Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Statistical Learning


RaCalNet: Radar Calibration Network for Sparse-Supervised Metric Depth Estimation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Dense depth estimation using millimeter-wave radar typically requires dense LiDAR supervision, generated via multi-frame projection and interpolation, for guiding the learning of accurate depth from sparse radar measurements and RGB images. However, this paradigm is both costly and data-intensive. To address this, we propose RaCalNet, a novel framework that eliminates the need for dense supervision by using sparse LiDAR to supervise the learning of refined radar measurements, resulting in a supervision density of merely around 1\% compared to dense-supervised methods. RaCalNet is composed of two key modules. The Radar Recalibration module performs radar point screening and pixel-wise displacement refinement, producing accurate and reliable depth priors from sparse radar inputs. These priors are then used by the Metric Depth Optimization module, which learns to infer scene-level scale priors and fuses them with monocular depth predictions to achieve metrically accurate outputs. This modular design enhances structural consistency and preserves fine-grained geometric details. Despite relying solely on sparse supervision, RaCalNet produces depth maps with clear object contours and fine-grained textures, demonstrating superior visual quality compared to state-of-the-art dense-supervised methods. Quantitatively, it achieves performance comparable to existing methods on the ZJU-4DRadarCam dataset and yields a 34.89\% RMSE reduction in real-world deployment scenarios. We plan to gradually release the code and models in the future at https://github.com/818slam/RaCalNet.git.


Enhancing Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimators for Image Reconstruction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autoregressive models are often employed to learn distributions of image data by decomposing the $D$-dimensional density function into a product of one-dimensional conditional distributions. Each conditional depends on preceding variables (pixels, in the case of image data), making the order in which variables are processed fundamental to the model performance. In this paper, we study the problem of observing a small subset of image pixels (referred to as a pixel patch) to predict the unobserved parts of the image. As our prediction mechanism, we propose a generalized version of the convolutional neural autoregressive distribution estimation (ConvNADE) model adapted for real-valued and color images. Moreover, we investigate the quality of image reconstruction when observing both random pixel patches and low-discrepancy pixel patches inspired by quasi-Monte Carlo theory. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that, where design permits, pixels sampled or stored to preserve uniform coverage improves reconstruction fidelity and test performance.


Graph Inverse Style Transfer for Counterfactual Explainability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Counterfactual explainability seeks to uncover model decisions by identifying minimal changes to the input that alter the predicted outcome. This task becomes particularly challenging for graph data due to preserving structural integrity and semantic meaning. Unlike prior approaches that rely on forward perturbation mechanisms, we introduce Graph Inverse Style Transfer (GIST), the first framework to re-imagine graph counterfactual generation as a backtracking process, leveraging spectral style transfer. By aligning the global structure with the original input spectrum and preserving local content faithfulness, GIST produces valid counterfactuals as interpolations between the input style and counterfactual content. Tested on 8 binary and multi-class graph classification benchmarks, GIST achieves a remarkable +7.6% improvement in the validity of produced counterfactuals and significant gains (+45.5%) in faithfully explaining the true class distribution. Additionally, GIST's backtracking mechanism effectively mitigates overshooting the underlying predictor's decision boundary, minimizing the spectral differences between the input and the counterfactuals. These results challenge traditional forward perturbation methods, offering a novel perspective that advances graph explainability.


Probabilistic Embeddings for Frozen Vision-Language Models: Uncertainty Quantification with Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) learn joint representations by mapping images and text into a shared latent space. However, recent research highlights that deterministic embeddings from standard VLMs often struggle to capture the uncertainties arising from the ambiguities in visual and textual descriptions and the multiple possible correspondences between images and texts. Existing approaches tackle this by learning probabilistic embeddings during VLM training, which demands large datasets and does not leverage the powerful representations already learned by large-scale VLMs like CLIP. In this paper, we propose GroVE, a post-hoc approach to obtaining probabilistic embeddings from frozen VLMs. GroVE builds on Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GPLVM) to learn a shared low-dimensional latent space where image and text inputs are mapped to a unified representation, optimized through single-modal embedding reconstruction and cross-modal alignment objectives. Once trained, the Gaussian Process model generates uncertainty-aware probabilistic embeddings. Evaluation shows that GroVE achieves state-of-the-art uncertainty calibration across multiple downstream tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, and active learning.


DRBM-ClustNet: A Deep Restricted Boltzmann-Kohonen Architecture for Data Clustering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A Bayesian Deep Restricted Boltzmann-Kohonen architecture for data clustering termed as DRBM-ClustNet is proposed. This core-clustering engine consists of a Deep Restricted Boltzmann Machine (DRBM) for processing unlabeled data by creating new features that are uncorrelated and have large variance with each other. Next, the number of clusters are predicted using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), followed by a Kohonen Network-based clustering layer. The processing of unlabeled data is done in three stages for efficient clustering of the non-linearly separable datasets. In the first stage, DRBM performs non-linear feature extraction by capturing the highly complex data representation by projecting the feature vectors of $d$ dimensions into $n$ dimensions. Most clustering algorithms require the number of clusters to be decided a priori, hence here to automate the number of clusters in the second stage we use BIC. In the third stage, the number of clusters derived from BIC forms the input for the Kohonen network, which performs clustering of the feature-extracted data obtained from the DRBM. This method overcomes the general disadvantages of clustering algorithms like the prior specification of the number of clusters, convergence to local optima and poor clustering accuracy on non-linear datasets. In this research we use two synthetic datasets, fifteen benchmark datasets from the UCI Machine Learning repository, and four image datasets to analyze the DRBM-ClustNet. The proposed framework is evaluated based on clustering accuracy and ranked against other state-of-the-art clustering methods. The obtained results demonstrate that the DRBM-ClustNet outperforms state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.


Identifying bias in cluster quality metrics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study potential biases of popular cluster quality metrics, such as conductance or modularity. We propose a method that uses both stochastic and preferential attachment block models construction to generate networks with preset community structures, to which quality metrics will be applied. These models also allow us to generate multi-level structures of varying strength, which will show if metrics favour partitions into a larger or smaller number of clusters. Additionally, we propose another quality metric, the density ratio. We observed that most of the studied metrics tend to favour partitions into a smaller number of big clusters, even when their relative internal and external connectivity are the same. The metrics found to be less biased are modularity and density ratio.


Morphological Analysis for the Maltese Language: The Challenges of a Hybrid System

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Maltese is a morphologically rich language with a hybrid morphological system which features both concatenative and non-concatenative processes. This paper analyses the impact of this hybridity on the performance of machine learning techniques for morphological labelling and clustering. In particular, we analyse a dataset of morphologically related word clusters to evaluate the difference in results for concatenative and nonconcatenative clusters. We also describe research carried out in morphological labelling, with a particular focus on the verb category. Two evaluations were carried out, one using an unseen dataset, and another one using a gold standard dataset which was manually labelled. The gold standard dataset was split into concatenative and non-concatenative to analyse the difference in results between the two morphological systems.


A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this chapter, we utilize dynamical systems to analyze several aspects of machine learning algorithms. As an expository contribution we demonstrate how to re-formulate a wide variety of challenges from deep neural networks, (stochastic) gradient descent, and related topics into dynamical statements. We also tackle three concrete challenges. First, we consider the process of information propagation through a neural network, i.e., we study the input-output map for different architectures. We explain the universal embedding property for augmented neural ODEs representing arbitrary functions of given regularity, the classification of multilayer perceptrons and neural ODEs in terms of suitable function classes, and the memory-dependence in neural delay equations. Second, we consider the training aspect of neural networks dynamically. We describe a dynamical systems perspective on gradient descent and study stability for overdetermined problems. We then extend this analysis to the overparameterized setting and describe the edge of stability phenomenon, also in the context of possible explanations for implicit bias. For stochastic gradient descent, we present stability results for the overparameterized setting via Lyapunov exponents of interpolation solutions. Third, we explain several results regarding mean-field limits of neural networks. We describe a result that extends existing techniques to heterogeneous neural networks involving graph limits via digraph measures. This shows how large classes of neural networks naturally fall within the framework of Kuramoto-type models on graphs and their large-graph limits. Finally, we point out that similar strategies to use dynamics to study explainable and reliable AI can also be applied to settings such as generative models or fundamental issues in gradient training methods, such as backpropagation or vanishing/exploding gradients.


VERITAS: Verification and Explanation of Realness in Images for Transparency in AI Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The widespread and rapid adoption of AI-generated content, created by models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models, has revolutionized the digital media landscape by allowing efficient and creative content generation. However, these models also blur the difference between real images and AI-generated synthetic images, raising concerns regarding content authenticity and integrity. While many existing solutions to detect fake images focus solely on classification and higher-resolution images, they often lack transparency in their decision-making, making it difficult for users to understand why an image is classified as fake. In this paper, we present VERITAS, a comprehensive framework that not only accurately detects whether a small (32x32) image is AI-generated but also explains why it was classified that way through artifact localization and semantic reasoning. VERITAS produces human-readable explanations that describe key artifacts in synthetic images. We show that this architecture offers clear explanations of the basis of zero-shot synthetic image detection tasks. Code and relevant prompts can be found at https://github.com/V-i-g-n-e-s-h-N/VERITAS .


Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) From Scratch

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Kronecker-factored approximate curvature (KFAC) is arguably one of the most prominent curvature approximations in deep learning. Its applications range from optimization to Bayesian deep learning, training data attribution with influence functions, and model compression or merging. While the intuition behind KFAC is easy to understand, its implementation is tedious: It comes in many flavours, has common pitfalls when translating the math to code, and is challenging to test, which complicates ensuring a properly functioning implementation. Some of the authors themselves have dealt with these challenges and experienced the discomfort of not being able to fully test their code. Thanks to recent advances in understanding KFAC, we are now able to provide test cases and a recipe for a reliable KFAC implementation. This tutorial is meant as a ground-up introduction to KFAC. In contrast to the existing work, our focus lies on providing both math and code side-by-side and providing test cases based on the latest insights into KFAC that are scattered throughout the literature. We hope this tutorial provides a contemporary view of KFAC that allows beginners to gain a deeper understanding of this curvature approximation while lowering the barrier to its implementation, extension, and usage in practice.