Muhammad Usman

Mohammed Alsaafin, Musab Alsheikh, Saeed Anwar et al.

The no-reference image quality assessment is a challenging domain that addresses estimating image quality without the original reference. We introduce an improved mechanism to extract local and non-local information from images via different transformer encoders and CNNs. The utilization of Transformer encoders aims to mitigate locality bias and generate a non-local representation by sequentially processing CNN features, which inherently capture local visual structures. Establishing a stronger connection between subjective and objective assessments is achieved through sorting within batches of images based on relative distance information. A self-consistency approach to self-supervision is presented, explicitly addressing the degradation of no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models under equivariant transformations. Our approach ensures model robustness by maintaining consistency between an image and its horizontally flipped equivalent. Through empirical evaluation of five popular image quality assessment datasets, the proposed model outperforms alternative algorithms in the context of no-reference image quality assessment datasets, especially on smaller datasets. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/mas94/ADTRS}{https://github.com/mas94/ADTRS}

Che-Jui Chang, Samuel S. Sohn, Sen Zhang et al.

Previous studies regarding the perception of emotions for embodied virtual agents have shown the effectiveness of using virtual characters in conveying emotions through interactions with humans. However, creating an autonomous embodied conversational agent with expressive behaviors presents two major challenges. The first challenge is the difficulty of synthesizing the conversational behaviors for each modality that are as expressive as real human behaviors. The second challenge is that the affects are modeled independently, which makes it difficult to generate multimodal responses with consistent emotions across all modalities. In this work, we propose a conceptual framework, ACTOR (Affect-Consistent mulTimodal behaviOR generation), that aims to increase the perception of affects by generating multimodal behaviors conditioned on a consistent driving affect. We have conducted a user study with 199 participants to assess how the average person judges the affects perceived from multimodal behaviors that are consistent and inconsistent with respect to a driving affect. The result shows that among all model conditions, our affect-consistent framework receives the highest Likert scores for the perception of driving affects. Our statistical analysis suggests that making a modality affect-inconsistent significantly decreases the perception of driving affects. We also observe that multimodal behaviors conditioned on consistent affects are more expressive compared to behaviors with inconsistent affects. Therefore, we conclude that multimodal emotion conditioning and affect consistency are vital to enhancing the perception of affects for embodied conversational agents.

Xun Zhang, Mathew Schwartz, Muhammad Usman et al.

In this paper, we focus on the modification of policies that can lead to movement patterns and directional guidance of occupants, which are represented as agents in a 3D simulation engine. We demonstrate an optimization method that improves a spatial distancing metric by modifying the navigation graph by introducing a measure of spatial distancing of agents as a function of agent density (i.e., occupancy). Our optimization framework utilizes such metrics as the target function, using a hybrid approach of combining genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. We show that within our framework, the simulation-optimization process can help to improve spatial distancing between agents by optimizing the navigation policies for a given indoor environment.

Glen Berseth, Mahyar Khayatkhoei, Brandon Haworth et al.

The design of a building requires an architect to balance a wide range of constraints: aesthetic, geometric, usability, lighting, safety, etc. At the same time, there are often a multiplicity of diverse designs that can meet these constraints equally well. Architects must use their skills and artistic vision to explore these rich but highly constrained design spaces. A number of computer-aided design tools use automation to provide useful analytical data and optimal designs with respect to certain fitness criteria. However, this automation can come at the expense of a designer's creative control. We propose uDOME, a user-in-the-loop system for computer-aided design exploration that balances automation and control by efficiently exploring, analyzing, and filtering the space of environment layouts to better inform an architect's decision-making. At each design iteration, uDOME provides a set of diverse designs which satisfy user-defined constraints and optimality criteria within a user defined parameterization of the design space. The user then selects a design and performs a similar optimization with the same or different parameters and objectives. This exploration process can be repeated as many times as the designer wishes. Our user studies indicates that \DOME, with its diversity-based approach, improves the efficiency and effectiveness of even novice users with minimal training, without compromising the quality of their designs.