Anh Minh Truong

Yuexi Chen, Vlad I. Morariu, Anh Truong et al.

Mixed-media tutorials, which integrate videos, images, text, and diagrams to teach procedural skills, offer more browsable alternatives than timeline-based videos. However, manually creating such tutorials is tedious, and existing automated solutions are often restricted to a particular domain. While AI models hold promise, it is unclear how to effectively harness their powers, given the multi-modal data involved and the vast landscape of models. We present TutoAI, a cross-domain framework for AI-assisted mixed-media tutorial creation on physical tasks. First, we distill common tutorial components by surveying existing work; then, we present an approach to identify, assemble, and evaluate AI models for component extraction; finally, we propose guidelines for designing user interfaces (UI) that support tutorial creation based on AI-generated components. We show that TutoAI has achieved higher or similar quality compared to a baseline model in preliminary user studies.

Lusine Abrahamyan, Anh Minh Truong, Wilfried Philips et al.

Recent success in the field of single image super-resolution (SISR) is achieved by optimizing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the image space with the L1 or L2 loss. However, when trained with these loss functions, models usually fail to recover sharp edges present in the high-resolution (HR) images for the reason that the model tends to give a statistical average of potential HR solutions. During our research, we observe that gradient maps of images generated by the models trained with the L1 or L2 loss have significantly lower variance than the gradient maps of the original high-resolution images. In this work, we propose to alleviate the above issue by introducing a structure-enhancing loss function, coined Gradient Variance (GV) loss, and generate textures with perceptual-pleasant details. Specifically, during the training of the model, we extract patches from the gradient maps of the target and generated output, calculate the variance of each patch and form variance maps for these two images. Further, we minimize the distance between the computed variance maps to enforce the model to produce high variance gradient maps that will lead to the generation of high-resolution images with sharper edges. Experimental results show that the GV loss can significantly improve both Structure Similarity (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance of existing image super-resolution (SR) deep learning models.

Daniel Y. Fu, Will Crichton, James Hong et al.

Many real-world video analysis applications require the ability to identify domain-specific events in video, such as interviews and commercials in TV news broadcasts, or action sequences in film. Unfortunately, pre-trained models to detect all the events of interest in video may not exist, and training new models from scratch can be costly and labor-intensive. In this paper, we explore the utility of specifying new events in video in a more traditional manner: by writing queries that compose outputs of existing, pre-trained models. To write these queries, we have developed Rekall, a library that exposes a data model and programming model for compositional video event specification. Rekall represents video annotations from different sources (object detectors, transcripts, etc.) as spatiotemporal labels associated with continuous volumes of spacetime in a video, and provides operators for composing labels into queries that model new video events. We demonstrate the use of Rekall in analyzing video from cable TV news broadcasts, films, static-camera vehicular video streams, and commercial autonomous vehicle logs. In these efforts, domain experts were able to quickly (in a few hours to a day) author queries that enabled the accurate detection of new events (on par with, and in some cases much more accurate than, learned approaches) and to rapidly retrieve video clips for human-in-the-loop tasks such as video content curation and training data curation. Finally, in a user study, novice users of Rekall were able to author queries to retrieve new events in video given just one hour of query development time.

Anh Truong, Austin Walters, Jeremy Goodsitt et al.

There has been considerable growth and interest in industrial applications of machine learning (ML) in recent years. ML engineers, as a consequence, are in high demand across the industry, yet improving the efficiency of ML engineers remains a fundamental challenge. Automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a way to save time and effort on repetitive tasks in ML pipelines, such as data pre-processing, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter optimization, and prediction result analysis. In this paper, we investigate the current state of AutoML tools aiming to automate these tasks. We conduct various evaluations of the tools on many datasets, in different data segments, to examine their performance, and compare their advantages and disadvantages on different test cases.

Mike Roberts, Debadeepta Dey, Anh Truong et al.

Drones equipped with cameras are emerging as a powerful tool for large-scale aerial 3D scanning, but existing automatic flight planners do not exploit all available information about the scene, and can therefore produce inaccurate and incomplete 3D models. We present an automatic method to generate drone trajectories, such that the imagery acquired during the flight will later produce a high-fidelity 3D model. Our method uses a coarse estimate of the scene geometry to plan camera trajectories that: (1) cover the scene as thoroughly as possible; (2) encourage observations of scene geometry from a diverse set of viewing angles; (3) avoid obstacles; and (4) respect a user-specified flight time budget. Our method relies on a mathematical model of scene coverage that exhibits an intuitive diminishing returns property known as submodularity. We leverage this property extensively to design a trajectory planning algorithm that reasons globally about the non-additive coverage reward obtained across a trajectory, jointly with the cost of traveling between views. We evaluate our method by using it to scan three large outdoor scenes, and we perform a quantitative evaluation using a photorealistic video game simulator.