HCJan 26
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: Automatic Visualization Evaluation from Reconstruction QualityRoxana Bujack, Li-Ta Lo, Ethan Stam et al.
Recent advances in AI enable the automatic generation of visualizations directly from textual prompts using agentic workflows. However, visualizations produced via one-shot generative methods often suffer from insufficient quality, typically requiring a human in the loop to refine the outputs. Human evaluation, though effective, is costly and impractical at scale. To alleviate this problem, we propose an automated metric that evaluates visualization quality without relying on extensive human-labeled datasets. Instead, our approach uses the original underlying data as implicit ground truth. Specifically, we introduce a method that measures visualization quality by assessing the reconstruction accuracy of the original data from the visualization itself. This reconstruction-based metric provides an autonomous and scalable proxy for thorough human evaluation, facilitating more efficient and reliable AI-driven visualization workflows.
CHEM-PHMar 30, 2025
Optimal Invariant Bases for Atomistic Machine LearningAlice E. A. Allen, Emily Shinkle, Roxana Bujack et al.
The representation of atomic configurations for machine learning models has led to the development of numerous descriptors, often to describe the local environment of atoms. However, many of these representations are incomplete and/or functionally dependent. Incomplete descriptor sets are unable to represent all meaningful changes in the atomic environment. Complete constructions of atomic environment descriptors, on the other hand, often suffer from a high degree of functional dependence, where some descriptors can be written as functions of the others. These redundant descriptors do not provide additional power to discriminate between different atomic environments and increase the computational burden. By employing techniques from the pattern recognition literature to existing atomistic representations, we remove descriptors that are functions of other descriptors to produce the smallest possible set that satisfies completeness. We apply this in two ways: first we refine an existing description, the Atomistic Cluster Expansion. We show that this yields a more efficient subset of descriptors. Second, we augment an incomplete construction based on a scalar neural network, yielding a new message-passing network architecture that can recognize up to 5-body patterns in each neuron by taking advantage of an optimal set of Cartesian tensor invariants. This architecture shows strong accuracy on state-of-the-art benchmarks while retaining low computational cost. Our results not only yield improved models, but point the way to classes of invariant bases that minimize cost while maximizing expressivity for a host of applications.
CVMar 27, 2025
Flexible Moment-Invariant Bases from Irreducible TensorsRoxana Bujack, Emily Shinkle, Alice Allen et al.
Moment invariants are a powerful tool for the generation of rotation-invariant descriptors needed for many applications in pattern detection, classification, and machine learning. A set of invariants is optimal if it is complete, independent, and robust against degeneracy in the input. In this paper, we show that the current state of the art for the generation of these bases of moment invariants, despite being robust against moment tensors being identically zero, is vulnerable to a degeneracy that is common in real-world applications, namely spherical functions. We show how to overcome this vulnerability by combining two popular moment invariant approaches: one based on spherical harmonics and one based on Cartesian tensor algebra.
HCSep 11, 2019
Mathematical Foundations in VisualizationIngrid Hotz, Roxana Bujack, Christoph Garth et al.
Mathematical concepts and tools have shaped the field of visualization in fundamental ways and played a key role in the development of a large variety of visualization techniques. In this chapter, we sample the visualization literature to provide a taxonomy of the usage of mathematics in visualization, and to identify a fundamental set of mathematics that should be taught to students as part of an introduction to contemporary visualization research. Within the scope of this chapter, we are unable to provide a full review of all mathematical foundations of visualization; rather, we identify a number of concepts that are useful in visualization, explain their significance, and provide references for further reading.
CVJun 10, 2013
Detection of Outer Rotations on 3D-Vector Fields with Iterative Geometric Correlation and its EfficiencyRoxana Bujack, Gerik Scheuermann, Eckhard Hitzer
Correlation is a common technique for the detection of shifts. Its generalization to the multidimensional geometric correlation in Clifford algebras has been proven a useful tool for color image processing, because it additionally contains information about a rotational misalignment. But so far the exact correction of a three-dimensional outer rotation could only be achieved in certain special cases. In this paper we prove that applying the geometric correlation iteratively has the potential to detect the outer rotational misalignment for arbitrary three-dimensional vector fields. We further present the explicit iterative algorithm, analyze its efficiency detecting the rotational misalignment in the color space of a color image. The experiments suggest a method for the acceleration of the algorithm, which is practically tested with great success.