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Jul 28

A Discriminative Approach to Bayesian Filtering with Applications to Human Neural Decoding

Given a stationary state-space model that relates a sequence of hidden states and corresponding measurements or observations, Bayesian filtering provides a principled statistical framework for inferring the posterior distribution of the current state given all measurements up to the present time. For example, the Apollo lunar module implemented a Kalman filter to infer its ___location from a sequence of earth-based radar measurements and land safely on the moon. To perform Bayesian filtering, we require a measurement model that describes the conditional distribution of each observation given state. The Kalman filter takes this measurement model to be linear, Gaussian. Here we show how a nonlinear, Gaussian approximation to the distribution of state given observation can be used in conjunction with Bayes' rule to build a nonlinear, non-Gaussian measurement model. The resulting approach, called the Discriminative Kalman Filter (DKF), retains fast closed-form updates for the posterior. We argue there are many cases where the distribution of state given measurement is better-approximated as Gaussian, especially when the dimensionality of measurements far exceeds that of states and the Bernstein-von Mises theorem applies. Online neural decoding for brain-computer interfaces provides a motivating example, where filtering incorporates increasingly detailed measurements of neural activity to provide users control over external devices. Within the BrainGate2 clinical trial, the DKF successfully enabled three volunteers with quadriplegia to control an on-screen cursor in real-time using mental imagery alone. Participant "T9" used the DKF to type out messages on a tablet PC.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 16, 2018

Gated KalmaNet: A Fading Memory Layer Through Test-Time Ridge Regression

As efficient alternatives to softmax Attention, linear State-Space Models (SSMs) achieve constant memory and linear compute, but maintain only a lossy, fading summary of the past, often leading to inferior performance in recall-oriented tasks. We propose Gated KalmaNet (GKA), a layer that accounts for the full past while maintaining SSM-style efficiency. We ground our approach in the Kalman Filter (KF) framework, which provides a principled solution for optimal inference in dynamical systems. We show that several existing SSM layers (DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet, and Kimi Delta Attention) are approximations to the KF recurrence that assume identity error covariance, thereby ignoring how past measurements (keys and values) should optimally influence state updates. In contrast, GKA computes the exact Kalman gain by maintaining the full error covariance. Under a steady-state assumption that enables parallelization, this reduces to solving an online ridge regression problem with constant memory and linear compute cost. A critical insight is that standard KF equations are numerically unstable in low-precision environments (like bfloat16) and hard to parallelize on modern hardware. We address this through: (1) adaptive regularization with input-dependent gating to control the condition number of the ridge regression for numerical stability, and (2) Chebyshev Iteration, which we show is more stable than conventional iterative solvers in low-precision settings. We further develop hardware-aware chunk-wise kernels to enable efficient training. Empirically, GKA outperforms existing SSM layers (like Mamba2 and Gated DeltaNet) on short-context tasks and achieves more than 10\% relative improvement on long-context RAG and LongQA tasks up to 128k tokens.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

Optimal-state Dynamics Estimation for Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Videos

Human motion capture from monocular videos has made significant progress in recent years. However, modern approaches often produce temporal artifacts, e.g. in form of jittery motion and struggle to achieve smooth and physically plausible motions. Explicitly integrating physics, in form of internal forces and exterior torques, helps alleviating these artifacts. Current state-of-the-art approaches make use of an automatic PD controller to predict torques and reaction forces in order to re-simulate the input kinematics, i.e. the joint angles of a predefined skeleton. However, due to imperfect physical models, these methods often require simplifying assumptions and extensive preprocessing of the input kinematics to achieve good performance. To this end, we propose a novel method to selectively incorporate the physics models with the kinematics observations in an online setting, inspired by a neural Kalman-filtering approach. We develop a control loop as a meta-PD controller to predict internal joint torques and external reaction forces, followed by a physics-based motion simulation. A recurrent neural network is introduced to realize a Kalman filter that attentively balances the kinematics input and simulated motion, resulting in an optimal-state dynamics prediction. We show that this filtering step is crucial to provide an online supervision that helps balancing the shortcoming of the respective input motions, thus being important for not only capturing accurate global motion trajectories but also producing physically plausible human poses. The proposed approach excels in the physics-based human pose estimation task and demonstrates the physical plausibility of the predictive dynamics, compared to state of the art. The code is available on https://github.com/cuongle1206/OSDCap

  • 4 authors
·
May 13, 2025

Discovery of interpretable structural model errors by combining Bayesian sparse regression and data assimilation: A chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky test case

Models of many engineering and natural systems are imperfect. The discrepancy between the mathematical representations of a true physical system and its imperfect model is called the model error. These model errors can lead to substantial differences between the numerical solutions of the model and the state of the system, particularly in those involving nonlinear, multi-scale phenomena. Thus, there is increasing interest in reducing model errors, particularly by leveraging the rapidly growing observational data to understand their physics and sources. Here, we introduce a framework named MEDIDA: Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation. MEDIDA only requires a working numerical solver of the model and a small number of noise-free or noisy sporadic observations of the system. In MEDIDA, first the model error is estimated from differences between the observed states and model-predicted states (the latter are obtained from a number of one-time-step numerical integrations from the previous observed states). If observations are noisy, a data assimilation (DA) technique such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is employed to provide the analysis state of the system, which is then used to estimate the model error. Finally, an equation-discovery technique, here the relevance vector machine (RVM), a sparsity-promoting Bayesian method, is used to identify an interpretable, parsimonious, and closed-form representation of the model error. Using the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) system as the test case, we demonstrate the excellent performance of MEDIDA in discovering different types of structural/parametric model errors, representing different types of missing physics, using noise-free and noisy observations.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 1, 2021

Probabilistic 3D Multi-Object Cooperative Tracking for Autonomous Driving via Differentiable Multi-Sensor Kalman Filter

Current state-of-the-art autonomous driving vehicles mainly rely on each individual sensor system to perform perception tasks. Such a framework's reliability could be limited by occlusion or sensor failure. To address this issue, more recent research proposes using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to share perception information with others. However, most relevant works focus only on cooperative detection and leave cooperative tracking an underexplored research field. A few recent datasets, such as V2V4Real, provide 3D multi-object cooperative tracking benchmarks. However, their proposed methods mainly use cooperative detection results as input to a standard single-sensor Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithm. In their approach, the measurement uncertainty of different sensors from different connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) may not be properly estimated to utilize the theoretical optimality property of Kalman Filter-based tracking algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D multi-object cooperative tracking algorithm for autonomous driving via a differentiable multi-sensor Kalman Filter. Our algorithm learns to estimate measurement uncertainty for each detection that can better utilize the theoretical property of Kalman Filter-based tracking methods. The experiment results show that our algorithm improves the tracking accuracy by 17% with only 0.037x communication costs compared with the state-of-the-art method in V2V4Real. Our code and videos are available at https://github.com/eddyhkchiu/DMSTrack/ and https://eddyhkchiu.github.io/dmstrack.github.io/ .

Observation-Centric SORT: Rethinking SORT for Robust Multi-Object Tracking

Kalman filter (KF) based methods for multi-object tracking (MOT) make an assumption that objects move linearly. While this assumption is acceptable for very short periods of occlusion, linear estimates of motion for prolonged time can be highly inaccurate. Moreover, when there is no measurement available to update Kalman filter parameters, the standard convention is to trust the priori state estimations for posteriori update. This leads to the accumulation of errors during a period of occlusion. The error causes significant motion direction variance in practice. In this work, we show that a basic Kalman filter can still obtain state-of-the-art tracking performance if proper care is taken to fix the noise accumulated during occlusion. Instead of relying only on the linear state estimate (i.e., estimation-centric approach), we use object observations (i.e., the measurements by object detector) to compute a virtual trajectory over the occlusion period to fix the error accumulation of filter parameters during the occlusion period. This allows more time steps to correct errors accumulated during occlusion. We name our method Observation-Centric SORT (OC-SORT). It remains Simple, Online, and Real-Time but improves robustness during occlusion and non-linear motion. Given off-the-shelf detections as input, OC-SORT runs at 700+ FPS on a single CPU. It achieves state-of-the-art on multiple datasets, including MOT17, MOT20, KITTI, head tracking, and especially DanceTrack where the object motion is highly non-linear. The code and models are available at https://github.com/noahcao/OC_SORT.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2022

Multivariate Density Estimation with Deep Neural Mixture Models

Albeit worryingly underrated in the recent literature on machine learning in general (and, on deep learning in particular), multivariate density estimation is a fundamental task in many applications, at least implicitly, and still an open issue. With a few exceptions, deep neural networks (DNNs) have seldom been applied to density estimation, mostly due to the unsupervised nature of the estimation task, and (especially) due to the need for constrained training algorithms that ended up realizing proper probabilistic models that satisfy Kolmogorov's axioms. Moreover, in spite of the well-known improvement in terms of modeling capabilities yielded by mixture models over plain single-density statistical estimators, no proper mixtures of multivariate DNN-based component densities have been investigated so far. The paper fills this gap by extending our previous work on Neural Mixture Densities (NMMs) to multivariate DNN mixtures. A maximum-likelihood (ML) algorithm for estimating Deep NMMs (DNMMs) is handed out, which satisfies numerically a combination of hard and soft constraints aimed at ensuring satisfaction of Kolmogorov's axioms. The class of probability density functions that can be modeled to any degree of precision via DNMMs is formally defined. A procedure for the automatic selection of the DNMM architecture, as well as of the hyperparameters for its ML training algorithm, is presented (exploiting the probabilistic nature of the DNMM). Experimental results on univariate and multivariate data are reported on, corroborating the effectiveness of the approach and its superiority to the most popular statistical estimation techniques.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 6, 2020

Modeling Information Blackouts in Missing Not-At-Random Time Series Data

Large-scale traffic forecasting relies on fixed sensor networks that often exhibit blackouts: contiguous intervals of missing measurements caused by detector or communication failures. These outages are typically handled under a Missing At Random (MAR) assumption, even though blackout events may correlate with unobserved traffic conditions (e.g., congestion or anomalous flow), motivating a Missing Not At Random (MNAR) treatment. We propose a latent state-space framework that jointly models (i) traffic dynamics via a linear dynamical system and (ii) sensor dropout via a Bernoulli observation channel whose probability depends on the latent traffic state. Inference uses an Extended Kalman Filter with Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoothing, and parameters are learned via an approximate EM procedure with a dedicated update for detector-specific missingness parameters. On the Seattle inductive loop detector data, introducing latent dynamics yields large gains over naive baselines, reducing blackout imputation RMSE from 7.02 (LOCF) and 5.02 (linear interpolation + seasonal naive) to 4.23 (MAR LDS), corresponding to about a 64% reduction in MSE relative to LOCF. Explicit MNAR modeling provides a consistent but smaller additional improvement on real data (imputation RMSE 4.20; 0.8% RMSE reduction relative to MAR), with similar modest gains for short-horizon post-blackout forecasts (evaluated at 1, 3, and 6 steps). In controlled synthetic experiments, the MNAR advantage increases as the true missingness dependence on latent state strengthens. Overall, temporal dynamics dominate performance, while MNAR modeling offers a principled refinement that becomes most valuable when missingness is genuinely informative.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 5 1

MambaTrack: A Simple Baseline for Multiple Object Tracking with State Space Model

Tracking by detection has been the prevailing paradigm in the field of Multi-object Tracking (MOT). These methods typically rely on the Kalman Filter to estimate the future locations of objects, assuming linear object motion. However, they fall short when tracking objects exhibiting nonlinear and diverse motion in scenarios like dancing and sports. In addition, there has been limited focus on utilizing learning-based motion predictors in MOT. To address these challenges, we resort to exploring data-driven motion prediction methods. Inspired by the great expectation of state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, in long-term sequence modeling with near-linear complexity, we introduce a Mamba-based motion model named Mamba moTion Predictor (MTP). MTP is designed to model the complex motion patterns of objects like dancers and athletes. Specifically, MTP takes the spatial-temporal ___location dynamics of objects as input, captures the motion pattern using a bi-Mamba encoding layer, and predicts the next motion. In real-world scenarios, objects may be missed due to occlusion or motion blur, leading to premature termination of their trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we further expand the application of MTP. We employ it in an autoregressive way to compensate for missing observations by utilizing its own predictions as inputs, thereby contributing to more consistent trajectories. Our proposed tracker, MambaTrack, demonstrates advanced performance on benchmarks such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, which are characterized by complex motion and severe occlusion.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 17, 2024

Generalizable End-to-End Deep Learning Frameworks for Real-Time Attitude Estimation Using 6DoF Inertial Measurement Units

This paper presents a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for real-time inertial attitude estimation using 6DoF IMU measurements. Inertial Measurement Units are widely used in various applications, including engineering and medical sciences. However, traditional filters used for attitude estimation suffer from poor generalization over different motion patterns and environmental disturbances. To address this problem, we propose two deep learning models that incorporate accelerometer and gyroscope readings as inputs. These models are designed to be generalized to different motion patterns, sampling rates, and environmental disturbances. Our models consist of convolutional neural network layers combined with Bi-Directional Long-Short Term Memory followed by a Fully Forward Neural Network to estimate the quaternion. We evaluate the proposed method on seven publicly available datasets, totaling more than 120 hours and 200 kilometers of IMU measurements. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Additionally, our framework demonstrates superior generalization over various motion characteristics and sensor sampling rates. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive and reliable solution for real-time inertial attitude estimation using 6DoF IMUs, which has significant implications for a wide range of applications.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 12, 2023

ABC: Any-Subset Autoregression via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space

Generating continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic processes (e.g., videos, weather forecasts) conditioned on partial observations (e.g., first and last frames) is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches, (e.g., diffusion models), suffer from key limitations: (1) noise-to-data evolution fails to capture structural similarity between states close in physical time and has unstable integration in low-step regimes; (2) random noise injected is insensitive to the physical process's time elapsed, resulting in incorrect dynamics; (3) they overlook conditioning on arbitrary subsets of states (e.g., irregularly sampled timesteps, future observations). We propose ABC: Any-Subset Autoregressive Models via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space. Crucially, we model the process with one continual SDE whose time variable and intermediate states track the real time and process states. This has provable advantages: (1) the starting point for generating future states is the already-close previous state, rather than uninformative noise; (2) random noise injection scales with physical time elapsed, encouraging physically plausible dynamics with similar time-adjacent states. We derive SDE dynamics via changes-of-measure on path space, yielding another advantage: (3) path-dependent conditioning on arbitrary subsets of the state history and/or future. To learn these dynamics, we derive a path- and time-dependent extension of denoising score matching. Our experiments show ABC's superiority to competing methods on multiple domains, including video generation and weather forecasting.

  • 6 authors
·
May 4

Next Generation Multitarget Trackers: Random Finite Set Methods vs Transformer-based Deep Learning

Multitarget Tracking (MTT) is the problem of tracking the states of an unknown number of objects using noisy measurements, with important applications to autonomous driving, surveillance, robotics, and others. In the model-based Bayesian setting, there are conjugate priors that enable us to express the multi-object posterior in closed form, which could theoretically provide Bayes-optimal estimates. However, the posterior involves a super-exponential growth of the number of hypotheses over time, forcing state-of-the-art methods to resort to approximations for remaining tractable, which can impact their performance in complex scenarios. Model-free methods based on deep-learning provide an attractive alternative, as they can, in principle, learn the optimal filter from data, but to the best of our knowledge were never compared to current state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, specially not in contexts where accurate models are available. In this paper, we propose a high-performing deep-learning method for MTT based on the Transformer architecture and compare it to two state-of-the-art Bayesian filters, in a setting where we assume the correct model is provided. Although this gives an edge to the model-based filters, it also allows us to generate unlimited training data. We show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art Bayesian filters in complex scenarios, while matching their performance in simpler cases, which validates the applicability of deep-learning also in the model-based regime. The code for all our implementations is made available at https://github.com/JulianoLagana/MT3 .

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 1, 2021

Solving the Catastrophic Forgetting Problem in Generalized Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify a mix of known and novel categories within unlabeled data sets, providing a more realistic setting for image recognition. Essentially, GCD needs to remember existing patterns thoroughly to recognize novel categories. Recent state-of-the-art method SimGCD transfers the knowledge from known-class data to the learning of novel classes through debiased learning. However, some patterns are catastrophically forgot during adaptation and thus lead to poor performance in novel categories classification. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning approach, LegoGCD, which is seamlessly integrated into previous methods to enhance the discrimination of novel classes while maintaining performance on previously encountered known classes. Specifically, we design two types of techniques termed as Local Entropy Regularization (LER) and Dual-views Kullback Leibler divergence constraint (DKL). The LER optimizes the distribution of potential known class samples in unlabeled data, thus ensuring the preservation of knowledge related to known categories while learning novel classes. Meanwhile, DKL introduces Kullback Leibler divergence to encourage the model to produce a similar prediction distribution of two view samples from the same image. In this way, it successfully avoids mismatched prediction and generates more reliable potential known class samples simultaneously. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed LegoGCD effectively addresses the known category forgetting issue across all datasets, eg, delivering a 7.74% and 2.51% accuracy boost on known and novel classes in CUB, respectively. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Cliffia123/LegoGCD.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 9, 2025

Fire Together Wire Together: A Dynamic Pruning Approach with Self-Supervised Mask Prediction

Dynamic model pruning is a recent direction that allows for the inference of a different sub-network for each input sample during deployment. However, current dynamic methods rely on learning a continuous channel gating through regularization by inducing sparsity loss. This formulation introduces complexity in balancing different losses (e.g task loss, regularization loss). In addition, regularization based methods lack transparent tradeoff hyperparameter selection to realize a computational budget. Our contribution is two-fold: 1) decoupled task and pruning losses. 2) Simple hyperparameter selection that enables FLOPs reduction estimation before training. Inspired by the Hebbian theory in Neuroscience: "neurons that fire together wire together", we propose to predict a mask to process k filters in a layer based on the activation of its previous layer. We pose the problem as a self-supervised binary classification problem. Each mask predictor module is trained to predict if the log-likelihood for each filter in the current layer belongs to the top-k activated filters. The value k is dynamically estimated for each input based on a novel criterion using the mass of heatmaps. We show experiments on several neural architectures, such as VGG, ResNet and MobileNet on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. On CIFAR, we reach similar accuracy to SOTA methods with 15% and 24% higher FLOPs reduction. Similarly in ImageNet, we achieve lower drop in accuracy with up to 13% improvement in FLOPs reduction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 15, 2021

MM-LINS: a Multi-Map LiDAR-Inertial System for Over-Degenerate Environments

SLAM plays a crucial role in automation tasks, such as warehouse logistics, healthcare robotics, and restaurant delivery. These scenes come with various challenges, including navigating around crowds of people, dealing with flying plastic bags that can temporarily blind sensors, and addressing reduced LiDAR density caused by cooking smoke. Such scenarios can result in over-degeneracy, causing the map to drift. To address this issue, this paper presents a multi-map LiDAR-inertial system (MM-LINS) for the first time. The front-end employs an iterated error state Kalman filter for state estimation and introduces a reliable evaluation strategy for degeneracy detection. If over-degeneracy is detected, the active map will be stored into sleeping maps. Subsequently, the system continuously attempts to construct new maps using a dynamic initialization method to ensure successful initialization upon leaving the over-degeneracy. Regarding the back-end, the Scan Context descriptor is utilized to detect inter-map similarity. Upon successful recognition of a sleeping map that shares a common region with the active map, the overlapping trajectory region is utilized to constrain the positional transformation near the edge of the prior map. In response to this, a constraint-enhanced map fusion strategy is proposed to achieve high-precision positional and mapping results. Experiments have been conducted separately on both public datasets that exhibited over-degenerate conditions and in real-world environments. These tests demonstrated the effectiveness of MM-LINS in over-degeneracy environment. Our codes are open-sourced on Github.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025

Robustifying State-space Models for Long Sequences via Approximate Diagonalization

State-space models (SSMs) have recently emerged as a framework for learning long-range sequence tasks. An example is the structured state-space sequence (S4) layer, which uses the diagonal-plus-low-rank structure of the HiPPO initialization framework. However, the complicated structure of the S4 layer poses challenges; and, in an effort to address these challenges, models such as S4D and S5 have considered a purely diagonal structure. This choice simplifies the implementation, improves computational efficiency, and allows channel communication. However, diagonalizing the HiPPO framework is itself an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we propose a general solution for this and related ill-posed diagonalization problems in machine learning. We introduce a generic, backward-stable "perturb-then-diagonalize" (PTD) methodology, which is based on the pseudospectral theory of non-normal operators, and which may be interpreted as the approximate diagonalization of the non-normal matrices defining SSMs. Based on this, we introduce the S4-PTD and S5-PTD models. Through theoretical analysis of the transfer functions of different initialization schemes, we demonstrate that the S4-PTD/S5-PTD initialization strongly converges to the HiPPO framework, while the S4D/S5 initialization only achieves weak convergences. As a result, our new models show resilience to Fourier-mode noise-perturbed inputs, a crucial property not achieved by the S4D/S5 models. In addition to improved robustness, our S5-PTD model averages 87.6% accuracy on the Long-Range Arena benchmark, demonstrating that the PTD methodology helps to improve the accuracy of deep learning models.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Deep Probability Estimation

Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or whether a patient has died or not), because the ground-truth probabilities of the events of interest are typically unknown. The problem is therefore analogous to binary classification, with the difference that the objective is to estimate probabilities rather than predicting the specific outcome. This work investigates probability estimation from high-dimensional data using deep neural networks. There exist several methods to improve the probabilities generated by these models but they mostly focus on model (epistemic) uncertainty. For problems with inherent uncertainty, it is challenging to evaluate performance without access to ground-truth probabilities. To address this, we build a synthetic dataset to study and compare different computable metrics. We evaluate existing methods on the synthetic data as well as on three real-world probability estimation tasks, all of which involve inherent uncertainty: precipitation forecasting from radar images, predicting cancer patient survival from histopathology images, and predicting car crashes from dashcam videos. We also give a theoretical analysis of a model for high-dimensional probability estimation which reproduces several of the phenomena evinced in our experiments. Finally, we propose a new method for probability estimation using neural networks, which modifies the training process to promote output probabilities that are consistent with empirical probabilities computed from the data. The method outperforms existing approaches on most metrics on the simulated as well as real-world data.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 20, 2021

Towards an end-to-end artificial intelligence driven global weather forecasting system

The weather forecasting system is important for science and society, and significant achievements have been made in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medium-range weather forecasting. However, existing AI-based weather forecasting models rely on analysis or reanalysis products from traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as initial conditions for making predictions. Initial states are typically generated by traditional data assimilation components, which are computational expensive and time-consuming. Here we present an AI-based data assimilation model, i.e., Adas, for global weather variables. By introducing the confidence matrix, Adas employs gated convolution to handle sparse observations and gated cross-attention for capturing the interactions between the background and observations. Further, we combine Adas with the advanced AI-based forecasting model (i.e., FengWu) to construct the first end-to-end AI-based global weather forecasting system: FengWu-Adas. We demonstrate that Adas can assimilate global observations to produce high-quality analysis, enabling the system operate stably for long term. Moreover, we are the first to apply the methods to real-world scenarios, which is more challenging and has considerable practical application potential. We have also achieved the forecasts based on the analyses generated by AI with a skillful forecast lead time exceeding that of the IFS for the first time.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

Revisiting Diffusion Model Predictions Through Dimensionality

Recent advances in diffusion and flow matching models have highlighted a shift in the preferred prediction target -- moving from noise (varepsilon) and velocity (v) to direct data (x) prediction -- particularly in high-dimensional settings. However, a formal explanation of why the optimal target depends on the specific properties of the data remains elusive. In this work, we provide a theoretical framework based on a generalized prediction formulation that accommodates arbitrary output targets, of which varepsilon-, v-, and x-prediction are special cases. We derive the analytical relationship between data's geometry and the optimal prediction target, offering a rigorous justification for why x-prediction becomes superior when the ambient dimension significantly exceeds the data's intrinsic dimension. Furthermore, while our theory identifies dimensionality as the governing factor for the optimal prediction target, the intrinsic dimension of manifold-bound data is typically intractable to estimate in practice. To bridge this gap, we propose k-Diff, a framework that employs a data-driven approach to learn the optimal prediction parameter k directly from data, bypassing the need for explicit dimension estimation. Extensive experiments in both latent-space and pixel-space image generation demonstrate that k-Diff consistently outperforms fixed-target baselines across varying architectures and data scales, providing a principled and automated approach to enhancing generative performance.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 29 2

A Frame is Worth One Token: Efficient Generative World Modeling with Delta Tokens

Anticipating diverse future states is a central challenge in video world modeling. Discriminative world models produce a deterministic prediction that implicitly averages over possible futures, while existing generative world models remain computationally expensive. Recent work demonstrates that predicting the future in the feature space of a vision foundation model (VFM), rather than a latent space optimized for pixel reconstruction, requires significantly fewer world model parameters. However, most such approaches remain discriminative. In this work, we introduce DeltaTok, a tokenizer that encodes the VFM feature difference between consecutive frames into a single continuous "delta" token, and DeltaWorld, a generative world model operating on these tokens to efficiently generate diverse plausible futures. Delta tokens reduce video from a three-dimensional spatio-temporal representation to a one-dimensional temporal sequence, for example yielding a 1,024x token reduction with 512x512 frames. This compact representation enables tractable multi-hypothesis training, where many futures are generated in parallel and only the best is supervised. At inference, this leads to diverse predictions in a single forward pass. Experiments on dense forecasting tasks demonstrate that DeltaWorld forecasts futures that more closely align with real-world outcomes, while having over 35x fewer parameters and using 2,000x fewer FLOPs than existing generative world models. Code and weights: https://deltatok.github.io.

amazon Amazon
·
Apr 5 2

Robust Moment-Based Estimation via Spectral Gradient Reweighting

Moment-based estimation is a theoretically attractive approach to parametric inference, especially when likelihood-based estimation is unavailable, misspecified, or computationally inconvenient. However, the moment equations involve sample averages, which makes moment-based estimation sensitive to outliers. We propose the SGR-GMM algorithm, a robust generalized method of moments (GMM) procedure that uses a spectral gradient reweighting (SGR) primitive to soft-reweight the per-observation gradients during the moment-matching optimization. Our analysis has three layers. First, for a fixed center, the SGR primitive is formulated as an entropy-regularized spectral game between a sample-weight player and a density-matrix player, which is analyzed using classical multiplicative-weights and matrix-multiplicative-weights regret bounds. Second, we establish explicit convergence radius and finite termination bound for the fixed-center updates in the SGR primitive. Third, we prove a local finite-sample parameter estimation error bound with explicit dependence on the contamination fraction, inlier gradient stability, local GMM identification strength, and optimization accuracy. We further specialize the SGR-GMM algorithm to obtain a robust diagonally-weighted GMM (DGMM) estimator for estimating heteroscedastic low-rank Gaussian mixtures observed under additive Gaussian noise and strong contamination. In the numerical experiments, the SGR primitive produces nearly-oracle gradient estimation and the robust DGMM specialization substantially improves over non-robust moment baselines. The code and data are available at https://github.com/liu-lzhang/sgr-gmm.

  • 2 authors
·
May 25

Structural and Convergence Analysis of Discrete-Time Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

This paper studies the original discrete-time denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) from a probabilistic point of view. We present three main theoretical results. First, we show that the time-dependent score function associated with the forward diffusion process admits a characterization as the backward component of a forward--backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE). This result provides a structural description of the score function and clarifies how score estimation errors propagate along the reverse-time dynamics. As a by-product, we also obtain a system of semilinear parabolic PDEs for the score function. Second, we use tools from Schrödinger's problem to relate distributional errors arising in reverse time to corresponding errors in forward time. This approach allows us to control the reverse-time sampling error in a systematic way. Third, combining these results, we derive an explicit upper bound for the total variation distance between the sampling distribution of the discrete-time DDPM algorithm and the target data distribution under general finite noise schedules. The resulting bound separates the contributions of the learning error and the time discretization error. Our analysis highlights the intrinsic probabilistic structure underlying discrete-time DDPMs and provides a clearer understanding of the sources of error in their sampling procedure.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 9

Multimodal Atmospheric Super-Resolution With Deep Generative Models

Score-based diffusion modeling is a generative machine learning algorithm that can be used to sample from complex distributions. They achieve this by learning a score function, i.e., the gradient of the log-probability density of the data, and reversing a noising process using the same. Once trained, score-based diffusion models not only generate new samples but also enable zero-shot conditioning of the generated samples on observed data. This promises a novel paradigm for data and model fusion, wherein the implicitly learned distributions of pretrained score-based diffusion models can be updated given the availability of online data in a Bayesian formulation. In this article, we apply such a concept to the super-resolution of a high-dimensional dynamical system, given the real-time availability of low-resolution and experimentally observed sparse sensor measurements from multimodal data. Additional analysis on how score-based sampling can be used for uncertainty estimates is also provided. Our experiments are performed for a super-resolution task that generates the ERA5 atmospheric dataset given sparse observations from a coarse-grained representation of the same and/or from unstructured experimental observations of the IGRA radiosonde dataset. We demonstrate accurate recovery of the high dimensional state given multiple sources of low-fidelity measurements. We also discover that the generative model can balance the influence of multiple dataset modalities during spatiotemporal reconstructions.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 28, 2025 1

iPINNER: An Iterative Physics-Informed Neural Network with Ensemble Kalman Filter

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for solving forward and inverse problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs) by incorporating physical laws into the training process. However, the performance of PINNs is often hindered in real-world scenarios involving noisy observational data and missing physics, particularly in inverse problems. In this work, we propose an iterative multi-objective PINN ensemble Kalman filter (iPINNER) framework that improves the robustness and accuracy of PINNs in both forward and inverse problems by using the ensemble Kalman filter and the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm III (NSGA-III). Specifically, NSGA-III is used as a multi-objective optimizer that can generate various ensemble members of PINNs along the optimal Pareto front, while accounting the model uncertainty in the solution space. These ensemble members are then utilized within the EnKF to assimilate noisy observational data. The EnKF's analysis is subsequently used to refine the data loss component for retraining the PINNs, thereby iteratively updating their parameters. The iterative procedure generates improved solutions to the PDEs. The proposed method is tested on two benchmark problems: the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation and the time-fractional mixed diffusion-wave equation (TFMDWE). The numerical results show it outperforms standard PINNs in handling noisy data and missing physics.

  • 3 authors
·
May 31, 2025

CDMamba: Incorporating Local Clues into Mamba for Remote Sensing Image Binary Change Detection

Recently, the Mamba architecture based on state space models has demonstrated remarkable performance in a series of natural language processing tasks and has been rapidly applied to remote sensing change detection (CD) tasks. However, most methods enhance the global receptive field by directly modifying the scanning mode of Mamba, neglecting the crucial role that local information plays in dense prediction tasks (e.g., binary CD). In this article, we propose a model called CDMamba, which effectively combines global and local features for handling binary CD tasks. Specifically, the Scaled Residual ConvMamba (SRCM) block is proposed to utilize the ability of Mamba to extract global features and convolution to enhance the local details to alleviate the issue that current Mamba-based methods lack detailed clues and are difficult to achieve fine detection in dense prediction tasks. Furthermore, considering the characteristics of bi-temporal feature interaction required for CD, the Adaptive Global Local Guided Fusion (AGLGF) block is proposed to dynamically facilitate the bi-temporal interaction guided by other temporal global/local features. Our intuition is that more discriminative change features can be acquired with the guidance of other temporal features. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that our proposed CDMamba is comparable to the current methods (such as the F1/IoU scores are improved by 2.10%/3.00% and 2.44%/2.91% on LEVIR+CD and CLCD, respectively). Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/zmoka-zht/CDMamba.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Robust Representation Consistency Model via Contrastive Denoising

Robustness is essential for deep neural networks, especially in security-sensitive applications. To this end, randomized smoothing provides theoretical guarantees for certifying robustness against adversarial perturbations. Recently, diffusion models have been successfully employed for randomized smoothing to purify noise-perturbed samples before making predictions with a standard classifier. While these methods excel at small perturbation radii, they struggle with larger perturbations and incur a significant computational overhead during inference compared to classical methods. To address this, we reformulate the generative modeling task along the diffusion trajectories in pixel space as a discriminative task in the latent space. Specifically, we use instance discrimination to achieve consistent representations along the trajectories by aligning temporally adjacent points. After fine-tuning based on the learned representations, our model enables implicit denoising-then-classification via a single prediction, substantially reducing inference costs. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance with minimal computation budget during inference. For example, our method outperforms the certified accuracy of diffusion-based methods on ImageNet across all perturbation radii by 5.3% on average, with up to 11.6% at larger radii, while reducing inference costs by 85times on average. Codes are available at: https://github.com/jiachenlei/rRCM.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

h-calibration: Rethinking Classifier Recalibration with Probabilistic Error-Bounded Objective

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance across numerous learning tasks but often suffer from miscalibration, resulting in unreliable probability outputs. This has inspired many recent works on mitigating miscalibration, particularly through post-hoc recalibration methods that aim to obtain calibrated probabilities without sacrificing the classification performance of pre-trained models. In this study, we summarize and categorize previous works into three general strategies: intuitively designed methods, binning-based methods, and methods based on formulations of ideal calibration. Through theoretical and practical analysis, we highlight ten common limitations in previous approaches. To address these limitations, we propose a probabilistic learning framework for calibration called h-calibration, which theoretically constructs an equivalent learning formulation for canonical calibration with boundedness. On this basis, we design a simple yet effective post-hoc calibration algorithm. Our method not only overcomes the ten identified limitations but also achieves markedly better performance than traditional methods, as validated by extensive experiments. We further analyze, both theoretically and experimentally, the relationship and advantages of our learning objective compared to traditional proper scoring rule. In summary, our probabilistic framework derives an approximately equivalent differentiable objective for learning error-bounded calibrated probabilities, elucidating the correspondence and convergence properties of computational statistics with respect to theoretical bounds in canonical calibration. The theoretical effectiveness is verified on standard post-hoc calibration benchmarks by achieving state-of-the-art performance. This research offers valuable reference for learning reliable likelihood in related fields.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025

On filter design in deep convolutional neural network

The deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in computer vision has given promising results. It is widely applied in many areas, from medicine, agriculture, self-driving car, biometric system, and almost all computer vision-based applications. Filters or weights are the critical elements responsible for learning in DCNN. Backpropagation has been the primary learning algorithm for DCNN and provides promising results, but the size and numbers of the filters remain hyper-parameters. Various studies have been done in the last decade on semi-supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised methods and their properties. The effects of filter initialization, size-shape selection, and the number of filters on learning and optimization have not been investigated in a separate publication to collate all the options. Such attributes are often treated as hyper-parameters and lack mathematical understanding. Computer vision algorithms have many limitations in real-life applications, and understanding the learning process is essential to have some significant improvement. To the best of our knowledge, no separate investigation has been published discussing the filters; this is our primary motivation. This study focuses on arguments for choosing specific physical parameters of filters, initialization, and learning technic over scattered methods. The promising unsupervised approaches have been evaluated. Additionally, the limitations, current challenges, and future scope have been discussed in this paper.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

HumanMAC: Masked Motion Completion for Human Motion Prediction

Human motion prediction is a classical problem in computer vision and computer graphics, which has a wide range of practical applications. Previous effects achieve great empirical performance based on an encoding-decoding style. The methods of this style work by first encoding previous motions to latent representations and then decoding the latent representations into predicted motions. However, in practice, they are still unsatisfactory due to several issues, including complicated loss constraints, cumbersome training processes, and scarce switch of different categories of motions in prediction. In this paper, to address the above issues, we jump out of the foregoing style and propose a novel framework from a new perspective. Specifically, our framework works in a masked completion fashion. In the training stage, we learn a motion diffusion model that generates motions from random noise. In the inference stage, with a denoising procedure, we make motion prediction conditioning on observed motions to output more continuous and controllable predictions. The proposed framework enjoys promising algorithmic properties, which only needs one loss in optimization and is trained in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, it accomplishes the switch of different categories of motions effectively, which is significant in realistic tasks, e.g., the animation task. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks confirm the superiority of the proposed framework. The project page is available at https://lhchen.top/Human-MAC.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 7, 2023

Intrinsic Selection and Particle Resampling for Inference-Time Scaling Beyond Domain Verifiability

Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) has largely succeeded in verifiable domains like math and coding, where cheap verification enables scalable output selection. However, extending ITS to tasks prone to systematic failure - driven by faulty initial assumptions or unmet multidimensional constraints - typically relies on costly external solvers or brittle, model-based verifiers. Our key insight is that the intrinsic statistics of parallel sample sets, specifically length-adjusted tail entropy, provide a robust discriminative signal for solution quality without access to ground truth. Crucially, these statistics serve as a difficulty gate for adaptive compute allocation, dynamically routing problems across scaling regimes. First, Intrinsic Selection (iS) ranks candidates post-hoc, matching consensus-based algorithms across three domains and improving engineering design selection by 20% over pass@1 baselines. Second, Intrinsic Particle Filtering (iPF) generalizes this to step-level resampling, guiding generation toward high-confidence reasoning trajectories to improve pass@1 by 6.1 points on average on hard math problems. Finally, Particle Distillation (dPF) injects privileged guidance via early logit blending and KL-guided resampling, steering generation past systematic reasoning errors to satisfy expert rubrics, yielding up to 26.5% gains on complex clinical responses. Our pipeline applies seamlessly across broad-purpose, ___domain-specialized, and multimodal architectures, successfully extending ITS to open-ended domains without requiring trained reward models or exact ground-truth verification.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 6

Bayes-optimal learning of an extensive-width neural network from quadratically many samples

We consider the problem of learning a target function corresponding to a single hidden layer neural network, with a quadratic activation function after the first layer, and random weights. We consider the asymptotic limit where the input dimension and the network width are proportionally large. Recent work [Cui & al '23] established that linear regression provides Bayes-optimal test error to learn such a function when the number of available samples is only linear in the dimension. That work stressed the open challenge of theoretically analyzing the optimal test error in the more interesting regime where the number of samples is quadratic in the dimension. In this paper, we solve this challenge for quadratic activations and derive a closed-form expression for the Bayes-optimal test error. We also provide an algorithm, that we call GAMP-RIE, which combines approximate message passing with rotationally invariant matrix denoising, and that asymptotically achieves the optimal performance. Technically, our result is enabled by establishing a link with recent works on optimal denoising of extensive-rank matrices and on the ellipsoid fitting problem. We further show empirically that, in the absence of noise, randomly-initialized gradient descent seems to sample the space of weights, leading to zero training loss, and averaging over initialization leads to a test error equal to the Bayes-optimal one.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 7, 2024

T2V-DDPM: Thermal to Visible Face Translation using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Modern-day surveillance systems perform person recognition using deep learning-based face verification networks. Most state-of-the-art facial verification systems are trained using visible spectrum images. But, acquiring images in the visible spectrum is impractical in scenarios of low-light and nighttime conditions, and often images are captured in an alternate ___domain such as the thermal infrared ___domain. Facial verification in thermal images is often performed after retrieving the corresponding visible ___domain images. This is a well-established problem often known as the Thermal-to-Visible (T2V) image translation. In this paper, we propose a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) based solution for T2V translation specifically for facial images. During training, the model learns the conditional distribution of visible facial images given their corresponding thermal image through the diffusion process. During inference, the visible ___domain image is obtained by starting from Gaussian noise and performing denoising repeatedly. The existing inference process for DDPMs is stochastic and time-consuming. Hence, we propose a novel inference strategy for speeding up the inference time of DDPMs, specifically for the problem of T2V image translation. We achieve the state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets. The code and pretrained models are publically available at http://github.com/Nithin-GK/T2V-DDPM

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 19, 2022

Tackling Incomplete Data in Air Quality Prediction: A Bayesian Deep Learning Framework for Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate air quality forecasts are vital for public health alerts, exposure assessment, and emissions control. In practice, observational data are often missing in varying proportions and patterns due to collection and transmission issues. These incomplete spatiotemporal records impede reliable inference and risk assessment and can lead to overconfident extrapolation. To address these challenges, we propose an end to end framework, the channel gated learning unit based spatiotemporal bayesian neural field (CGLUBNF). It uses Fourier features with a graph attention encoder to capture multiscale spatial dependencies and seasonal temporal dynamics. A channel gated learning unit, equipped with learnable activations and gated residual connections, adaptively filters and amplifies informative features. Bayesian inference jointly optimizes predictive distributions and parameter uncertainty, producing point estimates and calibrated prediction intervals. We conduct a systematic evaluation on two real world datasets, covering four typical missing data patterns and comparing against five state of the art baselines. CGLUBNF achieves superior prediction accuracy and sharper confidence intervals. In addition, we further validate robustness across multiple prediction horizons and analysis the contribution of extraneous variables. This research lays a foundation for reliable deep learning based spatio-temporal forecasting with incomplete observations in emerging sensing paradigms, such as real world vehicle borne mobile monitoring.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 3, 2025

DC-Solver: Improving Predictor-Corrector Diffusion Sampler via Dynamic Compensation

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable performance in visual synthesis but are computationally expensive due to the need for multiple evaluations during the sampling. Recent predictor-corrector diffusion samplers have significantly reduced the required number of function evaluations (NFE), but inherently suffer from a misalignment issue caused by the extra corrector step, especially with a large classifier-free guidance scale (CFG). In this paper, we introduce a new fast DPM sampler called DC-Solver, which leverages dynamic compensation (DC) to mitigate the misalignment of the predictor-corrector samplers. The dynamic compensation is controlled by compensation ratios that are adaptive to the sampling steps and can be optimized on only 10 datapoints by pushing the sampling trajectory toward a ground truth trajectory. We further propose a cascade polynomial regression (CPR) which can instantly predict the compensation ratios on unseen sampling configurations. Additionally, we find that the proposed dynamic compensation can also serve as a plug-and-play module to boost the performance of predictor-only samplers. Extensive experiments on both unconditional sampling and conditional sampling demonstrate that our DC-Solver can consistently improve the sampling quality over previous methods on different DPMs with a wide range of resolutions up to 1024times1024. Notably, we achieve 10.38 FID (NFE=5) on unconditional FFHQ and 0.394 MSE (NFE=5, CFG=7.5) on Stable-Diffusion-2.1. Code is available at https://github.com/wl-zhao/DC-Solver

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 5, 2024

UMDATrack: Unified Multi-Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions

Visual object tracking has gained promising progress in past decades. Most of the existing approaches focus on learning target representation in well-conditioned daytime data, while for the unconstrained real-world scenarios with adverse weather conditions, e.g. nighttime or foggy environment, the tremendous ___domain shift leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose UMDATrack, which is capable of maintaining high-quality target state prediction under various adverse weather conditions within a unified ___domain adaptation framework. Specifically, we first use a controllable scenario generator to synthesize a small amount of unlabeled videos (less than 2% frames in source daytime datasets) in multiple weather conditions under the guidance of different text prompts. Afterwards, we design a simple yet effective ___domain-customized adapter (DCA), allowing the target objects' representation to rapidly adapt to various weather conditions without redundant model updating. Furthermore, to enhance the localization consistency between source and target domains, we propose a target-aware confidence alignment module (TCA) following optimal transport theorem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMDATrack can surpass existing advanced visual trackers and lead new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/Z-Z188/UMDATrack.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 30, 2025