pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Super-Resolution Ultrasound Localization Microscopy from Radio-Frequency Data
Authors: Christopher Hahne, Georges Chabouh, Olivier Couture, Raphael Sznitman
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM) enables imaging of vascular structures in the micrometer range by accumulating contrast agent particle locations over time. Precise and efficient target localization accuracy remains an active research topic in the ULM field to further push the boundaries of this promising medical imaging technology. Existing work incorporates Delay-And-Sum (DAS) beamforming into particle localization pipelines, which ultimately determines the ULM image resolution capability. In this paper we propose to feed unprocessed Radio-Frequency (RF) data into a super-resolution network while bypassing DAS beamforming and its limitations. To facilitate this, we demonstrate label projection and inverse point transformation between B-mode and RF coordinate space as required by our approach. We assess our method against state-of-the-art techniques based on a public dataset featuring in silico and in vivo data. Results from our RF-trained network suggest that excluding DAS beamforming offers a great potential to optimize on the ULM resolution performance.
Brain Networks and Intelligence: A Graph Neural Network Based Approach to Resting State fMRI Data
Authors: Bishal Thapaliya, Esra Akbas, Jiayu Chen, Raam Sapkota, Bhaskar Ray, Pranav Suresh, Vince Calhoun, Jingyu Liu
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) is a powerful tool for investigating the relationship between brain function and cognitive processes as it allows for the functional organization of the brain to be captured without relying on a specific task or stimuli. In this paper, we present a novel modeling architecture called BrainRGIN for predicting intelligence (fluid, crystallized, and total intelligence) using graph neural networks on rsfMRI derived static functional network connectivity matrices. Extending from the existing graph convolution networks, our approach incorporates a clustering-based embedding and graph isomorphism network in the graph convolutional layer to reflect the nature of the brain sub-network organization and efficient network expression, in combination with TopK pooling and attention-based readout functions. We evaluated our proposed architecture on a large dataset, specifically the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Dataset, and demonstrated its effectiveness in predicting individual differences in intelligence. Our model achieved lower mean squared errors and higher correlation scores than existing relevant graph architectures and other traditional machine learning models for all of the intelligence prediction tasks. The middle frontal gyrus exhibited a significant contribution to both fluid and crystallized intelligence, suggesting their pivotal role in these cognitive processes. Total composite scores identified a diverse set of brain regions to be relevant which underscores the complex nature of total intelligence.
MFAAN: Unveiling Audio Deepfakes with a Multi-Feature Authenticity Network
Authors: Karthik Sivarama Krishnan, Koushik Sivarama Krishnan
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Swapping, Misinformation

In the contemporary digital age, the proliferation of deepfakes presents a formidable challenge to the sanctity of information dissemination. Audio deepfakes, in particular, can be deceptively realistic, posing significant risks in misinformation campaigns. To address this threat, we introduce the Multi-Feature Audio Authenticity Network (MFAAN), an advanced architecture tailored for the detection of fabricated audio content. MFAAN incorporates multiple parallel paths designed to harness the strengths of different audio representations, including Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), linear-frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC), and Chroma Short Time Fourier Transform (Chroma-STFT). By synergistically fusing these features, MFAAN achieves a nuanced understanding of audio content, facilitating robust differentiation between genuine and manipulated recordings. Preliminary evaluations of MFAAN on two benchmark datasets, 'In-the-Wild' Audio Deepfake Data and The Fake-or-Real Dataset, demonstrate its superior performance, achieving accuracies of 98.93% and 94.47% respectively. Such results not only underscore the efficacy of MFAAN but also highlight its potential as a pivotal tool in the ongoing battle against deepfake audio content.
Astrocytes as a mechanism for meta-plasticity and contextually-guided network function
Authors: Lulu Gong, Fabio Pasqualetti, Thomas Papouin, ShiNung Ching
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

Astrocytes are a ubiquitous and enigmatic type of non-neuronal cell and are found in the brain of all vertebrates. While traditionally viewed as being supportive of neurons, it is increasingly recognized that astrocytes may play a more direct and active role in brain function and neural computation. On account of their sensitivity to a host of physiological covariates and ability to modulate neuronal activity and connectivity on slower time scales, astrocytes may be particularly well poised to modulate the dynamics of neural circuits in functionally salient ways. In the current paper, we seek to capture these features via actionable abstractions within computational models of neuron-astrocyte interaction. Specifically, we engage how nested feedback loops of neuron-astrocyte interaction, acting over separated time-scales may endow astrocytes with the capability to enable learning in context-dependent settings, where fluctuations in task parameters may occur much more slowly than within-task requirements. We pose a general model of neuron-synapse-astrocyte interaction and use formal analysis to characterize how astrocytic modulation may constitute a form of meta-plasticity, altering the ways in which synapses and neurons adapt as a function of time. We then embed this model in a bandit-based reinforcement learning task environment, and show how the presence of time-scale separated astrocytic modulation enables learning over multiple fluctuating contexts. Indeed, these networks learn far more reliably versus dynamically homogeneous networks and conventional non-network-based bandit algorithms. Our results indicate how the presence of neuron-astrocyte interaction in the brain may benefit learning over different time-scales and the conveyance of task-relevant contextual information onto circuit dynamics.
Multi-Resolution Diffusion for Privacy-Sensitive Recommender Systems
Authors: Derek Lilienthal, Paul Mello, Magdalini Eirinaki, Stas Tiomkin
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

While recommender systems have become an integral component of the Web experience, their heavy reliance on user data raises privacy and security concerns. Substituting user data with synthetic data can address these concerns, but accurately replicating these real-world datasets has been a notoriously challenging problem. Recent advancements in generative AI have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of diffusion models in generating realistic data across various domains. In this work we introduce a Score-based Diffusion Recommendation Module (SDRM), which captures the intricate patterns of real-world datasets required for training highly accurate recommender systems. SDRM allows for the generation of synthetic data that can replace existing datasets to preserve user privacy, or augment existing datasets to address excessive data sparsity. Our method outperforms competing baselines such as generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and recently proposed diffusion models in synthesizing various datasets to replace or augment the original data by an average improvement of 4.30% in Recall@k and 4.65% in NDCG@k.
CLIP-Motion: Learning Reward Functions for Robotic Actions Using Consecutive Observations
Authors: Xuzhe Dang, Stefan Edelkamp
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Position

This paper presents a novel method for learning reward functions for robotic motions by harnessing the power of a CLIP-based model. Traditional reward function design often hinges on manual feature engineering, which can struggle to generalize across an array of tasks. Our approach circumvents this challenge by capitalizing on CLIP's capability to process both state features and image inputs effectively. Given a pair of consecutive observations, our model excels in identifying the motion executed between them. We showcase results spanning various robotic activities, such as directing a gripper to a designated target and adjusting the position of a cube. Through experimental evaluations, we underline the proficiency of our method in precisely deducing motion and its promise to enhance reinforcement learning training in the realm of robotics.
Multi Loss-based Feature Fusion and Top Two Voting Ensemble Decision Strategy for Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild
Authors: Guangyao Zhou, Yuanlun Xie, Yiqin Fu, Zhaokun Wang
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is a challenging task affected by the image quality and has attracted broad interest in computer vision. There is no research using feature fusion and ensemble strategy for FER simultaneously. Different from previous studies, this paper applies both internal feature fusion for a single model and feature fusion among multiple networks, as well as the ensemble strategy. This paper proposes one novel single model named R18+FAML, as well as one ensemble model named R18+FAML-FGA-T2V to improve the performance of the FER in the wild. Based on the structure of ResNet18 (R18), R18+FAML combines internal Feature fusion and three Attention blocks using Multiple Loss functions (FAML) to improve the diversity of the feature extraction. To improve the performance of R18+FAML, we propose a Feature fusion among networks based on the Genetic Algorithm (FGA), which can fuse the convolution kernels for feature extraction of multiple networks. On the basis of R18+FAML and FGA, we propose one ensemble strategy, i.e., the Top Two Voting (T2V) to support the classification of FER, which can consider more classification information comprehensively. Combining the above strategies, R18+FAML-FGA-T2V can focus on the main expression-aware areas. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our single model R18+FAML and the ensemble model R18+FAML-FGA-T2V achieve the accuracies of $\left( 90.32, 62.17, 65.83 \right)\%$ and $\left( 91.59, 63.27, 66.63 \right)\%$ on three challenging unbalanced FER datasets RAF-DB, AffectNet-8 and AffectNet-7 respectively, both outperforming the state-of-the-art results.
Flexible uniform-sampling foveated Fourier single-pixel imaging
Authors: Huan Cui, Jie Cao, Qun Hao, Haoyu Zhang, Chang Zhou
Date: 2023-11-05 00:00:00

Fourier single-pixel imaging (FSI) is a data-efficient single-pixel imaging (SPI). However, there is still a serious challenge to obtain higher imaging quality using fewer measurements, which limits the development of real-time SPI. In this work, a uniform-sampling foveated FSI (UFFSI) is proposed with three features, uniform sampling, effective sampling and flexible fovea, to achieve under-sampling high-efficiency and high-quality SPI, even in a large-scale scene. First, by flexibly using the three proposed foveated pattern structures, data redundancy is reduced significantly to only require high resolution (HR) on regions of interest (ROIs), which radically reduces the need of total data number. Next, by the non-uniform weight distribution processing, non-uniform spatial sampling is transformed into uniform sampling, then the fast Fourier transform is used accurately and directly to obtain under-sampling high imaging quality with further reduced measurements. At a sampling ratio of 0.0084 referring to HR FSI with 1024*768 pixels, experimentally, by UFFSI with 255*341 cells of 89% reduction in data redundancy, the ROI has a significantly better imaging quality to meet imaging needs. We hope this work can provide a breakthrough for future real-time SPI.
FinA: Fairness of Adverse Effects in Decision-Making of Human-Cyber-Physical-System
Authors: Tianyu Zhao, Salma Elmalaki
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Ensuring fairness in decision-making systems within Human-Cyber-Physical-Systems (HCPS) is a pressing concern, particularly when diverse individuals, each with varying behaviors and expectations, coexist within the same application space, influenced by a shared set of control actions in the system. The long-term adverse effects of these actions further pose the challenge, as historical experiences and interactions shape individual perceptions of fairness. This paper addresses the challenge of fairness from an equity perspective of adverse effects, taking into account the dynamic nature of human behavior and evolving preferences while recognizing the lasting impact of adverse effects. We formally introduce the concept of Fairness-in-Adverse-Effects (FinA) within the HCPS context. We put forth a comprehensive set of five formulations for FinA, encompassing both the instantaneous and long-term aspects of adverse effects. To empirically validate the effectiveness of our FinA approach, we conducted an evaluation within the domain of smart homes, a pertinent HCPS application. The outcomes of our evaluation demonstrate that the adoption of FinA significantly enhances the overall perception of fairness among individuals, yielding an average improvement of 66.7% when compared to the state-of-the-art method.
ProPath: Disease-Specific Protein Language Model for Variant Pathogenicity
Authors: Huixin Zhan, Zijun Zhang
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Protein Language Model

Clinical variant classification of pathogenic versus benign genetic variants remains a pivotal challenge in clinical genetics. Recently, the proposition of protein language models has improved the generic variant effect prediction (VEP) accuracy via weakly-supervised or unsupervised training. However, these VEPs are not disease-specific, limiting their adaptation at point-of-care. To address this problem, we propose a disease-specific \textsc{pro}tein language model for variant \textsc{path}ogenicity, termed ProPath, to capture the pseudo-log-likelihood ratio in rare missense variants through a siamese network. We evaluate the performance of ProPath against pre-trained language models, using clinical variant sets in inherited cardiomyopathies and arrhythmias that were not seen during training. Our results demonstrate that ProPath surpasses the pre-trained ESM1b with an over $5\%$ improvement in AUC across both datasets. Furthermore, our model achieved the highest performances across all baselines for both datasets. Thus, our ProPath offers a potent disease-specific variant effect prediction, particularly valuable for disease associations and clinical applicability.
GQKVA: Efficient Pre-training of Transformers by Grouping Queries, Keys, and Values
Authors: Farnoosh Javadi, Walid Ahmed, Habib Hajimolahoseini, Foozhan Ataiefard, Mohammad Hassanpour, Saina Asani, Austin Wen, Omar Mohamed Awad, Kangling Liu, Yang Liu
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Massive transformer-based models face several challenges, including slow and computationally intensive pre-training and over-parametrization. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a versatile method called GQKVA, which generalizes query, key, and value grouping techniques. GQKVA is designed to speed up transformer pre-training while reducing the model size. Our experiments with various GQKVA variants highlight a clear trade-off between performance and model size, allowing for customized choices based on resource and time limitations. Our findings also indicate that the conventional multi-head attention approach is not always the best choice, as there are lighter and faster alternatives available. We tested our method on ViT, which achieved an approximate 0.3% increase in accuracy while reducing the model size by about 4% in the task of image classification. Additionally, our most aggressive model reduction experiment resulted in a reduction of approximately 15% in model size, with only around a 1% drop in accuracy.
An AI-Guided Data Centric Strategy to Detect and Mitigate Biases in Healthcare Datasets
Authors: Faris F. Gulamali, Ashwin S. Sawant, Lora Liharska, Carol R. Horowitz, Lili Chan, Patricia H. Kovatch, Ira Hofer, Karandeep Singh, Lynne D. Richardson, Emmanuel Mensah, Alexander W Charney, David L. Reich, Jianying Hu, Girish N. Nadkarni
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

The adoption of diagnosis and prognostic algorithms in healthcare has led to concerns about the perpetuation of bias against disadvantaged groups of individuals. Deep learning methods to detect and mitigate bias have revolved around modifying models, optimization strategies, and threshold calibration with varying levels of success. Here, we generate a data-centric, model-agnostic, task-agnostic approach to evaluate dataset bias by investigating the relationship between how easily different groups are learned at small sample sizes (AEquity). We then apply a systematic analysis of AEq values across subpopulations to identify and mitigate manifestations of racial bias in two known cases in healthcare - Chest X-rays diagnosis with deep convolutional neural networks and healthcare utilization prediction with multivariate logistic regression. AEq is a novel and broadly applicable metric that can be applied to advance equity by diagnosing and remediating bias in healthcare datasets.
Using Symmetries to Lift Satisfiability Checking
Authors: Pierre Carbonnelle, Gottfried Schenner, Maurice Bruynooghe, Bart Bogaerts, Marc Denecker
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

We analyze how symmetries can be used to compress structures (also known as interpretations) onto a smaller domain without loss of information. This analysis suggests the possibility to solve satisfiability problems in the compressed domain for better performance. Thus, we propose a 2-step novel method: (i) the sentence to be satisfied is automatically translated into an equisatisfiable sentence over a ``lifted'' vocabulary that allows domain compression; (ii) satisfiability of the lifted sentence is checked by growing the (initially unknown) compressed domain until a satisfying structure is found. The key issue is to ensure that this satisfying structure can always be expanded into an uncompressed structure that satisfies the original sentence to be satisfied. We present an adequate translation for sentences in typed first-order logic extended with aggregates. Our experimental evaluation shows large speedups for generative configuration problems. The method also has applications in the verification of software operating on complex data structures. Our results justify further research in automatic translation of sentences for symmetry reduction.
Federated Learning for Clinical Structured Data: A Benchmark Comparison of Engineering and Statistical Approaches
Authors: Siqi Li, Di Miao, Qiming Wu, Chuan Hong, Danny D'Agostino, Xin Li, Yilin Ning, Yuqing Shang, Huazhu Fu, Marcus Eng Hock Ong, Hamed Haddadi, Nan Liu
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning (FL) has shown promising potential in safeguarding data privacy in healthcare collaborations. While the term "FL" was originally coined by the engineering community, the statistical field has also explored similar privacy-preserving algorithms. Statistical FL algorithms, however, remain considerably less recognized than their engineering counterparts. Our goal was to bridge the gap by presenting the first comprehensive comparison of FL frameworks from both engineering and statistical domains. We evaluated five FL frameworks using both simulated and real-world data. The results indicate that statistical FL algorithms yield less biased point estimates for model coefficients and offer convenient confidence interval estimations. In contrast, engineering-based methods tend to generate more accurate predictions, sometimes surpassing central pooled and statistical FL models. This study underscores the relative strengths and weaknesses of both types of methods, emphasizing the need for increased awareness and their integration in future FL applications.
PowerFlowNet: Power Flow Approximation Using Message Passing Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Nan Lin, Stavros Orfanoudakis, Nathan Ordonez Cardenas, Juan S. Giraldo, Pedro P. Vergara
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

Accurate and efficient power flow (PF) analysis is crucial in modern electrical networks' operation and planning. Therefore, there is a need for scalable algorithms that can provide accurate and fast solutions for both small and large scale power networks. As the power network can be interpreted as a graph, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for improving the accuracy and speed of PF approximations by exploiting information sharing via the underlying graph structure. In this study, we introduce PowerFlowNet, a novel GNN architecture for PF approximation that showcases similar performance with the traditional Newton-Raphson method but achieves it 4 times faster in the simple IEEE 14-bus system and 145 times faster in the realistic case of the French high voltage network (6470rte). Meanwhile, it significantly outperforms other traditional approximation methods, such as the DC relaxation method, in terms of performance and execution time; therefore, making PowerFlowNet a highly promising solution for real-world PF analysis. Furthermore, we verify the efficacy of our approach by conducting an in-depth experimental evaluation, thoroughly examining the performance, scalability, interpretability, and architectural dependability of PowerFlowNet. The evaluation provides insights into the behavior and potential applications of GNNs in power system analysis.
A Generative Neural Network Approach for 3D Multi-Criteria Design Generation and Optimization of an Engine Mount for an Unmanned Air Vehicle
Authors: Christoph Petroll, Sebastian Eilermann, Philipp Hoefer, Oliver Niggemann
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

One of the most promising developments in computer vision in recent years is the use of generative neural networks for functionality condition-based 3D design reconstruction and generation. Here, neural networks learn dependencies between functionalities and a geometry in a very effective way. For a neural network the functionalities are translated in conditions to a certain geometry. But the more conditions the design generation needs to reflect, the more difficult it is to learn clear dependencies. This leads to a multi criteria design problem due various conditions, which are not considered in the neural network structure so far. In this paper, we address this multi-criteria challenge for a 3D design use case related to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) motor mount. We generate 10,000 abstract 3D designs and subject them all to simulations for three physical disciplines: mechanics, thermodynamics, and aerodynamics. Then, we train a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) using the geometry and corresponding multicriteria functional constraints as input. We use our trained CVAE as well as the Marching cubes algorithm to generate meshes for simulation based evaluation. The results are then evaluated with the generated UAV designs. Subsequently, we demonstrate the ability to generate optimized designs under self-defined functionality conditions using the trained neural network.