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Given an input painting, we reconstruct a time-lapse video of how it may have been painted. We formulate this as an autoregressive image generation problem, in which an initially blank "canvas" is iteratively updated. The model learns from real artists by training on many painting videos. Our approach incorporates text and region understanding to define a set of painting "instructions" and updates the canvas with a novel diffusion-based renderer. The method extrapolates beyond the limited, acrylic style paintings on which it has been trained, showing plausible results for a wide range of artistic styles and genres., Comment: Project Page: https://inversepainting.github.io

Portrait editing is challenging for existing techniques due to difficulties in preserving subject features like identity. In this paper, we propose a training-based method leveraging auto-generated paired data to learn desired editing while ensuring the preservation of unchanged subject features. Specifically, we design a data generation process to create reasonably good training pairs for desired editing at low cost. Based on these pairs, we introduce a Multi-Conditioned Diffusion Model to effectively learn the editing direction and preserve subject features. During inference, our model produces accurate editing mask that can guide the inference process to further preserve detailed subject features. Experiments on costume editing and cartoon expression editing show that our method achieves state-of-the-art quality, quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantifying the value of data within a machine learning workflow can play a pivotal role in making more strategic decisions in machine learning initiatives. The existing Shapley value based frameworks for data valuation in machine learning are computationally expensive as they require considerable amount of repeated training of the model to obtain the Shapley value. In this paper, we introduce an efficient data valuation framework EcoVal, to estimate the value of data for machine learning models in a fast and practical manner. Instead of directly working with individual data sample, we determine the value of a cluster of similar data points. This value is further propagated amongst all the member cluster points. We show that the overall value of the data can be determined by estimating the intrinsic and extrinsic value of each data. This is enabled by formulating the performance of a model as a \textit{production function}, a concept which is popularly used to estimate the amount of output based on factors like labor and capital in a traditional free economic market. We provide a formal proof of our valuation technique and elucidate the principles and mechanisms that enable its accelerated performance. We demonstrate the real-world applicability of our method by showcasing its effectiveness for both in-distribution and out-of-sample data. This work addresses one of the core challenges of efficient data valuation at scale in machine learning models. The code is available at \underline{https://github.com/respai-lab/ecoval}., Comment: KDD-2024

The automotive industry plays a critical role in the global economy, and particularly important is the expanding Chinese automobile market due to its immense scale and influence. However, existing automotive sector datasets are limited in their coverage, failing to adequately consider the growing demand for more and diverse variables. This paper aims to bridge this data gap by introducing a comprehensive dataset spanning the years from 2016 to 2022, encompassing sales data, online reviews, and a wealth of information related to the Chinese automotive industry. This dataset serves as a valuable resource, significantly expanding the available data. Its impact extends to various dimensions, including improving forecasting accuracy, expanding the scope of business applications, informing policy development and regulation, and advancing academic research within the automotive sector. To illustrate the dataset's potential applications in both business and academic contexts, we present two application examples. Our developed dataset enhances our understanding of the Chinese automotive market and offers a valuable tool for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders worldwide.

We present a method to generate full-body selfies from photographs originally taken at arms length. Because self-captured photos are typically taken close up, they have limited field of view and exaggerated perspective that distorts facial shapes. We instead seek to generate the photo some one else would take of you from a few feet away. Our approach takes as input four selfies of your face and body, a background image, and generates a full-body selfie in a desired target pose. We introduce a novel diffusion-based approach to combine all of this information into high-quality, well-composed photos of you with the desired pose and background., Comment: Project page: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~boweiche/project_page/totalselfie/

Near-Periodic Patterns (NPP) are ubiquitous in man-made scenes and are composed of tiled motifs with appearance differences caused by lighting, defects, or design elements. A good NPP representation is useful for many applications including image completion, segmentation, and geometric remapping. But representing NPP is challenging because it needs to maintain global consistency (tiled motifs layout) while preserving local variations (appearance differences). Methods trained on general scenes using a large dataset or single-image optimization struggle to satisfy these constraints, while methods that explicitly model periodicity are not robust to periodicity detection errors. To address these challenges, we learn a neural implicit representation using a coordinate-based MLP with single image optimization. We design an input feature warping module and a periodicity-guided patch loss to handle both global consistency and local variations. To further improve the robustness, we introduce a periodicity proposal module to search and use multiple candidate periodicities in our pipeline. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on more than 500 images of building facades, friezes, wallpapers, ground, and Mondrian patterns on single and multi-planar scenes., Comment: ECCV 2022. Project page: https://armastuschen.github.io/projects/NPP_Net/

We describe a novel approach to decompose a single panorama of an empty indoor environment into four appearance components: specular, direct sunlight, diffuse and diffuse ambient without direct sunlight. Our system is weakly supervised by automatically generated semantic maps (with floor, wall, ceiling, lamp, window and door labels) that have shown success on perspective views and are trained for panoramas using transfer learning without any further annotations. A GAN-based approach supervised by coarse information obtained from the semantic map extracts specular reflection and direct sunlight regions on the floor and walls. These lighting effects are removed via a similar GAN-based approach and a semantic-aware inpainting step. The appearance decomposition enables multiple applications including sun direction estimation, virtual furniture insertion, floor material replacement, and sun direction change, providing an effective tool for virtual home staging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large and recently released dataset of panoramas of empty homes., Comment: To appear in SIGGRAPH 2022

There is a growing interest in product aesthetics analytics and design. However, the lack of available large-scale data that covers various variables and information is one of the biggest challenges faced by analysts and researchers. In this paper, we present our multidisciplinary initiative of developing a comprehensive automotive dataset from different online sources and formats. Specifically, the created dataset contains 1.4 million images from 899 car models and their corresponding model specifications and sales information over more than ten years in the UK market. Our work makes significant contributions to: (i) research and applications in the automotive industry; (ii) big data creation and sharing; (iii) database design; and (iv) data fusion. Apart from our motivation, technical details and data structure, we further present three simple examples to demonstrate how our data can be used in business research and applications., Comment: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Big Data, pp. 4130-4137, 2022

We propose a new approach to train a variational information bottleneck (VIB) that improves its robustness to adversarial perturbations. Unlike the traditional methods where the hard labels are usually used for the classification task, we refine the categorical class information in the training phase with soft labels which are obtained from a pre-trained reference neural network and can reflect the likelihood of the original class labels. We also relax the Gaussian posterior assumption in the VIB implementation by using the mutual information neural estimation. Extensive experiments have been performed with the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, and the results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the benchmarked models., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Multi-task learning (MTL) is an important subject in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Its applications to computer vision, signal processing, and speech recognition are ubiquitous. Although this subject has attracted considerable attention recently, the performance and robustness of the existing models to different tasks have not been well balanced. This article proposes an MTL model based on the architecture of the variational information bottleneck (VIB), which can provide a more effective latent representation of the input features for the downstream tasks. Extensive observations on three public data sets under adversarial attacks show that the proposed model is competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms concerning the prediction accuracy. Experimental results suggest that combining the VIB and the task-dependent uncertainties is a very effective way to abstract valid information from the input features for accomplishing multiple tasks., Comment: 10 pages

Partial (replication) index tracking is a popular passive investment strategy. It aims to replicate the performance of a given index by constructing a tracking portfolio which contains some constituents of the index. The tracking error optimisation is quadratic and NP-hard when taking the L0 constraint into account so it is usually solved by heuristic methods such as evolutionary algorithms. This paper introduces a simple, efficient and scalable connectionist model as an alternative. We propose a novel reparametrisation method and then solve the optimisation problem with stochastic neural networks. The proposed approach is examined with S&P 500 index data for more than 10 years and compared with widely used index tracking approaches such as forward and backward selection and the largest market capitalisation methods. The empirical results show our model achieves excellent performance. Compared with the benchmarked models, our model has the lowest tracking error, across a range of portfolio sizes. Meanwhile it offers comparable performance to the others on secondary criteria such as volatility, Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2020 (Oral). 8 pages, 4 figures. Camera-ready version

One trend in the recent healthcare transformations is people are encouraged to monitor and manage their health based on their daily diets and physical activity habits. However, much attention of the use of operational research and analytical models in healthcare has been paid to the systematic level such as country or regional policy making or organisational issues. This paper proposes a model concerned with healthcare analytics at the individual level, which can predict human physical activity status from sequential lifelogging data collected from wearable sensors. The model has a two-stage hybrid structure (in short, MOGP-HMM) -- a multi-objective genetic programming (MOGP) algorithm in the first stage to reduce the dimensions of lifelogging data and a hidden Markov model (HMM) in the second stage for activity status prediction over time. It can be used as a decision support tool to provide real-time monitoring, statistical analysis and personalized advice to individuals, encouraging positive attitudes towards healthy lifestyles. We validate the model with the real data collected from a group of participants in the UK, and compare it with other popular two-stage hybrid models. Our experimental results show that the MOGP-HMM can achieve comparable performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first study that uses the MOGP in the hybrid two-stage structure for individuals' activity status prediction. It fits seamlessly with the current trend in the UK healthcare transformation of patient empowerment as well as contributing to a strategic development for more efficient and cost-effective provision of healthcare.

In this paper we develop a novel neural network model for predicting implied volatility surface. Prior financial domain knowledge is taken into account. A new activation function that incorporates volatility smile is proposed, which is used for the hidden nodes that process the underlying asset price. In addition, financial conditions, such as the absence of arbitrage, the boundaries and the asymptotic slope, are embedded into the loss function. This is one of the very first studies which discuss a methodological framework that incorporates prior financial domain knowledge into neural network architecture design and model training. The proposed model outperforms the benchmarked models with the option data on the S&P 500 index over 20 years. More importantly, the domain knowledge is satisfied empirically, showing the model is consistent with the existing financial theories and conditions related to implied volatility surface., Comment: 8 pages, SIGKDD 2021