Nghia Nguyen

Raghav Kansal, David Crair, Nghia Nguyen et al.

Flow matching (FM) has emerged as a powerful framework for learning dynamic transport maps between two empirical distributions. However, less explored is the setting with intermediate observed marginals that can help constrain the flows between the endpoints. This "multimarginal" regime is central to modeling temporal evolution in dynamical systems in many scientific domains that can sample sequential distributions. We tackle this problem with a novel approach that leverages the connection between FM and dynamic optimal transport (OT), softly steering the flow towards the intermediate marginals through potential terms in the dynamic OT action. By extending the conditional FM learning target to incorporate these potentials, we derive an efficient, simulation-free algorithm for multimarginal FM that offers considerable flexibility in the spatiotemporal dynamics of the learned flows. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and training efficiency of OT-potential FM (OTP-FM) on diverse single-cell RNA sequencing, oceanographic, and meteorological datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bexorg-Inc/OTP-FM.

Nghia T. Nguyen, Long Luu, Phuong L. Vo et al.

Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) has been widely used in video streaming recently. In DASH, the client downloads video chunks in order from a server. The rate adaptation function at the video client enhances the user's quality-of-experience (QoE) by choosing a suitable quality level for each video chunk to download based on the network condition. Today networks such as content delivery networks, edge caching networks, content-centric networks,... usually replicate video contents on multiple cache nodes. We study video streaming from multiple sources in this work. In multi-source streaming, video chunks may arrive out of order due to different conditions of the network paths. Hence, to guarantee a high QoE, the video client needs not only rate adaptation but also chunk scheduling. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the state-of-the-art control method in various fields in recent years. This paper proposes two algorithms for streaming from multiple sources: RL-based adaptation with greedy scheduling (RLAGS) and RL-based adaptation and scheduling (RLAS). We also build a simulation environment for training and evaluating. The efficiency of the proposed algorithms is proved via extensive simulations with real-trace data.

Nhan T. Nguyen, Dat Q. Tran, Nghia T. Nguyen et al.

We propose a novel method that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a long short-term memory (LSTM) mechanism for accurate prediction of intracranial hemorrhage on computed tomography (CT) scans. The CNN plays the role of a slice-wise feature extractor while the LSTM is responsible for linking the features across slices. The whole architecture is trained end-to-end with input being an RGB-like image formed by stacking 3 different viewing windows of a single slice. We validate the method on the recent RSNA Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection challenge and on the CQ500 dataset. For the RSNA challenge, our best single model achieves a weighted log loss of 0.0522 on the leaderboard, which is comparable to the top 3% performances, almost all of which make use of ensemble learning. Importantly, our method generalizes very well: the model trained on the RSNA dataset significantly outperforms the 2D model, which does not take into account the relationship between slices, on CQ500. Our codes and models is publicly avaiable at https://github.com/VinBDI-MedicalImagingTeam/midl2020-cnnlstm-ich.

Chi Nhan Duong, Khoa Luu, Kha Gia Quach et al.

This paper presents a novel approach to synthesize automatically age-progressed facial images in video sequences using Deep Reinforcement Learning. The proposed method models facial structures and the longitudinal face-aging process of given subjects coherently across video frames. The approach is optimized using a long-term reward, Reinforcement Learning function with deep feature extraction from Deep Convolutional Neural Network. Unlike previous age-progression methods that are only able to synthesize an aged likeness of a face from a single input image, the proposed approach is capable of age-progressing facial likenesses in videos with consistently synthesized facial features across frames. In addition, the deep reinforcement learning method guarantees preservation of the visual identity of input faces after age-progression. Results on videos of our new collected aging face AGFW-v2 database demonstrate the advantages of the proposed solution in terms of both quality of age-progressed faces, temporal smoothness, and cross-age face verification.