pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Link prediction in multiplex networks via triadic closure
Authors: Alberto Aleta, Marta Tuninetti, Daniela Paolotti, Yamir Moreno, Michele Starnini
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Prediction

Link prediction algorithms can help to understand the structure and dynamics of complex systems, to reconstruct networks from incomplete data sets and to forecast future interactions in evolving networks. Available algorithms based on similarity between nodes are bounded by the limited amount of links present in these networks. In this work, we reduce this latter intrinsic limitation and show that different kind of relational data can be exploited to improve the prediction of new links. To this aim, we propose a novel link prediction algorithm by generalizing the Adamic-Adar method to multiplex networks composed by an arbitrary number of layers, that encode diverse forms of interactions. We show that the new metric outperforms the classical single-layered Adamic-Adar score and other state-of-the-art methods, across several social, biological and technological systems. As a byproduct, the coefficients that maximize the Multiplex Adamic-Adar metric indicate how the information structured in a multiplex network can be optimized for the link prediction task, revealing which layers are redundant. Interestingly, this effect can be asymmetric with respect to predictions in different layers. Our work paves the way for a deeper understanding of the role of different relational data in predicting new interactions and provides a new algorithm for link prediction in multiplex networks that can be applied to a plethora of systems.
A Transfer Learning Based Active Learning Framework for Brain Tumor Classification
Authors: Ruqian Hao, Khashayar Namdar, Lin Liu, Farzad Khalvati
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Brain Tumor Classification, General Classification, Prognosis, Transfer Learning

Brain tumor is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death globally among children and adults. Precise classification of brain tumor grade (low-grade and high-grade glioma) at early stage plays a key role in successful prognosis and treatment planning. With recent advances in deep learning, Artificial Intelligence-enabled brain tumor grading systems can assist radiologists in the interpretation of medical images within seconds. The performance of deep learning techniques is, however, highly depended on the size of the annotated dataset. It is extremely challenging to label a large quantity of medical images given the complexity and volume of medical data. In this work, we propose a novel transfer learning based active learning framework to reduce the annotation cost while maintaining stability and robustness of the model performance for brain tumor classification. We employed a 2D slice-based approach to train and finetune our model on the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) training dataset of 203 patients and a validation dataset of 66 patients which was used as the baseline. With our proposed method, the model achieved Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve (AUC) of 82.89% on a separate test dataset of 66 patients, which was 2.92% higher than the baseline AUC while saving at least 40% of labeling cost. In order to further examine the robustness of our method, we created a balanced dataset, which underwent the same procedure. The model achieved AUC of 82% compared with AUC of 78.48% for the baseline, which reassures the robustness and stability of our proposed transfer learning augmented with active learning framework while significantly reducing the size of training data.
Respiratory Distress Detection from Telephone Speech using Acoustic and Prosodic Features
Authors: Meemnur Rashid, Kaisar Ahmed Alman, Khaled Hasan, John H. L. Hansen, Taufiq Hasan
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00

With the widespread use of telemedicine services, automatic assessment of health conditions via telephone speech can significantly impact public health. This work summarizes our preliminary findings on automatic detection of respiratory distress using well-known acoustic and prosodic features. Speech samples are collected from de-identified telemedicine phonecalls from a healthcare provider in Bangladesh. The recordings include conversational speech samples of patients talking to doctors showing mild or severe respiratory distress or asthma symptoms. We hypothesize that respiratory distress may alter speech features such as voice quality, speaking pattern, loudness, and speech-pause duration. To capture these variations, we utilize a set of well-known acoustic and prosodic features with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for detecting the presence of respiratory distress. Experimental evaluations are performed using a 3-fold cross-validation scheme, ensuring patient-independent data splits. We obtained an overall accuracy of 86.4\% in detecting respiratory distress from the speech recordings using the acoustic feature set. Correlation analysis reveals that the top-performing features include loudness, voice rate, voice duration, and pause duration.
Noise-Resilient Automatic Interpretation of Holter ECG Recordings
Authors: Konstantin Egorov, Elena Sokolova, Manvel Avetisian, Alexander Tuzhilin
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Holter monitoring, a long-term ECG recording (24-hours and more), contains a large amount of valuable diagnostic information about the patient. Its interpretation becomes a difficult and time-consuming task for the doctor who analyzes them because every heartbeat needs to be classified, thus requiring highly accurate methods for automatic interpretation. In this paper, we present a three-stage process for analysing Holter recordings with robustness to noisy signal. First stage is a segmentation neural network (NN) with encoderdecoder architecture which detects positions of heartbeats. Second stage is a classification NN which will classify heartbeats as wide or narrow. Third stage in gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) on top of NN features that incorporates patient-wise features and further increases performance of our approach. As a part of this work we acquired 5095 Holter recordings of patients annotated by an experienced cardiologist. A committee of three cardiologists served as a ground truth annotators for the 291 examples in the test set. We show that the proposed method outperforms the selected baselines, including two commercial-grade software packages and some methods previously published in the literature.
Towards Improved and Interpretable Deep Metric Learning via Attentive Grouping
Authors: Xinyi Xu, Zhengyang Wang, Cheng Deng, Hao Yuan, Shuiwang Ji
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Position

Grouping has been commonly used in deep metric learning for computing diverse features. However, current methods are prone to overfitting and lack interpretability. In this work, we propose an improved and interpretable grouping method to be integrated flexibly with any metric learning framework. Our method is based on the attention mechanism with a learnable query for each group. The query is fully trainable and can capture group-specific information when combined with the diversity loss. An appealing property of our method is that it naturally lends itself interpretability. The attention scores between the learnable query and each spatial position can be interpreted as the importance of that position. We formally show that our proposed grouping method is invariant to spatial permutations of features. When used as a module in convolutional neural networks, our method leads to translational invariance. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our method. Our quantitative results indicate that the proposed method outperforms prior methods consistently and significantly across different datasets, evaluation metrics, base models, and loss functions. For the first time to the best of our knowledge, our interpretation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method enables the learning of distinct and diverse features across groups. The code is available on https://github.com/XinyiXuXD/DGML-master.
Contrastive Registration for Unsupervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Lihao Liu, Angelica I Aviles-Rivero, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a relevant task as it serves as the first step for several diagnosis processes, thus it is indispensable in clinical usage. Whilst major success has been reported using supervised techniques, they assume a large and well-representative labelled set. This is a strong assumption in the medical domain where annotations are expensive, time-consuming, and inherent to human bias. To address this problem, unsupervised techniques have been proposed in the literature yet it is still an open problem due to the difficulty of learning any transformation pattern. In this work, we present a novel optimisation model framed into a new CNN-based contrastive registration architecture for unsupervised medical image segmentation. The core of our approach is to exploit image-level registration and feature-level from a contrastive learning mechanism, to perform registration-based segmentation. Firstly, we propose an architecture to capture the image-to-image transformation pattern via registration for unsupervised medical image segmentation. Secondly, we embed a contrastive learning mechanism into the registration architecture to enhance the discriminating capacity of the network in the feature-level. We show that our proposed technique mitigates the major drawbacks of existing unsupervised techniques. We demonstrate, through numerical and visual experiments, that our technique substantially outperforms the current state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation methods on two major medical image datasets.
Probing Fairness of Mobile Ocular Biometrics Methods Across Gender on VISOB 2.0 Dataset
Authors: Anoop Krishnan, Ali Almadan, Ajita Rattani
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Classification, Fairness, Gender Classification, General Classification

Recent research has questioned the fairness of face-based recognition and attribute classification methods (such as gender and race) for dark-skinned people and women. Ocular biometrics in the visible spectrum is an alternate solution over face biometrics, thanks to its accuracy, security, robustness against facial expression, and ease of use in mobile devices. With the recent COVID-19 crisis, ocular biometrics has a further advantage over face biometrics in the presence of a mask. However, fairness of ocular biometrics has not been studied till now. This first study aims to explore the fairness of ocular-based authentication and gender classification methods across males and females. To this aim, VISOB $2.0$ dataset, along with its gender annotations, is used for the fairness analysis of ocular biometrics methods based on ResNet-50, MobileNet-V2 and lightCNN-29 models. Experimental results suggest the equivalent performance of males and females for ocular-based mobile user-authentication in terms of genuine match rate (GMR) at lower false match rates (FMRs) and an overall Area Under Curve (AUC). For instance, an AUC of 0.96 for females and 0.95 for males was obtained for lightCNN-29 on an average. However, males significantly outperformed females in deep learning based gender classification models based on ocular-region.
Whose hand is this? Person Identification from Egocentric Hand Gestures
Authors: Satoshi Tsutsui, Yanwei Fu, David Crandall
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Person Identification

Recognizing people by faces and other biometrics has been extensively studied in computer vision. But these techniques do not work for identifying the wearer of an egocentric (first-person) camera because that person rarely (if ever) appears in their own first-person view. But while one's own face is not frequently visible, their hands are: in fact, hands are among the most common objects in one's own field of view. It is thus natural to ask whether the appearance and motion patterns of people's hands are distinctive enough to recognize them. In this paper, we systematically study the possibility of Egocentric Hand Identification (EHI) with unconstrained egocentric hand gestures. We explore several different visual cues, including color, shape, skin texture, and depth maps to identify users' hands. Extensive ablation experiments are conducted to analyze the properties of hands that are most distinctive. Finally, we show that EHI can improve generalization of other tasks, such as gesture recognition, by training adversarially to encourage these models to ignore differences between users.
Reactive Human-to-Robot Handovers of Arbitrary Objects
Authors: Wei Yang, Chris Paxton, Arsalan Mousavian, Yu-Wei Chao, Maya Cakmak, Dieter Fox
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Grasp Generation, Motion Planning

Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape, and rigidity. In this paper, we present a vision-based system that enables reactive human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects. Our approach combines closed-loop motion planning with real-time, temporally-consistent grasp generation to ensure reactivity and motion smoothness. Our system is robust to different object positions and orientations, and can grasp both rigid and non-rigid objects. We demonstrate the generalizability, usability, and robustness of our approach on a novel benchmark set of 26 diverse household objects, a user study with naive users (N=6) handing over a subset of 15 objects, and a systematic evaluation examining different ways of handing objects. More results and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/nvidia.com/handovers-of-arbitrary-objects.
Interpretable Survival Prediction for Colorectal Cancer using Deep Learning
Authors: Ellery Wulczyn, David F. Steiner, Melissa Moran, Markus Plass, Robert Reihs, Fraser Tan, Isabelle Flament-Auvigne, Trissia Brown, Peter Regitnig, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Narayan Hegde, Apaar Sadhwani, Robert MacDonald, Benny Ayalew, Greg S. Corrado, Lily H. Peng, Daniel Tse, Heimo Müller, Zhaoyang Xu, Yun Liu, Martin C. Stumpe, Kurt Zatloukal, Craig H. Mermel
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning, Prediction, Survival Prediction

Deriving interpretable prognostic features from deep-learning-based prognostic histopathology models remains a challenge. In this study, we developed a deep learning system (DLS) for predicting disease specific survival for stage II and III colorectal cancer using 3,652 cases (27,300 slides). When evaluated on two validation datasets containing 1,239 cases (9,340 slides) and 738 cases (7,140 slides) respectively, the DLS achieved a 5-year disease-specific survival AUC of 0.70 (95%CI 0.66-0.73) and 0.69 (95%CI 0.64-0.72), and added significant predictive value to a set of 9 clinicopathologic features. To interpret the DLS, we explored the ability of different human-interpretable features to explain the variance in DLS scores. We observed that clinicopathologic features such as T-category, N-category, and grade explained a small fraction of the variance in DLS scores (R2=18% in both validation sets). Next, we generated human-interpretable histologic features by clustering embeddings from a deep-learning based image-similarity model and showed that they explain the majority of the variance (R2 of 73% to 80%). Furthermore, the clustering-derived feature most strongly associated with high DLS scores was also highly prognostic in isolation. With a distinct visual appearance (poorly differentiated tumor cell clusters adjacent to adipose tissue), this feature was identified by annotators with 87.0-95.5% accuracy. Our approach can be used to explain predictions from a prognostic deep learning model and uncover potentially-novel prognostic features that can be reliably identified by people for future validation studies.
Machine-Learning Number Fields
Authors: Yang-Hui He, Kyu-Hwan Lee, Thomas Oliver
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, regression

We show that standard machine-learning algorithms may be trained to predict certain invariants of algebraic number fields to high accuracy. A random-forest classifier that is trained on finitely many Dedekind zeta coefficients is able to distinguish between real quadratic fields with class number 1 and 2, to 0.96 precision. Furthermore, the classifier is able to extrapolate to fields with discriminant outside the range of the training data. When trained on the coefficients of defining polynomials for Galois extensions of degrees 2, 6, and 8, a logistic regression classifier can distinguish between Galois groups and predict the ranks of unit groups with precision >0.97.
Asymptotics of Discrete Schrödinger Bridges via Chaos Decomposition
Authors: Zaid Harchaoui, Lang Liu, Soumik Pal
Date: 2020-11-17 00:00:00

Consider the problem of matching two independent i.i.d. samples of size $N$ from two distributions $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. For an arbitrary continuous cost function, the optimal assignment problem looks for the matching that minimizes the total cost. We consider instead in this paper the problem where each matching is endowed with a Gibbs probability weight proportional to the exponential of the negative total cost of that matching. Viewing each matching as a joint distribution with $N$ atoms, we then take a convex combination with respect to the above Gibbs probability measure. We show that this resulting random joint distribution converges, as $N\rightarrow \infty$, to the solution of a variational problem, introduced by F\"ollmer, called the Schr\"odinger problem. We also derive the first two error terms of orders $N^{-1/2}$ and $N^{-1}$, respectively. This gives us central limit theorems for integrated test functions, including for the cost of transport, and second order Gaussian chaos limits when the limiting Gaussian variance is zero. The proofs are based on a novel chaos decomposition of the discrete Schr\"odinger bridge by polynomial functions of the pair of empirical distributions as the first and second order Taylor approximations in the space of measures. This is achieved by extending the Hoeffding decomposition from the classical theory of U-statistics.
Ensemble of CNN for multi-focus image fusion
Authors: Mostafa Amin-Naji, Ali Aghagolzadeh, Mehdi Ezoji
Date: 2019-02-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Multi Focus Image Fusion

The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based multi-focus image fusion methods have recently attracted enormous attention. They greatly enhanced the constructed decision map compared with the previous state of the art methods that have been done in the spatial and transform domains. Nevertheless, these methods have not reached to the satisfactory initial decision map, and they need to undergo vast post-processing algorithms to achieve a satisfactory decision map. In this paper, a novel CNNs based method with the help of the ensemble learning is proposed. It is very reasonable to use various models and datasets rather than just one. The ensemble learning based methods intend to pursue increasing diversity among the models and datasets in order to decrease the problem of the overfitting on the training dataset. It is obvious that the results of an ensemble of CNNs are better than just one single CNNs. Also, the proposed method introduces a new simple type of multi-focus images dataset. It simply changes the arranging of the patches of the multi-focus datasets, which is very useful for obtaining the better accuracy. With this new type arrangement of datasets, the three different datasets including the original and the Gradient in directions of vertical and horizontal patches are generated from the COCO dataset. Therefore, the proposed method introduces a new network that three CNNs models which have been trained on three different created datasets to construct the initial segmented decision map. These ideas greatly improve the initial segmented decision map of the proposed method which is similar, or even better than, the other final decision map of CNNs based methods obtained after applying many post-processing algorithms. Many real multi-focus test images are used in our experiments, and the results are compared with quantitative and qualitative criteria. The obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed CNNs based network is more accurate and have the better decision map without post-processing algorithms than the other existing state of the art multi-focus fusion methods which used many post-processing algorithms.
Multi-Focus Image Fusion in DCT Domain using Variance and Energy of Laplacian and Correlation Coefficient for Visual Sensor Networks
Authors: Mostafa Amin-Naji, Ali Aghagolzadeh
Date: 2018-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi Focus Image Fusion

The purpose of multi-focus image fusion is gathering the essential information and the focused parts from the input multi-focus images into a single image. These multi-focus images are captured with different depths of focus of cameras. A lot of multi-focus image fusion techniques have been introduced using considering the focus measurement in the spatial domain. However, the multi-focus image fusion processing is very time-saving and appropriate in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain, especially when JPEG images are used in visual sensor networks (VSN). So the most of the researchers are interested in focus measurements calculation and fusion processes directly in DCT domain. Accordingly, many researchers developed some techniques which are substituting the spatial domain fusion process with DCT domain fusion process. Previous works in DCT domain have some shortcomings in selection of suitable divided blocks according to their criterion for focus measurement. In this paper, calculation of two powerful focus measurements, energy of Laplacian (EOL) and variance of Laplacian (VOL), are proposed directly in DCT domain. In addition, two other new focus measurements which work by measuring correlation coefficient between source blocks and artificial blurred blocks are developed completely in DCT domain. However, a new consistency verification method is introduced as a post-processing, improving the quality of fused image significantly. These proposed methods reduce the drawbacks significantly due to unsuitable block selection. The output images quality of our proposed methods is demonstrated by comparing the results of proposed algorithms with the previous algorithms.
证据：天津大学化工学院张裕卿教授和其女儿张丝萌多篇学术造假
Authors: 吕翔
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00

从 2011 年到 2020 年，张裕卿教授实验室便没有了失败，每次实验都能成功，想多成功就会有多成功，平均每年张裕卿教授最少有 4 篇 sci 论文发表，而且每篇 SCi 论文成本不足 500 元，因为他几乎从来不给学生发钱（我们研二时给我这届每人每月发 100 元，并扣了我们的身体损伤费，算是每人每月给 52 元），也不做花钱的表征，也正因为这些假论文，张裕卿在 2013 年从一个副教授摇身一变成了一位正教授，也不知道他用这些假文章假专利申请了多少项目基金，骗了多少钱。当然这也是张裕卿教授看不起化工学院别的发不了论文老师的资本，看不起别的和工厂做项目老师的原因，他以为他可以这样混一辈子，瞒天过海，别人都不知道，即便知道了也不敢举报。写论文的时候，我发现我们实验室的同学永远只能是二作，一作和通信作者永远是张裕卿教授我这里列举的造假只是张裕卿教授造假的一小部分，在这过去的十年里，张裕卿至少造假了 30 到 40 篇硕士毕业论文，还有至少 50 篇学术期刊论文。 这也意味着在过去十年里有 30 到 40名研究生被他坑害了，所有人都知道他是学术败类，但至今还没有人敢举报他。大家都是敢怒不敢言，有时候连怒都不敢， 学生就这样被他任意欺辱。还有一个重要的原因是学生毕业前被逼签的保证书，即是说实验数据都是真的， 有成果的时候他和他女儿是一作，要是万一以后有人举报他，他又会说这都是学生干的，和他没关系。骂学生，对学生进行肉体和精神折磨，逼的学生退学。并且学术造假。被实名举报教授和其女张丝萌学术造假。