epe
Flow: An Efficient Multi-frame Scene Flow Estimation Method
While recent trends shift towards multi-frame reasoning, they suffer from rapidly escalating computational costs as the number of frames grows. To leverage temporal information more efficiently, we propose DeltaFlow ( Flow), a lightweight 3D framework that captures motion cues via a scheme, extracting temporal features with minimal computational cost, regardless of the number of frames. Additionally, scene flow estimation faces challenges such as imbalanced object class distributions and motion inconsistency. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Category-Balanced Loss to enhance learning across underrepresented classes and an Instance Consistency Loss to enforce coherent object motion, improving flow accuracy. Extensive evaluations on the Argoverse 2, Waymo and nuScenes datasets show that Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 22% lower error and 2 faster inference compared to the next-best multi-frame supervised method, while also demonstrating a strong cross-domain generalization ability.
Subgroup Discovery with the Cox Model
We study the problem of subgroup discovery for survival analysis, where the goal is to find an interpretable subset of the data on which a Cox model is highly accurate. Our work is the first to study this particular subgroup problem, for which we make several contributions. Subgroup discovery methods generally require a "quality function" in order to sift through and select the most advantageous subgroups. We first examine why existing natural choices for quality functions are insufficient to solve the subgroup discovery problem for the Cox model. To address the shortcomings of existing metrics, we introduce two technical innovations: the *expected prediction entropy (EPE)*, a novel metric for evaluating survival models which predict a hazard function; and the *conditional rank statistics (CRS)*, a statistical object which quantifies the deviation of an individual point to the distribution of survival times in an existing subgroup. We study the EPE and CRS theoretically and show that they can solve many of the problems with existing metrics. We introduce a total of eight algorithms for the Cox subgroup discovery problem. The main algorithm is able to take advantage of both the EPE and the CRS, allowing us to give theoretical correctness results for this algorithm in a well-specified setting. We evaluate all of the proposed methods empirically on both synthetic and real data. The experiments confirm our theory, showing that our contributions allow for the recovery of a ground-truth subgroup in well-specified cases, as well as leading to better model fit compared to naively fitting the Cox model to the whole dataset in practical settings. Lastly, we conduct a case study on jet engine simulation data from NASA. The discovered subgroups uncover known nonlinearities/homogeneity in the data, and which suggest design choices which have been mirrored in practice.
Physics-Constrained Adaptive Neural Networks Enable Real-Time Semiconductor Manufacturing Optimization with Minimal Training Data
The semiconductor industry faces a computational crisis in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography optimization, where traditional methods consume billions of CPU hours while failing to achieve sub-nanometer precision. We present a physics-constrained adaptive learning framework that automatically calibrates electromagnetic approximations through learnable parameters $\boldsymbolθ = \{θ_d, θ_a, θ_b, θ_p, θ_c\}$ while simultaneously minimizing Edge Placement Error (EPE) between simulated aerial images and target photomasks. The framework integrates differentiable modules for Fresnel diffraction, material absorption, optical point spread function blur, phase-shift effects, and contrast modulation with direct geometric pattern matching objectives, enabling cross-geometry generalization with minimal training data. Through physics-constrained learning on 15 representative patterns spanning current production to future research nodes, we demonstrate consistent sub-nanometer EPE performance (0.664-2.536 nm range) using only 50 training samples per pattern. Adaptive physics learning achieves an average improvement of 69.9\% over CNN baselines without physics constraints, with a significant inference speedup over rigorous electromagnetic solvers after training completion. This approach requires 90\% fewer training samples through cross-geometry generalization compared to pattern-specific CNN training approaches. This work establishes physics-constrained adaptive learning as a foundational methodology for real-time semiconductor manufacturing optimization, addressing the critical gap between academic physics-informed neural networks and industrial deployment requirements through joint physics calibration and manufacturing precision objectives.
Differentiable Edge-based OPC
Chen, Guojin, Yang, Haoyu, Ren, Haoxing, Yu, Bei, Pan, David Z.
Optical proximity correction (OPC) is crucial for pushing the boundaries of semiconductor manufacturing and enabling the continued scaling of integrated circuits. While pixel-based OPC, termed as inverse lithography technology (ILT), has gained research interest due to its flexibility and precision. Its complexity and intricate features can lead to challenges in mask writing, increased defects, and higher costs, hence hindering widespread industrial adoption. In this paper, we propose DiffOPC, a differentiable OPC framework that enjoys the virtue of both edge-based OPC and ILT. By employing a mask rule-aware gradient-based optimization approach, DiffOPC efficiently guides mask edge segment movement during mask optimization, minimizing wafer error by propagating true gradients from the cost function back to the mask edges. Our approach achieves lower edge placement error while reducing manufacturing cost by half compared to state-of-the-art OPC techniques, bridging the gap between the high accuracy of pixel-based OPC and the practicality required for industrial adoption, thus offering a promising solution for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
Fully Convolutional Slice-to-Volume Reconstruction for Single-Stack MRI
Young, Sean I., Balbastre, Yaël, Fischl, Bruce, Golland, Polina, Iglesias, Juan Eugenio
In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), slice-to-volume reconstruction (SVR) refers to computational reconstruction of an unknown 3D magnetic resonance volume from stacks of 2D slices corrupted by motion. While promising, current SVR methods require multiple slice stacks for accurate 3D reconstruction, leading to long scans and limiting their use in time-sensitive applications such as fetal fMRI. Here, we propose a SVR method that overcomes the shortcomings of previous work and produces state-of-the-art reconstructions in the presence of extreme inter-slice motion. Inspired by the recent success of single-view depth estimation methods, we formulate SVR as a single-stack motion estimation task and train a fully convolutional network to predict a motion stack for a given slice stack, producing a 3D reconstruction as a byproduct of the predicted motion. Extensive experiments on the SVR of adult and fetal brains demonstrate that our fully convolutional method is twice as accurate as previous SVR methods. Our code is available at github.com/seannz/svr.
Minimising the Expected Posterior Entropy Yields Optimal Summary Statistics
Hoffmann, Till, Onnela, Jukka-Pekka
Extracting low-dimensional summary statistics from large datasets is essential for efficient (likelihood-free) inference. We characterise different classes of summaries and demonstrate their importance for correctly analysing dimensionality reduction algorithms. We propose obtaining summaries by minimising the expected posterior entropy (EPE) under the prior predictive distribution of the model. Many existing methods are equivalent to or are special or limiting cases of minimising the EPE. We develop a method to obtain high-fidelity summaries that minimise the EPE; we apply it to benchmark and real-world examples. We both offer a unifying perspective for obtaining informative summaries and provide concrete recommendations for practitioners.
PanoFlow: Learning 360{\deg} Optical Flow for Surrounding Temporal Understanding
Shi, Hao, Zhou, Yifan, Yang, Kailun, Yin, Xiaoting, Wang, Ze, Ye, Yaozu, Yin, Zhe, Meng, Shi, Li, Peng, Wang, Kaiwei
Optical flow estimation is a basic task in self-driving and robotics systems, which enables to temporally interpret traffic scenes. Autonomous vehicles clearly benefit from the ultra-wide Field of View (FoV) offered by 360{\deg} panoramic sensors. However, due to the unique imaging process of panoramic cameras, models designed for pinhole images do not directly generalize satisfactorily to 360{\deg} panoramic images. In this paper, we put forward a novel network framework--PanoFlow, to learn optical flow for panoramic images. To overcome the distortions introduced by equirectangular projection in panoramic transformation, we design a Flow Distortion Augmentation (FDA) method, which contains radial flow distortion (FDA-R) or equirectangular flow distortion (FDA-E). We further look into the definition and properties of cyclic optical flow for panoramic videos, and hereby propose a Cyclic Flow Estimation (CFE) method by leveraging the cyclicity of spherical images to infer 360{\deg} optical flow and converting large displacement to relatively small displacement. PanoFlow is applicable to any existing flow estimation method and benefits from the progress of narrow-FoV flow estimation. In addition, we create and release a synthetic panoramic dataset FlowScape based on CARLA to facilitate training and quantitative analysis. PanoFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public OmniFlowNet and the established FlowScape benchmarks. Our proposed approach reduces the End-Point-Error (EPE) on FlowScape by 27.3%. On OmniFlowNet, PanoFlow achieves a 55.5% error reduction from the best published result. We also qualitatively validate our method via a collection vehicle and a public real-world OmniPhotos dataset, indicating strong potential and robustness for real-world navigation applications. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/PanoFlow.
No Unbiased Estimator of the Variance of K-Fold Cross-Validation
Bengio, Yoshua, Grandvalet, Yves
Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare algorithm performances. In order to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate the uncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the estimation of uncertainty around the K-fold cross-validation estimator. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation. An analysis based on the eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix of errors helps to better understand the nature of the problem and shows that naive estimators may grossly underestimate variance, as con£rmed by numerical experiments.
No Unbiased Estimator of the Variance of K-Fold Cross-Validation
Bengio, Yoshua, Grandvalet, Yves
Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare algorithm performances. In order to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate the uncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the estimation of uncertainty around the K-fold cross-validation estimator. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation. An analysis based on the eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix of errors helps to better understand the nature of the problem and shows that naive estimators may grossly underestimate variance, as con£rmed by numerical experiments.
No Unbiased Estimator of the Variance of K-Fold Cross-Validation
Bengio, Yoshua, Grandvalet, Yves
Most machine learning researchers perform quantitative experiments to estimate generalization error and compare algorithm performances. In order to draw statistically convincing conclusions, it is important to estimate theuncertainty of such estimates. This paper studies the estimation of uncertainty around the K-fold cross-validation estimator. The main theorem shows that there exists no universal unbiased estimator of the variance of K-fold cross-validation. An analysis based on the eigendecomposition ofthe covariance matrix of errors helps to better understand the nature of the problem and shows that naive estimators may grossly underestimate variance, as con£rmed by numerical experiments.