In this paper, we aim to devise a universally versatile style transfer method capable of performing artistic, photo-realistic, and video style transfer jointly, without seeing videos during training. Previous single-frame methods assume a strong constraint on the whole image to maintain temporal consistency, which could be violated in many cases. Instead, we make a mild and reasonable assumption that global inconsistency is dominated by local inconsistencies and devise a generic Contrastive Coherence Preserving Loss (CCPL) applied to local patches. CCPL can preserve the coherence of the content source during style transfer without degrading stylization. Moreover, it owns a neighbor-regulating mechanism, resulting in a vast reduction of local distortions and considerable visual quality improvement. Aside from its superior performance on versatile style transfer, it can be easily extended to other tasks, such as image-to-image translation. Besides, to better fuse content and style features, we propose Simple Covariance Transformation (SCT) to effectively align second-order statistics of the content feature with the style feature. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the resulting model for versatile style transfer, when armed with CCPL.
Utkarsh Pratiush, Austin Houston, Kamyar Barakati et al.
Microscopy is a primary source of information on materials structure and functionality at nanometer and atomic scales. The data generated is often well-structured, enriched with metadata and sample histories, though not always consistent in detail or format. The adoption of Data Management Plans (DMPs) by major funding agencies promotes preservation and access. However, deriving insights remains difficult due to the lack of standardized code ecosystems, benchmarks, and integration strategies. As a result, data usage is inefficient and analysis time is extensive. In addition to post-acquisition analysis, new APIs from major microscope manufacturers enable real-time, ML-based analytics for automated decision-making and ML-agent-controlled microscope operation. Yet, a gap remains between the ML and microscopy communities, limiting the impact of these methods on physics, materials discovery, and optimization. Hackathons help bridge this divide by fostering collaboration between ML researchers and microscopy experts. They encourage the development of novel solutions that apply ML to microscopy, while preparing a future workforce for instrumentation, materials science, and applied ML. This hackathon produced benchmark datasets and digital twins of microscopes to support community growth and standardized workflows. All related code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/KalininGroup/Mic-hackathon-2024-codes-publication/tree/1.0.0.1
This paper aims for a new generation task: non-stationary multi-texture synthesis, which unifies synthesizing multiple non-stationary textures in a single model. Most non-stationary textures have large scale variance and can hardly be synthesized through one model. To combat this, we propose a multi-scale generator to capture structural patterns of various scales and effectively synthesize textures with a minor cost. However, it is still hard to handle textures of different categories with different texture patterns. Therefore, we present a category-specific training strategy to focus on learning texture pattern of a specific domain. Interestingly, once trained, our model is able to produce multi-pattern generations with dynamic variations without the need to finetune the model for different styles. Moreover, an objective evaluation metric is designed for evaluating the quality of texture expansion and global structure consistency. To our knowledge, ours is the first scheme for this challenging task, including model, training, and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method achieves superior performance and time efficiency. The code will be available after the publication.
In this paper, we propose a novel minimum gravitational potential energy (MPE)-based algorithm for global point set registration. The feature descriptors extraction algorithms have emerged as the standard approach to align point sets in the past few decades. However, the alignment can be challenging to take effect when the point set suffers from raw point data problems such as noises (Gaussian and Uniformly). Different from the most existing point set registration methods which usually extract the descriptors to find correspondences between point sets, our proposed MPE alignment method is able to handle large scale raw data offset without depending on traditional descriptors extraction, whether for the local or global registration methods. We decompose the solution into a global optimal convex approximation and the fast descent process to a local minimum. For the approximation step, the proposed minimum potential energy (MPE) approach consists of two main steps. Firstly, according to the construction of the force traction operator, we could simply compute the position of the potential energy minimum; Secondly, with respect to the finding of the MPE point, we propose a new theory that employs the two flags to observe the status of the registration procedure. The method of fast descent process to the minimum that we employed is the iterative closest point algorithm; it can achieve the global minimum. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm on synthetic data as well as on real data. The proposed method outperforms the other global methods in terms of both efficiency, accuracy and noise resistance.