Jie Liu

Xiaoqing Guo, Jie Liu, Tongliang Liu et al.

This paper studies a practical domain adaptive (DA) semantic segmentation problem where only pseudo-labeled target data is accessible through a black-box model. Due to the domain gap and label shift between two domains, pseudo-labeled target data contains mixed closed-set and open-set label noises. In this paper, we propose a simplex noise transition matrix (SimT) to model the mixed noise distributions in DA semantic segmentation and formulate the problem as estimation of SimT. By exploiting computational geometry analysis and properties of segmentation, we design three complementary regularizers, i.e. volume regularization, anchor guidance, convex guarantee, to approximate the true SimT. Specifically, volume regularization minimizes the volume of simplex formed by rows of the non-square SimT, which ensures outputs of segmentation model to fit into the ground truth label distribution. To compensate for the lack of open-set knowledge, anchor guidance and convex guarantee are devised to facilitate the modeling of open-set noise distribution and enhance the discriminative feature learning among closed-set and open-set classes. The estimated SimT is further utilized to correct noise issues in pseudo labels and promote the generalization ability of segmentation model on target domain data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SimT can be flexibly plugged into existing DA methods to boost the performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/SimT.

Jie Liu, Yixiao Zhang, Jie-Neng Chen et al.

An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked impact on automated organ segmentation and tumor detection. However, due to the small size and partially labeled problem of each dataset, as well as a limited investigation of diverse types of tumors, the resulting models are often limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors and ignore the semantics of anatomical structures, nor can they be extended to novel domains. To address these issues, we propose the CLIP-Driven Universal Model, which incorporates text embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models. This CLIP-based label encoding captures anatomical relationships, enabling the model to learn a structured feature embedding and segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors. The proposed model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets, using a total of 3,410 CT scans for training and then evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 additional datasets. We rank first on the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) public leaderboard and achieve state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Additionally, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster) compared with dataset-specific models, generalized better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks.

Jie Liu, Yanqi Bao, Guo-Sen Xie et al.

The key challenge for few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) is how to tailor a desirable interaction among support and query features and/or their prototypes, under the episodic training scenario. Most existing FSS methods implement such support-query interactions by solely leveraging plain operations - e.g., cosine similarity and feature concatenation - for segmenting the query objects. However, these interaction approaches usually cannot well capture the intrinsic object details in the query images that are widely encountered in FSS, e.g., if the query object to be segmented has holes and slots, inaccurate segmentation almost always happens. To this end, we propose a dynamic prototype convolution network (DPCN) to fully capture the aforementioned intrinsic details for accurate FSS. Specifically, in DPCN, a dynamic convolution module (DCM) is firstly proposed to generate dynamic kernels from support foreground, then information interaction is achieved by convolution operations over query features using these kernels. Moreover, we equip DPCN with a support activation module (SAM) and a feature filtering module (FFM) to generate pseudo mask and filter out background information for the query images, respectively. SAM and FFM together can mine enriched context information from the query features. Our DPCN is also flexible and efficient under the k-shot FSS setting. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i show that DPCN yields superior performances under both 1-shot and 5-shot settings.

Feiyang Cai, Zhenkai Zhang, Jie Liu et al.

Deep neural networks have demonstrated prominent capacities for image classification tasks in a closed set setting, where the test data come from the same distribution as the training data. However, in a more realistic open set scenario, traditional classifiers with incomplete knowledge cannot tackle test data that are not from the training classes. Open set recognition (OSR) aims to address this problem by both identifying unknown classes and distinguishing known classes simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to OSR that is based on the vision transformer (ViT) technique. Specifically, our approach employs two separate training stages. First, a ViT model is trained to perform closed set classification. Then, an additional detection head is attached to the embedded features extracted by the ViT, trained to force the representations of known data to class-specific clusters compactly. Test examples are identified as known or unknown based on their distance to the cluster centers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to leverage ViT for the purpose of OSR, and our extensive evaluation against several OSR benchmark datasets reveals that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods and obtains new state-of-the-art performance.

Wenting Chen, Jie Liu, Tommy W. S. Chow et al.

Pathology image are essential for accurately interpreting lesion cells in cytopathology screening, but acquiring high-resolution digital slides requires specialized equipment and long scanning times. Though super-resolution (SR) techniques can alleviate this problem, existing deep learning models recover pathology image in a black-box manner, which can lead to untruthful biological details and misdiagnosis. Additionally, current methods allocate the same computational resources to recover each pixel of pathology image, leading to the sub-optimal recovery issue due to the large variation of pathology image. In this paper, we propose the first hierarchical reinforcement learning framework named Spatial-Temporal hierARchical Reinforcement Learning (STAR-RL), mainly for addressing the aforementioned issues in pathology image super-resolution problem. We reformulate the SR problem as a Markov decision process of interpretable operations and adopt the hierarchical recovery mechanism in patch level, to avoid sub-optimal recovery. Specifically, the higher-level spatial manager is proposed to pick out the most corrupted patch for the lower-level patch worker. Moreover, the higher-level temporal manager is advanced to evaluate the selected patch and determine whether the optimization should be stopped earlier, thereby avoiding the over-processed problem. Under the guidance of spatial-temporal managers, the lower-level patch worker processes the selected patch with pixel-wise interpretable actions at each time step. Experimental results on medical images degraded by different kernels show the effectiveness of STAR-RL. Furthermore, STAR-RL validates the promotion in tumor diagnosis with a large margin and shows generalizability under various degradations. The source code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/STAR-RL.

Yujia Lou, Jie Liu, Yuan Sheng et al.

This study proposes a method for imbalanced data classification based on deep probabilistic graphical models (DPGMs) to solve the problem that traditional methods have insufficient learning ability for minority class samples. To address the classification bias caused by class imbalance, we introduce variational inference optimization probability modeling, which enables the model to adaptively adjust the representation ability of minority classes and combines the class-aware weight adjustment strategy to enhance the classifier's sensitivity to minority classes. In addition, we combine the adversarial learning mechanism to generate minority class samples in the latent space so that the model can better characterize the category boundary in the high-dimensional feature space. The experiment is evaluated on the Kaggle "Credit Card Fraud Detection" dataset and compared with a variety of advanced imbalanced classification methods (such as GAN-based sampling, BRF, XGBoost-Cost Sensitive, SAAD, HAN). The results show that the method in this study has achieved the best performance in AUC, Precision, Recall and F1-score indicators, effectively improving the recognition rate of minority classes and reducing the false alarm rate. This method can be widely used in imbalanced classification tasks such as financial fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and anomaly detection, providing a new solution for related research.

Jiaming Peng, Xinhai Chen, Jie Liu

Mesh generation is a crucial step in numerical simulations, significantly impacting simulation accuracy and efficiency. However, generating meshes remains time-consuming and requires expensive computational resources. In this paper, we propose a novel method, 3DMeshNet, for three-dimensional structured mesh generation. The method embeds the meshing-related differential equations into the loss function of neural networks, formulating the meshing task as an unsupervised optimization problem. It takes geometric points as input to learn the potential mapping between parametric and computational domains. After suitable offline training, 3DMeshNet can efficiently output a three-dimensional structured mesh with a user-defined number of quadrilateral/hexahedral cells through the feed-forward neural prediction. To enhance training stability and accelerate convergence, we integrate loss function reweighting through weight adjustments and gradient projection alongside applying finite difference methods to streamline derivative computations in the loss. Experiments on different cases show that 3DMeshNet is robust and fast. It outperforms neural network-based methods and yields superior meshes compared to traditional mesh partitioning methods. 3DMeshNet significantly reduces training times by up to 85% compared to other neural network-based approaches and lowers meshing overhead by 4 to 8 times relative to traditional meshing methods.

Jie Liu, Cheng Sun, Xiang Xu et al.

The video-based person re-identification is to recognize a person under different cameras, which is a crucial task applied in visual surveillance system. Most previous methods mainly focused on the feature of full body in the frame. In this paper we propose a novel Spatial and Temporal Features Mixture Model (STFMM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN), in which the human body is split into $N$ parts in horizontal direction so that we can obtain more specific features. The proposed method skillfully integrates features of each part to achieve more expressive representation of each person. We first split the video sequence into $N$ part sequences which include the information of head, waist, legs and so on. Then the features are extracted by STFMM whose $2N$ inputs are obtained from the developed Siamese network, and these features are combined into a discriminative representation for one person. Experiments are conducted on the iLIDS-VID and PRID-2011 datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods for video-based person re-identification. It achieves a rank-1 CMC accuracy of 74\% on the iLIDS-VID dataset, exceeding the the most recently developed method ASTPN by 12\%. For the cross-data testing, our method achieves a rank-1 CMC accuracy of 48\% exceeding the ASTPN method by 18\%, which shows that our model has significant stability.