Daily Papers

We demonstrate several techniques to encourage practical uses of neural networks for fluid flow estimation. In the present paper, three perspectives which are remaining challenges for applications of machine learning to fluid dynamics are considered: 1. interpretability of machine-learned results, 2. bulking out of training data, and 3. generalizability of neural networks. For the interpretability, we first demonstrate two methods to observe the internal procedure of neural networks, i.e., visualization of hidden layers and application of gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM), applied to canonical fluid flow estimation problems -- (1) drag coefficient estimation of a cylinder wake and (2) velocity estimation from particle images. It is exemplified that both approaches can successfully tell us evidences of the great capability of machine learning-based estimations. We then utilize some techniques to bulk out training data for super-resolution analysis and temporal prediction for cylinder wake and NOAA sea surface temperature data to demonstrate that sufficient training of neural networks with limited amount of training data can be achieved for fluid flow problems. The generalizability of machine learning model is also discussed by accounting for the perspectives of inter/extrapolation of training data, considering super-resolution of wakes behind two parallel cylinders. We find that various flow patterns generated by complex interaction between two cylinders can be reconstructed well, even for the test configurations regarding the distance factor. The present paper can be a significant step toward practical uses of neural networks for both laminar and turbulent flow problems.

Longitudinal brain analysis is essential for understanding healthy aging and identifying pathological deviations. Longitudinal registration of sequential brain MRI underpins such analyses. However, existing methods are limited by reliance on densely sampled time series, a trade-off between accuracy and temporal smoothness, and an inability to prospectively forecast future brain states. To overcome these challenges, we introduce TimeFlow, a learning-based framework for longitudinal brain MRI registration. TimeFlow uses a U-Net backbone with temporal conditioning to model neuroanatomy as a continuous function of age. Given only two scans from an individual, TimeFlow estimates accurate and temporally coherent deformation fields, enabling non-linear extrapolation to predict future brain states. This is achieved by our proposed inter-/extra-polation consistency constraints applied to both the deformation fields and deformed images. Remarkably, these constraints preserve temporal consistency and continuity without requiring explicit smoothness regularizers or densely sampled sequential data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both future timepoint forecasting and registration accuracy. Moreover, TimeFlow supports novel biological brain aging analyses by differentiating neurodegenerative trajectories from normal aging without requiring segmentation, thereby eliminating the need for labor-intensive annotations and mitigating segmentation inconsistency. TimeFlow offers an accurate, data-efficient, and annotation-free framework for longitudinal analysis of brain aging and chronic diseases, capable of forecasting brain changes beyond the observed study period.

In this work, we leverage the intrinsic segmentation of language sequences and design a new positional encoding method called Bilevel Positional Encoding (BiPE). For each position, our BiPE blends an intra-segment encoding and an inter-segment encoding. The intra-segment encoding identifies the locations within a segment and helps the model capture the semantic information therein via absolute positional encoding. The inter-segment encoding specifies the segment index, models the relationships between segments, and aims to improve extrapolation capabilities via relative positional encoding. Theoretical analysis shows this disentanglement of positional information makes learning more effective. The empirical results also show that our BiPE has superior length extrapolation capabilities across a wide range of tasks in diverse text modalities.

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multi-spectral images by fusing the spatial detail of panchromatic images with the spectral richness of low-resolution MS data. However, most existing methods are evaluated under limited, low-resolution settings, limiting their generalization to real-world, high-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we systematically investigate the data, algorithmic, and computational challenges of cross-scale pansharpening. We first introduce PanScale, the first large-scale, cross-scale pansharpening dataset, accompanied by PanScale-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating generalization across varying resolutions and scales. To realize scale generalization, we propose ScaleFormer, a novel architecture designed for multi-scale pansharpening. ScaleFormer reframes generalization across image resolutions as generalization across sequence lengths: it tokenizes images into patch sequences of the same resolution but variable length proportional to image scale. A Scale-Aware Patchify module enables training for such variations from fixed-size crops. ScaleFormer then decouples intra-patch spatial feature learning from inter-patch sequential dependency modeling, incorporating Rotary Positional Encoding to enhance extrapolation to unseen scales. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods in fusion quality and cross-scale generalization. The datasets and source code are available upon acceptance.

We study the problem of extrapolative controlled generation, i.e., generating sequences with attribute values beyond the range seen in training. This task is of significant importance in automated design, especially drug discovery, where the goal is to design novel proteins that are better (e.g., more stable) than existing sequences. Thus, by definition, the target sequences and their attribute values are out of the training distribution, posing challenges to existing methods that aim to directly generate the target sequence. Instead, in this work, we propose Iterative Controlled Extrapolation (ICE) which iteratively makes local edits to a sequence to enable extrapolation. We train the model on synthetically generated sequence pairs that demonstrate small improvement in the attribute value. Results on one natural language task (sentiment analysis) and two protein engineering tasks (ACE2 stability and AAV fitness) show that ICE considerably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches despite its simplicity. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/vishakhpk/iter-extrapolation.

Relative positional embeddings (RPE) have received considerable attention since RPEs effectively model the relative distance among tokens and enable length extrapolation. We propose KERPLE, a framework that generalizes relative position embedding for extrapolation by kernelizing positional differences. We achieve this goal using conditionally positive definite (CPD) kernels, a class of functions known for generalizing distance metrics. To maintain the inner product interpretation of self-attention, we show that a CPD kernel can be transformed into a PD kernel by adding a constant offset. This offset is implicitly absorbed in the Softmax normalization during self-attention. The diversity of CPD kernels allows us to derive various RPEs that enable length extrapolation in a principled way. Experiments demonstrate that the logarithmic variant achieves excellent extrapolation performance on three large language modeling datasets. Our implementation and pretrained checkpoints are released at https://github.com/chijames/KERPLE.git.

Scene extrapolation -- the idea of generating novel views by flying into a given image -- is a promising, yet challenging task. For each predicted frame, a joint inpainting and 3D refinement problem has to be solved, which is ill posed and includes a high level of ambiguity. Moreover, training data for long-range scenes is difficult to obtain and usually lacks sufficient views to infer accurate camera poses. We introduce DiffDreamer, an unsupervised framework capable of synthesizing novel views depicting a long camera trajectory while training solely on internet-collected images of nature scenes. Utilizing the stochastic nature of the guided denoising steps, we train the diffusion models to refine projected RGBD images but condition the denoising steps on multiple past and future frames for inference. We demonstrate that image-conditioned diffusion models can effectively perform long-range scene extrapolation while preserving consistency significantly better than prior GAN-based methods. DiffDreamer is a powerful and efficient solution for scene extrapolation, producing impressive results despite limited supervision. Project page: https://primecai.github.io/diffdreamer.