Wind speed super-resolution and validation: from ERA5 to CERRA via diffusion models

The Copernicus Regional Reanalysis for Europe, CERRA, is a high-resolution regional reanalysis dataset for the European domain. In recent years it has shown significant utility across various climate-related tasks, ranging from forecasting and climate change research to renewable energy prediction, resource management, air quality risk assessment, and the forecasting of rare events, among others. Unfortunately, the availability of CERRA is lagging two years behind the current date, due to constraints in acquiring the requisite external data and the intensive computational demands inherent in its generation. As a solution, this paper introduces a novel method using diffusion models to approximate CERRA downscaling in a data-driven manner, without additional informations. By leveraging the lower resolution ERA5 dataset, which provides boundary conditions for CERRA, we approach this as a super-resolution task. Focusing on wind speed around Italy, our model, trained on existing CERRA data, shows promising results, closely mirroring original CERRA data. Validation with in-situ observations further confirms the model's accuracy in approximating ground measurements.

Precipitation nowcasting with generative diffusion models

In recent years traditional numerical methods for accurate weather prediction have been increasingly challenged by deep learning methods. Numerous historical datasets used for short and medium-range weather forecasts are typically organized into a regular spatial grid structure. This arrangement closely resembles images: each weather variable can be visualized as a map or, when considering the temporal axis, as a video. Several classes of generative models, comprising Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, or the recent Denoising Diffusion Models have largely proved their applicability to the next-frame prediction problem, and is thus natural to test their performance on the weather prediction benchmarks. Diffusion models are particularly appealing in this context, due to the intrinsically probabilistic nature of weather forecasting: what we are really interested to model is the probability distribution of weather indicators, whose expected value is the most likely prediction. In our study, we focus on a specific subset of the ERA-5 dataset, which includes hourly data pertaining to Central Europe from the years 2016 to 2021. Within this context, we examine the efficacy of diffusion models in handling the task of precipitation nowcasting. Our work is conducted in comparison to the performance of well-established U-Net models, as documented in the existing literature. Our proposed approach of Generative Ensemble Diffusion (GED) utilizes a diffusion model to generate a set of possible weather scenarios which are then amalgamated into a probable prediction via the use of a post-processing network. This approach, in comparison to recent deep learning models, substantially outperformed them in terms of overall performance.

Head Rotation in Denoising Diffusion Models

Denoising Diffusion Models (DDM) are emerging as the cutting-edge technology in the realm of deep generative modeling, challenging the dominance of Generative Adversarial Networks. However, effectively exploring the latent space's semantics and identifying compelling trajectories for manipulating and editing important attributes of the generated samples remains challenging, primarily due to the high-dimensional nature of the latent space. In this study, we specifically concentrate on face rotation, which is known to be one of the most intricate editing operations. By leveraging a recent embedding technique for Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM), we achieve, in many cases, noteworthy manipulations encompassing a wide rotation angle of $\pm 30^o$, preserving the distinct characteristics of the individual. Our methodology exploits the computation of trajectories approximating clouds of latent representations of dataset samples with different yaw rotations through linear regression. Specific trajectories are obtained by restricting the analysis to subsets of data sharing significant attributes with the source image. One of these attributes is the light provenance: a byproduct of our research is a labeling of CelebA, categorizing images into three major groups based on the illumination direction: left, center, and right.

Comparing the latent space of generative models

Different encodings of datapoints in the latent space of latent-vector generative models may result in more or less effective and disentangled characterizations of the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Many works have been recently devoted to the explorationof the latent space of specific models, mostly focused on the study of how features are disentangled and of how trajectories producing desired alterations of data in the visible space can be found. In this work we address the more general problem of comparing the latent spaces of different models, looking for transformations between them. We confined the investigation to the familiar and largely investigated case of generative models for the data manifold of human faces. The surprising, preliminary result reported in this article is that (provided models have not been taught or explicitly conceived to act differently) a simple linear mapping is enough to pass from a latent space to another while preserving most of the information.

MicroRacer: a didactic environment for Deep Reinforcement Learning

MicroRacer is a simple, open source environment inspired by car racing especially meant for the didactics of Deep Reinforcement Learning. The complexity of the environment has been explicitly calibrated to allow users to experiment with many different methods, networks and hyperparameters settings without requiring sophisticated software or the need of exceedingly long training times. Baseline agents for major learning algorithms such as DDPG, PPO, SAC, TD2 and DSAC are provided too, along with a preliminary comparison in terms of training time and performance.

Enhancing variational generation through self-decomposition

In this article we introduce the notion of Split Variational Autoencoder (SVAE), whose output $\hat{x}$ is obtained as a weighted sum $\sigma \odot \hat{x_1} + (1-\sigma) \odot \hat{x_2}$ of two generated images $\hat{x_1},\hat{x_2}$, and $\sigma$ is a learned compositional map. The network is trained as a usual Variational Autoencoder with a negative loglikelihood loss between training and reconstructed images. The decomposition is nondeterministic, but follows two main schemes, that we may roughly categorize as either "syntactic" or "semantic". In the first case, the map tends to exploit the strong correlation between adjacent pixels, splitting the image in two complementary high frequency sub-images. In the second case, the map typically focuses on the contours of objects, splitting the image in interesting variations of its content, with more marked and distinctive features. In this case, the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of $\hat{x_1}$ and $\hat{x_2}$ is usually lower (hence better) than that of $\hat{x}$, that clearly suffers from being the average of the formers. In a sense, a SVAE forces the Variational Autoencoder to {\em make choices}, in contrast with its intrinsic tendency to average between alternatives with the aim to minimize the reconstruction loss towards a specific sample. According to the FID metric, our technique, tested on typical datasets such as Mnist, Cifar10 and Celeba, allows us to outperform all previous purely variational architectures (not relying on normalization flows).

Dissecting FLOPs along input dimensions for GreenAI cost estimations

The term GreenAI refers to a novel approach to Deep Learning, that is more aware of the ecological impact and the computational efficiency of its methods. The promoters of GreenAI suggested the use of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) as a measure of the computational cost of Neural Networks; however, that measure does not correlate well with the energy consumption of hardware equipped with massively parallel processing units like GPUs or TPUs. In this article, we propose a simple refinement of the formula used to compute floating point operations for convolutional layers, called {\alpha}-FLOPs, explaining and correcting the traditional discrepancy with respect to different layers, and closer to reality. The notion of {\alpha}-FLOPs relies on the crucial insight that, in case of inputs with multiple dimensions, there is no reason to believe that the speedup offered by parallelism will be uniform along all different axes.

Syllabification of the Divine Comedy

We provide a syllabification algorithm for the Divine Comedy using techniques from probabilistic and constraint programming. We particularly focus on the synalephe, addressed in terms of the "propensity" of a word to take part in a synalephe with adjacent words. We jointly provide an online vocabulary containing, for each word, information about its syllabification, the location of the tonic accent, and the aforementioned synalephe propensity, on the left and right sides. The algorithm is intrinsically nondeterministic, producing different possible syllabifications for each verse, with different likelihoods; metric constraints relative to accents on the 10th, 4th and 6th syllables are used to further reduce the solution space. The most likely syllabification is hence returned as output. We believe that this work could be a major milestone for a lot of different investigations. From the point of view of digital humanities it opens new perspectives on computer assisted analysis of digital sources, comprising automated detection of anomalous and problematic cases, metric clustering of verses and their categorization, or more foundational investigations addressing e.g. the phonetic roles of consonants and vowels. From the point of view of text processing and deep learning, information about syllabification and the location of accents opens a wide range of exciting perspectives, from the possibility of automatic learning syllabification of words and verses, to the improvement of generative models, aware of metric issues, and more respectful of the expected musicality.

Variance Loss in Variational Autoencoders

In this article, we highlight what appears to be major issue of Variational Autoencoders, evinced from an extensive experimentation with different network architectures and datasets: the variance of generated data is sensibly lower than that of training data. Since generative models are usually evaluated with metrics such as the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) that compare the distributions of (features of) real versus generated images, the variance loss typically results in degraded scores. This problem is particularly relevant in a two stage setting, where we use a second VAE to sample in the latent space of the first VAE. The minor variance creates a mismatch between the actual distribution of latent variables and those generated by the second VAE, that hinders the beneficial effects of the second stage. Renormalizing the output of the second VAE towards the expected normal spherical distribution, we obtain a sudden burst in the quality of generated samples, as also testified in terms of FID.

Balancing reconstruction error and Kullback-Leibler divergence in Variational Autoencoders

In the loss function of Variational Autoencoders there is a well known tension between two components: the reconstruction loss, improving the quality of the resulting images, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, acting as a regularizer of the latent space. Correctly balancing these two components is a delicate issue, easily resulting in poor generative behaviours. In a recent work, Dai and Wipf obtained a sensible improvement by allowing the network to learn the balancing factor during training, according to a suitable loss function. In this article, we show that learning can be replaced by a simple deterministic computation, helping to understand the underlying mechanism, and resulting in a faster and more accurate behaviour. On typical datasets such as Cifar and Celeba, our technique sensibly outperforms all previous VAE architectures.