Jiahao Lu

Jiahao Lu, Chong Yin, Oswin Krause et al.

Feature-based self-explanatory methods explain their classification in terms of human-understandable features. In the medical imaging community, this semantic matching of clinical knowledge adds significantly to the trustworthiness of the AI. However, the cost of additional annotation of features remains a pressing issue. We address this problem by proposing cRedAnno, a data-/annotation-efficient self-explanatory approach for lung nodule diagnosis. cRedAnno considerably reduces the annotation need by introducing self-supervised contrastive learning to alleviate the burden of learning most parameters from annotation, replacing end-to-end training with two-stage training. When training with hundreds of nodule samples and only 1% of their annotations, cRedAnno achieves competitive accuracy in predicting malignancy, meanwhile significantly surpassing most previous works in predicting nodule attributes. Visualisation of the learned space further indicates that the correlation between the clustering of malignancy and nodule attributes coincides with clinical knowledge. Our complete code is open-source available: https://github.com/diku-dk/credanno.

Jiacheng Deng, Chuxin Wang, Jiahao Lu et al.

Unsupervised point cloud shape correspondence aims to obtain dense point-to-point correspondences between point clouds without manually annotated pairs. However, humans and some animals have bilateral symmetry and various orientations, which lead to severe mispredictions of symmetrical parts. Besides, point cloud noise disrupts consistent representations for point cloud and thus degrades the shape correspondence accuracy. To address the above issues, we propose a Self-Ensembling ORientation-aware Network termed SE-ORNet. The key of our approach is to exploit an orientation estimation module with a domain adaptive discriminator to align the orientations of point cloud pairs, which significantly alleviates the mispredictions of symmetrical parts. Additionally, we design a selfensembling framework for unsupervised point cloud shape correspondence. In this framework, the disturbances of point cloud noise are overcome by perturbing the inputs of the student and teacher networks with different data augmentations and constraining the consistency of predictions. Extensive experiments on both human and animal datasets show that our SE-ORNet can surpass state-of-the-art unsupervised point cloud shape correspondence methods.

Jiahao Lu, Chong Yin, Kenny Erleben et al.

Recently, attempts have been made to reduce annotation requirements in feature-based self-explanatory models for lung nodule diagnosis. As a representative, cRedAnno achieves competitive performance with considerably reduced annotation needs by introducing self-supervised contrastive learning to do unsupervised feature extraction. However, it exhibits unstable performance under scarce annotation conditions. To improve the accuracy and robustness of cRedAnno, we propose an annotation exploitation mechanism by conducting semi-supervised active learning with sparse seeding and training quenching in the learned semantically meaningful reasoning space to jointly utilise the extracted features, annotations, and unlabelled data. The proposed approach achieves comparable or even higher malignancy prediction accuracy with 10x fewer annotations, meanwhile showing better robustness and nodule attribute prediction accuracy under the condition of 1% annotations. Our complete code is open-source available: https://github.com/diku-dk/credanno.

Lili Bao, Jiahao Lu, Shihui Ying et al.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to deformable image registration that captures sliding motions. The large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) registration method faces challenges in representing sliding motion since it per construction generates smooth warps. To address this issue, we extend LDDMM by incorporating both zeroth- and first-order momenta with a non-differentiable kernel. This allows to represent both discontinuous deformation at switching boundaries and diffeomorphic deformation in homogeneous regions. We provide a mathematical analysis of the proposed deformation model from the viewpoint of discontinuous systems. To evaluate our approach, we conduct experiments on both artificial images and the publicly available DIR-Lab 4DCT dataset. Results show the effectiveness of our approach in capturing plausible sliding motion.

Jiacheng Deng, Jiahao Lu, Tianzhu Zhang

3D object detection is essential for understanding 3D scenes. Contemporary techniques often require extensive annotated training data, yet obtaining point-wise annotations for point clouds is time-consuming and laborious. Recent developments in semi-supervised methods seek to mitigate this problem by employing a teacher-student framework to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled point clouds. However, these pseudo-labels frequently suffer from insufficient diversity and inferior quality. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce an Agent-based Diffusion Model for Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection (Diff3DETR). Specifically, an agent-based object query generator is designed to produce object queries that effectively adapt to dynamic scenes while striking a balance between sampling locations and content embedding. Additionally, a box-aware denoising module utilizes the DDIM denoising process and the long-range attention in the transformer decoder to refine bounding boxes incrementally. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that Diff3DETR outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised 3D object detection methods.

Jiahao Lu, Jiacheng Deng, Tianzhu Zhang

3D instance segmentation (3DIS) is a crucial task, but point-level annotations are tedious in fully supervised settings. Thus, using bounding boxes (bboxes) as annotations has shown great potential. The current mainstream approach is a two-step process, involving the generation of pseudo-labels from box annotations and the training of a 3DIS network with the pseudo-labels. However, due to the presence of intersections among bboxes, not every point has a determined instance label, especially in overlapping areas. To generate higher quality pseudo-labels and achieve more precise weakly supervised 3DIS results, we propose the Box-Supervised Simulation-assisted Mean Teacher for 3D Instance Segmentation (BSNet), which devises a novel pseudo-labeler called Simulation-assisted Transformer. The labeler consists of two main components. The first is Simulation-assisted Mean Teacher, which introduces Mean Teacher for the first time in this task and constructs simulated samples to assist the labeler in acquiring prior knowledge about overlapping areas. To better model local-global structure, we also propose Local-Global Aware Attention as the decoder for teacher and student labelers. Extensive experiments conducted on the ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets verify the superiority of our designs. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/peoplelu/BSNet}{https://github.com/peoplelu/BSNet}.

Jiahao Lu, Xingyi Yang, Xinchao Wang

Foundation segmentation models, while powerful, pose a significant risk: they enable users to effortlessly extract any objects from any digital content with a single click, potentially leading to copyright infringement or malicious misuse. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a new task "Anything Unsegmentable" to grant any image "the right to be unsegmented". The ambitious pursuit of the task is to achieve highly transferable adversarial attacks against all prompt-based segmentation models, regardless of model parameterizations and prompts. We highlight the non-transferable and heterogeneous nature of prompt-specific adversarial noises. Our approach focuses on disrupting image encoder features to achieve prompt-agnostic attacks. Intriguingly, targeted feature attacks exhibit better transferability compared to untargeted ones, suggesting the optimal update direction aligns with the image manifold. Based on the observations, we design a novel attack named Unsegment Anything by Simulating Deformation (UAD). Our attack optimizes a differentiable deformation function to create a target deformed image, which alters structural information while preserving achievable feature distance by adversarial example. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach, compromising a variety of promptable segmentation models with different architectures and prompt interfaces. We release the code at https://github.com/jiahaolu97/anything-unsegmentable.

Jiahao Lu, Chong Yin, Silvia Ingala et al.

Lung cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally, emphasises the importance of early detection for better patient outcomes. Pulmonary nodules, often early indicators of lung cancer, necessitate accurate, timely diagnosis. Despite Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) advances, many existing systems struggle providing clear, comprehensive explanations, especially with limited labelled data. This study introduces MERA, a Multimodal and Multiscale self-Explanatory model designed for lung nodule diagnosis with considerably Reduced Annotation requirements. MERA integrates unsupervised and weakly supervised learning strategies (self-supervised learning techniques and Vision Transformer architecture for unsupervised feature extraction) and a hierarchical prediction mechanism leveraging sparse annotations via semi-supervised active learning in the learned latent space. MERA explains its decisions on multiple levels: model-level global explanations via semantic latent space clustering, instance-level case-based explanations showing similar instances, local visual explanations via attention maps, and concept explanations using critical nodule attributes. Evaluations on the public LIDC dataset show MERA's superior diagnostic accuracy and self-explainability. With only 1% annotated samples, MERA achieves diagnostic accuracy comparable to or exceeding state-of-the-art methods requiring full annotation. The model's inherent design delivers comprehensive, robust, multilevel explanations aligned closely with clinical practice, enhancing trustworthiness and transparency. Demonstrated viability of unsupervised and weakly supervised learning lowers the barrier to deploying diagnostic AI in broader medical domains. Our complete code is open-source available: https://github.com/diku-dk/credanno.

Jiacheng Deng, Jiahao Lu, Tianzhu Zhang

Unsupervised point cloud shape correspondence aims to establish point-wise correspondences between source and target point clouds. Existing methods obtain correspondences directly by computing point-wise feature similarity between point clouds. However, non-rigid objects possess strong deformability and unusual shapes, making it a longstanding challenge to directly establish correspondences between point clouds with unconventional shapes. To address this challenge, we propose an unsupervised Template-Assisted point cloud shape correspondence Network, termed TANet, including a template generation module and a template assistance module. The proposed TANet enjoys several merits. Firstly, the template generation module establishes a set of learnable templates with explicit structures. Secondly, we introduce a template assistance module that extensively leverages the generated templates to establish more accurate shape correspondences from multiple perspectives. Extensive experiments on four human and animal datasets demonstrate that TANet achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.

Jiahao Lu, Jiacheng Deng, Tianzhu Zhang

3D instance segmentation aims to predict a set of object instances in a scene and represent them as binary foreground masks with corresponding semantic labels. Currently, transformer-based methods are gaining increasing attention due to their elegant pipelines, reduced manual selection of geometric properties, and superior performance. However, transformer-based methods fail to simultaneously maintain strong position and content information during query initialization. Additionally, due to supervision at each decoder layer, there exists a phenomenon of object disappearance with the deepening of layers. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce Beyond the Final Layer: Hierarchical Query Fusion Transformer with Agent-Interpolation Initialization for 3D Instance Segmentation (BFL). Specifically, an Agent-Interpolation Initialization Module is designed to generate resilient queries capable of achieving a balance between foreground coverage and content learning. Additionally, a Hierarchical Query Fusion Decoder is designed to retain low overlap queries, mitigating the decrease in recall with the deepening of layers. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2, ScanNet200, ScanNet++ and S3DIS datasets demonstrate the superior performance of BFL.

Zhuoyuan Li, Yubo Ai, Jiahao Lu et al.

Transformers have demonstrated impressive results for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation. However, the quadratic complexity of transformer makes computation costs high, limiting the number of points that can be processed simultaneously and impeding the modeling of long-range dependencies between objects in a single scene. Drawing inspiration from the great potential of recent state space models (SSM) for long sequence modeling, we introduce Mamba, an SSM-based architecture, to the point cloud domain and propose Pamba, a novel architecture with strong global modeling capability under linear complexity. Specifically, to make the disorderness of point clouds fit in with the causal nature of Mamba, we propose a multi-path serialization strategy applicable to point clouds. Besides, we propose the ConvMamba block to compensate for the shortcomings of Mamba in modeling local geometries and in unidirectional modeling. Pamba obtains state-of-the-art results on several 3D point cloud segmentation tasks, including ScanNet v2, ScanNet200, S3DIS and nuScenes, while its effectiveness is validated by extensive experiments.

Jon Sporring, Peidi Xu, Jiahao Lu et al.

We present Locally Orderless Networks (LON) and its theoretic foundation which links it to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), to Scale-space histograms, and measurement theory. The key elements are a regular sampling of the bias and the derivative of the activation function. We compare LON, CNN, and Scale-space histograms on prototypical single-layer networks. We show how LON and CNN can emulate each other, how LON expands the set of functionals computable to non-linear functions such as squaring. We demonstrate simple networks which illustrate the improved performance of LON over CNN on simple tasks for estimating the gradient magnitude squared, for regressing shape area and perimeter lengths, and for explainability of individual pixels' influence on the result.

Jiahao Lu, Xi Sheryl Zhang, Tianli Zhao et al.

Federated learning frameworks typically require collaborators to share their local gradient updates of a common model instead of sharing training data to preserve privacy. However, prior works on Gradient Leakage Attacks showed that private training data can be revealed from gradients. So far almost all relevant works base their attacks on fully-connected or convolutional neural networks. Given the recent overwhelmingly rising trend of adapting Transformers to solve multifarious vision tasks, it is highly valuable to investigate the privacy risk of vision transformers. In this paper, we analyse the gradient leakage risk of self-attention based mechanism in both theoretical and practical manners. Particularly, we propose APRIL - Attention PRIvacy Leakage, which poses a strong threat to self-attention inspired models such as ViT. Showing how vision Transformers are at the risk of privacy leakage via gradients, we urge the significance of designing privacy-safer Transformer models and defending schemes.