Partial Convolution for Padding, Inpainting, and Image Synthesis.

Partial convolution weights convolutions with binary masks and renormalizes on valid pixels. It was originally proposed for image inpainting task because a corrupted image processed by a standard convolutional often leads to artifacts. Therefore, binary masks are constructed that define the valid and corrupted pixels, so that partial convolution results are only calculated based on valid pixels. It has been also used for conditional image synthesis task, so that when a scene is generated, convolution results of an instance depend only on the feature values that belong to the same instance. One of the unexplored applications for partial convolution is padding which is a critical component of modern convolutional networks. Common padding schemes make strong assumptions about how the padded data should be extrapolated. We show that these padding schemes impair model accuracy, whereas partial convolution based padding provides consistent improvements across a range of tasks. In this article, we review partial convolution applications under one framework. We conduct a comprehensive study of the partial convolution based padding on a variety of computer vision tasks, including image classification, 3D-convolution-based action recognition, and semantic segmentation. Our results suggest that partial convolution-based padding shows promising improvements over strong baselines.

NetExtractor: Extracting a Cerebellar Tissue Gene Regulatory Network Using Differentially Expressed High Mutual Information Binary RNA Profiles.

Bigenic expression relationships are conventionally defined based on metrics such as Pearson or Spearman correlation that cannot typically detect latent, non-linear dependencies or require the relationship to be monotonic. Further, the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic noise as well as embedded relationships between sample sub-populations reduces the probability of extracting biologically relevant edges during the construction of gene co-expression networks (GCNs). In this report, we address these problems via our NetExtractor algorithm. NetExtractor examines all pairwise gene expression profiles first with Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to identify sample sub-populations followed by mutual information (MI) analysis that is capable of detecting non-linear differential bigenic expression relationships. We applied NetExtractor to brain tissue RNA profiles from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project to obtain a brain tissue specific gene expression relationship network centered on cerebellar and cerebellar hemisphere enriched edges. We leveraged the PsychENCODE pre-frontal cortex (PFC) gene regulatory network (GRN) to construct a cerebellar cortex (cerebellar) GRN associated with transcriptionally active regions in cerebellar tissue. Thus, we demonstrate the utility of our NetExtractor approach to detect biologically relevant and novel non-linear binary gene relationships.