From Scalars to Time Series: Rethinking Implicit Neural Representations for Time-Varying Volumetric Data

Implicit neural representations (INRs) for time-varying volumetric data are typically trained using dense sampling over spatiotemporal coordinates, where each observation corresponds to a single point in space and time. This coordinate-wise formulation requires extensive sampling during optimization, leading to high computational cost and inefficient use of temporal structure. In this work, we revisit this design choice and show that dense spatiotemporal sampling is not necessary for learning time-varying fields. Instead, we represent the data as a collection of spatially indexed time series and train INRs using sequence-level supervision over each spatial location, rather than coordinate-wise scalar samples. This reformulation eliminates the need for dense spatiotemporal sampling and instead learns each spatial location from its full temporal evolution in a structured manner. We demonstrate that this representation is compatible with a range of existing INR architectures and consistently improves reconstruction quality, while significantly reducing training cost. Furthermore, we show that this formulation can be combined with mixture-of-experts architectures, and that our MoE instantiation further improves reconstruction quality compared to both the base reformulation and existing MoE-based INR methods, providing a stronger capacity allocation under heterogeneous temporal dynamics.

Versatile Ordering Network: An Attention-based Neural Network for Ordering Across Scales and Quality Metrics

Ordering has been extensively studied in many visualization applications, such as axis and matrix reordering, for the simple reason that the order will greatly impact the perceived pattern of data. Many quality metrics concerning data pattern, perception, and aesthetics are proposed, and respective optimization algorithms are developed. However, the optimization problems related to ordering are often difficult to solve (e.g., TSP is NP-complete), and developing specialized optimization algorithms is costly. In this paper, we propose Versatile Ordering Network (VON), which automatically learns the strategy to order given a quality metric. VON uses the quality metric to evaluate its solutions, and leverages reinforcement learning with a greedy rollout baseline to improve itself. This keeps the metric transparent and allows VON to optimize over different metrics. Additionally, VON uses the attention mechanism to collect information across scales and reposition the data points with respect to the current context. This allows VONs to deal with data points following different distributions. We examine the effectiveness of VON under different usage scenarios and metrics. The results demonstrate that VON can produce comparable results to specialized solvers. The code is available at https://github.com/sysuvis/VON.

Classification of COVID-19 X-ray Images Using a Combination of Deep and Handcrafted Features

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) demonstrated the need for accurate and fast diagnosis methods for emergent viral diseases. Soon after the emergence of COVID-19, medical practitioners used X-ray and computed tomography (CT) images of patients' lungs to detect COVID-19. Machine learning methods are capable of improving the identification accuracy of COVID-19 in X-ray and CT images, delivering near real-time results, while alleviating the burden on medical practitioners. In this work, we demonstrate the efficacy of a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, trained with a combination of deep convolutional and handcrafted features extracted from X-ray chest scans. We use this combination of features to discriminate between healthy, common pneumonia, and COVID-19 patients. The performance of the combined feature approach is compared with a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) and the SVM trained with handcrafted features. We find that combining the features in our novel framework improves the performance of the classification task compared to the independent application of convolutional and handcrafted features. Specifically, we achieve an accuracy of 0.988 in the classification task with our combined approach compared to 0.963 and 0.983 accuracy for the handcrafted features with SVM and CNN respectively.