arXiv subjects

Jordan M. Malof

Publications and source records attributed to Jordan M. Malof.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Closing Gaps in Emissions Monitoring with Climate TRACE

Global greenhouse gas emissions estimates are essential for monitoring and mitigation planning. Existing emissions datasets provide critical foundations for understanding emissions patterns across sectors, geographies, and time scales. Through a structured assessment of recent emissions datasets, we identified opportunities to further increase the actionability of emissions data through more comprehensive source-level coverage, finer spatial and temporal resolution, and more frequent updates. Building on existing resources to address these opportunities, we present the Climate TRACE framework and resulting dataset, which is available on an open-access platform (climatetrace.org). The Climate TRACE framework synthesizes existing emissions data, prioritizing accuracy, coverage, and resolution, and fills remaining gaps using sector-specific estimation approaches. The resulting dataset is the first to provide global emissions estimates for individual sources (e.g., individual power plants) for most anthropogenic emitting sectors. The dataset spans January 1, 2021, to the present, with a two-month reporting lag and monthly updates. This dataset and open-access platform provides access to detailed emissions estimates for most subnational governments worldwide. By combining source-level spatial detail, monthly updates, and broad sectoral coverage, the dataset is designed to support analyses relevant to emissions monitoring and mitigation planning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Improving and Evaluating Open Deep Research Agents

We focus here on Deep Research Agents (DRAs), which are systems that can take a natural language prompt from a user, and then autonomously search for, and utilize, internet-based content to address the prompt. Recent DRAs have demonstrated impressive capabilities on public benchmarks however, recent research largely involves proprietary closed-source systems. At the time of this work, we only found one open-source DRA, termed Open Deep Research (ODR). In this work we adapt the challenging recent BrowseComp benchmark to compare ODR to existing proprietary systems. We propose BrowseComp-Small (BC-Small), comprising a subset of BrowseComp, as a more computationally-tractable DRA benchmark for academic labs. We benchmark ODR and two other proprietary systems on BC-Small: one system from Anthropic and one system from Google. We find that all three systems achieve 0% accuracy on the test set of 60 questions. We introduce three strategic improvements to ODR, resulting in the ODR+ model, which achieves a state-of-the-art 10% success rate on BC-Small among both closed-source and open-source systems. We report ablation studies indicating that all three of our improvements contributed to the success of ODR+.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

An Agentic Framework for Autonomous Metamaterial Modeling and Inverse Design

Recent significant advances in integrating multiple Large Language Model (LLM) systems have enabled Agentic Frameworks capable of performing complex tasks autonomously, including novel scientific research. We develop and demonstrate such a framework specifically for the inverse design of photonic metamaterials. When queried with a desired optical spectrum, the Agent autonomously proposes and develops a forward deep learning model, accesses external tools via APIs for tasks like simulation and optimization, utilizes memory, and generates a final design via a deep inverse method. The framework's effectiveness is demonstrated in its ability to automate, reason, plan, and adapt. Notably, the Agentic Framework possesses internal reflection and decision flexibility, permitting highly varied and potentially novel outputs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Learning Electromagnetic Metamaterial Physics With ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, LlaMa, and Claude are trained on massive quantities of text parsed from the internet and have shown a remarkable ability to respond to complex prompts in a manner often indistinguishable from humans. For all-dielectric metamaterials consisting of unit cells with four elliptical resonators, we present a LLM fine-tuned on up to 40,000 data that can predict the absorptivity spectrum given a text prompt that only specifies the metasurface geometry. Results are compared to conventional machine learning approaches including feed-forward neural networks, random forest, linear regression, and K-nearest neighbor (KNN). Remarkably, the fine-tuned LLM (FT-LLM) achieves a comparable performance across large dataset sizes with a deep neural network. We also explore inverse problems by asking the LLM to predict the geometry necessary to achieve a desired spectrum. LLMs possess several advantages over humans that may give them benefits for research, including the ability to process enormous amounts of data, find hidden patterns in data, and operate in higher-dimensional spaces. This suggests they may be able to leverage their general knowledge of the world to learn faster from training data than traditional models, making them valuable tools for research and analysis.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Meta-Learning for Color-to-Infrared Cross-Modal Style Transfer

Recent object detection models for infrared (IR) imagery are based upon deep neural networks (DNNs) and require large amounts of labeled training imagery. However, publicly available datasets that can be used for such training are limited in their size and diversity. To address this problem, we explore cross-modal style transfer (CMST) to leverage large and diverse color imagery datasets so that they can be used to train DNN-based IR image-based object detectors. We evaluate six contemporary stylization methods on four publicly-available IR datasets - the first comparison of its kind - and find that CMST is highly effective for DNN-based detectors. Surprisingly, we find that existing data-driven methods are outperformed by a simple grayscale stylization (an average of the color channels). Our analysis reveals that existing data-driven methods are either too simplistic or introduce significant artifacts into the imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose meta-learning style transfer (MLST), which learns a stylization by composing and tuning well-behaved analytic functions. We find that MLST leads to more complex stylizations without introducing significant image artifacts and achieves the best overall detector performance on our benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Are Deep Learning Models Robust to Partial Object Occlusion in Visual Recognition Tasks?

Image classification models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), perform well on a variety of classification tasks but struggle under conditions of partial occlusion, i.e., conditions in which objects are partially covered from the view of a camera. Methods to improve performance under occlusion, including data augmentation, part-based clustering, and more inherently robust architectures, including Vision Transformer (ViT) models, have, to some extent, been evaluated on their ability to classify objects under partial occlusion. However, evaluations of these methods have largely relied on images containing artificial occlusion, which are typically computer-generated and therefore inexpensive to label. Additionally, methods are rarely compared against each other, and many methods are compared against early, now outdated, deep learning models. We contribute the Image Recognition Under Occlusion (IRUO) dataset, based on the recently developed Occluded Video Instance Segmentation (OVIS) dataset (arXiv:2102.01558). IRUO utilizes real-world and artificially occluded images to test and benchmark leading methods' robustness to partial occlusion in visual recognition tasks. In addition, we contribute the design and results of a human study using images from IRUO that evaluates human classification performance at multiple levels and types of occlusion. We find that modern CNN-based models show improved recognition accuracy on occluded images compared to earlier CNN-based models, and ViT-based models are more accurate than CNN-based models on occluded images, performing only modestly worse than human accuracy. We also find that certain types of occlusion, including diffuse occlusion, where relevant objects are seen through "holes" in occluders such as fences and leaves, can greatly reduce the accuracy of deep recognition models as compared to humans, especially those with CNN backbones.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Segment anything, from space?

Recently, the first foundation model developed specifically for image segmentation tasks was developed, termed the "Segment Anything Model" (SAM). SAM can segment objects in input imagery based on cheap input prompts, such as one (or more) points, a bounding box, or a mask. The authors examined the \textit{zero-shot} image segmentation accuracy of SAM on a large number of vision benchmark tasks and found that SAM usually achieved recognition accuracy similar to, or sometimes exceeding, vision models that had been trained on the target tasks. The impressive generalization of SAM for segmentation has major implications for vision researchers working on natural imagery. In this work, we examine whether SAM's performance extends to overhead imagery problems and help guide the community's response to its development. We examine SAM's performance on a set of diverse and widely studied benchmark tasks. We find that SAM does often generalize well to overhead imagery, although it fails in some cases due to the unique characteristics of overhead imagery and its common target objects. We report on these unique systematic failure cases for remote sensing imagery that may comprise useful future research for the community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Randomized Histogram Matching: A Simple Augmentation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Overhead Imagery

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) are highly accurate on many recognition tasks for overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery. However, visual domain shifts (e.g., statistical changes due to geography, sensor, or atmospheric conditions) remain a challenge, causing the accuracy of DNNs to degrade substantially and unpredictably when testing on new sets of imagery. In this work, we model domain shifts caused by variations in imaging hardware, lighting, and other conditions as non-linear pixel-wise transformations, and we perform a systematic study indicating that modern DNNs can become largely robust to these types of transformations, if provided with appropriate training data augmentation. In general, however, we do not know the transformation between two sets of imagery. To overcome this, we propose a fast real-time unsupervised training augmentation technique, termed randomized histogram matching (RHM). We conduct experiments with two large benchmark datasets for building segmentation and find that despite its simplicity, RHM consistently yields similar or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches, while being significantly simpler and more computationally efficient. RHM also offers substantially better performance than other comparably simple approaches that are widely used for overhead imagery.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Mixture Manifold Networks: A Computationally Efficient Baseline for Inverse Modeling

We propose and show the efficacy of a new method to address generic inverse problems. Inverse modeling is the task whereby one seeks to determine the control parameters of a natural system that produce a given set of observed measurements. Recent work has shown impressive results using deep learning, but we note that there is a trade-off between model performance and computational time. For some applications, the computational time at inference for the best performing inverse modeling method may be overly prohibitive to its use. We present a new method that leverages multiple manifolds as a mixture of backward (e.g., inverse) models in a forward-backward model architecture. These multiple backwards models all share a common forward model, and their training is mitigated by generating training examples from the forward model. The proposed method thus has two innovations: 1) the multiple Manifold Mixture Network (MMN) architecture, and 2) the training procedure involving augmenting backward model training data using the forward model. We demonstrate the advantages of our method by comparing to several baselines on four benchmark inverse problems, and we furthermore provide analysis to motivate its design.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Meta-simulation for the Automated Design of Synthetic Overhead Imagery

The use of synthetic (or simulated) data for training machine learning models has grown rapidly in recent years. Synthetic data can often be generated much faster and more cheaply than its real-world counterpart. One challenge of using synthetic imagery however is scene design: e.g., the choice of content and its features and spatial arrangement. To be effective, this design must not only be realistic, but appropriate for the target domain, which (by assumption) is unlabeled. In this work, we propose an approach to automatically choose the design of synthetic imagery based upon unlabeled real-world imagery. Our approach, termed Neural-Adjoint Meta-Simulation (NAMS), builds upon the seminal recent meta-simulation approaches. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art methods, our approach can be pre-trained once offline, and then provides fast design inference for new target imagery. Using both synthetic and real-world problems, we show that NAMS infers synthetic designs that match both the in-domain and out-of-domain target imagery, and that training segmentation models with NAMS-designed imagery yields superior results compared to naïve randomized designs and state-of-the-art meta-simulation methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Automated Extraction of Energy Systems Information from Remotely Sensed Data: A Review and Analysis

High quality energy systems information is a crucial input to energy systems research, modeling, and decision-making. Unfortunately, actionable information about energy systems is often of limited availability, incomplete, or only accessible for a substantial fee or through a non-disclosure agreement. Recently, remotely sensed data (e.g., satellite imagery, aerial photography) have emerged as a potentially rich source of energy systems information. However, the use of these data is frequently challenged by its sheer volume and complexity, precluding manual analysis. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning have enabled automated and rapid extraction of useful information from remotely sensed data, facilitating large-scale acquisition of critical energy system variables. Here we present a systematic review of the literature on this emerging topic, providing an in-depth survey and review of papers published within the past two decades. We first taxonomize the existing literature into ten major areas, spanning the energy value chain. Within each research area, we distill and critically discuss major features that are relevant to energy researchers, including, for example, key challenges regarding the accessibility and reliability of the methods. We then synthesize our findings to identify limitations and trends in the literature as a whole, and discuss opportunities for innovation. These include the opportunity to extend the methods beyond electricity to broader energy systems and wider geographic areas; and the ability to expand the use of these methods in research and decision making as satellite data become cheaper and easier to access. We also find that there are persistent challenges: limited standardization and rigor of performance assessments; limited sharing of code, which would improve replicability; and a limited consideration of the ethics and privacy of data.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

What you get is not always what you see: pitfalls in solar array assessment using overhead imagery

Effective integration planning for small, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays into electric power grids requires access to high quality data: the location and power capacity of individual solar PV arrays. Unfortunately, national databases of small-scale solar PV do not exist; those that do are limited in their spatial resolution, typically aggregated up to state or national levels. While several promising approaches for solar PV detection have been published, strategies for evaluating the performance of these models are often highly heterogeneous from study to study. The resulting comparison of these methods for practical applications for energy assessments becomes challenging and may imply that the reported performance evaluations are overly optimistic. The heterogeneity comes in many forms, each of which we explore in this work: the level of spatial aggregation, the validation of ground truth, inconsistencies in the training and validation datasets, and the degree of diversity of the locations and sensors from which the training and validation data originate. For each, we discuss emerging practices from the literature to address them or suggest directions of future research. As part of our investigation, we evaluate solar PV identification performance in two large regions. Our findings suggest that traditional performance evaluation of the automated identification of solar PV from satellite imagery may be optimistic due to common limitations in the validation process. The takeaways from this work are intended to inform and catalyze the large-scale practical application of automated solar PV assessment techniques by energy researchers and professionals.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Inverse deep learning methods and benchmarks for artificial electromagnetic material design

Deep learning (DL) inverse techniques have increased the speed of artificial electromagnetic material (AEM) design and improved the quality of resulting devices. Many DL inverse techniques have succeeded on a number of AEM design tasks, but to compare, contrast, and evaluate assorted techniques it is critical to clarify the underlying ill-posedness of inverse problems. Here we review state-of-the-art approaches and present a comprehensive survey of deep learning inverse methods and invertible and conditional invertible neural networks to AEM design. We produce easily accessible and rapidly implementable AEM design benchmarks, which offers a methodology to efficiently determine the DL technique best suited to solving different design challenges. Our methodology is guided by constraints on repeated simulation and an easily integrated metric, which we propose expresses the relative ill-posedness of any AEM design problem. We show that as the problem becomes increasingly ill-posed, the neural adjoint with boundary loss (NA) generates better solutions faster, regardless of simulation constraints. On simpler AEM design tasks, direct neural networks (NN) fare better when simulations are limited, while geometries predicted by mixture density networks (MDN) and conditional variational auto-encoders (VAE) can improve with continued sampling and re-simulation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

SIMPL: Generating Synthetic Overhead Imagery to Address Zero-shot and Few-Shot Detection Problems

Recently deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success for object detection in overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery. One ongoing challenge however is the acquisition of training data, due to high costs of obtaining satellite imagery and annotating objects in it. In this work we present a simple approach - termed Synthetic object IMPLantation (SIMPL) - to easily and rapidly generate large quantities of synthetic overhead training data for custom target objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using SIMPL synthetic imagery for training DNNs in zero-shot scenarios where no real imagery is available; and few-shot learning scenarios, where limited real-world imagery is available. We also conduct experiments to study the sensitivity of SIMPL's effectiveness to some key design parameters, providing users for insights when designing synthetic imagery for custom objects. We release a software implementation of our SIMPL approach so that others can build upon it, or use it for their own custom problems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Neural-adjoint method for the inverse design of all-dielectric metasurfaces

All-dielectric metasurfaces exhibit exotic electromagnetic responses, similar to those obtained with metal-based metamaterials. Research in all-dielectric metasurfaces currently uses relatively simple unit-cell designs, but increased geometrical complexity may yield even greater scattering states. Although machine learning has recently been applied to the design of metasurfaces with impressive results, the much more challenging task of finding a geometry that yields the desired spectra remains largely unsolved. We explore and adapt a recent deep learning approach -- termed neural-adjoint -- and find it is capable of accurately and efficiently estimating complex geometry needed to yield a targeted frequency-dependent scattering. We also show how the neural-adjoint method can intelligently grow the design search space to include designs that increasingly and accurately approximate the desired scattering response. The neural-adjoint method is not restricted to the case demonstrated and may be applied to plasmonics, photonic bandgap, and other structured material systems.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2020

The Synthinel-1 dataset: a collection of high resolution synthetic overhead imagery for building segmentation

Recently deep learning - namely convolutional neural networks (CNNs) - have yielded impressive performance for the task of building segmentation on large overhead (e.g., satellite) imagery benchmarks. However, these benchmark datasets only capture a small fraction of the variability present in real-world overhead imagery, limiting the ability to properly train, or evaluate, models for real-world application. Unfortunately, developing a dataset that captures even a small fraction of real-world variability is typically infeasible due to the cost of imagery, and manual pixel-wise labeling of the imagery. In this work we develop an approach to rapidly and cheaply generate large and diverse virtual environments from which we can capture synthetic overhead imagery for training segmentation CNNs. Using this approach, generate and publicly-release a collection of synthetic overhead imagery - termed Synthinel-1 with full pixel-wise building labels. We use several benchmark dataset to demonstrate that Synthinel-1 is consistently beneficial when used to augment real-world training imagery, especially when CNNs are tested on novel geographic locations or conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Tiling and Stitching Segmentation Output for Remote Sensing: Basic Challenges and Recommendations

In this work we consider the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for pixel-wise labeling (a.k.a., semantic segmentation) of remote sensing imagery (e.g., aerial color or hyperspectral imagery). Remote sensing imagery is usually stored in the form of very large images, referred to as "tiles", which are too large to be segmented directly using most CNNs and their associated hardware. As a result, during label inference, smaller sub-images, called "patches", are processed individually and then "stitched" (concatenated) back together to create a tile-sized label map. This approach suffers from computational ineffiency and can result in discontinuities at output boundaries. We propose a simple alternative approach in which the input size of the CNN is dramatically increased only during label inference. This does not avoid stitching altogether, but substantially mitigates its limitations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach against a vonventional stitching approach using two popular segmentation CNN models and two large-scale remote sensing imagery datasets. The results suggest that the proposed approach substantially reduces label inference time, while also yielding modest overall label accuracy increases. This approach contributed to our wining entry (overall performance) in the INRIA building labeling competition.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

gprHOG and the popularity of Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) for Buried Threat Detection in Ground-Penetrating Radar

Substantial research has been devoted to the development of algorithms that automate buried threat detection (BTD) with ground penetrating radar (GPR) data, resulting in a large number of proposed algorithms. One popular algorithm GPR-based BTD, originally applied by Torrione et al., 2012, is the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature. In a recent large-scale comparison among five veteran institutions, a modified version of HOG referred to here as "gprHOG", performed poorly compared to other modern algorithms. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence demonstrating that the modifications to HOG that comprise gprHOG result in a substantially better-performing algorithm. The results here, in conjunction with the large-scale algorithm comparison, suggest that HOG is not competitive with modern GPR-based BTD algorithms. Given HOG's popularity, these results raise some questions about many existing studies, and suggest gprHOG (and especially HOG) should be employed with caution in future studies.

cs.CV↗