Evaluating the Efficacy of Skincare Product: A Realistic Short-Term Facial Pore Simulation

Simulating the effects of skincare products on face is a potential new way to communicate the efficacy of skincare products in skin diagnostics and product recommendations. Furthermore, such simulations enable one to anticipate his/her skin conditions and better manage skin health. However, there is a lack of effective simulations today. In this paper, we propose the first simulation model to reveal facial pore changes after using skincare products. Our simulation pipeline consists of 2 steps: training data establishment and facial pore simulation. To establish training data, we collect face images with various pore quality indexes from short-term (8-weeks) clinical studies. People often experience significant skin fluctuations (due to natural rhythms, external stressors, etc.,), which introduces large perturbations in clinical data. To address this problem, we propose a sliding window mechanism to clean data and select representative index(es) to represent facial pore changes. Facial pore simulation stage consists of 3 modules: UNet-based segmentation module to localize facial pores; regression module to predict time-dependent warping hyperparameters; and deformation module, taking warping hyperparameters and pore segmentation labels as inputs, to precisely deform pores accordingly. The proposed simulation is able to render realistic facial pore changes. And this work will pave the way for future research in facial skin simulation and skincare product developments.

Debiasing Recommendation by Learning Identifiable Latent Confounders

Recommendation systems aim to predict users' feedback on items not exposed to them. Confounding bias arises due to the presence of unmeasured variables (e.g., the socio-economic status of a user) that can affect both a user's exposure and feedback. Existing methods either (1) make untenable assumptions about these unmeasured variables or (2) directly infer latent confounders from users' exposure. However, they cannot guarantee the identification of counterfactual feedback, which can lead to biased predictions. In this work, we propose a novel method, i.e., identifiable deconfounder (iDCF), which leverages a set of proxy variables (e.g., observed user features) to resolve the aforementioned non-identification issue. The proposed iDCF is a general deconfounded recommendation framework that applies proximal causal inference to infer the unmeasured confounders and identify the counterfactual feedback with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets verify the proposed method's effectiveness and robustness.

Diverse Human Motion Prediction via Gumbel-Softmax Sampling from an Auxiliary Space

Diverse human motion prediction aims at predicting multiple possible future pose sequences from a sequence of observed poses. Previous approaches usually employ deep generative networks to model the conditional distribution of data, and then randomly sample outcomes from the distribution. While different results can be obtained, they are usually the most likely ones which are not diverse enough. Recent work explicitly learns multiple modes of the conditional distribution via a deterministic network, which however can only cover a fixed number of modes within a limited range. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling strategy for sampling very diverse results from an imbalanced multimodal distribution learned by a deep generative model. Our method works by generating an auxiliary space and smartly making randomly sampling from the auxiliary space equivalent to the diverse sampling from the target distribution. We propose a simple yet effective network architecture that implements this novel sampling strategy, which incorporates a Gumbel-Softmax coefficient matrix sampling method and an aggressive diversity promoting hinge loss function. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves both the diversity and accuracy of the samplings compared with previous state-of-the-art sampling approaches. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Droliven/diverse_sampling.

Atomic Filter: a Weak Form of Shift Operator for Graph Signals

The shift operation plays a crucial role in the classical signal processing. It is the generator of all the filters and the basic operation for time-frequency analysis, such as windowed Fourier transform and wavelet transform. With the rapid development of internet technology and big data science, a large amount of data are expressed as signals defined on graphs. In order to establish the theory of filtering, windowed Fourier transform and wavelet transform in the setting of graph signals, we need to extend the shift operation of classical signals to graph signals. It is a fundamental problem since the vertex set of a graph is usually not a vector space and the addition operation cannot be defined on the vertex set of the graph. In this paper, based on our understanding on the core role of shift operation in classical signal processing we propose the concept of atomic filters, which can be viewed as a weak form of the shift operator for graph signals. Then, we study the conditions such that an atomic filter is norm-preserving, periodic, or real-preserving. The property of real-preserving holds naturally in the classical signal processing, but no the research has been reported on this topic in the graph signal setting. With these conditions we propose the concept of normal atomic filters for graph signals, which degenerates into the classical shift operator under mild conditions if the graph is circulant. Typical examples of graphs that have or have not normal atomic filters are given. Finally, as an application, atomic filters are utilized to construct time-frequency atoms which constitute a frame of the graph signal space.

Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction

This paper presents a high-quality human motion prediction method that accurately predicts future human poses given observed ones. Our method is based on the observation that a good initial guess of the future poses is very helpful in improving the forecasting accuracy. This motivates us to propose a novel two-stage prediction framework, including an init-prediction network that just computes the good guess and then a formal-prediction network that predicts the target future poses based on the guess. More importantly, we extend this idea further and design a multi-stage prediction framework where each stage predicts initial guess for the next stage, which brings more performance gain. To fulfill the prediction task at each stage, we propose a network comprising Spatial Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (S-DGCN) and Temporal Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (T-DGCN). Alternatively executing the two networks helps extract spatiotemporal features over the global receptive field of the whole pose sequence. All the above design choices cooperating together make our method outperform previous approaches by large margins: 6%-7% on Human3.6M, 5%-10% on CMU-MoCap, and 13%-16% on 3DPW.

Deep Filtering with DNN, CNN and RNN

This paper is about a deep learning approach for linear and nonlinear filtering. The idea is to train a neural network with Monte Carlo samples generated from a nominal dynamic model. Then the network weights are applied to Monte Carlo samples from an actual dynamic model. A main focus of this paper is on the deep filters with three major neural network architectures (DNN, CNN, RNN). Our deep filter compares favorably to the traditional Kalman filter in linear cases and outperform the extended Kalman filter in nonlinear cases. Then a switching model with jumps is studied to show the adaptiveness and power of our deep filtering. Among the three major NNs, the CNN outperform the others on average. while the RNN does not seem to be suitable for the filtering problem. One advantage of the deep filter is its robustness when the nominal model and actual model differ. The other advantage of deep filtering is real data can be used directly to train the deep neutral network. Therefore, model calibration can be by-passed all together.

Two New Stenosis Detection Methods of Coronary Angiograms

Coronary angiography is the "gold standard" for diagnosing coronary artery disease (CAD). At present, the methods for detecting and evaluating coronary artery stenosis cannot satisfy the clinical needs, e.g., there is no prior study of detecting stenoses in prespecified vessel segments, which is necessary in clinical practice. Two vascular stenosis detection methods are proposed to assist the diagnosis. The first one is an automatic method, which can automatically extract the entire coronary artery tree and mark all the possible stenoses. The second one is an interactive method. With this method, the user can choose any vessel segment to do further analysis of its stenoses. Experiments show that the proposed methods are robust for angiograms with various vessel structures. The precision, sensitivity, and $F_1$ score of the automatic stenosis detection method are 0.821, 0.757, and 0.788, respectively. Further investigation proves that the interactive method can provide a more precise outcome of stenosis detection, and our quantitative analysis is closer to reality. The proposed automatic method and interactive method are effective and can complement each other in clinical practice. The first method can be used for preliminary screening, and the second method can be used for further quantitative analysis. We believe the proposed solution is more suitable for the clinical diagnosis of CAD.

MSR-GCN: Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Networks for Human Motion Prediction

Human motion prediction is a challenging task due to the stochasticity and aperiodicity of future poses. Recently, graph convolutional network has been proven to be very effective to learn dynamic relations among pose joints, which is helpful for pose prediction. On the other hand, one can abstract a human pose recursively to obtain a set of poses at multiple scales. With the increase of the abstraction level, the motion of the pose becomes more stable, which benefits pose prediction too. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Residual Graph Convolution Network (MSR-GCN) for human pose prediction task in the manner of end-to-end. The GCNs are used to extract features from fine to coarse scale and then from coarse to fine scale. The extracted features at each scale are then combined and decoded to obtain the residuals between the input and target poses. Intermediate supervisions are imposed on all the predicted poses, which enforces the network to learn more representative features. Our proposed approach is evaluated on two standard benchmark datasets, i.e., the Human3.6M dataset and the CMU Mocap dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Droliven/MSRGCN.