Lin Liu

Hua Wei, Jingxiao Chen, Xiyang Ji et al.

This paper introduces Honor of Kings Arena, a reinforcement learning (RL) environment based on Honor of Kings, one of the world's most popular games at present. Compared to other environments studied in most previous work, ours presents new generalization challenges for competitive reinforcement learning. It is a multi-agent problem with one agent competing against its opponent; and it requires the generalization ability as it has diverse targets to control and diverse opponents to compete with. We describe the observation, action, and reward specifications for the Honor of Kings domain and provide an open-source Python-based interface for communicating with the game engine. We provide twenty target heroes with a variety of tasks in Honor of Kings Arena and present initial baseline results for RL-based methods with feasible computing resources. Finally, we showcase the generalization challenges imposed by Honor of Kings Arena and possible remedies to the challenges. All of the software, including the environment-class, are publicly available at https://github.com/tencent-ailab/hok_env . The documentation is available at https://aiarena.tencent.com/hok/doc/ .

Lin Liu, Lingxi Xie, Xiaopeng Zhang et al.

Learning a generalized prior for natural image restoration is an important yet challenging task. Early methods mostly involved handcrafted priors including normalized sparsity, l_0 gradients, dark channel priors, etc. Recently, deep neural networks have been used to learn various image priors but do not guarantee to generalize. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that embeds a task-agnostic prior into a transformer. Our approach, named Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding (TAPE), consists of two stages, namely, task-agnostic pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning, where the first stage embeds prior knowledge about natural images into the transformer and the second stage extracts the knowledge to assist downstream image restoration. Experiments on various types of degradation validate the effectiveness of TAPE. The image restoration performance in terms of PSNR is improved by as much as 1.45dB and even outperforms task-specific algorithms. More importantly, TAPE shows the ability of disentangling generalized image priors from degraded images, which enjoys favorable transfer ability to unknown downstream tasks.

Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Richard Shaw et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Lin Liu, Junfeng An, Jianzhuang Liu et al.

Low-light video enhancement (LLVE) is an important yet challenging task with many applications such as photographing and autonomous driving. Unlike single image low-light enhancement, most LLVE methods utilize temporal information from adjacent frames to restore the color and remove the noise of the target frame. However, these algorithms, based on the framework of multi-frame alignment and enhancement, may produce multi-frame fusion artifacts when encountering extreme low light or fast motion. In this paper, inspired by the low latency and high dynamic range of events, we use synthetic events from multiple frames to guide the enhancement and restoration of low-light videos. Our method contains three stages: 1) event synthesis and enhancement, 2) event and image fusion, and 3) low-light enhancement. In this framework, we design two novel modules (event-image fusion transform and event-guided dual branch) for the second and third stages, respectively. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing low-light video or single image enhancement approaches on both synthetic and real LLVE datasets.

Juan Gong, Zhenlin Chen, Chaoyi Ma et al.

Ranking model plays an essential role in e-commerce search and recommendation. An effective ranking model should give a personalized ranking list for each user according to the user preference. Existing algorithms usually extract a user representation vector from the user behavior sequence, then feed the vector into a feed-forward network (FFN) together with other features for feature interactions, and finally produce a personalized ranking score. Despite tremendous progress in the past, there is still room for improvement. Firstly, the personalized patterns of feature interactions for different users are not explicitly modeled. Secondly, most of existing algorithms have poor personalized ranking results for long-tail users with few historical behaviors due to the data sparsity. To overcome the two challenges, we propose Attention Weighted Mixture of Experts (AW-MoE) with contrastive learning for personalized ranking. Firstly, AW-MoE leverages the MoE framework to capture personalized feature interactions for different users. To model the user preference, the user behavior sequence is simultaneously fed into expert networks and the gate network. Within the gate network, one gate unit and one activation unit are designed to adaptively learn the fine-grained activation vector for experts using an attention mechanism. Secondly, a random masking strategy is applied to the user behavior sequence to simulate long-tail users, and an auxiliary contrastive loss is imposed to the output of the gate network to improve the model generalization for these users. This is validated by a higher performance gain on the long-tail user test set. Experiment results on a JD real production dataset and a public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of AW-MoE, which significantly outperforms state-of-art methods. Notably, AW-MoE has been successfully deployed in the JD e-commerce search engine, ...

Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu et al.

In many fields of scientific research and real-world applications, unbiased estimation of causal effects from non-experimental data is crucial for understanding the mechanism underlying the data and for decision-making on effective responses or interventions. A great deal of research has been conducted to address this challenging problem from different angles. For estimating causal effect in observational data, assumptions such as Markov condition, faithfulness and causal sufficiency are always made. Under the assumptions, full knowledge such as, a set of covariates or an underlying causal graph, is typically required. A practical challenge is that in many applications, no such full knowledge or only some partial knowledge is available. In recent years, research has emerged to use search strategies based on graphical causal modelling to discover useful knowledge from data for causal effect estimation, with some mild assumptions, and has shown promise in tackling the practical challenge. In this survey, we review these data-driven methods on causal effect estimation for a single treatment with a single outcome of interest and focus on the challenges faced by data-driven causal effect estimation. We concisely summarise the basic concepts and theories that are essential for data-driven causal effect estimation using graphical causal modelling but are scattered around the literature. We identify and discuss the challenges faced by data-driven causal effect estimation and characterise the existing methods by their assumptions and the approaches to tackling the challenges. We analyse the strengths and limitations of the different types of methods and present an empirical evaluation to support the discussions. We hope this review will motivate more researchers to design better data-driven methods based on graphical causal modelling for the challenging problem of causal effect estimation.

Muhammad Anwar Ma'sum, Mahardhika Pratama, Savitha Ramasamy et al.

Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL) is a new direction in continual learning (CL) for addressing catastrophic forgetting and non-IID data distribution simultaneously. Existing FCIL methods call for high communication costs and exemplars from previous classes. We propose a novel rehearsal-free method for FCIL named prototypes-injected prompt (PIP) that involves 3 main ideas: a) prototype injection on prompt learning, b) prototype augmentation, and c) weighted Gaussian aggregation on the server side. Our experiment result shows that the proposed method outperforms the current state of the arts (SOTAs) with a significant improvement (up to 33%) in CIFAR100, MiniImageNet and TinyImageNet datasets. Our extensive analysis demonstrates the robustness of PIP in different task sizes, and the advantage of requiring smaller participating local clients, and smaller global rounds. For further study, source codes of PIP, baseline, and experimental logs are shared publicly in https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/PIP.

Debo Cheng, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment variable and independent of all other variables in the system. However, it is challenging to search for a standard IV from data directly due to the strict conditions. The conditional IV (CIV) method has been proposed to allow a variable to be an instrument conditioning on a set of variables, allowing a wider choice of possible IVs and enabling broader practical applications of the IV approach. Nevertheless, there is not a data-driven method to discover a CIV and its conditioning set directly from data. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose to learn the representations of the information of a CIV and its conditioning set from data with latent confounders for average causal effect estimation. By taking advantage of deep generative models, we develop a novel data-driven approach for simultaneously learning the representation of a CIV from measured variables and generating the representation of its conditioning set given measured variables. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method outperforms the existing IV methods.

Ziqi Xu, Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li et al.

An essential and challenging problem in causal inference is causal effect estimation from observational data. The problem becomes more difficult with the presence of unobserved confounding variables. The front-door adjustment is a practical approach for dealing with unobserved confounding variables. However, the restriction for the standard front-door adjustment is difficult to satisfy in practice. In this paper, we relax some of the restrictions by proposing the concept of conditional front-door (CFD) adjustment and develop the theorem that guarantees the causal effect identifiability of CFD adjustment. Furthermore, as it is often impossible for a CFD variable to be given in practice, it is desirable to learn it from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models, we propose CFDiVAE to learn the representation of the CFD adjustment variable directly from data with the identifiable Variational AutoEncoder and formally prove the model identifiability. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of CFDiVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of CFDiVAE is less sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounding variables. We further apply CFDiVAE to a real-world dataset to demonstrate its potential application.

Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu et al.

Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful approach to inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data even when there exist latent confounders between the treatment and the outcome. However, existing IV methods require that an IV is selected and justified with domain knowledge. An invalid IV may lead to biased estimates. Hence, discovering a valid IV is critical to the applications of IV methods. In this paper, we study and design a data-driven algorithm to discover valid IVs from data under mild assumptions. We develop the theory based on partial ancestral graphs (PAGs) to support the search for a set of candidate Ancestral IVs (AIVs), and for each possible AIV, the identification of its conditioning set. Based on the theory, we propose a data-driven algorithm to discover a pair of IVs from data. The experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the developed IV discovery algorithm estimates accurate estimates of causal effects in comparison with the state-of-the-art IV based causal effect estimators.

Ziqi Xu, Jixue Liu, Debo Cheng et al.

Much research has been devoted to the problem of learning fair representations; however, they do not explicitly the relationship between latent representations. In many real-world applications, there may be causal relationships between latent representations. Furthermore, most fair representation learning methods focus on group-level fairness and are based on correlations, ignoring the causal relationships underlying the data. In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that using the structured representations enable downstream predictive models to achieve counterfactual fairness, and then we propose the Counterfactual Fairness Variational AutoEncoder (CF-VAE) to obtain structured representations with respect to domain knowledge. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better fairness and accuracy performance than the benchmark fairness methods.

Ziqi Xu, Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li et al.

Estimating direct and indirect causal effects from observational data is crucial to understanding the causal mechanisms and predicting the behaviour under different interventions. Causal mediation analysis is a method that is often used to reveal direct and indirect effects. Deep learning shows promise in mediation analysis, but the current methods only assume latent confounders that affect treatment, mediator and outcome simultaneously, and fail to identify different types of latent confounders (e.g., confounders that only affect the mediator or outcome). Furthermore, current methods are based on the sequential ignorability assumption, which is not feasible for dealing with multiple types of latent confounders. This work aims to circumvent the sequential ignorability assumption and applies the piecemeal deconfounding assumption as an alternative. We propose the Disentangled Mediation Analysis Variational AutoEncoder (DMAVAE), which disentangles the representations of latent confounders into three types to accurately estimate the natural direct effect, natural indirect effect and total effect. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and has strong generalisation ability. We further apply the method to a real-world dataset to show its potential application.

Debo Cheng, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

This paper studies the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from observational data, in the presence of unobserved confounders. The two-stage least square (TSLS) method and its variants with a standard instrumental variable (IV) are commonly used to eliminate confounding bias, including the bias caused by unobserved confounders, but they rely on the linearity assumption. Besides, the strict condition of unconfounded instruments posed on a standard IV is too strong to be practical. To address these challenging and practical problems of the standard IV method (linearity assumption and the strict condition), in this paper, we use a conditional IV (CIV) to relax the unconfounded instrument condition of standard IV and propose a non-linear CIV regression with Confounding Balancing Representation Learning, CBRL.CIV, for jointly eliminating the confounding bias from unobserved confounders and balancing the observed confounders, without the linearity assumption. We theoretically demonstrate the soundness of CBRL.CIV. Extensive experiments on synthetic and two real-world datasets show the competitive performance of CBRL.CIV against state-of-the-art IV-based estimators and superiority in dealing with the non-linear situation.

Debo Cheng, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

One of the fundamental challenges in causal inference is to estimate the causal effect of a treatment on its outcome of interest from observational data. However, causal effect estimation often suffers from the impacts of confounding bias caused by unmeasured confounders that affect both the treatment and the outcome. The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a powerful way to eliminate the confounding bias from latent confounders. However, the existing IV-based estimators require a nominated IV, and for a conditional IV (CIV) the corresponding conditioning set too, for causal effect estimation. This limits the application of IV-based estimators. In this paper, by leveraging the advantage of disentangled representation learning, we propose a novel method, named DVAE.CIV, for learning and disentangling the representations of CIV and the representations of its conditioning set for causal effect estimations from data with latent confounders. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DVAE.CIV method against the existing causal effect estimators.

Lin Liu, Mingming Zhao, Shanxin Yuan et al.

Image compression aims to reduce the information redundancy in images. Most existing neural image compression methods rely on side information from hyperprior or context models to eliminate spatial redundancy, but rarely address the channel redundancy. Inspired by the mask sampling modeling in recent self-supervised learning methods for natural language processing and high-level vision, we propose a novel pretraining strategy for neural image compression. Specifically, Cube Mask Sampling Module (CMSM) is proposed to apply both spatial and channel mask sampling modeling to image compression in the pre-training stage. Moreover, to further reduce channel redundancy, we propose the Learnable Channel Mask Module (LCMM) and the Learnable Channel Completion Module (LCCM). Our plug-and-play CMSM, LCMM, LCCM modules can apply to both CNN-based and Transformer-based architectures, significantly reduce the computational cost, and improve the quality of images. Experiments on the public Kodak and Tecnick datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with lower computational complexity compared to state-of-the-art image compression methods.

Miao Yan, Ping Zhang, Haofei Zhang et al.

Thermal infrared (TIR) tracking is pivotal in computer vision tasks due to its all-weather imaging capability. Traditional tracking methods predominantly rely on hand-crafted features, and while deep learning has introduced correlation filtering techniques, these are often constrained by rudimentary correlation operations. Furthermore, transformer-based approaches tend to overlook temporal and coordinate information, which is critical for TIR tracking that lacks texture and color information. In this paper, to address these issues, we apply natural language modeling to TIR tracking and propose a coordinate-aware thermal infrared tracking model called NLMTrack, which enhances the utilization of coordinate and temporal information. NLMTrack applies an encoder that unifies feature extraction and feature fusion, which simplifies the TIR tracking pipeline. To address the challenge of low detail and low contrast in TIR images, on the one hand, we design a multi-level progressive fusion module that enhances the semantic representation and incorporates multi-scale features. On the other hand, the decoder combines the TIR features and the coordinate sequence features using a causal transformer to generate the target sequence step by step. Moreover, we explore an adaptive loss aimed at elevating tracking accuracy and a simple template update strategy to accommodate the target's appearance variations. Experiments show that NLMTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. The Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ELOESZHANG/NLMTrack}.

Ziqi Xu, Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li et al.

An essential problem in causal inference is estimating causal effects from observational data. The problem becomes more challenging with the presence of unobserved confounders. When there are unobserved confounders, the commonly used back-door adjustment is not applicable. Although the instrumental variable (IV) methods can deal with unobserved confounders, they all assume that the treatment directly affects the outcome, and there is no mediator between the treatment and the outcome. This paper aims to use the front-door criterion to address the challenging problem with the presence of unobserved confounders and mediators. In practice, it is often difficult to identify the set of variables used for front-door adjustment from data. By leveraging the ability of deep generative models in representation learning, we propose FDVAE to learn the representation of a Front-Door adjustment set with a Variational AutoEncoder, instead of trying to search for a set of variables for front-door adjustment. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of FDVAE and its superiority over existing methods. The experiments also show that the performance of FDVAE is not sensitive to the causal strength of unobserved confounders and is feasible in the case of dimensionality mismatch between learned representations and the ground truth. We further apply the method to three real-world datasets to demonstrate its potential applications.

Jiuyong Li, Ha Xuan Tran, Thuc Duy Le et al.

This paper studies the problem of estimating the contributions of features to the prediction of a specific instance by a machine learning model and the overall contribution of a feature to the model. The causal effect of a feature (variable) on the predicted outcome reflects the contribution of the feature to a prediction very well. A challenge is that most existing causal effects cannot be estimated from data without a known causal graph. In this paper, we define an explanatory causal effect based on a hypothetical ideal experiment. The definition brings several benefits to model agnostic explanations. First, explanations are transparent and have causal meanings. Second, the explanatory causal effect estimation can be data driven. Third, the causal effects provide both a local explanation for a specific prediction and a global explanation showing the overall importance of a feature in a predictive model. We further propose a method using individual and combined variables based on explanatory causal effects for explanations. We show the definition and the method work with experiments on some real-world data sets.

Wentao Gao, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

As the growing demand for long sequence time-series forecasting in real-world applications, such as electricity consumption planning, the significance of time series forecasting becomes increasingly crucial across various domains. This is highlighted by recent advancements in representation learning within the field. This study introduces a novel multi-view approach for time series forecasting that innovatively integrates trend and seasonal representations with an Independent Component Analysis (ICA)-based representation. Recognizing the limitations of existing methods in representing complex and high-dimensional time series data, this research addresses the challenge by combining TS (trend and seasonality) and ICA (independent components) perspectives. This approach offers a holistic understanding of time series data, going beyond traditional models that often miss nuanced, nonlinear relationships. The efficacy of TSI model is demonstrated through comprehensive testing on various benchmark datasets, where it shows superior performance over current state-of-the-art models, particularly in multivariate forecasting. This method not only enhances the accuracy of forecasting but also contributes significantly to the field by providing a more in-depth understanding of time series data. The research which uses ICA for a view lays the groundwork for further exploration and methodological advancements in time series forecasting, opening new avenues for research and practical applications.

Guixian Zhang, Guan Yuan, Debo Cheng et al.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) creates new opportunities for recommender systems, especially by exploiting the side information (e.g., descriptions and analyses of items) generated by these models. However, aligning this side information with collaborative information from historical interactions poses significant challenges. The inherent biases within LLMs can skew recommendations, resulting in distorted and potentially unfair user experiences. On the other hand, propensity bias causes side information to be aligned in such a way that it often tends to represent all inputs in a low-dimensional subspace, leading to a phenomenon known as dimensional collapse, which severely restricts the recommender system's ability to capture user preferences and behaviours. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework named Counterfactual LLM Recommendation (CLLMR). Specifically, we propose a spectrum-based side information encoder that implicitly embeds structural information from historical interactions into the side information representation, thereby circumventing the risk of dimension collapse. Furthermore, our CLLMR approach explores the causal relationships inherent in LLM-based recommender systems. By leveraging counterfactual inference, we counteract the biases introduced by LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CLLMR approach consistently enhances the performance of various recommender models.

Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu, Ziqi Xu et al.

A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature on the outcome, i.e., how the outcome will change if the feature is changed while keeping the values of other features unchanged. This is because causal effect estimation requires interventional probabilities. However, many real world problems such as personalised decision making, recommendation, and fairness computing, need to know the causal effect of any feature on the outcome for a given instance. This is different from the traditional causal effect estimation problem with a fixed treatment variable. This paper first tackles the challenge of estimating the causal effect of any feature (as the treatment) on the outcome w.r.t. a given instance. The theoretical results naturally link a predictive model to causal effect estimations and imply that a predictive model is causally interpretable when the conditions identified in the paper are satisfied. The paper also reveals the robust property of a causally interpretable model. We use experiments to demonstrate that various types of predictive models, when satisfying the conditions identified in this paper, can estimate the causal effects of features as accurately as state-of-the-art causal effect estimation methods. We also show the potential of such causally interpretable predictive models for robust predictions and personalised decision making.

Chenrui Zhang, Lin Liu, Jinpeng Wang et al.

As an effective tool for eliciting the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting has recently demonstrated unprecedented abilities across a variety of complex tasks. To further improve the performance, prompt ensemble has attracted substantial interest for tackling the hallucination and instability of LLMs. However, existing methods usually adopt a two-stage paradigm, which requires a pre-prepared set of prompts with substantial manual effort, and is unable to perform directed optimization for different weak learners. In this paper, we propose a simple, universal, and automatic method named PREFER (Pompt Ensemble learning via Feedback-Reflect-Refine) to address the stated limitations. Specifically, given the fact that weak learners are supposed to focus on hard examples during boosting, PREFER builds a feedback mechanism for reflecting on the inadequacies of existing weak learners. Based on this, the LLM is required to automatically synthesize new prompts for iterative refinement. Moreover, to enhance stability of the prompt effect evaluation, we propose a novel prompt bagging method involving forward and backward thinking, which is superior to majority voting and is beneficial for both feedback and weight calculation in boosting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PREFER achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple types of tasks by a significant margin. We have made our code publicly available.

Chulong Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Na Li et al.

Pathologists need to combine information from differently stained pathology slices for accurate diagnosis. Deformable image registration is a necessary technique for fusing multi-modal pathology slices. This paper proposes a hybrid deep feature-based deformable image registration framework for stained pathology samples. We first extract dense feature points via the detector-based and detector-free deep learning feature networks and perform points matching. Then, to further reduce false matches, an outlier detection method combining the isolation forest statistical model and the local affine correction model is proposed. Finally, the interpolation method generates the deformable vector field for pathology image registration based on the above matching points. We evaluate our method on the dataset of the Non-rigid Histology Image Registration (ANHIR) challenge, which is co-organized with the IEEE ISBI 2019 conference. Our technique outperforms the traditional approaches by 17% with the Average-Average registration target error (rTRE) reaching 0.0034. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance and ranked 1st in evaluating the test dataset. The proposed hybrid deep feature-based registration method can potentially become a reliable method for pathology image registration.

Zhongyi Pei, Lin Liu, Chen Wang et al.

Today, many industrial processes are undergoing digital transformation, which often requires the integration of well-understood domain models and state-of-the-art machine learning technology in business processes. However, requirements elicitation and design decision making about when, where and how to embed various domain models and end-to-end machine learning techniques properly into a given business workflow requires further exploration. This paper aims to provide an overview of the requirements engineering process for machine learning applications in terms of cross domain collaborations. We first review the literature on requirements engineering for machine learning, and then go through the collaborative requirements analysis process step-by-step. An example case of industrial data-driven intelligence applications is also discussed in relation to the aforementioned steps.

Xiaojing Du, Jiuyong Li, Debo Cheng et al.

Estimating causal effects is crucial for decision-makers in many applications, but it is particularly challenging with observational network data due to peer interactions. Many algorithms have been proposed to estimate causal effects involving network data, particularly peer effects, but they often overlook the variety of peer effects. To address this issue, we propose a general setting which considers both peer direct effects and peer indirect effects, and the effect of an individual's own treatment, and provide identification conditions of these causal effects and proofs. To estimate these causal effects, we utilize attention mechanisms to distinguish the influences of different neighbors and explore high-order neighbor effects through multi-layer graph neural networks (GNNs). Additionally, to control the dependency between node features and representations, we incorporate the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) into the GNN, fully utilizing the structural information of the graph, to enhance the robustness and accuracy of the model. Extensive experiments on two semi-synthetic datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Our theoretical findings have the potential to improve intervention strategies in networked systems, with applications in areas such as social networks and epidemiology.

Qilong Wu, Lin Liu, Shibei Xue

Federated learning protects data privacy and security by exchanging models instead of data. However, unbalanced data distributions among participating clients compromise the accuracy and convergence speed of federated learning algorithms. To alleviate this problem, unlike previous studies that limit the distance of updates for local models, we propose global-update-guided federated learning (FedGG), which introduces a model-cosine loss into local objective functions, so that local models can fit local data distributions under the guidance of update directions of global models. Furthermore, considering that the update direction of a global model is informative in the early stage of training, we propose adaptive loss weights based on the update distances of local models. Numerical simulations show that, compared with other advanced algorithms, FedGG has a significant improvement on model convergence accuracies and speeds. Additionally, compared with traditional fixed loss weights, adaptive loss weights enable our algorithm to be more stable and easier to implement in practice.

Siqi Xu, Lin Liu, Zhonghua Liu

Causal mediation analysis can unpack the black box of causality and is therefore a powerful tool for disentangling causal pathways in biomedical and social sciences, and also for evaluating machine learning fairness. To reduce bias for estimating Natural Direct and Indirect Effects in mediation analysis, we propose a new method called DeepMed that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to cross-fit the infinite-dimensional nuisance functions in the efficient influence functions. We obtain novel theoretical results that our DeepMed method (1) can achieve semiparametric efficiency bound without imposing sparsity constraints on the DNN architecture and (2) can adapt to certain low dimensional structures of the nuisance functions, significantly advancing the existing literature on DNN-based semiparametric causal inference. Extensive synthetic experiments are conducted to support our findings and also expose the gap between theory and practice. As a proof of concept, we apply DeepMed to analyze two real datasets on machine learning fairness and reach conclusions consistent with previous findings.

Muhammad Tanzil Furqon, Mahardhika Pratama, Lin Liu et al.

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions play vital role for asset planning and maintenance leading to many benefits to industries such as reduced downtime, low maintenance costs, etc. Although various efforts have been devoted to study this topic, most existing works are restricted for i.i.d conditions assuming the same condition of the training phase and the deployment phase. This paper proposes a solution to this problem where a mix-up domain adaptation (MDAN) is put forward. MDAN encompasses a three-staged mechanism where the mix-up strategy is not only performed to regularize the source and target domains but also applied to establish an intermediate mix-up domain where the source and target domains are aligned. The self-supervised learning strategy is implemented to prevent the supervision collapse problem. Rigorous evaluations have been performed where MDAN is compared to recently published works for dynamic RUL predictions. MDAN outperforms its counterparts with substantial margins in 12 out of 12 cases. In addition, MDAN is evaluated with the bearing machine dataset where it beats prior art with significant gaps in 8 of 12 cases. Source codes of MDAN are made publicly available in \url{https://github.com/furqon3009/MDAN}.

Yang Xie, Ziqi Xu, Debo Cheng et al.

Estimating causal effects from observational data is challenging, especially in the presence of latent confounders. Much work has been done on addressing this challenge, but most of the existing research ignores the bias introduced by the post-treatment variables. In this paper, we propose a novel method of joint Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and identifiable Variational AutoEncoder (iVAE) for learning the representations of latent confounders and latent post-treatment variables from their proxy variables, termed CPTiVAE, to achieve unbiased causal effect estimation from observational data. We further prove the identifiability in terms of the representation of latent post-treatment variables. Extensive experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate that the CPTiVAE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the presence of latent confounders and post-treatment variables. We further apply CPTiVAE to a real-world dataset to show its potential application.

Enqiang Xu, Xinhui Li, Zhigong Zhou et al.

In the rapidly evolving field of e-commerce, the effectiveness of search re-ranking models is crucial for enhancing user experience and driving conversion rates. Despite significant advancements in feature representation and model architecture, the integration of multimodal information remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating the computation and fusion of textual and visual information in the context of re-ranking. We propose \textbf{A}dvancing \textbf{R}e-Ranking with \textbf{M}ulti\textbf{m}odal Fusion and \textbf{T}arget-Oriented Auxiliary Tasks (ARMMT), which integrates an attention-based multimodal fusion technique and an auxiliary ranking-aligned task to enhance item representation and improve targeting capabilities. This method not only enriches the understanding of product attributes but also enables more precise and personalized recommendations. Experimental evaluations on JD.com's search platform demonstrate that ARMMT achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal information integration, evidenced by a 0.22\% increase in the Conversion Rate (CVR), significantly contributing to Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV). This pioneering approach has the potential to revolutionize e-commerce re-ranking, leading to elevated user satisfaction and business growth.

Xinxin Fan, Lin Liu, Haoran Zhang

The use of multimodal data in assisted diagnosis and segmentation has emerged as a prominent area of interest in current research. However, one of the primary challenges is how to effectively fuse multimodal features. Most of the current approaches focus on the integration of multimodal features while ignoring the correlation and consistency between different modal features, leading to the inclusion of potentially irrelevant information. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative Multimodal Information Cross Transformer (MicFormer), which employs a dual-stream architecture to simultaneously extract features from each modality. Leveraging the Cross Transformer, it queries features from one modality and retrieves corresponding responses from another, facilitating effective communication between bimodal features. Additionally, we incorporate a deformable Transformer architecture to expand the search space. We conducted experiments on the MM-WHS dataset, and in the CT-MRI multimodal image segmentation task, we successfully improved the whole-heart segmentation DICE score to 85.57 and MIoU to 75.51. Compared to other multimodal segmentation techniques, our method outperforms by margins of 2.83 and 4.23, respectively. This demonstrates the efficacy of MicFormer in integrating relevant information between different modalities in multimodal tasks. These findings hold significant implications for multimodal image tasks, and we believe that MicFormer possesses extensive potential for broader applications across various domains. Access to our method is available at https://github.com/fxxJuses/MICFormer

M. Anwar Ma'sum, Mahardhika Pratama, Savitha Ramasamy et al.

The data privacy constraint in online continual learning (OCL), where the data can be seen only once, complicates the catastrophic forgetting problem in streaming data. A common approach applied by the current SOTAs in OCL is with the use of memory saving exemplars or features from previous classes to be replayed in the current task. On the other hand, the prompt-based approach performs excellently in continual learning but with the cost of a growing number of trainable parameters. The first approach may not be applicable in practice due to data openness policy, while the second approach has the issue of throughput associated with the streaming data. In this study, we propose a novel prompt-based method for online continual learning that includes 4 main components: (1) single light-weight prompt generator as a general knowledge, (2) trainable scaler-and-shifter as specific knowledge, (3) pre-trained model (PTM) generalization preserving, and (4) hard-soft updates mechanism. Our proposed method achieves significantly higher performance than the current SOTAs in CIFAR100, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-A, and CUB dataset. Our complexity analysis shows that our method requires a relatively smaller number of parameters and achieves moderate training time, inference time, and throughput. For further study, the source code of our method is available at https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/PROL.

Guanghao Zhu, Jing Zhang, Juanxiu Liu et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown considerable potential in medical image segmentation, primarily leveraging consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling. However, many SSL approaches only pay attention to low-level consistency and overlook the significance of pseudo-label reliability. Therefore, in this work, we propose an adversarial self-training consistency framework (AstMatch). Firstly, we design an adversarial consistency regularization (ACR) approach to enhance knowledge transfer and strengthen prediction consistency under varying perturbation intensities. Second, we apply a feature matching loss for adversarial training to incorporate high-level consistency regularization. Additionally, we present the pyramid channel attention (PCA) and efficient channel and spatial attention (ECSA) modules to improve the discriminator's performance. Finally, we propose an adaptive self-training (AST) approach to ensure the pseudo-labels' quality. The proposed AstMatch has been extensively evaluated with cutting-edge SSL methods on three public-available datasets. The experimental results under different labeled ratios indicate that AstMatch outperforms other existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/GuanghaoZhu663/AstMatch.

Di Wang, Meiqi Hu, Yao Jin et al.

Accurate hyperspectral image (HSI) interpretation is critical for providing valuable insights into various earth observation-related applications such as urban planning, precision agriculture, and environmental monitoring. However, existing HSI processing methods are predominantly task-specific and scene-dependent, which severely limits their ability to transfer knowledge across tasks and scenes, thereby reducing the practicality in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we present HyperSIGMA, a vision transformer-based foundation model that unifies HSI interpretation across tasks and scenes, scalable to over one billion parameters. To overcome the spectral and spatial redundancy inherent in HSIs, we introduce a novel sparse sampling attention (SSA) mechanism, which effectively promotes the learning of diverse contextual features and serves as the basic block of HyperSIGMA. HyperSIGMA integrates spatial and spectral features using a specially designed spectral enhancement module. In addition, we construct a large-scale hyperspectral dataset, HyperGlobal-450K, for pre-training, which contains about 450K hyperspectral images, significantly surpassing existing datasets in scale. Extensive experiments on various high-level and low-level HSI tasks demonstrate HyperSIGMA's versatility and superior representational capability compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, HyperSIGMA shows significant advantages in scalability, robustness, cross-modal transferring capability, real-world applicability, and computational efficiency. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/WHU-Sigma/HyperSIGMA.

Muhammad Anwar Ma'sum, Mahardhika Pratama, Ramasamy Savitha et al.

A continual learning (CL) model is desired for remote sensing image analysis because of varying camera parameters, spectral ranges, resolutions, etc. There exist some recent initiatives to develop CL techniques in this domain but they still depend on massive labelled samples which do not fully fit remote sensing applications because ground truths are often obtained via field-based surveys. This paper addresses this problem with a proposal of unsupervised flat-wide learning approach (UNISA) for unsupervised few-shot continual learning approaches of remote sensing image scene classifications which do not depend on any labelled samples for its model updates. UNISA is developed from the idea of prototype scattering and positive sampling for learning representations while the catastrophic forgetting problem is tackled with the flat-wide learning approach combined with a ball generator to address the data scarcity problem. Our numerical study with remote sensing image scene datasets and a hyperspectral dataset confirms the advantages of our solution. Source codes of UNISA are shared publicly in \url{https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/UNISA} to allow convenient future studies and reproductions of our numerical results.

Muhammad Anwar Ma'sum, MD Rasel Sarkar, Mahardhika Pratama et al.

A reliable long-term time-series forecaster is highly demanded in practice but comes across many challenges such as low computational and memory footprints as well as robustness against dynamic learning environments. This paper proposes Meta-Transformer Networks (MANTRA) to deal with the dynamic long-term time-series forecasting tasks. MANTRA relies on the concept of fast and slow learners where a collection of fast learners learns different aspects of data distributions while adapting quickly to changes. A slow learner tailors suitable representations to fast learners. Fast adaptations to dynamic environments are achieved using the universal representation transformer layers producing task-adapted representations with a small number of parameters. Our experiments using four datasets with different prediction lengths demonstrate the advantage of our approach with at least $3\%$ improvements over the baseline algorithms for both multivariate and univariate settings. Source codes of MANTRA are publicly available in \url{https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/MANTRA}.

Zhaolong Ling, Kui Yu, Yiwen Zhang et al.

Causal Learner is a toolbox for learning causal structure and Markov blanket (MB) from data. It integrates functions for generating simulated Bayesian network data, a set of state-of-the-art global causal structure learning algorithms, a set of state-of-the-art local causal structure learning algorithms, a set of state-of-the-art MB learning algorithms, and functions for evaluating algorithms. The data generation part of Causal Learner is written in R, and the rest of Causal Learner is written in MATLAB. Causal Learner aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an open-source platform for causal learning from data and for the development and evaluation of new causal learning algorithms. The Causal Learner project is available at http://bigdata.ahu.edu.cn/causal-learner.

Kui Yu, Xianjie Guo, Lin Liu et al.

Feature selection is a crucial preprocessing step in data analytics and machine learning. Classical feature selection algorithms select features based on the correlations between predictive features and the class variable and do not attempt to capture causal relationships between them. It has been shown that the knowledge about the causal relationships between features and the class variable has potential benefits for building interpretable and robust prediction models, since causal relationships imply the underlying mechanism of a system. Consequently, causality-based feature selection has gradually attracted greater attentions and many algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in causality-based feature selection. To facilitate the development of new algorithms in the research area and make it easy for the comparisons between new methods and existing ones, we develop the first open-source package, called CausalFS, which consists of most of the representative causality-based feature selection algorithms (available at https://github.com/kuiy/CausalFS). Using CausalFS, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the representative algorithms with both synthetic and real-world data sets. Finally, we discuss some challenging problems to be tackled in future causality-based feature selection research.

Kui Yu, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu

Causal discovery studies the problem of mining causal relationships between variables from data, which is of primary interest in science. During the past decades, significant amount of progresses have been made toward this fundamental data mining paradigm. Recent years, as the availability of abundant large-sized and complex observational data, the constrain-based approaches have gradually attracted a lot of interest and have been widely applied to many diverse real-world problems due to the fast running speed and easy generalizing to the problem of causal insufficiency. In this paper, we aim to review the constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. Firstly, we discuss the learning paradigm of the constraint-based approaches. Secondly and primarily, the state-of-the-art constraint-based casual inference algorithms are surveyed with the detailed analysis. Thirdly, several related open-source software packages and benchmark data repositories are briefly summarized. As a conclusion, some open problems in constraint-based causal discovery are outlined for future research.

Debo Cheng, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

Causal inference from longitudinal observational data is a challenging problem due to the difficulty in correctly identifying the time-dependent confounders, especially in the presence of latent time-dependent confounders. Instrumental variable (IV) is a powerful tool for addressing the latent confounders issue, but the traditional IV technique cannot deal with latent time-dependent confounders in longitudinal studies. In this work, we propose a novel Time-dependent Instrumental Factor Model (TIFM) for time-varying causal effect estimation from data with latent time-dependent confounders. At each time-step, the proposed TIFM method employs the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture to infer latent IV, and then uses the inferred latent IV factor for addressing the confounding bias caused by the latent time-dependent confounders. We provide a theoretical analysis for the proposed TIFM method regarding causal effect estimation in longitudinal data. Extensive evaluation with synthetic datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of TIFM in addressing causal effect estimation over time. We further apply TIFM to a climate dataset to showcase the potential of the proposed method in tackling real-world problems.

Zhihan Xiao, Lin Liu, Yixin Gao et al.

Text-guided video editing, particularly for object removal and addition, remains a challenging task due to the need for precise spatial and temporal consistency. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary masks or reference images for editing guidance, which limits their scalability and generalization. To address these issues, we propose LoVoRA, a novel framework for mask-free video object removal and addition using object-aware localization mechanism. Our approach utilizes a unique dataset construction pipeline that integrates image-to-video translation, optical flow-based mask propagation, and video inpainting, enabling temporally consistent edits. The core innovation of LoVoRA is its learnable object-aware localization mechanism, which provides dense spatio-temporal supervision for both object insertion and removal tasks. By leveraging a Diffusion Mask Predictor, LoVoRA achieves end-to-end video editing without requiring external control signals during inference. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness and high-quality performance of LoVoRA. https://cz-5f.github.io/LoVoRA.github.io

Muhammad Tanzil Furqon, Mahardhika Pratama, Ary Mazharuddin Shiddiqi et al.

The issue of source-free time-series domain adaptations still gains scarce research attentions. On the other hand, existing approaches rely solely on time-domain features ignoring frequency components providing complementary information. This paper proposes Time Frequency Domain Adaptation (TFDA), a method to cope with the source-free time-series domain adaptation problems. TFDA is developed with a dual branch network structure fully utilizing both time and frequency features in delivering final predictions. It induces pseudo-labels based on a neighborhood concept where predictions of a sample group are aggregated to generate reliable pseudo labels. The concept of contrastive learning is carried out in both time and frequency domains with pseudo label information and a negative pair exclusion strategy to make valid neighborhood assumptions. In addition, the time-frequency consistency technique is proposed using the self-distillation strategy while the uncertainty reduction strategy is implemented to alleviate uncertainties due to the domain shift problem. Last but not least, the curriculum learning strategy is integrated to combat noisy pseudo labels. Our experiments demonstrate the advantage of our approach over prior arts with noticeable margins in benchmark problems.

Debo Cheng, Yang Xie, Ziqi Xu et al.

In causal inference, it is a fundamental task to estimate the causal effect from observational data. However, latent confounders pose major challenges in causal inference in observational data, for example, confounding bias and M-bias. Recent data-driven causal effect estimators tackle the confounding bias problem via balanced representation learning, but assume no M-bias in the system, thus they fail to handle the M-bias. In this paper, we identify a challenging and unsolved problem caused by a variable that leads to confounding bias and M-bias simultaneously. To address this problem with co-occurring M-bias and confounding bias, we propose a novel Disentangled Latent Representation learning framework for learning latent representations from proxy variables for unbiased Causal effect Estimation (DLRCE) from observational data. Specifically, DLRCE learns three sets of latent representations from the measured proxy variables to adjust for the confounding bias and M-bias. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate that DLRCE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art estimators in the case of the presence of both confounding bias and M-bias.

Ziqiang Dang, Jianfang Li, Lin Liu

Facial landmark detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision for many downstream applications. This paper introduces a new facial landmark detector based on vision transformers, which consists of two unique designs: Dual Vision Transformer (D-ViT) and Long Skip Connections (LSC). Based on the observation that the channel dimension of feature maps essentially represents the linear bases of the heatmap space, we propose learning the interconnections between these linear bases to model the inherent geometric relations among landmarks via Channel-split ViT. We integrate such channel-split ViT into the standard vision transformer (i.e., spatial-split ViT), forming our Dual Vision Transformer to constitute the prediction blocks. We also suggest using long skip connections to deliver low-level image features to all prediction blocks, thereby preventing useful information from being discarded by intermediate supervision. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposal on the widely used benchmarks, i.e., WFLW, COFW, and 300W, demonstrating that our model outperforms the previous SOTAs across all three benchmarks.

Muhammad Tanzil Furqon, Mahardhika Pratama, Igor Škrjanc et al.

Although existing cross-domain continual learning approaches successfully address many streaming tasks having domain shifts, they call for a fully labeled source domain hindering their feasibility in the privacy constrained environments. This paper goes one step ahead with the problem of source-free cross-domain continual learning where the use of source-domain samples are completely prohibited. We propose the idea of rehearsal-free frequency-aware dynamic prompt collaborations (REFEREE) to cope with the absence of labeled source-domain samples in realm of cross-domain continual learning. REFEREE is built upon a synergy between a source-pre-trained model and a large-scale vision-language model, thus overcoming the problem of sub-optimal generalizations when relying only on a source pre-trained model. The domain shift problem between the source domain and the target domain is handled by a frequency-aware prompting technique encouraging low-frequency components while suppressing high-frequency components. This strategy generates frequency-aware augmented samples, robust against noisy pseudo labels. The noisy pseudo-label problem is further addressed with the uncertainty-aware weighting strategy where the mean and covariance matrix are weighted by prediction uncertainties, thus mitigating the adverse effects of the noisy pseudo label. Besides, the issue of catastrophic forgetting (CF) is overcome by kernel linear discriminant analysis (KLDA) where the backbone network is frozen while the classification is performed using the linear discriminant analysis approach guided by the random kernel method. Our rigorous numerical studies confirm the advantage of our approach where it beats prior arts having access to source domain samples with significant margins.

M. T. Furqon, Mahardhika Pratama, Igor Skrjanc et al.

The black-box domain adaptation (BBDA) topic is developed to address the privacy and security issues where only an application programming interface (API) of the source model is available for domain adaptations. Although the BBDA topic has attracted growing research attentions, existing works mostly target the vision applications and are not directly applicable to the time-series applications possessing unique spatio-temporal characteristics. In addition, none of existing approaches have explored the strength of foundation model for black box time-series domain adaptation (BBTSDA). This paper proposes a concept of Cross-Prompt Foundation Model (CPFM) for the BBTSDA problems. CPFM is constructed under a dual branch network structure where each branch is equipped with a unique prompt to capture different characteristics of data distributions. In the domain adaptation phase, the reconstruction learning phase in the prompt and input levels is developed. All of which are built upon a time-series foundation model to overcome the spatio-temporal dynamic. Our rigorous experiments substantiate the advantage of CPFM achieving improved results with noticeable margins from its competitors in three time-series datasets of different application domains.

Xiaojing Du, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu et al.

Estimating peer causal effects within complex real-world networks such as social networks is challenging, primarily due to simultaneous feedback between peers and unobserved confounders. Existing methods either address unobserved confounders while ignoring the simultaneous feedback, or account for feedback but under restrictive linear assumptions, thus failing to obtain accurate peer effect estimation. In this paper, we propose DIG2RSI, a novel Deep learning framework which leverages I-G transformation (matrix operation) and 2SRI (an instrumental variable or IV technique) to address both simultaneous feedback and unobserved confounding, while accommodating complex, nonlinear and high-dimensional relationships. DIG2RSI first applies the I-G transformation to disentangle mutual peer influences and eliminate the bias due to the simultaneous feedback. To deal with unobserved confounding, we first construct valid IVs from network data. In stage 1 of 2RSI, we train a neural network on these IVs to predict peer exposure, and extract residuals as proxies for the unobserved confounders. In the stage 2, we fit a separate neural network augmented by an adversarial discriminator that incorporates these residuals as a control function and enforces the learned representation to contain no residual confounding signal. The expressive power of deep learning models in capturing complex non-linear relationships and adversarial debiasing enhances the effectiveness of DIG2RSI in eliminating bias from both feedback loops and hidden confounders. We prove consistency of our estimator under standard regularity conditions, ensuring asymptotic recovery of the true peer effect. Empirical results on two semi-synthetic benchmarks and a real-world dataset demonstrate that DIG2RSI outperforms existing approaches.

Chong Liu, Zaiwen Feng, Lin Liu et al.

Plausibility Estimation (PE) plays a crucial role for enabling language models to objectively comprehend the real world. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in PE tasks but sometimes produce trivial commonsense errors due to the complexity of commonsense knowledge. They lack two key traits of an ideal PE model: a) Language-explainable: relying on critical word segments for decisions, and b) Commonsense-sensitive: detecting subtle linguistic variations in commonsense. To address these issues, we propose a novel model-agnostic method, referred to as Commonsense Counterfactual Samples Generating (CCSG). By training PE models with CCSG, we encourage them to focus on critical words, thereby enhancing both their language-explainable and commonsense-sensitive capabilities. Specifically, CCSG generates counterfactual samples by strategically replacing key words and introducing low-level dropout within sentences. These counterfactual samples are then incorporated into a sentence-level contrastive training framework to further enhance the model's learning process. Experimental results across nine diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCSG in addressing commonsense reasoning challenges, with our CCSG method showing 3.07% improvement against the SOTA methods.

Debo Cheng, Ziqi Xu, Jiuyong Li et al.

Intervention intuition is often used in model explanation where the intervention effect of a feature on the outcome is quantified by the difference of a model prediction when the feature value is changed from the current value to the baseline value. Such a model intervention effect of a feature is inherently association. In this paper, we will study the conditions when an intuitive model intervention effect has a causal interpretation, i.e., when it indicates whether a feature is a direct cause of the outcome. This work links the model intervention effect to the causal interpretation of a model. Such an interpretation capability is important since it indicates whether a machine learning model is trustworthy to domain experts. The conditions also reveal the limitations of using a model intervention effect for causal interpretation in an environment with unobserved features. Experiments on semi-synthetic datasets have been conducted to validate theorems and show the potential for using the model intervention effect for model interpretation.

Guanghao Zhu, Lin Liu, Jing Zhang et al.

Facial nerve segmentation is crucial for preoperative path planning in cochlear implantation surgery. Recently, researchers have proposed some segmentation methods, such as atlas-based and deep learning-based methods. However, since the facial nerve is a tubular organ with a diameter of only 1.0-1.5mm, it is challenging to locate and segment the facial nerve in CT scans. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware dualstream network (UADSN). UADSN consists of a 2D segmentation stream and a 3D segmentation stream. Predictions from two streams are used to identify uncertain regions, and a consistency loss is employed to supervise the segmentation of these regions. In addition, we introduce channel squeeze & spatial excitation modules into the skip connections of U-shaped networks to extract meaningful spatial information. In order to consider topologypreservation, a clDice loss is introduced into the supervised loss function. Experimental results on the facial nerve dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of UADSN and our submodules.