Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We investigate the detection of weak complex-valued signals immersed in non-Gaussian, range-varying interference, with emphasis on maritime radar scenarios. The proposed methodology exploits a Complex-valued Variational AutoEncoder (CVAE) trained exclusively on clutter-plus-noise to perform Out-Of-Distribution detection. By operating directly on in-phase / quadrature samples, the CVAE preserves phase and Doppler structure and is assessed in two configurations: (i) using unprocessed range profiles and (ii) after local whitening, where per-range covariance estimates are obtained from neighboring profiles. Using extensive simulations together with real sea-clutter data from the CSIR maritime dataset, we benchmark performance against classical and adaptive detectors (MF, NMF, AMF-SCM, ANMF-SCM, ANMF-Tyler). In both configurations, the CVAE yields a higher detection probability Pd at matched false-alarm rate Pfa, with the most notable improvements observed under whitening. We further integrate the CVAE with the ANMF through a weighted log-p fusion rule at the decision level, attaining enhanced robustness in strongly non-Gaussian clutter and enabling empirically calibrated Pfa control under H0. Overall, the results demonstrate that statistical normalization combined with complex-valued generative modeling substantively improves detection in realistic sea-clutter conditions, and that the fused CVAE-ANMF scheme constitutes a competitive alternative to established model-based detectors.

Network-on-Chip (NoC) design requires exploring a high-dimensional configuration space to satisfy stringent throughput requirements and latency constraints. Traditional design space exploration techniques are often slow and struggle to handle complex, non-linear parameter interactions. This work presents a machine learning-driven framework that automates NoC design space exploration using BookSim simulations and reverse neural network models. Specifically, we compare three architectures - a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP),a Conditional Diffusion Model, and a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to predict optimal NoC parameters given target performance metrics. Our pipeline generates over 150,000 simulation data points across varied mesh topologies. The Conditional Diffusion Model achieved the highest predictive accuracy, attaining a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.463 on unseen data. Furthermore, the proposed framework reduces design exploration time by several orders of magnitude, making it a practical solution for rapid and scalable NoC co-design.

Introducing variability while maintaining coherence is a core task in learning to generate utterances in conversation.

Designing frictional interfaces to exhibit prescribed macroscopic behavior is a challenging inverse problem, made difficult by the non-uniqueness of solutions and the computational cost of contact simulations. Traditional approaches rely on heuristic search over low-dimensional parameterizations, which limits their applicability to more complex or nonlinear friction laws. We introduce a generative modeling framework using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to infer surface topographies from target friction laws. Trained on a synthetic dataset composed of 200 million samples constructed from a parameterized contact mechanics model, the proposed method enables efficient, simulation-free generation of candidate topographies. We examine the potential and limitations of generative modeling for this inverse design task, focusing on balancing accuracy, throughput, and diversity in the generated solutions. Our results highlight trade-offs and outline practical considerations when balancing these objectives. This approach paves the way for near-real-time control of frictional behavior through tailored surface topographies.

We consider the problem of learning a common representation for dexterous manipulation across manipulators of different morphologies. To this end, we propose PCHands, a novel approach for extracting hand postural synergies from a large set of manipulators. We define a simplified and unified description format based on anchor positions for manipulators ranging from 2-finger grippers to 5-finger anthropomorphic hands. This enables learning a variable-length latent representation of the manipulator configuration and the alignment of the end-effector frame of all manipulators. We show that it is possible to extract principal components from this latent representation that is universal across manipulators of different structures and degrees of freedom. To evaluate PCHands, we use this compact representation to encode observation and action spaces of control policies for dexterous manipulation tasks learned with RL. In terms of learning efficiency and consistency, the proposed representation outperforms a baseline that learns the same tasks in joint space. We additionally show that PCHands performs robustly in RL from demonstration, when demonstrations are provided from a different manipulator. We further support our results with real-world experiments that involve a 2-finger gripper and a 4-finger anthropomorphic hand. Code and additional material are available at https://hsp-iit.github.io/PCHands/.

Inverse design, which seeks to find optimal parameters for a target output, is a central challenge in engineering. Surrogate-based optimization (SBO) has become a standard approach, yet it is fundamentally structured to converge to a single-point solution, thereby limiting design space exploration and ignoring potentially valuable alternative topologies. This paper presents a paradigm shift from single-point optimization to generative inverse design. We introduce a framework based on a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) that learns a probabilistic mapping between a system's design parameters and its performance, enabling the generation of a diverse portfolio of high-performing candidates conditioned on a specific performance objective. We apply this methodology to the complex, non-linear problem of minimizing airfoil self-noise, using a high-performing SBO method from a prior benchmark study as a rigorous baseline. The CVAE framework successfully generated 256 novel designs with a 94.1\% validity rate. A subsequent surrogate-based evaluation revealed that 77.2\% of these valid designs achieved superior performance compared to the single optimal design found by the SBO baseline. This work demonstrates that the generative approach not only discovers higher-quality solutions but also provides a rich portfolio of diverse candidates, fundamentally enhancing the engineering design process by enabling multi-criteria decision-making.

Supervised deep learning has been successfully applied to many recognition problems. Although it can approximate a complex many-to-one function well when a large amount of training data is provided, it is still challenging to model complex structured output representations that effectively perform probabilistic inference and make diverse predictions. In this work, we develop a deep conditional generative model for structured output prediction using Gaussian latent variables. The model is trained efficiently in the framework of stochastic gradient varia-tional Bayes, and allows for fast prediction using stochastic feed-forward inference. In addition, we provide novel strategies to build robust structured prediction algorithms, such as input noise-injection and multi-scale prediction objective at training. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison to the deterministic deep neural network counterparts in generating diverse but realistic structured output predictions using stochastic inference. Furthermore, the proposed training methods are complimentary, which leads to strong pixel-level object segmentation and semantic labeling performance on Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 and the subset of Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset.

Having generated novel SMILES with potentially identical druglikeliness, we now perform a self-consistency check. That is, we feed the generated SMILES into our model and predict the properties.