AI-interpreted Optical Scattering for Robust and Focal Depth-Aware Imaging

Optical scattering has conventionally been regarded as an impediment in imaging research due to the degradation of image quality during reconstruction. Nevertheless, this study explores two cases in which optical scattering may serve a beneficial role in image reconstruction tasks. We compared the No Scattering MNIST dataset with three Scattering MNIST datasets, each generated under distinct scattering conditions. To assess the information content of the resulting speckle patterns, we employed a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) approach which achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning approaches, but has an interpretable latent space. We find that scattering can enhance data robustness against spatial pixel loss by effectively distributing information. We also demonstrate that scattering can enable distinctions of focal depth information. We anticipate that these findings will contribute to more efficient imaging techniques, particularly in the presence of obstacles and three-dimensional signals.

Protein Representation Learning by Capturing Protein Sequence-Structure-Function Relationship

The goal of protein representation learning is to extract knowledge from protein databases that can be applied to various protein-related downstream tasks. Although protein sequence, structure, and function are the three key modalities for a comprehensive understanding of proteins, existing methods for protein representation learning have utilized only one or two of these modalities due to the difficulty of capturing the asymmetric interrelationships between them. To account for this asymmetry, we introduce our novel asymmetric multi-modal masked autoencoder (AMMA). AMMA adopts (1) a unified multi-modal encoder to integrate all three modalities into a unified representation space and (2) asymmetric decoders to ensure that sequence latent features reflect structural and functional information. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed AMMA is highly effective in learning protein representations that exhibit well-aligned inter-modal relationships, which in turn makes it effective for various downstream protein-related tasks.

Context-Preserving Two-Stage Video Domain Translation for Portrait Stylization

Portrait stylization, which translates a real human face image into an artistically stylized image, has attracted considerable interest and many prior works have shown impressive quality in recent years. However, despite their remarkable performances in the image-level translation tasks, prior methods show unsatisfactory results when they are applied to the video domain. To address the issue, we propose a novel two-stage video translation framework with an objective function which enforces a model to generate a temporally coherent stylized video while preserving context in the source video. Furthermore, our model runs in real-time with the latency of 0.011 seconds per frame and requires only 5.6M parameters, and thus is widely applicable to practical real-world applications.