LGOct 4, 2023
QuATON: Quantization Aware Training of Optical NeuronsHasindu Kariyawasam, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Quansan Yang et al. · cmu
Optical processors, built with "optical neurons", can efficiently perform high-dimensional linear operations at the speed of light. Thus they are a promising avenue to accelerate large-scale linear computations. With the current advances in micro-fabrication, such optical processors can now be 3D fabricated, but with a limited precision. This limitation translates to quantization of learnable parameters in optical neurons, and should be handled during the design of the optical processor in order to avoid a model mismatch. Specifically, optical neurons should be trained or designed within the physical-constraints at a predefined quantized precision level. To address this critical issues we propose a physics-informed quantization-aware training framework. Our approach accounts for physical constraints during the training process, leading to robust designs. We demonstrate that our approach can design state of the art optical processors using diffractive networks for multiple physics based tasks despite quantized learnable parameters. We thus lay the foundation upon which improved optical processors may be 3D fabricated in the future.
IVMar 28, 2022
Differentiable Microscopy for Content and Task Aware Compressive Fluorescence ImagingUdith Haputhanthri, Andrew Seeber, Dushan Wadduwage
The trade-off between throughput and image quality is an inherent challenge in microscopy. To improve throughput, compressive imaging under-samples image signals; the images are then computationally reconstructed by solving a regularized inverse problem. Compared to traditional regularizers, Deep Learning based methods have achieved greater success in compression and image quality. However, the information loss in the acquisition process sets the compression bounds. Further improvement in compression, without compromising the reconstruction quality is thus a challenge. In this work, we propose differentiable compressive fluorescence microscopy ($\partial μ$) which includes a realistic generalizable forward model with learnable-physical parameters (e.g. illumination patterns), and a novel physics-inspired inverse model. The cascaded model is end-to-end differentiable and can learn optimal compressive sampling schemes through training data. With our model, we performed thousands of numerical experiments on various compressive microscope configurations. We show that learned sampling encodes important information about the specimens in the illumination field of the microscope allowing higher compression up to $\times 1024$. We further utilize our framework for Task Aware Compression. The experimental results show superior performance on the cell segmentation task.