Ricardo Guerrero

Fangda Han, Guoyao Hao, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

Multi-attribute conditional image generation is a challenging problem in computervision. We propose Multi-attribute Pizza Generator (MPG), a conditional Generative Neural Network (GAN) framework for synthesizing images from a trichotomy of attributes: content, view-geometry, and implicit visual style. We design MPG by extending the state-of-the-art StyleGAN2, using a new conditioning technique that guides the intermediate feature maps to learn multi-scale multi-attribute entangled representationsof controlling attributes. Because of the complex nature of the multi-attribute image generation problem, we regularize the image generation by predicting the explicit conditioning attributes (ingredients and view). To synthesize a pizza image with view attributesoutside the range of natural training images, we design a CGI pizza dataset PizzaView using 3D pizza models and employ it to train a view attribute regressor to regularize the generation process, bridging the real and CGI training datasets. To verify the efficacy of MPG, we test it on Pizza10, a carefully annotated multi-ingredient pizza image dataset. MPG can successfully generate photo-realistic pizza images with desired ingredients and view attributes, beyond the range of those observed in real-world training data.

Hai X. Pham, Ricardo Guerrero, Jiatong Li et al.

Despite the abundance of multi-modal data, such as image-text pairs, there has been little effort in understanding the individual entities and their different roles in the construction of these data instances. In this work, we endeavour to discover the entities and their corresponding importance in cooking recipes automaticall} as a visual-linguistic association problem. More specifically, we introduce a novel cross-modal learning framework to jointly model the latent representations of images and text in the food image-recipe association and retrieval tasks. This model allows one to discover complex functional and hierarchical relationships between images and text, and among textual parts of a recipe including title, ingredients and cooking instructions. Our experiments show that by making use of efficient tree-structured Long Short-Term Memory as the text encoder in our computational cross-modal retrieval framework, we are not only able to identify the main ingredients and cooking actions in the recipe descriptions without explicit supervision, but we can also learn more meaningful feature representations of food recipes, appropriate for challenging cross-modal retrieval and recipe adaption tasks.

Fangda Han, Guoyao Hao, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

Multilabel conditional image generation is a challenging problem in computer vision. In this work we propose Multi-ingredient Pizza Generator (MPG), a conditional Generative Neural Network (GAN) framework for synthesizing multilabel images. We design MPG based on a state-of-the-art GAN structure called StyleGAN2, in which we develop a new conditioning technique by enforcing intermediate feature maps to learn scalewise label information. Because of the complex nature of the multilabel image generation problem, we also regularize synthetic image by predicting the corresponding ingredients as well as encourage the discriminator to distinguish between matched image and mismatched image. To verify the efficacy of MPG, we test it on Pizza10, which is a carefully annotated multi-ingredient pizza image dataset. MPG can successfully generate photo-realist pizza images with desired ingredients. The framework can be easily extend to other multilabel image generation scenarios.

Ricardo Guerrero, Hai Xuan Pham, Vladimir Pavlovic

Computational food analysis (CFA) naturally requires multi-modal evidence of a particular food, e.g., images, recipe text, etc. A key to making CFA possible is multi-modal shared representation learning, which aims to create a joint representation of the multiple views (text and image) of the data. In this work we propose a method for food domain cross-modal shared representation learning that preserves the vast semantic richness present in the food data. Our proposed method employs an effective transformer-based multilingual recipe encoder coupled with a traditional image embedding architecture. Here, we propose the use of imperfect multilingual translations to effectively regularize the model while at the same time adding functionality across multiple languages and alphabets. Experimental analysis on the public Recipe1M dataset shows that the representation learned via the proposed method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-arts (SOTA) on retrieval tasks. Furthermore, the representational power of the learned representation is demonstrated through a generative food image synthesis model conditioned on recipe embeddings. Synthesized images can effectively reproduce the visual appearance of paired samples, indicating that the learned representation captures the joint semantics of both the textual recipe and its visual content, thus narrowing the modality gap.

Minyoung Kim, Ricardo Guerrero, Vladimir Pavlovic

We deal with the problem of learning the underlying disentangled latent factors that are shared between the paired bi-modal data in cross-modal retrieval. Our assumption is that the data in both modalities are complex, structured, and high dimensional (e.g., image and text), for which the conventional deep auto-encoding latent variable models such as the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) often suffer from difficulty of accurate decoder training or realistic synthesis. A suboptimally trained decoder can potentially harm the model's capability of identifying the true factors. In this paper we propose a novel idea of the implicit decoder, which completely removes the ambient data decoding module from a latent variable model, via implicit encoder inversion that is achieved by Jacobian regularization of the low-dimensional embedding function. Motivated from the recent Identifiable VAE (IVAE) model, we modify it to incorporate the query modality data as conditioning auxiliary input, which allows us to prove that the true parameters of the model can be identified under some regularity conditions. Tested on various datasets where the true factors are fully/partially available, our model is shown to identify the factors accurately, significantly outperforming conventional encoder-decoder latent variable models. We also test our model on the Recipe1M, the large-scale food image/recipe dataset, where the learned factors by our approach highly coincide with the most pronounced food factors that are widely agreed on, including savoriness, wateriness, and greenness.

Jiatong Li, Fangda Han, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

Increased awareness of the impact of food consumption on health and lifestyle today has given rise to novel data-driven food analysis systems. Although these systems may recognize the ingredients, a detailed analysis of their amounts in the meal, which is paramount for estimating the correct nutrition, is usually ignored. In this paper, we study the novel and challenging problem of predicting the relative amount of each ingredient from a food image. We propose PITA, the Picture-to-Amount deep learning architecture to solve the problem. More specifically, we predict the ingredient amounts using a domain-driven Wasserstein loss from image-to-recipe cross-modal embeddings learned to align the two views of food data. Experiments on a dataset of recipes collected from the Internet show the model generates promising results and improves the baselines on this challenging task. A demo of our system and our data is availableat: foodai.cs.rutgers.edu.

Fangda Han, Ricardo Guerrero, Vladimir Pavlovic

In this work we propose a new computational framework, based on generative deep models, for synthesis of photo-realistic food meal images from textual list of its ingredients. Previous works on synthesis of images from text typically rely on pre-trained text models to extract text features, followed by generative neural networks (GAN) aimed to generate realistic images conditioned on the text features. These works mainly focus on generating spatially compact and well-defined categories of objects, such as birds or flowers, but meal images are significantly more complex, consisting of multiple ingredients whose appearance and spatial qualities are further modified by cooking methods. To generate real-like meal images from ingredients, we propose Cook Generative Adversarial Networks (CookGAN), CookGAN first builds an attention-based ingredients-image association model, which is then used to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistent constraint is added to further improve image quality and control appearance. Experiments show our model is able to generate meal images corresponding to the ingredients.

Jiatong Li, Ricardo Guerrero, Vladimir Pavlovic

In this paper, we study the novel problem of not only predicting ingredients from a food image, but also predicting the relative amounts of the detected ingredients. We propose two prediction-based models using deep learning that output sparse and dense predictions, coupled with important semi-automatic multi-database integrative data pre-processing, to solve the problem. Experiments on a dataset of recipes collected from the Internet show the models generate encouraging experimental results.

Fangda Han, Ricardo Guerrero, Vladimir Pavlovic

In this work we propose a new computational framework, based on generative deep models, for synthesis of photo-realistic food meal images from textual descriptions of its ingredients. Previous works on synthesis of images from text typically rely on pre-trained text models to extract text features, followed by a generative neural networks (GANs) aimed to generate realistic images conditioned on the text features. These works mainly focus on generating spatially compact and well-defined categories of objects, such as birds or flowers. In contrast, meal images are significantly more complex, consisting of multiple ingredients whose appearance and spatial qualities are further modified by cooking methods. We propose a method that first builds an attention-based ingredients-image association model, which is then used to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistent constraint is added to further improve image quality and control appearance. Extensive experiments show our model is able to generate meal image corresponding to the ingredients, which could be used to augment existing dataset for solving other computational food analysis problems.

Ognjen Rudovic, Yuria Utsumi, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

We introduce a novel personalized Gaussian Process Experts (pGPE) model for predicting per-subject ADAS-Cog13 cognitive scores -- a significant predictor of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in the cognitive domain -- over the future 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. We start by training a population-level model using multi-modal data from previously seen subjects using a base Gaussian Process (GP) regression. Then, we personalize this model by adapting the base GP sequentially over time to a new (target) subject using domain adaptive GPs, and also by training subject-specific GP. While we show that these models achieve improved performance when selectively applied to the forecasting task (one performs better than the other on different subjects/visits), the average performance per model is suboptimal. To this end, we used the notion of meta learning in the proposed pGPE to design a regression-based weighting of these expert models, where the expert weights are optimized for each subject and his/her future visit. The results on a cohort of subjects from the ADNI dataset show that this newly introduced personalized weighting of the expert models leads to large improvements in accurately forecasting future ADAS-Cog13 scores and their fine-grained changes associated with the AD progression. This approach has potential to help identify at-risk patients early and improve the construction of clinical trials for AD.

Christopher Bowles, Liang Chen, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

One of the biggest issues facing the use of machine learning in medical imaging is the lack of availability of large, labelled datasets. The annotation of medical images is not only expensive and time consuming but also highly dependent on the availability of expert observers. The limited amount of training data can inhibit the performance of supervised machine learning algorithms which often need very large quantities of data on which to train to avoid overfitting. So far, much effort has been directed at extracting as much information as possible from what data is available. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) offer a novel way to unlock additional information from a dataset by generating synthetic samples with the appearance of real images. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of introducing GAN derived synthetic data to the training datasets in two brain segmentation tasks, leading to improvements in Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of between 1 and 5 percentage points under different conditions, with the strongest effects seen fewer than ten training image stacks are available.

Sarah Parisot, Sofia Ira Ktena, Enzo Ferrante et al.

Graphs are widely used as a natural framework that captures interactions between individual elements represented as nodes in a graph. In medical applications, specifically, nodes can represent individuals within a potentially large population (patients or healthy controls) accompanied by a set of features, while the graph edges incorporate associations between subjects in an intuitive manner. This representation allows to incorporate the wealth of imaging and non-imaging information as well as individual subject features simultaneously in disease classification tasks. Previous graph-based approaches for supervised or unsupervised learning in the context of disease prediction solely focus on pairwise similarities between subjects, disregarding individual characteristics and features, or rather rely on subject-specific imaging feature vectors and fail to model interactions between them. In this paper, we present a thorough evaluation of a generic framework that leverages both imaging and non-imaging information and can be used for brain analysis in large populations. This framework exploits Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and involves representing populations as a sparse graph, where its nodes are associated with imaging-based feature vectors, while phenotypic information is integrated as edge weights. The extensive evaluation explores the effect of each individual component of this framework on disease prediction performance and further compares it to different baselines. The framework performance is tested on two large datasets with diverse underlying data, ABIDE and ADNI, for the prediction of Autism Spectrum Disorder and conversion to Alzheimer's disease, respectively. Our analysis shows that our novel framework can improve over state-of-the-art results on both databases, with 70.4% classification accuracy for ABIDE and 80.0% for ADNI.

Yuria Utsumi, Ognjen Rudovic, Kelly Peterson et al.

In this paper, we introduce the use of a personalized Gaussian Process model (pGP) to predict per-patient changes in ADAS-Cog13 -- a significant predictor of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in the cognitive domain -- using data from each patient's previous visits, and testing on future (held-out) data. We start by learning a population-level model using multi-modal data from previously seen patients using a base Gaussian Process (GP) regression. The personalized GP (pGP) is formed by adapting the base GP sequentially over time to a new (target) patient using domain adaptive GPs. We extend this personalized approach to predict the values of ADAS-Cog13 over the future 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. We compare this approach to a GP model trained only on past data of the target patients (tGP), as well as to a new approach that combines pGP with tGP. We find that the new approach, combining pGP with tGP, leads to large improvements in accurately forecasting future ADAS-Cog13 scores.

Kelly Peterson, Ognjen Rudovic, Ricardo Guerrero et al.

In this paper, we introduce the use of a personalized Gaussian Process model (pGP) to predict the key metrics of Alzheimer's Disease progression (MMSE, ADAS-Cog13, CDRSB and CS) based on each patient's previous visits. We start by learning a population-level model using multi-modal data from previously seen patients using the base Gaussian Process (GP) regression. Then, this model is adapted sequentially over time to a new patient using domain adaptive GPs to form the patient's pGP. We show that this new approach, together with an auto-regressive formulation, leads to significant improvements in forecasting future clinical status and cognitive scores for target patients when compared to modeling the population with traditional GPs.