Learning Robust Intervention Representations with Delta Embeddings

Causal representation learning has attracted significant research interest during the past few years, as a means for improving model generalization and robustness. Causal representations of interventional image pairs, have the property that only variables corresponding to scene elements affected by the intervention / action are changed between the start state and the end state. While most work in this area has focused on identifying and representing the variables of the scene under a causal model, fewer efforts have focused on representations of the interventions themselves. In this work, we show that an effective strategy for improving out of distribution (OOD) robustness is to focus on the representation of interventions in the latent space. Specifically, we propose that an intervention can be represented by a Causal Delta Embedding that is invariant to the visual scene and sparse in terms of the causal variables it affects. Leveraging this insight, we propose a framework that is capable of learning causal representations from image pairs, without any additional supervision. Experiments in the Causal Triplet challenge demonstrate that Causal Delta Embeddings are highly effective in OOD settings, significantly exceeding baseline performance in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.

Advances in Diffusion Models for Image Data Augmentation: A Review of Methods, Models, Evaluation Metrics and Future Research Directions

Image data augmentation constitutes a critical methodology in modern computer vision tasks, since it can facilitate towards enhancing the diversity and quality of training datasets; thereby, improving the performance and robustness of machine learning models in downstream tasks. In parallel, augmentation approaches can also be used for editing/modifying a given image in a context- and semantics-aware way. Diffusion Models (DMs), which comprise one of the most recent and highly promising classes of methods in the field of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), have emerged as a powerful tool for image data augmentation, capable of generating realistic and diverse images by learning the underlying data distribution. The current study realizes a systematic, comprehensive and in-depth review of DM-based approaches for image augmentation, covering a wide range of strategies, tasks and applications. In particular, a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental principles, model architectures and training strategies of DMs is initially performed. Subsequently, a taxonomy of the relevant image augmentation methods is introduced, focusing on techniques regarding semantic manipulation, personalization and adaptation, and application-specific augmentation tasks. Then, performance assessment methodologies and respective evaluation metrics are analyzed. Finally, current challenges and future research directions in the field are discussed.