Learning Distributions of Functions on a Continuous Time Domain

This work presents several contributions on the topic of learning representations of function spaces, as well as on learning the dynamics of glioma growth as a particular instance thereof. We begin with two preparatory efforts, showing how expert knowledge can be leveraged efficiently in an interactive segmentation context, and presenting a proof of concept for inferring non-deterministic glioma growth patterns purely from data. The remainder of our work builds upon the framework of Neural Processes. We show how these models represent function spaces and discover that they can implicitly decompose the space into different frequency components, not unlike a Fourier transform. In this context we derive an upper bound on the maximum signal frequency Neural Processes can represent and show how to control the learned representations to only contain certain frequencies. We continue with an improvement of a more recent addition to the Neural Process family called ConvCNP, which we combine with a Gaussian Process to make it non-deterministic and to improve generalization. Finally, we show how to perform segmentation in the Neural Process framework by extending a typical segmentation architecture with spatio-temporal attention. The resulting model can interpolate complex spatial variations of segmentations over time and, applied to glioma growth, it is able to represent multiple temporally consistent growth trajectories, exhibiting realistic and diverse spatial growth patterns

Inverse Evolution Layers: Physics-informed Regularizers for Deep Neural Networks

This paper proposes a novel approach to integrating partial differential equation (PDE)-based evolution models into neural networks through a new type of regularization. Specifically, we propose inverse evolution layers (IELs) based on evolution equations. These layers can achieve specific regularization objectives and endow neural networks' outputs with corresponding properties of the evolution models. Moreover, IELs are straightforward to construct and implement, and can be easily designed for various physical evolutions and neural networks. Additionally, the design process for these layers can provide neural networks with intuitive and mathematical interpretability, thus enhancing the transparency and explainability of the approach. To demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and simplicity of our approach, we present an example of endowing semantic segmentation models with the smoothness property based on the heat diffusion model. To achieve this goal, we design heat-diffusion IELs and apply them to address the challenge of semantic segmentation with noisy labels. The experimental results demonstrate that the heat-diffusion IELs can effectively mitigate the overfitting problem caused by noisy labels