Hui Jiang

Zijiang Yang, Zhongwei Qiu, Tiancheng Lin et al.

It is clinically crucial and potentially very beneficial to be able to analyze and model directly the spatial distributions of cells in histopathology whole slide images (WSI). However, most existing WSI datasets lack cell-level annotations, owing to the extremely high cost over giga-pixel images. Thus, it remains an open question whether deep learning models can directly and effectively analyze WSIs from the semantic aspect of cell distributions. In this work, we construct a large-scale WSI dataset with more than 5 billion cell-level annotations, termed WSI-Cell5B, and a novel hierarchical Cell Cloud Transformer (CCFormer) to tackle these challenges. WSI-Cell5B is based on 6,998 WSIs of 11 cancers from The Cancer Genome Atlas Program, and all WSIs are annotated per cell by coordinates and types. To the best of our knowledge, WSI-Cell5B is the first WSI-level large-scale dataset integrating cell-level annotations. On the other hand, CCFormer formulates the collection of cells in each WSI as a cell cloud and models cell spatial distribution. Specifically, Neighboring Information Embedding (NIE) is proposed to characterize the distribution of cells within the neighborhood of each cell, and a novel Hierarchical Spatial Perception (HSP) module is proposed to learn the spatial relationship among cells in a bottom-up manner. The clinical analysis indicates that WSI-Cell5B can be used to design clinical evaluation metrics based on counting cells that effectively assess the survival risk of patients. Extensive experiments on survival prediction and cancer staging show that learning from cell spatial distribution alone can already achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, i.e., CCFormer strongly outperforms other competing methods.

Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Zhen-Hua Ling et al.

In this paper, we propose commonsense knowledge enhanced embeddings (KEE) for solving the Pronoun Disambiguation Problems (PDP). The PDP task we investigate in this paper is a complex coreference resolution task which requires the utilization of commonsense knowledge. This task is a standard first round test set in the 2016 Winograd Schema Challenge. In this task, traditional linguistic features that are useful for coreference resolution, e.g. context and gender information, are no longer effective anymore. Therefore, the KEE models are proposed to provide a general framework to make use of commonsense knowledge for solving the PDP problems. Since the PDP task doesn't have training data, the KEE models would be used during the unsupervised feature extraction process. To evaluate the effectiveness of the KEE models, we propose to incorporate various commonsense knowledge bases, including ConceptNet, WordNet, and CauseCom, into the KEE training process. We achieved the best performance by applying the proposed methods to the 2016 Winograd Schema Challenge. In addition, experiments conducted on the standard PDP task indicate that, the proposed KEE models could solve the PDP problems by achieving 66.7% accuracy, which is a new state-of-the-art performance.

Quan Liu, Hui Jiang, Andrew Evdokimov et al.

In this paper, we propose a new deep learning approach, called neural association model (NAM), for probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. We propose to use neural networks to model association between any two events in a domain. Neural networks take one event as input and compute a conditional probability of the other event to model how likely these two events are to be associated. The actual meaning of the conditional probabilities varies between applications and depends on how the models are trained. In this work, as two case studies, we have investigated two NAM structures, namely deep neural networks (DNN) and relation-modulated neural nets (RMNN), on several probabilistic reasoning tasks in AI, including recognizing textual entailment, triple classification in multi-relational knowledge bases and commonsense reasoning. Experimental results on several popular datasets derived from WordNet, FreeBase and ConceptNet have all demonstrated that both DNNs and RMNNs perform equally well and they can significantly outperform the conventional methods available for these reasoning tasks. Moreover, compared with DNNs, RMNNs are superior in knowledge transfer, where a pre-trained model can be quickly extended to an unseen relation after observing only a few training samples. To further prove the effectiveness of the proposed models, in this work, we have applied NAMs to solving challenging Winograd Schema (WS) problems. Experiments conducted on a set of WS problems prove that the proposed models have the potential for commonsense reasoning.