Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of pseudo-healthy image reconstruction for anomaly detection with deep generative models: Application to brain FDG PET

Over the past years, pseudo-healthy reconstruction for unsupervised anomaly detection has gained in popularity. This approach has the great advantage of not requiring tedious pixel-wise data annotation and offers possibility to generalize to any kind of anomalies, including that corresponding to rare diseases. By training a deep generative model with only images from healthy subjects, the model will learn to reconstruct pseudo-healthy images. This pseudo-healthy reconstruction is then compared to the input to detect and localize anomalies. The evaluation of such methods often relies on a ground truth lesion mask that is available for test data, which may not exist depending on the application.We propose an evaluation procedure based on the simulation of realistic abnormal images to validate pseudo-healthy reconstruction methods when no ground truth is available. This allows us to extensively test generative models on different kinds of anomalies and measuring their performance using the pair of normal and abnormal images corresponding to the same subject. It can be used as a preliminary automatic step to validate the capacity of a generative model to reconstruct pseudo-healthy images, before a more advanced validation step that would require clinician’s expertise. We apply this framework to the reconstruction of 3D brain FDG PET using a convolutional variational autoencoder with the aim to detect as early as possible the neurodegeneration markers that are specific to dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.
$s$-Stable Kneser Graph are Hamiltonian

The Kneser Graph $K(n,k)$ has as vertices all $k$-subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ and edges connecting two vertices if they are disjoint. The $s$-stable Kneser Graph $K_{s-stab}(n, k)$ is obtained from the Kneser graph by deleting vertices with elements at cyclic distance less than $s$. In this article we show that connected $s$-Stable Kneser graph are Hamiltonian.
Improving Data Augmentation for Robust Visual Question Answering with Effective Curriculum Learning

Being widely used in learning unbiased visual question answering (VQA) models, Data Augmentation (DA) helps mitigate language biases by generating extra training samples beyond the original samples. While today's DA methods can generate robust samples, the augmented training set, significantly larger than the original dataset, often exhibits redundancy in terms of difficulty or content repetition, leading to inefficient model training and even compromising the model performance. To this end, we design an Effective Curriculum Learning strategy ECL to enhance DA-based VQA methods. Intuitively, ECL trains VQA models on relatively ``easy'' samples first, and then gradually changes to ``harder'' samples, and less-valuable samples are dynamically removed. Compared to training on the entire augmented dataset, our ECL strategy can further enhance VQA models' performance with fewer training samples. Extensive ablations have demonstrated the effectiveness of ECL on various methods.
Prediction of Breast Cancer Recurrence Risk Using a Multi-Model Approach Integrating Whole Slide Imaging and Clinicopathologic Features

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy affecting women worldwide and is notable for its morphologic and biologic diversity, with varying risks of recurrence following treatment. The Oncotype DX Breast Recurrence Score test is an important predictive and prognostic genomic assay for estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer that guides therapeutic strategies; however, such tests can be expensive, delay care, and are not widely available. The aim of this study was to develop a multi-model approach integrating the analysis of whole slide images and clinicopathologic data to predict their associated breast cancer recurrence risks and categorize these patients into two risk groups according to the predicted score: low and high risk. The proposed novel methodology uses convolutional neural networks for feature extraction and vision transformers for contextual aggregation, complemented by a logistic regression model that analyzes clinicopathologic data for classification into two risk categories. This method was trained and tested on 993 hematoxylin and eosin-stained whole-slide images of breast cancers with corresponding clinicopathological features that had prior Oncotype DX testing. The model's performance was evaluated using an internal test set of 198 patients from Dartmouth Health and an external test set of 418 patients from the University of Chicago. The multi-model approach achieved an AUC of 0.92 (95 percent CI: 0.88-0.96) on the internal set and an AUC of 0.85 (95 percent CI: 0.79-0.90) on the external cohort. These results suggest that with further validation, the proposed methodology could provide an alternative to assist clinicians in personalizing treatment for breast cancer patients and potentially improving their outcomes.
Momentary Stressor Logging and Reflective Visualizations: Implications for Stress Management with Wearables

Commercial wearables from Fitbit, Garmin, and Whoop have recently introduced real-time notifications based on detecting changes in physiological responses indicating potential stress. In this paper, we investigate how these new capabilities can be leveraged to improve stress management. We developed a smartwatch app, a smartphone app, and a cloud service, and conducted a 100-day field study with 122 participants who received prompts triggered by physiological responses several times a day. They were asked whether they were stressed, and if so, to log the most likely stressor. Each week, participants received new visualizations of their data to self-reflect on patterns and trends. Participants reported better awareness of their stressors, and self-initiating fourteen kinds of behavioral changes to reduce stress in their daily lives. Repeated self-reports over 14 weeks showed reductions in both stress intensity (in 26,521 momentary ratings) and stress frequency (in 1,057 weekly surveys).
Mapping graph homology to $K$-theory of Roe algebras

Given a graph $\Gamma$, one may conside the set $X$ of its vertices as a metric space by assuming that all edges have length one. We consider two versions of homology theory of $\Gamma$ and their $K$-theory counterparts -- the $K$-theory of the (uniform) Roe algebra of the metric space $X$ of vertices of $\Gamma$. We construct here a natural map from homology of $\Gamma$ to the $K$-theory of the Roe algebra of $X$, and its uniform version. We show that, when $\Gamma$ is the Cayley graph of $\mathbb Z$, the constructed maps are isomorphisms.
Doubly regularized generalized linear models for spatial observations with high-dimensional covariates (preprint)

A discrete spatial lattice can be cast as a network structure over which spatially-correlated outcomes are observed. A second network structure may also capture similarities among measured features, when such information is available. Incorporating the network structures when analyzing such doubly-structured data can improve predictive power, and lead to better identification of important features in the data-generating process. Motivated by applications in spatial disease mapping, we develop a new doubly regularized regression framework to incorporate these network structures for analyzing high-dimensional datasets. Our estimators can easily be implemented with standard convex optimization algorithms. In addition, we describe a procedure to obtain asymptotically valid confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for our model parameters. We show empirically that our framework provides improved predictive accuracy and inferential power compared to existing high-dimensional spatial methods. These advantages hold given fully accurate network information, and also with networks which are partially misspecified or uninformative. The application of the proposed method to modeling COVID-19 mortality data suggests that it can improve prediction of deaths beyond standard spatial models, and that it selects relevant covariates more often.
Accelerating Material Property Prediction using Generically Complete Isometry Invariants

Material or crystal property prediction using machine learning has grown popular in recent years as it provides a computationally efficient replacement to classical simulation methods. A crucial first step for any of these algorithms is the representation used for a periodic crystal. While similar objects like molecules and proteins have a finite number of atoms and their representation can be built based upon a finite point cloud interpretation, periodic crystals are unbounded in size, making their representation more challenging. In the present work, we adapt the Pointwise Distance Distribution (PDD), a continuous and generically complete isometry invariant for periodic point sets, as a representation for our learning algorithm. While the PDD is effective in distinguishing periodic point sets up to isometry, there is no consideration for the composition of the underlying material. We develop a transformer model with a modified self-attention mechanism that can utilize the PDD and incorporate compositional information via a spatial encoding method. This model is tested on the crystals of the Materials Project and Jarvis-DFT databases and shown to produce accuracy on par with state-of-the-art methods while being several times faster in both training and prediction time.
Dynamics of the Surface Growth Resulted from Sedimentation of Spheres in a Hele-Shaw Cell Containing a Low-Viscosity Fluid

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of surface growth resulting from sedimentation of spherical granular particles in a fluid environment, using experiments and simulations. In the experimental part, spherical polystyrene particles are poured down from the top of a vertical Hele-Shaw cell and form a 1+1-dimensional growing surface. The surface roughness is obtained from the images and the growth and roughness exponents are measured. In the numerical simulation part, the surface growth process is simulated using the Molecular Dynamics method, considering the interactions between the grains; and the exponents are calculated. In this method, unlike conventional simulation models, instead of a discrete deposition law, the dynamics of the individual particles throughout the process are obtained considering different forces acting on the particles. Finally, the simulation results are compared with the experiment, and we see a very good agreement between them. We find different values for the exponents using different methods, which indicates that the system is multi-affine and does not obey scaling laws of affine models.
A Parameter Privacy-Preserving Strategy for Mixed-Autonomy Platoon Control

It has been demonstrated that leading cruise control (LCC) can improve the operation of mixed-autonomy platoons by allowing connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to make longitudinal control decisions based on the information provided by surrounding vehicles. However, LCC generally requires surrounding human-driven vehicles (HDVs) to share their real-time states, which can be used by adversaries to infer drivers' car-following behavior, potentially leading to financial losses or safety concerns. This paper aims to address such privacy concerns and protect the behavioral characteristics of HDVs by devising a parameter privacy-preserving approach for mixed-autonomy platoon control. First, we integrate a parameter privacy filter into LCC to protect sensitive car-following parameters. The privacy filter allows each vehicle to generate seemingly realistic pseudo states by distorting the true parameters to pseudo parameters, which can protect drivers' privacy in behavioral parameters without significantly influencing the control performance. Second, to enhance the practicality and reliability of the privacy filter within LCC, we first extend the current approach to accommodate continuous parameter spaces through a neural network estimator. Subsequently, we introduce an individual-level parameter privacy preservation constraint, focusing on the privacy level of each individual parameter pair, further enhancing the approach's reliability. Third, analysis of head-to-tail string stability reveals the potential impact of privacy filters in degrading mixed traffic flow performance. Simulation shows that this approach can effectively trade off privacy and control performance in LCC. We further demonstrate the benefit of such an approach in networked systems, i.e., by applying the privacy filter to a proceeding vehicle, one can also achieve a certain level of privacy for the following vehicle.
Scalable Factor Graph-Based Heterogeneous Bayesian DDF for Dynamic Systems

Heterogeneous Bayesian decentralized data fusion captures the set of problems in which two robots must combine two probability density functions over non-equal, but overlapping sets of random variables. In the context of multi-robot dynamic systems, this enables robots to take a"divide and conquer"approach to reason and share data over complementary tasks instead of over the full joint state space. For example, in a target tracking application, this allows robots to track different subsets of targets and share data on only common targets. This paper presents a framework by which robots can each use a local factor graph to represent relevant partitions of a complex global joint probability distribution, thus allowing them to avoid reasoning over the entirety of a more complex model and saving communication as well as computation costs. From a theoretical point of view, this paper makes contributions by casting the heterogeneous decentralized fusion problem in terms of a factor graph, analyzing the challenges that arise due to dynamic filtering, and then developing a new conservative filtering algorithm that ensures statistical correctness. From a practical point of view, we show how this framework can be used to represent different multi-robot applications and then test it with simulations and hardware experiments to validate and demonstrate its statistical conservativeness, applicability, and robustness to real-world challenges.
Boolean Logic as an Error feedback mechanism

The notion of Boolean logic backpropagation was introduced to build neural networks with weights and activations being Boolean numbers. Most of computations can be done with Boolean logic instead of real arithmetic, both during training and inference phases. But the underlying discrete optimization problem is NP-hard, and the Boolean logic has no guarantee. In this work we propose the first convergence analysis, under standard non-convex assumptions.
Evaluating Echo State Network for Parkinson's Disease Prediction using Voice Features

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a debilitating neurological disorder that necessitates precise and early diagnosis for effective patient care. This study aims to develop a diagnostic model capable of achieving both high accuracy and minimizing false negatives, a critical factor in clinical practice. Given the limited training data, a feature selection strategy utilizing ANOVA is employed to identify the most informative features. Subsequently, various machine learning methods, including Echo State Networks (ESN), Random Forest, k-nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Classifier, Extreme Gradient Boosting, and Decision Tree, are employed and thoroughly evaluated. The statistical analyses of the results highlight ESN's exceptional performance, showcasing not only superior accuracy but also the lowest false negative rate among all methods. Consistently, statistical data indicates that the ESN method consistently maintains a false negative rate of less than 8% in 83% of cases. ESN's capacity to strike a delicate balance between diagnostic precision and minimizing misclassifications positions it as an exemplary choice for PD diagnosis, especially in scenarios characterized by limited data. This research marks a significant step towards more efficient and reliable PD diagnosis, with potential implications for enhanced patient outcomes and healthcare dynamics.
MAPLE: Micro Analysis of Pairwise Language Evolution for Few-Shot Claim Verification

Claim verification is an essential step in the automated fact-checking pipeline which assesses the veracity of a claim against a piece of evidence. In this work, we explore the potential of few-shot claim verification, where only very limited data is available for supervision. We propose MAPLE (Micro Analysis of Pairwise Language Evolution), a pioneering approach that explores the alignment between a claim and its evidence with a small seq2seq model and a novel semantic measure. Its innovative utilization of micro language evolution path leverages unlabelled pairwise data to facilitate claim verification while imposing low demand on data annotations and computing resources. MAPLE demonstrates significant performance improvements over SOTA baselines SEED, PET and LLaMA 2 across three fact-checking datasets: FEVER, Climate FEVER, and SciFact. Data and code are available.
Bounded-degree Low Rank Parity Check Codes

Low rank parity check (LRPC) codes are the rank-metric analogue of low density parity check codes. In this paper we investigate a sub-family of LRPC codes, which have a parity check matrix defined over a subspace $V_{\alpha,d}=\langle 1,\alpha, \ldots, \alpha^{d-1}\rangle_{\mathbb{F}_q}\subsetneq \mathbb{F}_{q^m}$, where $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ is the finite field of $q^m$ elements and $d$ is significantly smaller than $m $. These codes are named bounded-degree LRPC (BD-LRPC) codes and are the same as the standard LRPC codes of density $2$ when the degree $d=2$, while BD-LRPC codes of degree $d>2$ constitute a proper subset of LRPC codes of density $d$. Exploiting the particular structure of their parity check matrix, we show that the BD-LRPC codes of degree $d$ can uniquely correct errors of rank weight $r$ when $n-k \geq r + u$ for certain $u \geq 1$, in contrast to the condition $n-k\geq dr$ required for the standard LRPC codes, where $d\geq n/(n-k)$. This underscores the superior decoding capability of the proposed BD-LRPC codes. As the code length $n$ approaches infinity, when $n/m\rightarrow 0$, it is shown that $u$ can be chosen as a certain constant, which indicates that the BD-LRPC codes with a code rate of $R$ can be, with a high probability, uniquely decodable with the decoding radius $\rho=r/n$ approaching the Singleton bound $1-R$ for $n \to \infty$; and when $b= n/m$ is a constant, the BD-LRPC codes can have unique decoding radius $\rho = 1-R-\epsilon $ for a small $\epsilon$, which can easily lead to $\rho>(1-R)/2$ with properly chosen parameters.
DGNN: Decoupled Graph Neural Networks with Structural Consistency between Attribute and Graph Embedding Representations

Graph neural networks (GNNs) demonstrate a robust capability for representation learning on graphs with complex structures, showcasing superior performance in various applications. The majority of existing GNNs employ a graph convolution operation by using both attribute and structure information through coupled learning. In essence, GNNs, from an optimization perspective, seek to learn a consensus and compromise embedding representation that balances attribute and graph information, selectively exploring and retaining valid information. To obtain a more comprehensive embedding representation of nodes, a novel GNNs framework, dubbed Decoupled Graph Neural Networks (DGNN), is introduced. DGNN explores distinctive embedding representations from the attribute and graph spaces by decoupled terms. Considering that semantic graph, constructed from attribute feature space, consists of different node connection information and provides enhancement for the topological graph, both topological and semantic graphs are combined for the embedding representation learning. Further, structural consistency among attribute embedding and graph embeddings is promoted to effectively remove redundant information and establish soft connection. This involves promoting factor sharing for adjacency reconstruction matrices, facilitating the exploration of a consensus and high-level correlation. Finally, a more powerful and complete representation is achieved through the concatenation of these embeddings. Experimental results conducted on several graph benchmark datasets verify its superiority in node classification task.
Vanishing-Point-Guided Video Semantic Segmentation of Driving Scenes

The estimation of implicit cross-frame correspondences and the high computational cost have long been major challenges in video semantic segmentation (VSS) for driving scenes. Prior works utilize keyframes, feature propagation, or cross-frame attention to address these issues. By contrast, we are the first to harness vanishing point (VP) priors for more effective segmentation. Intuitively, objects near VPs (i.e., away from the vehicle) are less discernible. Moreover, they tend to move radially away from the VP over time in the usual case of a forward-facing camera, a straight road, and linear forward motion of the vehicle. Our novel, efficient network for VSS, named VPSeg, incorporates two modules that utilize exactly this pair of static and dynamic VP priors: sparse-to-dense feature mining (DenseVP) and VP-guided motion fusion (MotionVP). MotionVP employs VP-guided motion estimation to establish explicit correspondences across frames and help attend to the most relevant features from neighboring frames, while DenseVP enhances weak dynamic features in distant regions around VPs. These modules operate within a context-detail framework, which separates contextual features from high-resolution local features at different input resolutions to reduce computational costs. Contextual and local features are integrated through contextualized motion attention (CMA) for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on two popular driving segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and ACDC, demonstrate that VPSeg outperforms previous SOTA methods, with only modest computational overhead.
A semidefinite programming approach for robust elliptic localization

This short communication addresses the problem of elliptic localization with outlier measurements, whose occurrences are prevalent in various location-enabled applications and can significantly compromise the positioning performance if not adequately handled. In contrast to the reliance on $M$-estimation adopted in the majority of existing solutions, we take a different path, specifically exploring the worst-case robust approximation criterion, to bolster resistance of the elliptic location estimator against outliers. From a geometric standpoint, our method boils down to pinpointing the Chebyshev center of the feasible set determined by the available bistatic ranges with bounded measurement errors. For a practical approach to the associated min-max problem, we convert it into the well-established convex optimization framework of semidefinite programming (SDP). Numerical simulations confirm that our SDP-based technique can outperform a number of existing elliptic localization schemes in terms of positioning accuracy in Gaussian mixture noise, a common type of impulsive interference in the context of range-based localization.