Baohua Yan

Baohua Yan, Jennifer Kava, Qingyuan Liu et al.

Standard diffusion models (DMs) rely on the total destruction of data into non-informative white noise, forcing the backward process to denoise from a fully unstructured noise state. While ensuring diversity, this results in a cumbersome and computationally intensive image generation task. We address this challenge by proposing new forward and backward process within a mathematically tractable spectral space. Unlike pixel-based DMs, our forward process converges towards an informative Gaussian prior N(mu_hat,Sigma_hat) rather than white noise. Our method, termed Preserving Spectral Structure and Statistics (PreSS) in diffusion models, guides spectral components toward this informative prior while ensuring that corresponding structural signals remain intact at terminal time. This provides a principled starting point for the backward process, enabling high-quality image reconstruction that builds upon preserved spectral structure while maintaining high generative diversity. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CelebA and CelebA-HQ demonstrate significant reductions in computational complexity, improved visual diversity, less drift, and a smoother diffusion process compared to pixel-based DMs.

Zhaobin Mo, Qingyuan Liu, Baohua Yan et al.

Spatiotemporal prediction over graphs (STPG) is crucial for transportation systems. In existing STPG models, an adjacency matrix is an important component that captures the relations among nodes over graphs. However, most studies calculate the adjacency matrix by directly memorizing the data, such as distance- and correlation-based matrices. These adjacency matrices do not consider potential pattern shift for the test data, and may result in suboptimal performance if the test data has a different distribution from the training one. This issue is known as the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a Causal Adjacency Learning (CAL) method to discover causal relations over graphs. The learned causal adjacency matrix is evaluated on a downstream spatiotemporal prediction task using real-world graph data. Results demonstrate that our proposed adjacency matrix can capture the causal relations, and using our learned adjacency matrix can enhance prediction performance on the OOD test data, even though causal learning is not conducted in the downstream task.