness.

Model complexity is a fundamental problem in deep learning. In this paper we conduct a systematic overview of the latest studies on model complexity in deep learning. Model complexity of deep learning can be categorized into expressive capacity and effective model complexity. We review the existing studies on those two categories along four important factors, including model framework, model size, optimization process and data complexity. We also discuss the applications of deep learning model complexity including understanding model generalization capability, model optimization, and model selection and design. We conclude by proposing several interesting future directions.

We present ARCH, a computational pathology (CP) multiple instance captioning dataset to facilitate dense supervision of CP tasks. Existing CP datasets focus on narrow tasks; ARCH on the other hand contains dense diagnostic and morphological descriptions for a range of stains, tissue types and pathologies. Using intrinsic dimensionality estimation, we show that ARCH is the only CP dataset to (ARCH-)rival its computer vision analog MS-COCO Captions. We conjecture that an encoder pre-trained on dense image captions learns transferable representations for most CP tasks. We support the conjecture with evidence that ARCH representation transfers to a variety of pathology sub-tasks better than ImageNet features or representations obtained via self-supervised or multi-task learning on pathology images alone. We release our best model and invite other researchers to test it on their CP tasks.