Previous methods decompose blind super resolution (SR) problem into two sequential steps: \textit{i}) estimating blur kernel from given low-resolution (LR) image and \textit{ii}) restoring SR image based on estimated kernel. This two-step solution involves two independently trained models, which may not well compatible with each other. Small estimation error of the first step could cause severe performance drop of the second one. While on the other hand, the first step can only utilize limited information from LR image, which makes it difficult to predict highly accurate blur kernel. Towards these issues, instead of considering these two steps separately, we adopt an alternating optimization algorithm, which can estimate blur kernel and restore SR image in a single model.

Statistically correcting measured cross sections for detector effects is an important step across many applications. In particle physics, this inverse problem is known as \textit{unfolding}. In cases with complex instruments, the distortions they introduce are often known only implicitly through simulations of the detector. Modern machine learning has enabled efficient simulation-based approaches for unfolding high-dimensional data. Among these, one of the first methods successfully deployed on experimental data is the \textsc{OmniFold} algorithm, a classifier-based Expectation-Maximization procedure. In practice, however, the forward model is only approximately specified, and the corresponding uncertainty is encoded through nuisance parameters. Building on the well-studied \textsc{OmniFold} algorithm, we show how to extend machine learning-based unfolding to incorporate nuisance parameters. Our new algorithm, called Profile \textsc{OmniFold}, is demonstrated using a Gaussian example as well as a particle physics case study using simulated data from the CMS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Weaknesses: All weaknesses are related to experiments, analysis and understanding. 1. Missing Methods to compare to: - NTIRE'20 leaders in real-SR tracks seems to be a must. Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution CVPR'20 (cited [33] but not compared against) - Cornillere et al. Blind Image Super-Resolution with Spatially Variant Degradations SIGA"19 2. Comparisons settings: Setting2- DIV2KRK is a great choice, but only few methods are tested on it. Also- comparison on non-blind setting with bicubic kernel is important to understand if the improvement is in the upscaling or in the kernel estimation. Using GT kernel and compare, try different intializations, ablate architectural elements (what happens if you do the high-level idea using the basic networks introduced in IKC?- this will let us know if the advantage comes from the elegant idea or from an optimized architecture).

Machine learning enables unbinned, highly-differential cross section measurements. A recent idea uses generative models to morph a starting simulation into the unfolded data. We show how to extend two morphing techniques, Schr\"odinger Bridges and Direct Diffusion, in order to ensure that the models learn the correct conditional probabilities. This brings distribution mapping to a similar level of accuracy as the state-of-the-art conditional generative unfolding methods. Numerical results are presented with a standard benchmark dataset of single jet substructure as well as for a new dataset describing a 22-dimensional phase space of Z + 2-jets.

Previous methods decompose blind super resolution (SR) problem into two sequential steps: \textit{i}) estimating blur kernel from given low-resolution (LR) image and \textit{ii}) restoring SR image based on estimated kernel. This two-step solution involves two independently trained models, which may not well compatible with each other. Small estimation error of the first step could cause severe performance drop of the second one. While on the other hand, the first step can only utilize limited information from LR image, which makes it difficult to predict highly accurate blur kernel. Towards these issues, instead of considering these two steps separately, we adopt an alternating optimization algorithm, which can estimate blur kernel and restore SR image in a single model.

Deconvolving ("unfolding'') detector distortions is a critical step in the comparison of cross section measurements with theoretical predictions in particle and nuclear physics. However, most existing approaches require histogram binning while many theoretical predictions are at the level of statistical moments. We develop a new approach to directly unfold distribution moments as a function of another observable without having to first discretize the data. Our Moment Unfolding technique uses machine learning and is inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We demonstrate the performance of this approach using jet substructure measurements in collider physics. With this illustrative example, we find that our Moment Unfolding protocol is more precise than bin-based approaches and is as or more precise than completely unbinned methods.

Narratives include a rich source of events unfolding over time and context. Automatic understanding of these events provides a summarised comprehension of the narrative for further computation (such as reasoning). In this paper, we study the Information Status (IS) of the events and propose a novel challenging task: the automatic identification of new events in a narrative. We define an event as a triplet of subject, predicate, and object. The event is categorized as new with respect to the discourse context and whether it can be inferred through commonsense reasoning. We annotated a publicly available corpus of narratives with the new events at sentence level using human annotators. We present the annotation protocol and study the quality of the annotation and the difficulty of the task. We publish the annotated dataset, annotation materials, and machine learning baseline models for the task of new event extraction for narrative understanding.

Unfolding is an important procedure in particle physics experiments which corrects for detector effects and provides differential cross section measurements that can be used for a number of downstream tasks, such as extracting fundamental physics parameters. Traditionally, unfolding is done by discretizing the target phase space into a finite number of bins and is limited in the number of unfolded variables. Recently, there have been a number of proposals to perform unbinned unfolding with machine learning. However, none of these methods (like most unfolding methods) allow for simultaneously constraining (profiling) nuisance parameters. We propose a new machine learning-based unfolding method that results in an unbinned differential cross section and can profile nuisance parameters. The machine learning loss function is the full likelihood function, based on binned inputs at detector-level. We first demonstrate the method with simple Gaussian examples and then show the impact on a simulated Higgs boson cross section measurement.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Many times we have come across this statement – Lasso regression causes sparsity while Ridge regression doesn't! But I'm pretty sure that most of us might not have understood how exactly this works. Let's try to understand this using calculus. First, let's understand what sparsity is.

Matrix inversion problems are often encountered in experimental physics, and in particular in high-energy particle physics, under the name of unfolding. The true spectrum of a physical quantity is deformed by the presence of a detector, resulting in an observed spectrum. If we discretize both the true and observed spectra into histograms, we can model the detector response via a matrix. Inferring a true spectrum starting from an observed spectrum requires therefore inverting the response matrix. Many methods exist in literature for this task, all starting from the observed spectrum and using a simulated true spectrum as a guide to obtain a meaningful solution in cases where the response matrix is not easily invertible. In this Manuscript, I take a different approach to the unfolding problem. Rather than inverting the response matrix and transforming the observed distribution into the most likely parent distribution in generator space, I sample many distributions in generator space, fold them through the original response matrix, and pick the generator-level distribution that yields the folded distribution closest to the data distribution. Regularization schemes can be introduced to treat the case where non-diagonal response matrices result in high-frequency oscillations of the solution in true space, and the introduced bias is studied. The algorithm performs as well as traditional unfolding algorithms in cases where the inverse problem is well-defined in terms of the discretization of the true and smeared space, and outperforms them in cases where the inverse problem is ill-defined---when the number of truth-space bins is larger than that of smeared-space bins. These advantages stem from the fact that the algorithm does not technically invert any matrix and uses only the data distribution as a guide to choose the best solution.