pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Segmentation of Mediastinal Lymph Nodes in CT with Anatomical Priors
Authors: Tejas Sudharshan Mathai, Bohan Liu, Ronald M. Summers
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00

Purpose: Lymph nodes (LNs) in the chest have a tendency to enlarge due to various pathologies, such as lung cancer or pneumonia. Clinicians routinely measure nodal size to monitor disease progression, confirm metastatic cancer, and assess treatment response. However, variations in their shapes and appearances make it cumbersome to identify LNs, which reside outside of most organs. Methods: We propose to segment LNs in the mediastinum by leveraging the anatomical priors of 28 different structures (e.g., lung, trachea etc.) generated by the public TotalSegmentator tool. The CT volumes from 89 patients available in the public NIH CT Lymph Node dataset were used to train three 3D nnUNet models to segment LNs. The public St. Olavs dataset containing 15 patients (out-of-training-distribution) was used to evaluate the segmentation performance. Results: For the 15 test patients, the 3D cascade nnUNet model obtained the highest Dice score of 72.2 +- 22.3 for mediastinal LNs with short axis diameter $\geq$ 8mm and 54.8 +- 23.8 for all LNs respectively. These results represent an improvement of 10 points over a current approach that was evaluated on the same test dataset. Conclusion: To our knowledge, we are the first to harness 28 distinct anatomical priors to segment mediastinal LNs, and our work can be extended to other nodal zones in the body. The proposed method has immense potential for improved patient outcomes through the identification of enlarged nodes in initial staging CT scans.
AGSPNet: A framework for parcel-scale crop fine-grained semantic change detection from UAV high-resolution imagery with agricultural geographic scene constraints
Authors: Shaochun Li, Yanjun Wang, Hengfan Cai, Lina Deng, Yunhao Lin
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Real-time and accurate information on fine-grained changes in crop cultivation is of great significance for crop growth monitoring, yield prediction and agricultural structure adjustment. Aiming at the problems of serious spectral confusion in visible high-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images of different phases, interference of large complex background and salt-and-pepper noise by existing semantic change detection (SCD) algorithms, in order to effectively extract deep image features of crops and meet the demand of agricultural practical engineering applications, this paper designs and proposes an agricultural geographic scene and parcel-scale constrained SCD framework for crops (AGSPNet). AGSPNet framework contains three parts: agricultural geographic scene (AGS) division module, parcel edge extraction module and crop SCD module. Meanwhile, we produce and introduce an UAV image SCD dataset (CSCD) dedicated to agricultural monitoring, encompassing multiple semantic variation types of crops in complex geographical scene. We conduct comparative experiments and accuracy evaluations in two test areas of this dataset, and the results show that the crop SCD results of AGSPNet consistently outperform other deep learning SCD models in terms of quantity and quality, with the evaluation metrics F1-score, kappa, OA, and mIoU obtaining improvements of 0.038, 0.021, 0.011 and 0.062, respectively, on average over the sub-optimal method. The method proposed in this paper can clearly detect the fine-grained change information of crop types in complex scenes, which can provide scientific and technical support for smart agriculture monitoring and management, food policy formulation and food security assurance.
YOLO-Former: YOLO Shakes Hand With ViT
Authors: Javad Khoramdel, Ahmad Moori, Yasamin Borhani, Armin Ghanbarzadeh, Esmaeil Najafi
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The proposed YOLO-Former method seamlessly integrates the ideas of transformer and YOLOv4 to create a highly accurate and efficient object detection system. The method leverages the fast inference speed of YOLOv4 and incorporates the advantages of the transformer architecture through the integration of convolutional attention and transformer modules. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with a mean average precision (mAP) of 85.76\% on the Pascal VOC dataset, while maintaining high prediction speed with a frame rate of 10.85 frames per second. The contribution of this work lies in the demonstration of how the innovative combination of these two state-of-the-art techniques can lead to further improvements in the field of object detection.
Leveraging Frequency Domain Learning in 3D Vessel Segmentation
Authors: Xinyuan Wang, Chengwei Pan, Hongming Dai, Gangming Zhao, Jinpeng Li, Xiao Zhang, Yizhou Yu
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Segmentation

Coronary microvascular disease constitutes a substantial risk to human health. Employing computer-aided analysis and diagnostic systems, medical professionals can intervene early in disease progression, with 3D vessel segmentation serving as a crucial component. Nevertheless, conventional U-Net architectures tend to yield incoherent and imprecise segmentation outcomes, particularly for small vessel structures. While models with attention mechanisms, such as Transformers and large convolutional kernels, demonstrate superior performance, their extensive computational demands during training and inference lead to increased time complexity. In this study, we leverage Fourier domain learning as a substitute for multi-scale convolutional kernels in 3D hierarchical segmentation models, which can reduce computational expenses while preserving global receptive fields within the network. Furthermore, a zero-parameter frequency domain fusion method is designed to improve the skip connections in U-Net architecture. Experimental results on a public dataset and an in-house dataset indicate that our novel Fourier transformation-based network achieves remarkable dice performance (84.37\% on ASACA500 and 80.32\% on ImageCAS) in tubular vessel segmentation tasks and substantially reduces computational requirements without compromising global receptive fields.
Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Shengbang Tong, Zhuang Liu, Yuexiang Zhai, Yi Ma, Yann Lecun, Saining Xie
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Visual Grounding

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research reveals that the visual capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings. To understand the roots of these errors, we explore the gap between the visual embedding space of CLIP and vision-only self-supervised learning. We identify ''CLIP-blind pairs'' - images that CLIP perceives as similar despite their clear visual differences. With these pairs, we construct the Multimodal Visual Patterns (MMVP) benchmark. MMVP exposes areas where state-of-the-art systems, including GPT-4V, struggle with straightforward questions across nine basic visual patterns, often providing incorrect answers and hallucinated explanations. We further evaluate various CLIP-based vision-and-language models and found a notable correlation between visual patterns that challenge CLIP models and those problematic for multimodal LLMs. As an initial effort to address these issues, we propose a Mixture of Features (MoF) approach, demonstrating that integrating vision self-supervised learning features with MLLMs can significantly enhance their visual grounding capabilities. Together, our research suggests visual representation learning remains an open challenge, and accurate visual grounding is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.
Efficient Deformable ConvNets: Rethinking Dynamic and Sparse Operator for Vision Applications
Authors: Yuwen Xiong, Zhiqi Li, Yuntao Chen, Feng Wang, Xizhou Zhu, Jiapeng Luo, Wenhai Wang, Tong Lu, Hongsheng Li, Yu Qiao, Lewei Lu, Jie zhou, Jifeng Dai
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce Deformable Convolution v4 (DCNv4), a highly efficient and effective operator designed for a broad spectrum of vision applications. DCNv4 addresses the limitations of its predecessor, DCNv3, with two key enhancements: 1. removing softmax normalization in spatial aggregation to enhance its dynamic property and expressive power and 2. optimizing memory access to minimize redundant operations for speedup. These improvements result in a significantly faster convergence compared to DCNv3 and a substantial increase in processing speed, with DCNv4 achieving more than three times the forward speed. DCNv4 demonstrates exceptional performance across various tasks, including image classification, instance and semantic segmentation, and notably, image generation. When integrated into generative models like U-Net in the latent diffusion model, DCNv4 outperforms its baseline, underscoring its possibility to enhance generative models. In practical applications, replacing DCNv3 with DCNv4 in the InternImage model to create FlashInternImage results in up to 80% speed increase and further performance improvement without further modifications. The advancements in speed and efficiency of DCNv4, combined with its robust performance across diverse vision tasks, show its potential as a foundational building block for future vision models.
TriNeRFLet: A Wavelet Based Triplane NeRF Representation
Authors: Rajaei Khatib, Raja Giryes
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Super-Resolution

In recent years, the neural radiance field (NeRF) model has gained popularity due to its ability to recover complex 3D scenes. Following its success, many approaches proposed different NeRF representations in order to further improve both runtime and performance. One such example is Triplane, in which NeRF is represented using three 2D feature planes. This enables easily using existing 2D neural networks in this framework, e.g., to generate the three planes. Despite its advantage, the triplane representation lagged behind in its 3D recovery quality compared to NeRF solutions. In this work, we propose TriNeRFLet, a 2D wavelet-based multiscale triplane representation for NeRF, which closes the 3D recovery performance gap and is competitive with current state-of-the-art methods. Building upon the triplane framework, we also propose a novel super-resolution (SR) technique that combines a diffusion model with TriNeRFLet for improving NeRF resolution.
Scissorhands: Scrub Data Influence via Connection Sensitivity in Networks
Authors: Jing Wu, Mehrtash Harandi
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Machine Unlearning, Sensitivity

Machine unlearning has become a pivotal task to erase the influence of data from a trained model. It adheres to recent data regulation standards and enhances the privacy and security of machine learning applications. In this work, we present a new machine unlearning approach Scissorhands. Initially, Scissorhands identifies the most pertinent parameters in the given model relative to the forgetting data via connection sensitivity. By reinitializing the most influential top-k percent of these parameters, a trimmed model for erasing the influence of the forgetting data is obtained. Subsequently, Scissorhands fine-tunes the trimmed model with a gradient projection-based approach, seeking parameters that preserve information on the remaining data while discarding information related to the forgetting data. Our experimental results, conducted across image classification and image generation tasks, demonstrate that Scissorhands, showcases competitive performance when compared to existing methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/JingWu321/Scissorhands.
Prediction of Cellular Identities from Trajectory and Cell Fate Information
Authors: Baiyang Dai, Jiamin Yang, Hari Shroff, Patrick La Riviere
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Tracking

Determining cell identities in imaging sequences is an important yet challenging task. The conventional method for cell identification is via cell tracking, which is complex and can be time-consuming. In this study, we propose an innovative approach to cell identification during early $\textit{C. elegans}$ embryogenesis using machine learning. Cell identification during $\textit{C. elegans}$ embryogenesis would provide insights into neural development with implications for higher organisms including humans. We employed random forest, MLP, and LSTM models, and tested cell classification accuracy on 3D time-lapse confocal datasets spanning the first 4 hours of embryogenesis. By leveraging a small number of spatial-temporal features of individual cells, including cell trajectory and cell fate information, our models achieve an accuracy of over 91%, even with limited data. We also determine the most important feature contributions and can interpret these features in the context of biological knowledge. Our research demonstrates the success of predicting cell identities in time-lapse imaging sequences directly from simple spatio-temporal features.
Solving the Discretised Multiphase Flow Equations with Interface Capturing on Structured Grids Using Machine Learning Libraries
Authors: Boyang Chen, Claire E. Heaney, Jefferson L. M. A. Gomes, Omar K. Matar, Christopher C. Pain
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

This paper solves the discretised multiphase flow equations using tools and methods from machine-learning libraries. The idea comes from the observation that convolutional layers can be used to express a discretisation as a neural network whose weights are determined by the numerical method, rather than by training, and hence, we refer to this approach as Neural Networks for PDEs (NN4PDEs). To solve the discretised multiphase flow equations, a multigrid solver is implemented through a convolutional neural network with a U-Net architecture. Immiscible two-phase flow is modelled by the 3D incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with surface tension and advection of a volume fraction field, which describes the interface between the fluids. A new compressive algebraic volume-of-fluids method is introduced, based on a residual formulation using Petrov-Galerkin for accuracy and designed with NN4PDEs in mind. High-order finite-element based schemes are chosen to model a collapsing water column and a rising bubble. Results compare well with experimental data and other numerical results from the literature, demonstrating that, for the first time, finite element discretisations of multiphase flows can be solved using an approach based on (untrained) convolutional neural networks. A benefit of expressing numerical discretisations as neural networks is that the code can run, without modification, on CPUs, GPUs or the latest accelerators designed especially to run AI codes.
A deep implicit-explicit minimizing movement method for option pricing in jump-diffusion models
Authors: Emmanuil H. Georgoulis, Antonis Papapantoleon, Costas Smaragdakis
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

We develop a novel deep learning approach for pricing European basket options written on assets that follow jump-diffusion dynamics. The option pricing problem is formulated as a partial integro-differential equation, which is approximated via a new implicit-explicit minimizing movement time-stepping approach, involving approximation by deep, residual-type Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for each time step. The integral operator is discretized via two different approaches: (a) a sparse-grid Gauss-Hermite approximation following localised coordinate axes arising from singular value decompositions, and (b) an ANN-based high-dimensional special-purpose quadrature rule. Crucially, the proposed ANN is constructed to ensure the appropriate asymptotic behavior of the solution for large values of the underlyings and also leads to consistent outputs with respect to a priori known qualitative properties of the solution. The performance and robustness with respect to the dimension of these methods are assessed in a series of numerical experiments involving the Merton jump-diffusion model, while a comparison with the deep Galerkin method and the deep BSDE solver with jumps further supports the merits of the proposed approach.
(Accelerated) Noise-adaptive Stochastic Heavy-Ball Momentum
Authors: Anh Dang, Reza Babanezhad, Sharan Vaswani
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00

Stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHB) is commonly used to train machine learning models, and often provides empirical improvements over stochastic gradient descent. By primarily focusing on strongly-convex quadratics, we aim to better understand the theoretical advantage of SHB and subsequently improve the method. For strongly-convex quadratics, Kidambi et al. (2018) show that SHB (with a mini-batch of size $1$) cannot attain accelerated convergence, and hence has no theoretical benefit over SGD. They conjecture that the practical gain of SHB is a by-product of using larger mini-batches. We first substantiate this claim by showing that SHB can attain an accelerated rate when the mini-batch size is larger than a threshold $b^*$ that depends on the condition number $\kappa$. Specifically, we prove that with the same step-size and momentum parameters as in the deterministic setting, SHB with a sufficiently large mini-batch size results in an $O\left(\exp(-\frac{T}{\sqrt{\kappa}}) + \sigma \right)$ convergence when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the $\ell_2$ norm, where $T$ is the number of iterations and $\sigma^2$ is the variance in the stochastic gradients. We prove a lower-bound which demonstrates that a $\kappa$ dependence in $b^*$ is necessary. To ensure convergence to the minimizer, we design a noise-adaptive multi-stage algorithm that results in an $O\left(\exp\left(-\frac{T}{\sqrt{\kappa}}\right) + \frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ rate when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the $\ell_2$ norm. We also consider the general smooth, strongly-convex setting and propose the first noise-adaptive SHB variant that converges to the minimizer at an $O(\exp(-\frac{T}{\kappa}) + \frac{\sigma^2}{T})$ rate when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the squared $\ell_2$ norm. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Deep Manifold Graph Auto-Encoder for Attributed Graph Embedding
Authors: Bozhen Hu, Zelin Zang, Jun Xia, Lirong Wu, Cheng Tan, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding

Representing graph data in a low-dimensional space for subsequent tasks is the purpose of attributed graph embedding. Most existing neural network approaches learn latent representations by minimizing reconstruction errors. Rare work considers the data distribution and the topological structure of latent codes simultaneously, which often results in inferior embeddings in real-world graph data. This paper proposes a novel Deep Manifold (Variational) Graph Auto-Encoder (DMVGAE/DMGAE) method for attributed graph data to improve the stability and quality of learned representations to tackle the crowding problem. The node-to-node geodesic similarity is preserved between the original and latent space under a pre-defined distribution. The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art baseline algorithms by a significant margin on different downstream tasks across popular datasets, which validates our solutions. We promise to release the code after acceptance.
Few-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text using Style Representations
Authors: Rafael Rivera Soto, Kailin Koch, Aleem Khan, Barry Chen, Marcus Bishop, Nicholas Andrews
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

The advent of instruction-tuned language models that convincingly mimic human writing poses a significant risk of abuse. However, such abuse may be counteracted with the ability to detect whether a piece of text was composed by a language model rather than a human author. Some previous approaches to this problem have relied on supervised methods by training on corpora of confirmed human- and machine- written documents. Unfortunately, model under-specification poses an unavoidable challenge for neural network-based detectors, making them brittle in the face of data shifts, such as the release of newer language models producing still more fluent text than the models used to train the detectors. Other approaches require access to the models that may have generated a document in question, which is often impractical. In light of these challenges, we pursue a fundamentally different approach not relying on samples from language models of concern at training time. Instead, we propose to leverage representations of writing style estimated from human-authored text. Indeed, we find that features effective at distinguishing among human authors are also effective at distinguishing human from machine authors, including state-of-the-art large language models like Llama-2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. Furthermore, given a handful of examples composed by each of several specific language models of interest, our approach affords the ability to predict which model generated a given document. The code and data to reproduce our experiments are available at https://github.com/LLNL/LUAR/tree/main/fewshot_iclr2024.
Model-Free Approximate Bayesian Learning for Large-Scale Conversion Funnel Optimization
Authors: Garud Iyengar, Raghav Singal
Date: 2024-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Marketing, Thompson Sampling

The flexibility of choosing the ad action as a function of the consumer state is critical for modern-day marketing campaigns. We study the problem of identifying the optimal sequential personalized interventions that maximize the adoption probability for a new product. We model consumer behavior by a conversion funnel that captures the state of each consumer (e.g., interaction history with the firm) and allows the consumer behavior to vary as a function of both her state and firm's sequential interventions. We show our model captures consumer behavior with very high accuracy (out-of-sample AUC of over 0.95) in a real-world email marketing dataset. However, it results in a very large-scale learning problem, where the firm must learn the state-specific effects of various interventions from consumer interactions. We propose a novel attribution-based decision-making algorithm for this problem that we call model-free approximate Bayesian learning. Our algorithm inherits the interpretability and scalability of Thompson sampling for bandits and maintains an approximate belief over the value of each state-specific intervention. The belief is updated as the algorithm interacts with the consumers. Despite being an approximation to the Bayes update, we prove the asymptotic optimality of our algorithm and analyze its convergence rate. We show that our algorithm significantly outperforms traditional approaches on extensive simulations calibrated to a real-world email marketing dataset.