arXiv subjects

Anna Thomas

Publications and source records attributed to Anna Thomas.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Artificial Intelligence for Food Innovation

Global food systems must deliver nutritious, sustainable foods while sharply reducing environmental impact. Yet, food innovation remains slow, empirical, and fragmented. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a transformative path to link molecular composition to functional performance, connect chemical structure to sensory outcomes, and accelerate cross-disciplinary innovation across the production pipeline. While broadly applicable to food systems, we focus on sustainable proteins--plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cultivated--as a high-impact testbed for AI-driven closed-loop design. We review the applications, opportunities, and challenges of AI for Food as an emerging discipline that integrates ingredient design, formulation development, fermentation and production, texture analysis, sensory science, manufacturing, and recipe generation. We identify four priorities: advancing scientific machine learning with embedded domain priors, treating food as a programmable biomaterial, building self-driving laboratories for automated discovery, and developing deep reasoning models that integrate nutrition and sustainability. Integrating AI responsibly into the food innovation cycle can accelerate the transition to sustainable food systems and establish a predictive, design-driven science of food for human and planetary health.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2021

Convolutional Sparse Coding based Channel Estimation for OTFS-SCMA in Uplink

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) has emerged as the most sought-after modulation technique in a high mobility scenario. Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is an attractive code-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. Recently a code-domain NOMA approach for OTFS, named OTFS-SCMA, is proposed. OTFS-SCMA is a promising framework that meets the demands of high mobility and massive connectivity. This paper presents a channel estimation technique based on the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) approach for OTFS-SCMA in the uplink. The channel estimation task is formulated as a CSC problem following a careful rearrangement of the OTFS input-output relation. We use an embedded pilot-aided sparse-pilot structure that enjoys the features of both OTFS and SCMA. The existing channel estimation techniques for OTFS in multi-user scenarios for uplink demand extremely high overhead for pilot and guard symbols, proportional to the number of users. The proposed method maintains a minimal overhead equivalent to a single user without compromising on the estimation error. The results show that the proposed channel estimation algorithm is very efficient in bit error rate (BER), normalized mean square error (NMSE), and spectral efficiency (SE).

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

OTFS-NOMA based on SCMA

Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) is a $\text{2-D}$ modulation technique that has the potential to overcome the challenges faced by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in high Doppler environments. The performance of OTFS in a multi-user scenario with orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques has been impressive. Due to the requirement of massive connectivity in 5G and beyond, it is immensely essential to devise and examine the OTFS system with the existing Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques. In this paper, we propose a multi-user OTFS system based on a code-domain NOMA technique called Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA). This system is referred to as the OTFS-SCMA model. The framework for OTFS-SCMA is designed for both downlink and uplink. First, the sparse SCMA codewords are strategically placed on the delay-Doppler plane such that the overall overloading factor of the OTFS-SCMA system is equal to that of the underlying basic SCMA system. The receiver in downlink performs the detection in two sequential phases: first, the conventional OTFS detection using the method of linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE), and then the conventional SCMA detection. For uplink, we propose a single-phase detector based on message-passing algorithm (MPA) to detect the multiple users' symbols. The performance of the proposed OTFS-SCMA system is validated through extensive simulations both in downlink and uplink. We consider delay-Doppler planes of different parameters and various SCMA systems of overloading factor up to 200$\%$. The performance of OTFS-SCMA is compared with those of existing OTFS-OMA techniques. The comprehensive investigation demonstrates the usefulness of OTFS-SCMA in future wireless communication standards.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Neurally-Guided Procedural Models: Amortized Inference for Procedural Graphics Programs using Neural Networks

Probabilistic inference algorithms such as Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) provide powerful tools for constraining procedural models in computer graphics, but they require many samples to produce desirable results. In this paper, we show how to create procedural models which learn how to satisfy constraints. We augment procedural models with neural networks which control how the model makes random choices based on the output it has generated thus far. We call such models neurally-guided procedural models. As a pre-computation, we train these models to maximize the likelihood of example outputs generated via SMC. They are then used as efficient SMC importance samplers, generating high-quality results with very few samples. We evaluate our method on L-system-like models with image-based constraints. Given a desired quality threshold, neurally-guided models can generate satisfactory results up to 10x faster than unguided models.

cs.GR↗