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Researcher profile

Yair Weiss

Yair Weiss contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computer Visionastro-ph.COMachine Learning

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Diffusion Models, Denoiser Architecture and Creativity

The creativity of diffusion models refers to their ability to generate highly realistic images that are different from their training data. Creativity is somewhat surprising since it is known that if the denoiser used in the diffusion model is the Bayes optimal denoiser for a given training set, then the model will simply copy the training samples. In this paper we present empirical and theoretical results that suggest that creativity in diffusion models is due to an interaction between the denoiser architecture and the target distribution. Theoretically, we give explicit forms for the distribution of generated samples as a function of the target distribution and the denoiser architecture for three different denoiser architectures (linear, polynomial, bottleneck). Empirically, we show that small changes in the popular UNET denoiser architecture leads to very different forms of creativity, and these small changes often yield samples that are highly nonrealistic. Taken together, our results show that diffusion models will only be successful if the inductive bias of the denoiser architecture is in strong alignment with the true target distribution.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Generating natural images with direct Patch Distributions Matching

Many traditional computer vision algorithms generate realistic images by requiring that each patch in the generated image be similar to a patch in a training image and vice versa. Recently, this classical approach has been replaced by adversarial training with a patch discriminator. The adversarial approach avoids the computational burden of finding nearest neighbors of patches but often requires very long training times and may fail to match the distribution of patches. In this paper we leverage the recently developed Sliced Wasserstein Distance and develop an algorithm that explicitly and efficiently minimizes the distance between patch distributions in two images. Our method is conceptually simple, requires no training and can be implemented in a few lines of codes. On a number of image generation tasks we show that our results are often superior to single-image-GANs, require no training, and can generate high quality images in a few seconds. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/ariel415el/GPDM

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

The Surprising Effectiveness of Linear Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation is an inherently ill-posed problem. Recent methods based on deep encoder-decoder architectures have shown impressive results, but we show that they only succeed due to a strong locality bias, and they fail to learn very simple nonlocal transformations (e.g. mapping upside down faces to upright faces). When the locality bias is removed, the methods are too powerful and may fail to learn simple local transformations. In this paper we introduce linear encoder-decoder architectures for unsupervised image to image translation. We show that learning is much easier and faster with these architectures and yet the results are surprisingly effective. In particular, we show a number of local problems for which the results of the linear methods are comparable to those of state-of-the-art architectures but with a fraction of the training time, and a number of nonlocal problems for which the state-of-the-art fails while linear methods succeed.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Weak lensing shear estimation beyond the shape-noise limit: a machine learning approach

Weak lensing shear estimation typically results in per galaxy statistical errors significantly larger than the sought after gravitational signal of only a few percent. These statistical errors are mostly a result of shape-noise -- an estimation error due to the diverse (and a-priori unknown) morphology of individual background galaxies. These errors are inversely proportional to the limiting angular resolution at which localized objects, such as galaxy clusters, can be probed with weak lensing shear. In this work we report on our initial attempt to reduce statistical errors in weak lensing shear estimation using a machine learning approach -- training a multi-layered convolutional neural network to directly estimate the shear given an observed background galaxy image. We train, calibrate and evaluate the performance and stability of our estimator using simulated galaxy images designed to mimic the distribution of HST observations of lensed background sources in the CLASH galaxy cluster survey. Using the trained estimator, we produce weak lensing shear maps of the cores of 20 galaxy clusters in the CLASH survey, demonstrating an RMS scatter reduced by approximately 26% when compared to maps produced with a commonly used shape estimator. This is equivalent to a survey speed enhancement of approximately 60%. However, given the non-transparent nature of the machine learning approach, this result requires further testing and validation. We provide python code to train and test this estimator on both simulated and real galaxy cluster observations. We also provide updated weak lensing catalogues for the 20 CLASH galaxy clusters studied.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2019arXiv

Why do deep convolutional networks generalize so poorly to small image transformations?

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly assumed to be invariant to small image transformations: either because of the convolutional architecture or because they were trained using data augmentation. Recently, several authors have shown that this is not the case: small translations or rescalings of the input image can drastically change the network's prediction. In this paper, we quantify this phenomena and ask why neither the convolutional architecture nor data augmentation are sufficient to achieve the desired invariance. Specifically, we show that the convolutional architecture does not give invariance since architectures ignore the classical sampling theorem, and data augmentation does not give invariance because the CNNs learn to be invariant to transformations only for images that are very similar to typical images from the training set. We discuss two possible solutions to this problem: (1) antialiasing the intermediate representations and (2) increasing data augmentation and show that they provide only a partial solution at best. Taken together, our results indicate that the problem of insuring invariance to small image transformations in neural networks while preserving high accuracy remains unsolved.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access