Bailey Trang, Parham Saremi, Alan Q Wang, Fangrui Huang, Zahra TehraniNasab, Amar Kumar, Tal Arbel, Li Fei-Fei, Ehsan Adeli
{"title":"Discovering Latent Graphs with GFlowNets for Diverse Conditional Image Generation.","authors":"Bailey Trang, Parham Saremi, Alan Q Wang, Fangrui Huang, Zahra TehraniNasab, Amar Kumar, Tal Arbel, Li Fei-Fei, Ehsan Adeli","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Capturing diversity is crucial in conditional and prompt-based image generation, particularly when conditions contain uncertainty that can lead to multiple plausible outputs. To generate diverse images reflecting this diversity, traditional methods often modify random seeds, making it difficult to discern meaningful differences between samples, or diversify the input prompt, which is limited in verbally interpretable diversity. We propose Rainbow, a novel conditional image generation framework, applicable to any pretrained conditional generative model, that addresses inherent condition/prompt uncertainty and generates diverse plausible images. Rainbow is based on a simple yet effective idea: decomposing the input condition into diverse latent representations, each capturing an aspect of the uncertainty and generating a distinct image. First, we integrate a latent graph, parameterized by Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), into the prompt representation computation. Second, leveraging GFlowNets' advanced graph sampling capabilities to capture uncertainty and output diverse trajectories over the graph, we produce multiple trajectories that collectively represent the input condition, leading to diverse condition representations and corresponding output images. Evaluations on natural image and medical image datasets demonstrate Rainbow's improvement in both diversity and fidelity across image synthesis, image generation, and counterfactual generation tasks.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"38 ","pages":"104553-104599"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13138530/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147846688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrea Dunn Beltran, Daniel Rho, Marc Niethammer, Roni Sengupta
{"title":"NFL-BA: Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment for SLAM in Dynamic Lighting.","authors":"Andrea Dunn Beltran, Daniel Rho, Marc Niethammer, Roni Sengupta","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems typically assume static, distant illumination; however, many real-world scenarios, such as endoscopy, subterranean robotics, and search & rescue in collapsed environments, require agents to operate with a co-located light and camera in the absence of external lighting. In such cases, dynamic near-field lighting introduces strong, view-dependent shading that significantly degrades SLAM performance. We introduce Near-Field Lighting Bundle Adjustment Loss (NFL-BA) which explicitly models near-field lighting as a part of Bundle Adjustment loss and enables better performance for scenes captured with dynamic lighting. NFL-BA can be integrated into neural rendering-based SLAM systems with implicit or explicit scene representations. Our evaluations mainly focus on endoscopy procedure where SLAM can enable autonomous navigation, guidance to unsurveyed regions, blindspot detections, and 3D visualizations, which can significantly improve patient outcomes and endoscopy experience for both physicians and patients. Replacing Photometric Bundle Adjustment loss of SLAM systems with NFL-BA leads to significant improvement in camera tracking, 37% for MonoGS and 14% for EndoGS, and leads to state-of-the-art camera tracking and mapping performance on the C3VD colonoscopy dataset. Further evaluation on indoor scenes captured with phone camera with flashlight turned on, also demonstrate significant improvement in SLAM performance due to NFL-BA.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"38 ","pages":"15437-15465"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13148239/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147846656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Barathi Subramanian, Rathinaraja Jeyaraj, Mitchell Nevin Peterson, Terry Guo, Nigam Shah, Curtis Langlotz, Andrew Y Ng, Jeanne Shen
{"title":"STARC-9: A Large-scale Dataset for Multi-Class Tissue Classification for CRC Histopathology.","authors":"Barathi Subramanian, Rathinaraja Jeyaraj, Mitchell Nevin Peterson, Terry Guo, Nigam Shah, Curtis Langlotz, Andrew Y Ng, Jeanne Shen","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Multi-class tissue-type classification of colorectal cancer (CRC) histopathologic images is a significant step in the development of downstream machine learning models for diagnosis and treatment planning. However, publicly available CRC datasets used to build tissue classifiers often suffer from insufficient morphologic diversity, class imbalance, and low-quality image tiles, limiting downstream model performance and generalizability. To address this research gap, we introduce STARC-9 (STAnford coloRectal Cancer), a large-scale dataset for multi-class tissue classification. STARC-9 comprises 630,000 histopathologic image tiles uniformly sampled across nine clinically relevant tissue classes (each represented by 70,000 tiles), systematically extracted from hematoxylin & eosin-stained whole-slide images (WSI) from 200 CRC patients at the Stanford University School of Medicine. To construct STARC-9, we propose a novel framework, DeepCluster++, consisting of two primary steps to ensure diversity within each tissue class, followed by pathologist verification. First, an encoder from an autoencoder trained specifically on histopathologic images is used to extract feature vectors from all tiles within a given input WSI. Next, K-means clustering groups morphologically similar tiles, followed by an equal-frequency binning method to sample diverse patterns within each tissue class. Finally, the selected tiles are verified by expert gastrointestinal pathologists to ensure classification accuracy. This semi-automated approach significantly reduces the manual effort required for dataset curation while producing high-quality training examples. To validate the utility of STARC-9, we benchmarked baseline convolutional neural networks, transformers, and pathology-specific foundation models on downstream multi-class CRC tissue classification and segmentation tasks when trained on STARC-9 versus publicly available datasets, demonstrating superior generalizability of models trained on STARC-9. Although we demonstrate the utility of DeepCluster++ on CRC as a pilot use-case, it is a flexible framework that can be used for constructing high-quality datasets from large WSI repositories across a wide range of cancer and non-cancer applications. https://huggingface.co/datasets/Path2AI/STARC-9/tree/main https://github.com/Path2AI/STARC-9/.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"38 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13138521/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147846694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lucine L Oganesian, Omid G Sani, Maryam M Shanechi
{"title":"Spectral Learning of Shared Dynamics Between Generalized-Linear Processes.","authors":"Lucine L Oganesian, Omid G Sani, Maryam M Shanechi","doi":"10.52202/079017-2829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52202/079017-2829","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Generalized-linear dynamical models (GLDMs) remain a widely-used framework within neuroscience for modeling time-series data, such as neural spiking activity or categorical decision outcomes. Whereas the standard usage of GLDMs is to model a single data source, certain applications require jointly modeling two generalized-linear time-series sources while also dissociating their shared and private dynamics. Most existing GLDM variants and their associated learning algorithms do not support this capability. Here we address this challenge by developing a multi-step analytical subspace identification algorithm for learning a GLDM that explicitly models shared vs. private dynamics within two generalized-linear time-series. In simulations, we demonstrate our algorithm's ability to dissociate and model the dynamics within two time-series sources while being agnostic to their respective observation distributions. In neural data, we consider two specific applications of our algorithm for modeling discrete population spiking activity with respect to a secondary time-series. In both synthetic and real data, GLDMs learned with our algorithm more accurately decoded one time-series from the other using lower-dimensional latent states, as compared to models identified using existing GLDM learning algorithms.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"37 ","pages":"89150-89183"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12646602/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145643498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contrastive dimension reduction: when and how?","authors":"Sam Hawke, YueEn Ma, Didong Li","doi":"10.52202/079017-2355","DOIUrl":"10.52202/079017-2355","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Dimension reduction (DR) is an important and widely studied technique in exploratory data analysis. However, traditional DR methods are not applicable to datasets with a contrastive structure, where data are split into a foreground group of interest (case or treatment group), and a background group (control group). This type of data, common in biomedical studies, necessitates contrastive dimension reduction (CDR) methods to effectively capture information unique to or enriched in the foreground group relative to the background group. Despite the development of various CDR methods, two critical questions remain underexplored: when should these methods be applied, and how can the information unique to the foreground group be quantified? In this work, we address these gaps by proposing a hypothesis test to determine the existence of contrastive information, and introducing a contrastive dimension estimator (CDE) to quantify the unique components in the foreground group. We provide theoretical support for our methods and validate their effectiveness through extensive simulated, semi-simulated, and real experiments involving images, gene expressions, protein expressions, and medical sensors, demonstrating their ability to identify the unique information in the foreground group.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"2024 ","pages":"74034-74057"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12587890/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145459900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"STimage-1K4M: A histopathology image-gene expression dataset for spatial transcriptomics.","authors":"Jiawen Chen, Muqing Zhou, Wenrong Wu, Jinwei Zhang, Yun Li, Didong Li","doi":"10.52202/079017-1129","DOIUrl":"10.52202/079017-1129","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent advances in multi-modal algorithms have driven and been driven by the increasing availability of large image-text datasets, leading to significant strides in various fields, including computational pathology. However, in most existing medical image-text datasets, the text typically provides high-level summaries that may not sufficiently describe sub-tile regions within a large pathology image. For example, an image might cover an extensive tissue area containing cancerous and healthy regions, but the accompanying text might only specify that this image is a cancer slide, lacking the nuanced details needed for in-depth analysis. In this study, we introduce STimage-1K4M, a novel dataset designed to bridge this gap by providing genomic features for sub-tile images. STimage-1K4M contains 1,149 images derived from spatial transcriptomics data, which captures gene expression information at the level of individual spatial spots within a pathology image. Specifically, each image in the dataset is broken down into smaller sub-image tiles, with each tile paired with 15,000 - 30,000 dimensional gene expressions. With 4,293,195 pairs of sub-tile images and gene expressions, STimage-1K4M offers unprecedented granularity, paving the way for a wide range of advanced research in multi-modal data analysis an innovative applications in computational pathology, and beyond.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"37 ","pages":"35796-35823"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12807523/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145999760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Newton Informed Neural Operator for Solving Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations.","authors":"Wenrui Hao, Xinliang Liu, Yahong Yang","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with multiple solutions is essential in various fields, including physics, biology, and engineering. However, traditional numerical methods, such as finite element and finite difference methods, often face challenges when dealing with nonlinear solvers, particularly in the presence of multiple solutions. These methods can become computationally expensive, especially when relying on solvers like Newton's method, which may struggle with ill-posedness near bifurcation points. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, the Newton Informed Neural Operator, which learns the Newton solver for nonlinear PDEs. Our method integrates traditional numerical techniques with the Newton nonlinear solver, efficiently learning the nonlinear mapping at each iteration. This approach allows us to compute multiple solutions in a single learning process while requiring fewer supervised data points than existing neural network methods.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"37 ","pages":"120832-120860"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11973962/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143804859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yue Yu, Ning Liu, Fei Lu, Tian Gao, Siavash Jafarzadeh, Stewart Silling
{"title":"Nonlocal Attention Operator: Materializing Hidden Knowledge Towards Interpretable Physics Discovery.","authors":"Yue Yu, Ning Liu, Fei Lu, Tian Gao, Siavash Jafarzadeh, Stewart Silling","doi":"10.52202/079017-3613","DOIUrl":"10.52202/079017-3613","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite the recent popularity of attention-based neural architectures in core AI fields like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), their potential in modeling complex physical systems remains under-explored. Learning problems in physical systems are often characterized as discovering operators that map between function spaces based on a few instances of function pairs. This task frequently presents a severely ill-posed PDE inverse problem. In this work, we propose a novel neural operator architecture based on the attention mechanism, which we coin Nonlocal Attention Operator (NAO), and explore its capability towards developing a foundation physical model. In particular, we show that the attention mechanism is equivalent to a double integral operator that enables nonlocal interactions among spatial tokens, with a data-dependent kernel characterizing the inverse mapping from data to the hidden parameter field of the underlying operator. As such, the attention mechanism extracts global prior information from training data generated by multiple systems, and suggests the exploratory space in the form of a nonlinear kernel map. Consequently, NAO can address ill-posedness and rank deficiency in inverse PDE problems by encoding regularization and achieving generalizability. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of NAO over baseline neural models in terms of generalizability to unseen data resolutions and system states. Our work not only suggests a novel neural operator architecture for learning interpretable foundation models of physical systems, but also offers a new perspective towards understanding the attention mechanism. Our code and data accompanying this paper are available at https://github.com/fishmoon1234/NAO.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"2024 ","pages":"113797-113822"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12588098/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145460325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dynamics of Supervised and Reinforcement Learning in the Non-Linear Perceptron.","authors":"Christian Schmid, James M Murray","doi":"10.52202/079017-4334","DOIUrl":"10.52202/079017-4334","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The ability of a brain or a neural network to efficiently learn depends crucially on both the task structure and the learning rule. Previous works have analyzed the dynamical equations describing learning in the relatively simplified context of the perceptron under assumptions of a student-teacher framework or a linearized output. While these assumptions have facilitated theoretical understanding, they have precluded a detailed understanding of the roles of the nonlinearity and input-data distribution in determining the learning dynamics, limiting the applicability of the theories to real biological or artificial neural networks. Here, we use a stochastic-process approach to derive flow equations describing learning, applying this framework to the case of a nonlinear perceptron performing binary classification. We characterize the effects of the learning rule (supervised or reinforcement learning, SL/RL) and input-data distribution on the perceptron's learning curve and the forgetting curve as subsequent tasks are learned. In particular, we find that the input-data noise differently affects the learning speed under SL vs. RL, as well as determines how quickly learning of a task is overwritten by subsequent learning. Additionally, we verify our approach with real data using the MNIST dataset. This approach points a way toward analyzing learning dynamics for more-complex circuit architectures.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"37 ","pages":"136424-136445"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13021158/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147576665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gaia Molinaro, Cédric Colas, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Anne G E Collins
{"title":"Latent Learning Progress Drives Autonomous Goal Selection in Human Reinforcement Learning.","authors":"Gaia Molinaro, Cédric Colas, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Anne G E Collins","doi":"10.52202/079017-1013","DOIUrl":"10.52202/079017-1013","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans are autotelic agents who learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. However, the precise mechanisms guiding human goal selection remain unclear. Learning progress, typically measured as the observed change in performance, can provide a valuable signal for goal selection in both humans and artificial agents. We hypothesize that human choices of goals may also be driven by <i>latent learning progress</i>, which humans can estimate through knowledge of their actions and the environment - even without experiencing immediate changes in performance. To test this hypothesis, we designed a hierarchical reinforcement learning task in which human participants (N = 175) repeatedly chose their own goals and learned goal-conditioned policies. Our behavioral and computational modeling results confirm the influence of latent learning progress on goal selection and uncover inter-individual differences, partially mediated by recognition of the environment's hierarchical structure. By investigating the role of latent learning progress in human goal selection, we pave the way for more effective and personalized learning experiences as well as the advancement of more human-like autotelic machines.</p>","PeriodicalId":72099,"journal":{"name":"Advances in neural information processing systems","volume":"37 ","pages":"32251-32280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12676560/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145703067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}