Abstract

Air pollution is a growing concern across the world. Road traffic is one of the major contributors to air pollution in urban areas. One of the approaches to solve this problem is to design a transportation policy that i) avoids extreme pollution in any area, ii) enables short transit times, and iii) makes effective use of the road capacities. Previous work to address this problem named MaxFlow-MCMC algorithm, proposed a novel sampling-based approach for this problem. In this work, we propose a significantly faster extension to the algorithm without compromising on the performance involving the following contributions: (a) We provide the first construction of a Markov Chain to sample a set of k-optimal max flow solutions directly from a planar graph. (b) We simulate traffic on large-scale real-world roadmaps using the SUMO traffic simulator. We observe a significant speed improvement in the range of 22 to 242 times in our experiments while obtaining lesser average pollution.

Abstract

The discovery of potential therapeutic agents for life‑threatening diseases has become a significant problem. There is a requirement for fast and accurate methods to identify drug‑like molecules that can be used as potential candidates for novel targets. Existing techniques like high‑throughput screening and virtual screening are time‑consuming and inefficient. Traditional molecule generation pipelines are more efficient than virtual screening but use time‑consuming docking software. Such docking functions can be emulated using Machine Learning models with comparable accuracy and faster execution times. However, we find that when pre‑trained machine learning models are employed in generative pipelines as oracles, they suffer from model degradation in areas where data is scarce. In this study, we propose an active learning‑based model that can be added as a supplement to enhanced molecule generation architectures. The proposed method uses uncertainty sampling on the molecules created by the generator model and dynamically learns as the generator samples molecules from different regions of the chemical space. The proposed framework can generate molecules with high binding affinity with ∼a 70% improvement in runtime compared to the baseline model by labeling only ∼30% of molecules compared to the baseline oracle.

Abstract

urpose: Melanin is a major contributor to the intensity and width of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) on optical coherence tomography (OCT). It is hypothesized, high melanin concentrations cause scattering making the RPE appear as a thick band and obscures adjacent layers. A split band appearance of the outermost hyperreflective band has been demonstrated in Albinism, meaning the RPE and Bruch’s Membrane appear as two separate bands. We performed a cross-sectional observational study to test the hypothesis that a reduction in melanin causes an increased ability to differentiate the hyperreflective bands seen on OCT images of the outer retina. Methods: Using the UK Biobank dataset, we generated a randomised sample of 300 participants with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria was an age between 40 to 65, visual acuity better than 0.60 logMAR, no ocular pathology, and

Abstract

Melanin is a major contributor to the intensity and width of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) on optical coherence tomography (OCT). It is hypothesized, high melanin concentrations cause scattering making the RPE appear as a thick band and obscures adjacent layers. A split band appearance of the outermost hyperreflective band has been demonstrated in Albinism, meaning the RPE and Bruch’s Membrane appear as two separate bands. We performed a cross-sectional observational study to test the hypothesis that a reduction in melanin causes an increased ability to differentiate the hyperreflective bands seen on OCT images of the outer retina.

Abstract

Parametric path problems arise independently in diverse domains, ranging from transportation to finance, where they are studied under various assumptions. We formulate a general path problem with relaxed assumptions, and describe how this formulation is applicable in these domains. We study the complexity of the general problem, and a variant of it where preprocessing is allowed. We show that when the parametric weights are linear functions, algorithms remain tractable even under our relaxed assumptions. Furthermore, we show that if the weights are allowed to be non-linear, the problem becomes NP-hard. We also study the mutli-dimensional version of the problem where the weight functions are parameterized by multiple parameters. We show that even with two parameters, the problem is NP-hard.

Abstract

Quality assessment of agricultural produce is a crucial step in minimizing food stock wastage. However, this is currently done manually and often requires expert supervision, especially in smaller seeds like corn. We propose a novel computer vision-based system for automating this process. We build a novel seed image acquisition setup, which captures both the top and bottom views. Dataset collection for this problem has challenges of data annotation costs/time and class imbalance. We address these challenges by i.) using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) to generate real-looking images for the classes with lesser images and ii.) annotate a large dataset with minimal expert human intervention by using a Batch Active Learning (BAL) based annotation tool. We benchmark different image classification models on the dataset obtained. We are able to get accuracies of up to 91.6% for testing the physical purity of seed samples.

Abstract

Normalizing flows are an essential alternative to GANs for generative modelling, which can be optimized directly on the maximum likelihood of the dataset. They also allow computation of the exact latent vector corresponding to an image since they are composed of invertible transformations. However, the requirement of invertibility of the transformation prevents standard and expressive neural network models such as CNNs from being directly used. Emergent convolutions were proposed to construct an invertible 3×3 CNN layer using a pair of masked CNN layers, making them inefficient. We study conditions such that 3×3 CNNs are invertible, allowing them to construct expressive normalizing flows. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on a padded CNN for it to be invertible. Our conditions for invertibility are simple, can easily be maintained during the training process. Since we require only a single CNN layer for every effective invertible CNN layer, our approach is more efficient than emerging convolutions. We also proposed a coupling method, Quad-coupling. We benchmark our approach and show similar performance results to emergent convolutions while improving the model's efficiency

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed utilization of modern machine learning approaches for predicting properties of material using available datasets. However, to identify potential candidates for material discovery, one has to systematically scan through a large chemical space and subsequently calculate the properties of all such samples. On the other hand, generative methods are capable of efficiently sampling the chemical space and can generate molecules/materials with desired properties. In this study, we report a deep learning based inorganic material generator (DING) framework consisting of a generator module and a predictor module. The generator module is developed based upon conditional variational autoencoders (CVAE) and the predictor module consists of three deep neural networks trained for predicting enthalpy of formation, volume per atom and energy per atom chosen to demonstrate the proposed method. The predictor and generator modules have been developed using a one hot key representation of the material composition. A series of tests were done to examine the robustness of the predictor models, to demonstrate the continuity of the latent material space, and its ability to generate materials exhibiting target property values. The DING architecture proposed in this paper can be extended to other properties based on which the chemical space can be efficiently explored for interesting materials/molecules.

Abstract

We continue the study of the covering complexity of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) initiated by Guruswami, Håstad and Sudan [SIAM J. Comp. 2002] and Dinur and Kol [CCC’13]. The covering number of a CSP instance Φ is the smallest number of assignments to the variables of Φ, such that each constraint of Φ is satisfied by at least one of the assignments. We show the following results: 1. Assuming a covering variant of the Unique Games Conjecture, introduced by Dinur and Kol, we show that for every non-odd predicate P over any constant-size alphabet and every integer K, it is NP-hard to approximate the covering number within a factor of K. This yields a complete characterization of CSPs over constant-size alphabets that are hard to cover.

Abstract

While several datasets for autonomous navigation have become available in recent years, they have tended to focus on structured driving environments. This usually corresponds to well-delineated infrastructure such as lanes, a small number of well-defined categories for traffic participants, low variation in object or background appearance and strong adherence to traffic rules. We propose DS, a novel dataset for road scene understanding in unstructured environments where the above assumptions are largely not satisfied. It consists of 10,004 images, finely annotated with 34 classes collected from 182 drive sequences on Indian roads. The label set is expanded in comparison to popular benchmarks such as Cityscapes, to account for new classes. It also reflects label distributions of road scenes significantly different from existing datasets, with most classes displaying greater within-class diversity. Consistent with …