OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Novel Audio-Visual Information Fusion System for Mental Disorders Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Mental disorders are among the foremost contributors to the global healthcare challenge. Research indicates that timely diagnosis and intervention are vital in treating various mental disorders. However, the early somatization symptoms of certain mental disorders may not be immediately evident, often resulting in their oversight and misdiagnosis. Additionally, the traditional diagnosis methods incur high time and cost. Deep learning methods based on fMRI and EEG have improved the efficiency of the mental disorder detection process. However, the cost of the equipment and trained staff are generally huge. Moreover, most systems are only trained for a specific mental disorder and are not general-purpose. Recently, physiological studies have shown that there are some speech and facial-related symptoms in a few mental disorders (e.g., depression and ADHD). In this paper, we focus on the emotional expression features of mental disorders and introduce a multimodal mental disorder diagnosis system based on audio-visual information input. Our proposed system is based on spatial-temporal attention networks and innovative uses a less computationally intensive pre-train audio recognition network to fine-tune the video recognition module for better results. We also apply the unified system for multiple mental disorders (ADHD and depression) for the first time. The proposed system achieves over 80\% accuracy on the real multimodal ADHD dataset and achieves state-of-the-art results on the depression dataset AVEC 2014.
Action-Based ADHD Diagnosis in Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) causes significant impairment in various domains. Early diagnosis of ADHD and treatment could significantly improve the quality of life and functioning. Recently, machine learning methods have improved the accuracy and efficiency of the ADHD diagnosis process. However, the cost of the equipment and trained staff required by the existing methods are generally huge. Therefore, we introduce the video-based frame-level action recognition network to ADHD diagnosis for the first time. We also record a real multi-modal ADHD dataset and extract three action classes from the video modality for ADHD diagnosis. The whole process data have been reported to CNTW-NHS Foundation Trust, which would be reviewed by medical consultants/professionals and will be made public in due course.
TreeTOp: Topology Optimization using Constructive Solid Geometry Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Feature-mapping methods for topology optimization (FMTO) facilitate direct geometry extraction by leveraging high-level geometric descriptions of the designs. However, FMTO often relies solely on Boolean unions, which can restrict the design space. This work proposes an FMTO framework leveraging an expanded set of Boolean operations, namely, union, intersection, and subtraction. The optimization process entails determining the primitives and the optimal Boolean operation tree. In particular, the framework leverages a recently proposed unified Boolean operation approach. This approach presents a continuous and differentiable function that interpolates the Boolean operations, enabling gradient-based optimization. The proposed methodology is agnostic to the specific primitive parametrization and is showcased through various numerical examples.
Kinesthetic Teaching in Robotics: a Mixed Reality Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

As collaborative robots become more common in manufacturing scenarios and adopted in hybrid human-robot teams, we should develop new interaction and communication strategies to ensure smooth collaboration between agents. In this paper, we propose a novel communicative interface that uses Mixed Reality as a medium to perform Kinesthetic Teaching (KT) on any robotic platform. We evaluate our proposed approach in a user study involving multiple subjects and two different robots, comparing traditional physical KT with holographic-based KT through user experience questionnaires and task-related metrics.
Coaching a Robotic Sonographer: Learning Robotic Ultrasound with Sparse Expert's Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Ultrasound is widely employed for clinical intervention and diagnosis, due to its advantages of offering non-invasive, radiation-free, and real-time imaging. However, the accessibility of this dexterous procedure is limited due to the substantial training and expertise required of operators. The robotic ultrasound (RUS) offers a viable solution to address this limitation; nonetheless, achieving human-level proficiency remains challenging. Learning from demonstrations (LfD) methods have been explored in RUS, which learns the policy prior from a dataset of offline demonstrations to encode the mental model of the expert sonographer. However, active engagement of experts, i.e. Coaching, during the training of RUS has not been explored thus far. Coaching is known for enhancing efficiency and performance in human training. This paper proposes a coaching framework for RUS to amplify its performance. The framework combines DRL (self-supervised practice) with sparse expert's feedback through coaching. The DRL employs an off-policy Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) network, with a reward based on image quality rating. The coaching by experts is modeled as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which updates the policy parameters based on the correction by the expert. The validation study on phantoms showed that coaching increases the learning rate by $25\%$ and the number of high-quality image acquisition by $74.5\%$.
Data-driven 2D stationary quantum droplets and wave propagations in the amended GP equation with two potentials via deep neural networks learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we develop a systematic deep learning approach to solve two-dimensional (2D) stationary quantum droplets (QDs) and investigate their wave propagation in the 2D amended Gross-Pitaevskii equation with Lee-Huang-Yang correction and two kinds of potentials. Firstly, we use the initial-value iterative neural network (IINN) algorithm for 2D stationary quantum droplets of stationary equations. Then the learned stationary QDs are used as the initial value conditions for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to explore their evolutions in the some space-time region. Especially, we consider two types of potentials, one is the 2D quadruple-well Gaussian potential and the other is the PT-symmetric HO-Gaussian potential, which lead to spontaneous symmetry breaking and the generation of multi-component QDs. The used deep learning method can also be applied to study wave propagations of other nonlinear physical models.
Understanding the Role of Functional Diversity in Weight-Ensembling with Ingredient Selection and Multidimensional Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Weight-ensembles are formed when the parameters of multiple neural networks are directly averaged into a single model. They have demonstrated generalization capability in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) which is not completely understood, though they are thought to successfully exploit functional diversity allotted by each distinct model. Given a collection of models, it is also unclear which combination leads to the optimal weight-ensemble; the SOTA is a linear-time ``greedy" method. We introduce two novel weight-ensembling approaches to study the link between performance dynamics and the nature of how each method decides to use apply the functionally diverse components, akin to diversity-encouragement in the prediction-ensemble literature. We develop a visualization tool to explain how each algorithm explores various domains defined via pairwise-distances to further investigate selection and algorithms' convergence. Empirical analyses shed perspectives which reinforce how high-diversity enhances weight-ensembling while qualifying the extent to which diversity alone improves accuracy. We also demonstrate that sampling positionally distinct models can contribute just as meaningfully to improvements in a weight-ensemble.
Sharing Analysis in the Pawns Compiler
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Pawns is a programming language under development that supports algebraic data types, polymorphism, higher order functions and "pure" declarative programming. It also supports impure imperative features including destructive update of shared data structures via pointers, allowing significantly increased efficiency for some operations. A novelty of Pawns is that all impure "effects" must be made obvious in the source code and they can be safely encapsulated in pure functions in a way that is checked by the compiler. Execution of a pure function can perform destructive updates on data structures that are local to or eventually returned from the function without risking modification of the data structures passed to the function. This paper describes the sharing analysis which allows impurity to be encapsulated. Aspects of the analysis are similar to other published work, but in addition it handles explicit pointers and destructive update, higher order functions including closures and pre- and post-conditions concerning sharing for functions.
Fuzzy Logic Control for Indoor Navigation of Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous mobile robots have many applications in indoor unstructured environment, wherein optimal movement of the robot is needed. The robot therefore needs to navigate in unknown and dynamic environments. This paper presents an implementation of fuzzy logic controller for navigation of mobile robot in an unknown dynamically cluttered environment. Fuzzy logic controller is used here as it is capable of making inferences even under uncertainties. It helps in rule generation and decision making process in order to reach the goal position under various situations. Sensor readings from the robot and the desired direction of motion are inputs to the fuzz logic controllers and the acceleration of the respective wheels are the output of the controller. Hence, the mobile robot avoids obstacles and reaches the goal position. Keywords: Fuzzy Logic Controller, Membership Functions, Takagi-Sugeno-Kang FIS, Centroid Defuzzification
ForeCal: Random Forest-based Calibration for DNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural network(DNN) based classifiers do extremely well in discriminating between observations, resulting in higher ROC AUC and accuracy metrics, but their outputs are often miscalibrated with respect to true event likelihoods. Post-hoc calibration algorithms are often used to calibrate the outputs of these classifiers. Methods like Isotonic regression, Platt scaling, and Temperature scaling have been shown to be effective in some cases but are limited by their parametric assumptions and/or their inability to capture complex non-linear relationships. We propose ForeCal - a novel post-hoc calibration algorithm based on Random forests. ForeCal exploits two unique properties of Random forests: the ability to enforce weak monotonicity and range-preservation. It is more powerful in achieving calibration than current state-of-the-art methods, is non-parametric, and can incorporate exogenous information as features to learn a better calibration function. Through experiments on 43 diverse datasets from the UCI ML repository, we show that ForeCal outperforms existing methods in terms of Expected Calibration Error(ECE) with minimal impact on the discriminative power of the base DNN as measured by AUC.
Plane2Depth: Hierarchical Adaptive Plane Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Monocular depth estimation aims to infer a dense depth map from a single image, which is a fundamental and prevalent task in computer vision. Many previous works have shown impressive depth estimation results through carefully designed network structures, but they usually ignore the planar information and therefore perform poorly in low-texture areas of indoor scenes. In this paper, we propose Plane2Depth, which adaptively utilizes plane information to improve depth prediction within a hierarchical framework. Specifically, in the proposed plane guided depth generator (PGDG), we design a set of plane queries as prototypes to softly model planes in the scene and predict per-pixel plane coefficients. Then the predicted plane coefficients can be converted into metric depth values with the pinhole camera model. In the proposed adaptive plane query aggregation (APGA) module, we introduce a novel feature interaction approach to improve the aggregation of multi-scale plane features in a top-down manner. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve outstanding performance, especially in low-texture or repetitive areas. Furthermore, under the same backbone network, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the NYU-Depth-v2 dataset, achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods KITTI dataset and can be generalized to unseen scenes effectively.
Understanding eGFR Trajectories and Kidney Function Decline via Large Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate (eGFR) is an essential indicator of kidney function in clinical practice. Although traditional equations and Machine Learning (ML) models using clinical and laboratory data can estimate eGFR, accurately predicting future eGFR levels remains a significant challenge for nephrologists and ML researchers. Recent advances demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can serve as robust foundation models for diverse applications. This study investigates the potential of LMMs to predict future eGFR levels with a dataset consisting of laboratory and clinical values from 50 patients. By integrating various prompting techniques and ensembles of LMMs, our findings suggest that these models, when combined with precise prompts and visual representations of eGFR trajectories, offer predictive performance comparable to existing ML models. This research extends the application of foundation models and suggests avenues for future studies to harness these models in addressing complex medical forecasting challenges.
Low-Resolution Object Recognition with Cross-Resolution Relational Contrastive Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recognizing objects in low-resolution images is a challenging task due to the lack of informative details. Recent studies have shown that knowledge distillation approaches can effectively transfer knowledge from a high-resolution teacher model to a low-resolution student model by aligning cross-resolution representations. However, these approaches still face limitations in adapting to the situation where the recognized objects exhibit significant representation discrepancies between training and testing images. In this study, we propose a cross-resolution relational contrastive distillation approach to facilitate low-resolution object recognition. Our approach enables the student model to mimic the behavior of a well-trained teacher model which delivers high accuracy in identifying high-resolution objects. To extract sufficient knowledge, the student learning is supervised with contrastive relational distillation loss, which preserves the similarities in various relational structures in contrastive representation space. In this manner, the capability of recovering missing details of familiar low-resolution objects can be effectively enhanced, leading to a better knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on low-resolution object classification and low-resolution face recognition clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of our approach.
How Do You Perceive My Face? Recognizing Facial Expressions in Multi-Modal Context by Modeling Mental Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Facial expression perception in humans inherently relies on prior knowledge and contextual cues, contributing to efficient and flexible processing. For instance, multi-modal emotional context (such as voice color, affective text, body pose, etc.) can prompt people to perceive emotional expressions in objectively neutral faces. Drawing inspiration from this, we introduce a novel approach for facial expression classification that goes beyond simple classification tasks. Our model accurately classifies a perceived face and synthesizes the corresponding mental representation perceived by a human when observing a face in context. With this, our model offers visual insights into its internal decision-making process. We achieve this by learning two independent representations of content and context using a VAE-GAN architecture. Subsequently, we propose a novel attention mechanism for context-dependent feature adaptation. The adapted representation is used for classification and to generate a context-augmented expression. We evaluate synthesized expressions in a human study, showing that our model effectively produces approximations of human mental representations. We achieve State-of-the-Art classification accuracies of 81.01% on the RAVDESS dataset and 79.34% on the MEAD dataset. We make our code publicly available.
Evaluation Study on SAM 2 for Class-agnostic Instance-level Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated powerful zero-shot segmentation performance in natural scenes. The recently released Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has further heightened researchers' expectations towards image segmentation capabilities. To evaluate the performance of SAM2 on class-agnostic instance-level segmentation tasks, we adopt different prompt strategies for SAM2 to cope with instance-level tasks for three relevant scenarios: Salient Instance Segmentation (SIS), Camouflaged Instance Segmentation (CIS), and Shadow Instance Detection (SID). In addition, to further explore the effectiveness of SAM2 in segmenting granular object structures, we also conduct detailed tests on the high-resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) benchmark to assess the fine-grained segmentation capability. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results indicate that the performance of SAM2 varies significantly across different scenarios. Besides, SAM2 is not particularly sensitive to segmenting high-resolution fine details. We hope this technique report can drive the emergence of SAM2-based adapters, aiming to enhance the performance ceiling of large vision models on class-agnostic instance segmentation tasks.
Assembling the Puzzle: Exploring Collaboration and Data Sensemaking in Nursing Practices for Remote Patient Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) involves the remote collection and transmission of patient health data, serving as a notable application of data-driven healthcare. This technology facilitates clinical monitoring and decision-making, offering benefits like reduced healthcare costs and improved patient outcomes. However, RPM also introduces challenges common to data-driven healthcare, such as additional data work that can disrupt clinician's workflow. This study explores the daily practices, collaboration mechanisms, and sensemaking processes of nurses in RPM through field observations and interviews with six stakeholders. Preliminary results indicate that RPM's scale-up pushes clinicians toward asynchronous collaboration. Data sensemaking is crucial for this type of collaboration, but existing technologies often create friction rather than support. This work provides empirical insights into clinical workflow in nursing practice, especially RPM. We suggest recognizing data sensemaking as a distinct nursing practice within data work and recommend further investigation into its role in the workflow of nurses in RPM.
Evaluating Environments Using Exploratory Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Exploration is a key part of many video games. We investigate the using an exploratory agent to provide feedback on the design of procedurally generated game levels, 5 engaging levels and 5 unengaging levels. We expand upon a framework introduced in previous research which models motivations for exploration and introduce a fitness function for evaluating an environment's potential for exploration. Our study showed that our exploratory agent can clearly distinguish between engaging and unengaging levels. The findings suggest that our agent has the potential to serve as an effective tool for assessing procedurally generated levels, in terms of exploration. This work contributes to the growing field of AI-driven game design by offering new insights into how game environments can be evaluated and optimised for player exploration.
PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose \textbf{PoseTalk}, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.
Rethinking HTG Evaluation: Bridging Generation and Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The evaluation of generative models for natural image tasks has been extensively studied. Similar protocols and metrics are used in cases with unique particularities, such as Handwriting Generation, even if they might not be completely appropriate. In this work, we introduce three measures tailored for HTG evaluation, $ \text{HTG}_{\text{HTR}} $, $ \text{HTG}_{\text{style}} $, and $ \text{HTG}_{\text{OOV}} $, and argue that they are more expedient to evaluate the quality of generated handwritten images. The metrics rely on the recognition error/accuracy of Handwriting Text Recognition and Writer Identification models and emphasize writing style, textual content, and diversity as the main aspects that adhere to the content of handwritten images. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the IAM handwriting database, showcasing that widely used metrics such as FID fail to properly quantify the diversity and the practical utility of generated handwriting samples. Our findings show that our metrics are richer in information and underscore the necessity of standardized evaluation protocols in HTG. The proposed metrics provide a more robust and informative protocol for assessing HTG quality, contributing to improved performance in HTR. Code for the evaluation protocol is available at: https://github.com/koninik/HTG_evaluation.