Beautimeter: Harnessing GPT for Assessing Architectural and Urban Beauty based on the 15 Properties of Living Structure

Beautimeter is a new tool powered by generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology, designed to evaluate architectural and urban beauty. Rooted in Christopher Alexander's theory of centers, this work builds on the idea that all environments possess, to varying degrees, an innate sense of life. Alexander identified 15 fundamental properties, such as levels of scale and thick boundaries, that characterize living structure, which Beautimeter uses as a basis for its analysis. By integrating GPT's advanced natural language processing capabilities, Beautimeter assesses the extent to which a structure embodies these 15 properties, enabling a nuanced evaluation of architectural and urban aesthetics. Using ChatGPT, the tool helps users generate insights into the perceived beauty and coherence of spaces. We conducted a series of case studies, evaluating images of architectural and urban environments, as well as carpets, paintings, and other artifacts. The results demonstrate Beautimeter's effectiveness in analyzing aesthetic qualities across diverse contexts. Our findings suggest that by leveraging GPT technology, Beautimeter offers architects, urban planners, and designers a powerful tool to create spaces that resonate deeply with people. This paper also explores the implications of such technology for architecture and urban design, highlighting its potential to enhance both the design process and the assessment of built environments. Keywords: Living structure, structural beauty, Christopher Alexander, AI in Design, human centered design

Enhancing Long Video Understanding via Hierarchical Event-Based Memory

Recently, integrating visual foundation models into large language models (LLMs) to form video understanding systems has attracted widespread attention. Most of the existing models compress diverse semantic information within the whole video and feed it into LLMs for content comprehension. While this method excels in short video understanding, it may result in a blend of multiple event information in long videos due to coarse compression, which causes information redundancy. Consequently, the semantics of key events might be obscured within the vast information that hinders the model's understanding capabilities. To address this issue, we propose a Hierarchical Event-based Memory-enhanced LLM (HEM-LLM) for better understanding of long videos. Firstly, we design a novel adaptive sequence segmentation scheme to divide multiple events within long videos. In this way, we can perform individual memory modeling for each event to establish intra-event contextual connections, thereby reducing information redundancy. Secondly, while modeling current event, we compress and inject the information of the previous event to enhance the long-term inter-event dependencies in videos. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on various video understanding tasks and the results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Medical Image Segmentation via Single-Source Domain Generalization with Random Amplitude Spectrum Synthesis

The field of medical image segmentation is challenged by domain generalization (DG) due to domain shifts in clinical datasets. The DG challenge is exacerbated by the scarcity of medical data and privacy concerns. Traditional single-source domain generalization (SSDG) methods primarily rely on stacking data augmentation techniques to minimize domain discrepancies. In this paper, we propose Random Amplitude Spectrum Synthesis (RASS) as a training augmentation for medical images. RASS enhances model generalization by simulating distribution changes from a frequency perspective. This strategy introduces variability by applying amplitude-dependent perturbations to ensure broad coverage of potential domain variations. Furthermore, we propose random mask shuffle and reconstruction components, which can enhance the ability of the backbone to process structural information and increase resilience intra- and cross-domain changes. The proposed Random Amplitude Spectrum Synthesis for Single-Source Domain Generalization (RAS^4DG) is validated on 3D fetal brain images and 2D fundus photography, and achieves an improved DG segmentation performance compared to other SSDG models.

IPED: An Implicit Perspective for Relational Triple Extraction based on Diffusion Model

Relational triple extraction is a fundamental task in the field of information extraction, and a promising framework based on table filling has recently gained attention as a potential baseline for entity relation extraction. However, inherent shortcomings such as redundant information and incomplete triple recognition remain problematic. To address these challenges, we propose an Implicit Perspective for relational triple Extraction based on Diffusion model (IPED), an innovative approach for extracting relational triples. Our classifier-free solution adopts an implicit strategy using block coverage to complete the tables, avoiding the limitations of explicit tagging methods. Additionally, we introduce a generative model structure, the block-denoising diffusion model, to collaborate with our implicit perspective and effectively circumvent redundant information disruptions. Experimental results on two popular datasets demonstrate that IPED achieves state-of-the-art performance while gaining superior inference speed and low computational complexity. To support future research, we have made our source code publicly available online.

Recursive Segmentation Living Image: An eXplainable AI (XAI) Approach for Computing Structural Beauty of Images or the Livingness of Space

This study introduces the concept of "structural beauty" as an objective computational approach for evaluating the aesthetic appeal of images. Through the utilization of the Segment anything model (SAM), we propose a method that leverages recursive segmentation to extract finer-grained substructures. Additionally, by reconstructing the hierarchical structure, we obtain a more accurate representation of substructure quantity and hierarchy. This approach reproduces and extends our previous research, allowing for the simultaneous assessment of Livingness in full-color images without the need for grayscale conversion or separate computations for foreground and background Livingness. Furthermore, the application of our method to the Scenic or Not dataset, a repository of subjective scenic ratings, demonstrates a high degree of consistency with subjective ratings in the 0-6 score range. This underscores that structural beauty is not solely a subjective perception, but a quantifiable attribute accessible through objective computation. Through our case studies, we have arrived at three significant conclusions. 1) our method demonstrates the capability to accurately segment meaningful objects, including trees, buildings, and windows, as well as abstract substructures within paintings. 2) we observed that the clarity of an image impacts our computational results; clearer images tend to yield higher Livingness scores. However, for equally blurry images, Livingness does not exhibit a significant reduction, aligning with human visual perception. 3) our approach fundamentally differs from methods employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for predicting image scores. Our method not only provides computational results but also offers transparency and interpretability, positioning it as a novel avenue in the realm of Explainable AI (XAI).

Prompt-enhanced Hierarchical Transformer Elevating Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Instruction via Temporal Action Segmentation

The vast majority of people who suffer unexpected cardiac arrest are performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by passersby in a desperate attempt to restore life, but endeavors turn out to be fruitless on account of disqualification. Fortunately, many pieces of research manifest that disciplined training will help to elevate the success rate of resuscitation, which constantly desires a seamless combination of novel techniques to yield further advancement. To this end, we collect a custom CPR video dataset in which trainees make efforts to behave resuscitation on mannequins independently in adherence to approved guidelines, thereby devising an auxiliary toolbox to assist supervision and rectification of intermediate potential issues via modern deep learning methodologies. Our research empirically views this problem as a temporal action segmentation (TAS) task in computer vision, which aims to segment an untrimmed video at a frame-wise level. Here, we propose a Prompt-enhanced hierarchical Transformer (PhiTrans) that integrates three indispensable modules, including a textual prompt-based Video Features Extractor (VFE), a transformer-based Action Segmentation Executor (ASE), and a regression-based Prediction Refinement Calibrator (PRC). The backbone of the model preferentially derives from applications in three approved public datasets (GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast) collected for TAS tasks, which accounts for the excavation of the segmentation pipeline on the CPR dataset. In general, we unprecedentedly probe into a feasible pipeline that genuinely elevates the CPR instruction qualification via action segmentation in conjunction with cutting-edge deep learning techniques. Associated experiments advocate our implementation with multiple metrics surpassing 91.0%.

Living Images: A Recursive Approach to Computing the Structural Beauty of Images or the Livingness of Space

Any image is perceived subconsciously as a coherent structure (or whole) with two contrast substructures: figure and ground. The figure consists of numerous auto-generated substructures with an inherent hierarchy of far more smalls than larges. Through these substructures, the structural beauty of an image (L) can be computed by the multiplication of the number of substructures (S) and their inherent hierarchy (H). This definition implies that the more substructures, the more living or more structurally beautiful, and the higher hierarchy of the substructures, the more living or more structurally beautiful. This is the non-recursive approach to the structural beauty of images or the livingness of space. In this paper we develop a recursive approach, which derives all substructures of an image (instead of its figure) and continues the deriving process for those decomposable substructures until none of them are decomposable. All of the substructures derived at different iterations (or recursive levels) together constitute a living structure; hence the notion of living images. We applied the recursive approach to a set of images and found that (1) the number of substructures of an image is far lower (3 percent on average) than the number of pixels and the centroids of the substructures can effectively capture the skeleton or saliency of the image; (2) all the images have the recursive levels more than three, indicating that they are indeed living images; (3) no more than 2 percent of the substructures are decomposable; (4) structural beauty can be measured by the recursively defined substructures, as well as their decomposable subsets. The recursive approach is proved to be more robust than the non-recursive approach. The recursive approach and the non-recursive approach both provide a powerful means to study the livingness or vitality of space in cities and communities.

Learning to Dub Movies via Hierarchical Prosody Models

Given a piece of text, a video clip and a reference audio, the movie dubbing (also known as visual voice clone V2C) task aims to generate speeches that match the speaker's emotion presented in the video using the desired speaker voice as reference. V2C is more challenging than conventional text-to-speech tasks as it additionally requires the generated speech to exactly match the varying emotions and speaking speed presented in the video. Unlike previous works, we propose a novel movie dubbing architecture to tackle these problems via hierarchical prosody modelling, which bridges the visual information to corresponding speech prosody from three aspects: lip, face, and scene. Specifically, we align lip movement to the speech duration, and convey facial expression to speech energy and pitch via attention mechanism based on valence and arousal representations inspired by recent psychology findings. Moreover, we design an emotion booster to capture the atmosphere from global video scenes. All these embeddings together are used to generate mel-spectrogram and then convert to speech waves via existing vocoder. Extensive experimental results on the Chem and V2C benchmark datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.

Mixed-UNet: Refined Class Activation Mapping for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-scale Inference

Deep learning techniques have shown great potential in medical image processing, particularly through accurate and reliable image segmentation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans or computed tomography (CT) scans, which allow the localization and diagnosis of lesions. However, training these segmentation models requires a large number of manually annotated pixel-level labels, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive, in contrast to image-level labels that are easier to obtain. It is imperative to resolve this problem through weakly-supervised semantic segmentation models using image-level labels as supervision since it can significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Most of the advanced solutions exploit class activation mapping (CAM). However, the original CAMs rarely capture the precise boundaries of lesions. In this study, we propose the strategy of multi-scale inference to refine CAMs by reducing the detail loss in single-scale reasoning. For segmentation, we develop a novel model named Mixed-UNet, which has two parallel branches in the decoding phase. The results can be obtained after fusing the extracted features from two branches. We evaluate the designed Mixed-UNet against several prevalent deep learning-based segmentation approaches on our dataset collected from the local hospital and public datasets. The validation results demonstrate that our model surpasses available methods under the same supervision level in the segmentation of various lesions from brain imaging.

Cerebrovascular morphology in aging and disease -- imaging biomarkers for ischemic stroke and Alzheimers disease

Background and Purpose: Altered brain vasculature is a key phenomenon in several neurologic disorders. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of vascular morphology in healthy and diseased adults including changes during aging and the anatomical variations in the Circle of Willis (CoW). Methods: We used our automatic method to segment and extract novel geometric features of the cerebral vasculature from MRA scans of 175 healthy subjects, 45 AIS, and 50 AD patients after spatial registration. This is followed by quantification and statistical analysis of vascular alterations in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), the biggest cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative disorders. Results: We determined that the CoW is fully formed in only 35 percent of healthy adults and found significantly increased tortuosity and fractality, with increasing age and with disease -- both AIS and AD. We also found significantly decreased vessel length, volume and number of branches in AIS patients. Lastly, we found that AD cerebral vessels exhibited significantly smaller diameter and more complex branching patterns, compared to age-matched healthy adults. These changes were significantly heightened with progression of AD from early onset to moderate-severe dementia. Conclusion: Altered vessel geometry in AIS patients shows that there is pathological morphology coupled with stroke. In AD due to pathological alterations in the endothelium or amyloid depositions leading to neuronal damage and hypoperfusion, vessel geometry is significantly altered even in mild or early dementia. The specific geometric features and quantitative comparisons demonstrate potential for using vascular morphology as a non-invasive imaging biomarker for neurologic disorders.