The inverse problem of supervised reconstruction of depth-variable (time-dependent) parameters in ordinary differential equations is considered, with the typical application of finding weights of a neural ordinary differential equation (NODE) for a residual network with time continuous layers. The differential equation is treated as an abstract and isolated entity, termed a standalone NODE (sNODE), to facilitate for a wide range of applications. The proposed parameter reconstruction is performed by minimizing a cost functional covering a variety of loss functions and penalty terms. Regularization via penalty terms is incorporated to enhance ethical and trustworthy AI formulations. A nonlinear conjugate gradient mini-batch optimization scheme (NCG) is derived for the training having the benefit of including a sensitivity problem. The model (differential equation)-based approach is thus combined with a data-driven learning procedure. Mathematical properties are stated for the differential equation and the cost functional. The adjoint problem needed is derived together with the sensitivity problem. The sensitivity problem itself can estimate changes in the output under perturbation of the trained parameters. To preserve smoothness during the iterations, the Sobolev gradient is calculated and incorporated. Numerical results are included to validate the procedure for a NODE and synthetic datasets and compared with standard gradient approaches. For stability, using the sensitivity problem, a strategy for adversarial attacks is constructed, and it is shown that the given method with Sobolev gradients is more robust than standard approaches for parameter identification.

Tillgång till vädervarningar med information om förväntade konsekvenser av vädret är nödvändigt för god krisberedskap hos myndigheter, kommuner, näringsliv och privatpersoner. Vidareutveckling av varningssystem som fokuserar på förväntade störningar (konsekvensbaserade varningssystem) är därför en viktig komponent i samhällets hantering av klimatförändringar. Forskningsprojektet AI för klimatanpassning (AI4CA) har analyserat möjligheter och hinder med att inkludera AI-baserad text- och bildanalys som stöd till SMHI:s konsekvensbaserade vädervarningssystem och på sikt även stödja långsiktig klimatanpassning. 

Hand in hand with the rapid development of machine learning, deep learning and generative AI algorithms and architectures, the graphics community has seen a remarkable evolution of novel techniques for material and appearance capture. Typically, these machine-learning-driven methods and technologies, in contrast to traditional techniques, rely on only a single or very few input images, while enabling the recovery of detailed, high-quality measurements of bi-directional reflectance distribution functions, as well as the corresponding spatially varying material properties, also known as Spatially Varying Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Functions (SVBRDFs). Learning-based approaches for appearance capture will play a key role in the development of new technologies that will exhibit a significant impact on virtually all domains of graphics. Therefore, to facilitate future research, this State-of-the-Art Report (STAR) presents an in-depth overview of the state-of-the-art in machine-learning-driven material capture in general, and focuses on SVBRDF acquisition in particular, due to its importance in accurately modelling complex light interaction properties of real-world materials. The overview includes a categorization of current methods along with a summary of each technique, an evaluation of their functionalities, their complexity in terms of acquisition requirements, computational aspects and usability constraints. The STAR is concluded by looking forward and summarizing open challenges in research and development toward predictive and general appearance capture in this field. A complete list of the methods and papers reviewed in this survey is available at . Papers surveyed in this study with a focus on the extraction of BRDF or SVBRDF from a few measurements, classifying them according to their specific geometries and lighting conditions. Whole-scene refers to techniques that capture entire indoor or outdoor outside the scope of this survey. image

We present a neural network representation which can be used for visually analyzing the similarities and differences in a large corpus of trained neural networks. The focus is on architecture-invariant comparisons based on network weights, estimating similarities of the statistical footprints encoded by the training setups and stochastic optimization procedures. To make this possible, we propose a novel visual descriptor of neural network weights. The visual descriptor considers local weight statistics in a model-agnostic manner by encoding the distribution of weights over different model depths. We show how such a representation can extract descriptive information, is robust to different parameterizations of a model, and is applicable to different architecture specifications. The descriptor is used to create a model atlas by projecting a model library to a 2D representation, where clusters can be found based on similar weight properties. A cluster analysis strategy makes it possible to understand the weight properties of clusters and how these connect to the different datasets and hyper-parameters used to train the models.

This paper considers a compressive multi-spectral light field camera model that utilizes a one-hot spectral-coded mask and a microlens array to capture spatial, angular, and spectral information using a singlemonochrome sensor. We propose a model that employs compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct thecomplete multi-spectral light field from undersampled measurements. Unlike previous work where a lightfield is vectorized to a 1D signal, our method employs a 5D basis and a novel 5D measurement model, hence,matching the intrinsic dimensionality of multispectral light fields. We mathematically and empirically showthe equivalence of 5D and 1D sensing models, and most importantly that the 5D framework achieves or-ders of magnitude faster reconstruction while requiring a small fraction of the memory. Moreover, our newmultidimensional sensing model opens new research directions for designing efficient visual data acquisitionalgorithms and hardware.

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (D-MRI) is a technique to measure the diffusion of water, in biological tissues. It is used to detect microscopic patterns, such as neural fibers in the living human brain, with many medical and neuroscience applications e.g. for fiber tracking. In this paper, we consider High-Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) which provides one of the richest representations of water diffusion. It records the movement of water molecules by measuring diffusion under 64 or more directions. A key challenge is that it generates high-dimensional, large, and complex datasets. In our work, we develop a novel representation that exploits the inherent sparsity of the HARDI signal by approximating it as a linear sum of basic atoms in an overcomplete data-driven dictionary using only a sparse set of coefficients. We show that this approach can be efficiently integrated into the standard q-ball imaging pipeline to compute the diffusion orientation distribution function (ODF). Sparse representations have the potential to reduce the size of the data while also giving some insight into the data. To explore the results, we provide a visualization of the atoms of the dictionary and their frequency in the data to highlight the basic characteristics of the data. We present our proposed pipeline and demonstrate its performance on 5 HARDI datasets.

We propose a novel dictionary-based representation learning model for Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs) aiming atcompact storage, real-time rendering performance, and high image quality. Our model is trained once, using a small trainingset, and then used to obtain a sparse tensor containing the model parameters. Our technique exploits redundancies in the dataacross all dimensions simultaneously, as opposed to existing methods that use only angular information and ignore correlationsin the spatial domain. We show that our model admits efficient angular interpolation directly in the model space, rather thanthe BTF space, leading to a notably higher rendering speed than in previous work. Additionally, the high quality-storage costtradeoff enabled by our method facilitates controlling the image quality, storage cost, and rendering speed using a singleparameter, the number of coefficients. Previous methods rely on a fixed number of latent variables for training and testing,hence limiting the potential for achieving a favorable quality-storage cost tradeoff and scalability. Our experimental resultsdemonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, as well as achieving a highercompression ratio and rendering speed.

Extreme weather events, such as flooding, are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. Therefore, the prediction of extreme weather events, assessment of their local impacts in urban environments, and implementation of adaptation measures are becoming high-priority challenges for local, regional, and national agencies and authorities. To manage these challenges, access to accurate weather warnings and information about the occurrence, extent, and impacts of extreme weather events are crucial. As a result, in addition to official sources of information for prediction and monitoring, citizen volunteered geographic information (VGI) has emerged as a complementary source of valuable information. In this work, we propose the formulation of an approach to complement the impact-based weather warning system that has been introduced in Sweden in 2021 by making use of such alternative sources of data. We present and discuss design considerations and opportunities towards the creation of a visual analytics (VA) pipeline for the identification and exploration of extreme weather events and their impacts from VGI texts and images retrieved from social media. The envisioned VA pipeline incorporates three main steps: (1) data collection, (2) image/text classification and analysis, and (3) visualization and exploration through an interactive visual interface. We envision that our work has the potential to support three processes that involve multiple stakeholders of the weather warning system: (1) the validation of previously issued warnings, (2) local and regional assessment-support documentation, and (3) the monitoring of ongoing events. The results of this work could thus generate information that is relevant to climate adaptation decision making and provide potential support for the future development of national weather warning systems.

As the problem of reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) imagesfrom a single exposure has attracted much research effort, it isessential to provide a robust protocol and clear guidelines on howto evaluate and compare new methods. In this work, we comparedsix recent single image HDR reconstruction (SI-HDR) methodsin a subjective image quality experiment on an HDR display. Wefound that only two methods produced results that are, on average,more preferred than the unprocessed single exposure images. Whenthe same methods are evaluated using image quality metrics, astypically done in papers, the metric predictions correlate poorlywith subjective quality scores. The main reason is a significant toneand color difference between the reference and reconstructed HDRimages. To improve the predictions of image quality metrics, we propose correcting for the inaccuracies of the estimated cameraresponse curve before computing quality values. We further analyzethe sources of prediction noise when evaluating SI-HDR methodsand demonstrate that existing metrics can reliably predict onlylarge quality differences.

Evaluating the transmittance between two points along a ray is a key component in solving the light transport through heterogeneous participating media and entails computing an intractable exponential of the integrated medium's extinction coefficient. While algorithms for estimating this transmittance exist, there is a lack of theoretical knowledge about their behaviour, which also prevent new theoretically sound algorithms from being developed. For this purpose, we introduce a new class of unbiased transmittance estimators based on random sampling or truncation of a Taylor expansion of the exponential function. In contrast to classical tracking algorithms, these estimators are non-analogous to the physical light transport process and directly sample the underlying extinction function without performing incremental advancement. We present several versions of the new class of estimators, based on either importance sampling or Russian roulette to provide finite unbiased estimators of the infinite Taylor series expansion. We also show that the well known ratio tracking algorithm can be seen as a special case of the new class of estimators. Lastly, we conduct performance evaluations on both the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU), and the results demonstrate that the new algorithms outperform traditional algorithms for heterogeneous mediums.