Miaomiao Zhang

Lei Zhao, Miaomiao Zhang, Guangyu Li et al.

This paper introduced the JiuTian Intelligent Network Simulation Platform, which can provide wireless communication simulation data services for the Open Innovation Platform. The platform contains a series of scalable simulator functionalities, offering open services that enable users to use reinforcement learning algorithms for model training and inference based on simulation environments and data. Additionally, it allows users to address optimization tasks in different scenarios by uploading and updating parameter configurations. The platform and its open services were primarily introduced from the perspectives of background, overall architecture, simulator, business scenarios, and future directions.

Tonmoy Hossain, Jing Ma, Jundong Li et al.

Geometric shape features have been widely used as strong predictors for image classification. Nevertheless, most existing classifiers such as deep neural networks (DNNs) directly leverage the statistical correlations between these shape features and target variables. However, these correlations can often be spurious and unstable across different environments (e.g., in different age groups, certain types of brain changes have unstable relations with neurodegenerative disease); hence leading to biased or inaccurate predictions. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that for the first time develops invariant shape representation learning (ISRL) to further strengthen the robustness of image classifiers. In contrast to existing approaches that mainly derive features in the image space, our model ISRL is designed to jointly capture invariant features in latent shape spaces parameterized by deformable transformations. To achieve this goal, we develop a new learning paradigm based on invariant risk minimization (IRM) to learn invariant representations of image and shape features across multiple training distributions/environments. By embedding the features that are invariant with regard to target variables in different environments, our model consistently offers more accurate predictions. We validate our method by performing classification tasks on both simulated 2D images, real 3D brain and cine cardiovascular magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tonmoy-hossain/ISRL.

Tonmoy Hossain, Miaomiao Zhang

Geometric transformations have been widely used to augment the size of training images. Existing methods often assume a unimodal distribution of the underlying transformations between images, which limits their power when data with multimodal distributions occur. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Multimodal Geometric Augmentation (MGAug), that for the first time generates augmenting transformations in a multimodal latent space of geometric deformations. To achieve this, we first develop a deep network that embeds the learning of latent geometric spaces of diffeomorphic transformations (a.k.a. diffeomorphisms) in a variational autoencoder (VAE). A mixture of multivariate Gaussians is formulated in the tangent space of diffeomorphisms and serves as a prior to approximate the hidden distribution of image transformations. We then augment the original training dataset by deforming images using randomly sampled transformations from the learned multimodal latent space of VAE. To validate the efficiency of our model, we jointly learn the augmentation strategy with two distinct domain-specific tasks: multi-class classification on 2D synthetic datasets and segmentation on real 3D brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs). We also compare MGAug with state-of-the-art transformation-based image augmentation algorithms. Experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms all baselines by significantly improved prediction accuracy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tonmoy-hossain/MGAug.

Tonmoy Hossain, Miaomiao Zhang

Deformable shape representations, parameterized by deformations relative to a given template, have proven effective for improved image analysis tasks. However, their broader applicability is hindered by two major challenges. First, existing methods mainly rely on a known template during testing, which is impractical and limits flexibility. Second, they often struggle to capture fine-grained, voxel-level distinctions between similar shapes (e.g., anatomical variations among healthy individuals, those with mild cognitive impairment, and diseased states). To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework - Contrastive Representation Learning of Deformable shapes (CoRLD) in learned deformation spaces and demonstrate its effectiveness in the context of image classification. Our CoRLD leverages a class-aware contrastive supervised learning objective in latent deformation spaces, promoting proximity among representations of similar classes while ensuring separation of dissimilar groups. In contrast to previous deep learning networks that require a reference image as input to predict deformation changes, our approach eliminates this dependency. Instead, template images are utilized solely as ground truth in the loss function during the training process, making our model more flexible and generalizable to a wide range of medical applications. We validate CoRLD on diverse datasets, including real brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) and adrenal shapes derived from computed tomography (CT) scans. Experimental results show that our model effectively extracts deformable shape features, which can be easily integrated with existing classifiers to substantially boost the classification accuracy. Our code is available at GitHub.

Nivetha Jayakumar, Srivardhan Reddy Gadila, Tonmoy Hossain et al.

Preserving topological structures is important in real-world applications, particularly in sensitive domains such as healthcare and medicine, where the correctness of human anatomy is critical. However, most existing image editing models focus on manipulating intensity and texture features, often overlooking object geometry within images. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel method, Topology-Preserved Image Editing with text instructions (TPIE), that for the first time ensures the topology and geometry remaining intact in edited images through text-guided generative diffusion models. More specifically, our method treats newly generated samples as deformable variations of a given input template, allowing for controllable and structure-preserving edits. Our proposed TPIE framework consists of two key modules: (i) an autoencoder-based registration network that learns latent representations of object transformations, parameterized by velocity fields, from pairwise training images; and (ii) a novel latent conditional geometric diffusion (LCDG) model efficiently capturing the data distribution of learned transformation features conditioned on custom-defined text instructions. We validate TPIE on a diverse set of 2D and 3D images and compare them with state-of-the-art image editing approaches. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other baselines in generating more realistic images with well-preserved topology. Our code will be made publicly available on Github.

William Paul, Yinzhi Cao, Miaomiao Zhang et al.

Machine learning (ML) models used in medical imaging diagnostics can be vulnerable to a variety of privacy attacks, including membership inference attacks, that lead to violations of regulations governing the use of medical data and threaten to compromise their effective deployment in the clinic. In contrast to most recent work in privacy-aware ML that has been focused on model alteration and post-processing steps, we propose here a novel and complementary scheme that enhances the security of medical data by controlling the data sharing process. We develop and evaluate a privacy defense protocol based on using a generative adversarial network (GAN) that allows a medical data sourcer (e.g. a hospital) to provide an external agent (a modeler) a proxy dataset synthesized from the original images, so that the resulting diagnostic systems made available to model consumers is rendered resilient to privacy attackers. We validate the proposed method on retinal diagnostics AI used for diabetic retinopathy that bears the risk of possibly leaking private information. To incorporate concerns of both privacy advocates and modelers, we introduce a metric to evaluate privacy and utility performance in combination, and demonstrate, using these novel and classical metrics, that our approach, by itself or in conjunction with other defenses, provides state of the art (SOTA) performance for defending against privacy attacks.