Overall I found the paper to be solid and rather enjoyable, and I would qualify it as a strong candidate for a poster. The authors' method of plotting velocity fields by decomposing the velocity into direction and speed, which they've apparently introduced, is especially effective. It made their arguments and conclusions much easier to follow, and will hopefully be picked up by others. In my opinion stating that this approach leads to "interpretable models" might be somewhat overselling the results – the interpretability of the results is still hampered by the fact that models are composed by 10-100 more or less arbitrary basis functions. That being said, their capacity to reproduce salient features of the phase diagram certainly makes them more interpretable than, say, recurrent neural networks.

Deep learning-based lane detection (LD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, such as adaptive cruise control. However, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attack methods on LD exhibit limited effectiveness in dynamic real-world scenarios, primarily because they fail to consider dynamic scene factors, including changes in driving perspectives (e.g., viewpoint transformations) and environmental conditions (e.g., weather or lighting changes). To tackle this issue, this paper introduces BadLANE, a dynamic scene adaptation backdoor attack for LD designed to withstand changes in real-world dynamic scene factors. To address the challenges posed by changing driving perspectives, we propose an amorphous trigger pattern composed of shapeless pixels. This trigger design allows the backdoor to be activated by various forms or shapes of mud spots or pollution on the road or lens, enabling adaptation to changes in vehicle observation viewpoints during driving. To mitigate the effects of environmental changes, we design a meta-learning framework to train meta-generators tailored to different environmental conditions. These generators produce meta-triggers that incorporate diverse environmental information, such as weather or lighting conditions, as the initialization of the trigger patterns for backdoor implantation, thus enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on various commonly used LD models in both digital and physical domains validate the effectiveness of our attacks, outperforming other baselines significantly (+25.15% on average in Attack Success Rate). Our codes will be available upon paper publication.

Population neural recordings with long-range temporal structure are often best understood in terms of a common underlying low-dimensional dynamical process. Advances in recording technology provide access to an ever-larger fraction of the population, but the standard computational approaches available to identify the collective dynamics scale poorly with the size of the dataset. We describe a new, scalable approach to discovering low-dimensional dynamics that underlie simultaneously recorded spike trains from a neural population. We formulate the Recurrent Linear Model (RLM) by generalising the Kalman-filter-based likelihood calculation for latent linear dynamical systems to incorporate a generalised-linear observation process. We show that RLMs describe motor-cortical population data better than either directly-coupled generalised-linear models or latent linear dynamical system models with generalised-linear observations. We also introduce the cascaded generalised-linear model (CGLM) to capture low-dimensional instantaneous correlations in neural populations. The CGLM describes the cortical recordings better than either Ising or Gaussian models and, like the RLM, can be fit exactly and quickly. The CGLM can also be seen as a generalisation of a lowrank Gaussian model, in this case factor analysis. The computational tractability of the RLM and CGLM allow both to scale to very high-dimensional neural data.

Latent linear dynamical systems with Bernoulli observations provide a powerful modeling framework for identifying the temporal dynamics underlying binary time series data, which arise in a variety of contexts such as binary decision-making and discrete stochastic processes (e.g., binned neural spike trains). Here we develop a spectral learning method for fast, efficient fitting of probit-Bernoulli latent linear dynamical system (LDS) models. Our approach extends traditional subspace identification methods to the Bernoulli setting via a transformation of the first and second sample moments. This results in a robust, fixed-cost estimator that avoids the hazards of local optima and the long computation time of iterative fitting procedures like the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. In regimes where data is limited or assumptions about the statistical structure of the data are not met, we demonstrate that the spectral estimate provides a good initialization for Laplace-EM fitting. Finally, we show that the estimator provides substantial benefits to real world settings by analyzing data from mice performing a sensory decision-making task.

Clinical investigations of anatomy's structural changes over time could greatly benefit from population-level quantification of shape, or spatiotemporal statistic shape modeling (SSM). Such a tool enables characterizing patient organ cycles or disease progression in relation to a cohort of interest. Constructing shape models requires establishing a quantitative shape representation (e.g., corresponding landmarks). Particle-based shape modeling (PSM) is a data-driven SSM approach that captures population-level shape variations by optimizing landmark placement. However, it assumes cross-sectional study designs and hence has limited statistical power in representing shape changes over time. Existing methods for modeling spatiotemporal or longitudinal shape changes require predefined shape atlases and pre-built shape models that are typically constructed cross-sectionally. This paper proposes a data-driven approach inspired by the PSM method to learn population-level spatiotemporal shape changes directly from shape data. We introduce a novel SSM optimization scheme that produces landmarks that are in correspondence both across the population (inter-subject) and across time-series (intra-subject). We apply the proposed method to 4D cardiac data from atrial-fibrillation patients and demonstrate its efficacy in representing the dynamic change of the left atrium. Furthermore, we show that our method outperforms an image-based approach for spatiotemporal SSM with respect to a generative time-series model, the Linear Dynamical System (LDS). LDS fit using a spatiotemporal shape model optimized via our approach provides better generalization and specificity, indicating it accurately captures the underlying time-dependency.

We study the problem of learning a mixture of multiple linear dynamical systems (LDSs) from unlabeled short sample trajectories, each generated by one of the LDS models. Despite the wide applicability of mixture models for time-series data, learning algorithms that come with end-to-end performance guarantees are largely absent from existing literature. There are multiple sources of technical challenges, including but not limited to (1) the presence of latent variables (i.e. the unknown labels of trajectories); (2) the possibility that the sample trajectories might have lengths much smaller than the dimension $d$ of the LDS models; and (3) the complicated temporal dependence inherent to time-series data. To tackle these challenges, we develop a two-stage meta-algorithm, which is guaranteed to efficiently recover each ground-truth LDS model up to error $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d/T})$, where $T$ is the total sample size. We validate our theoretical studies with numerical experiments, confirming the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

Understanding speed and travel-time dynamics in response to various city related events is an important and challenging problem. Sensor data (numerical) containing average speed of vehicles passing through a road link can be interpreted in terms of traffic related incident reports from city authorities and social media data (textual), providing a complementary understanding of traffic dynamics. State-of-the-art research is focused on either analyzing sensor observations or citizen observations; we seek to exploit both in a synergistic manner. We demonstrate the role of domain knowledge in capturing the non-linearity of speed and travel-time dynamics by segmenting speed and travel-time observations into simpler components amenable to description using linear models such as Linear Dynamical System (LDS). Specifically, we propose Restricted Switching Linear Dynamical System (RSLDS) to model normal speed and travel time dynamics and thereby characterize anomalous dynamics. We utilize the city traffic events extracted from text to explain anomalous dynamics. We present a large scale evaluation of the proposed approach on a real-world traffic and twitter dataset collected over a year with promising results.

Building accurate predictive models of clinical multivariate time series is crucial for understanding of the patient condition, the dynamics of a disease, and clinical decision making. A challenging aspect of this process is that the model should be flexible and adaptive to reflect well patient-specific temporal behaviors and this also in the case when the available patient-specific data are sparse and short span. To address this problem we propose and develop an adaptive two-stage forecasting approach for modeling multivariate, irregularly sampled clinical time series of varying lengths. The proposed model (1) learns the population trend from a collection of time series for past patients; (2) captures individual-specific short-term multivariate variability; and (3) adapts by automatically adjusting its predictions based on new observations. The proposed forecasting model is evaluated on a real-world clinical time series dataset. The results demonstrate that our approach is superior on the prediction tasks for multivariate, irregularly sampled clinical time series, and it outperforms both the population based and patient-specific time series prediction models in terms of prediction accuracy.

Population neural recordings with long-range temporal structure are often best understood in terms of a shared underlying low-dimensional dynamical process. Advances in recording technology provide access to an ever larger fraction of the population, but the standard computational approaches available to identify the collective dynamics scale poorly with the size of the dataset. Here we describe a new, scalable approach to discovering the low-dimensional dynamics that underlie simultaneously recorded spike trains from a neural population. Our method is based on recurrent linear models (RLMs), and relates closely to timeseries models based on recurrent neural networks. We formulate RLMs for neural data by generalising the Kalman-filter-based likelihood calculation for latent linear dynamical systems (LDS) models to incorporate a generalised-linear observation process. We show that RLMs describe motor-cortical population data better than either directly-coupled generalised-linear models or latent linear dynamical system models with generalised-linear observations. We also introduce the cascaded linear model (CLM) to capture low-dimensional instantaneous correlations in neural populations. The CLM describes the cortical recordings better than either Ising or Gaussian models and, like the RLM, can be fit exactly and quickly. The CLM can also be seen as a generalization of a low-rank Gaussian model, in this case factor analysis. The computational tractability of the RLM and CLM allow both to scale to very high-dimensional neural data.