Xin Chen

Ruizhe Li, Matteo Bastiani, Dorothee Auer et al.

Brain age estimation based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an active research area in early diagnosis of some neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. Alzheimer, Parkinson, Huntington, etc.) for elderly people or brain underdevelopment for the young group. Deep learning methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many medical image analysis tasks, including brain age estimation. However, the performance and generalisability of the deep learning model are highly dependent on the quantity and quality of the training data set. Both collecting and annotating brain MRI data are extremely time-consuming. In this paper, to overcome the data scarcity problem, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based image synthesis method. Different from the existing GAN-based methods, we integrate a task-guided branch (a regression model for age estimation) to the end of the generator in GAN. By adding a task-guided loss to the conventional GAN loss, the learned low-dimensional latent space and the synthesised images are more task-specific. It helps to boost the performance of the down-stream task by combining the synthesised images and real images for model training. The proposed method was evaluated on a public brain MRI data set for age estimation. Our proposed method outperformed (statistically significant) a deep convolutional neural network based regression model and the GAN-based image synthesis method without the task-guided branch. More importantly, it enables the identification of age-related brain regions in the image space. The code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/ruizhe-l/tgb-gan).

Yadong Zhang, Xin Chen

Inspired by the well-known permutation entropy (PE), an effective image encoding scheme for chaotic time series, Triad State Space Construction (TSSC), is proposed. The TSSC image can recognize higher-order temporal patterns and identify new forbidden regions in time series motifs beyond the Bandt-Pompe probabilities. The Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) is widely used in image classification. The ConvNet classifier based on TSSC images (TSSC-ConvNet) are highly accurate and very robust in the chaotic signal classification.

Mengting Wan, Xin Chen

We study the problem of providing recommended responses to customer service agents in live-chat dialogue systems. Smart-reply systems have been widely applied in real-world applications (e.g. Gmail, LinkedIn Messaging), where most of them can successfully recommend reactive responses. However, we observe a major limitation of current methods is that they generally have difficulties in suggesting proactive investigation act (e.g. "Do you perhaps have another account with us?") due to the lack of long-term context information, which indeed act as critical steps for customer service agents to collect information and resolve customers' issues. Thus in this work, we propose an end-to-end method with special focus on suggesting proactive investigative questions to customer agents in Airbnb's customer service live-chat system. Effectiveness of our proposed method can be validated through qualitative and quantitative results.

Yongxi Tan, Jin Yang, Xin Chen et al.

Mobile network that millions of people use every day is one of the most complex systems in the world. Optimization of mobile network to meet exploding customer demand and reduce capital/operation expenditures poses great challenges. Despite recent progress, application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to complex real world problem still remains unsolved, given data scarcity, partial observability, risk and complex rules/dynamics in real world, as well as the huge reality gap between simulation and real world. To bridge the reality gap, we introduce a Sim-to-Real framework to directly transfer learning from simulation to real world via graph convolutional neural network (CNN) - by abstracting partially observable mobile network into graph, then distilling domain-variant irregular graph into domain-invariant tensor in locally Euclidean space as input to CNN -, domain randomization and multi-task learning. We use a novel self-play mechanism to encourage competition among DRL agents for best record on multiple tasks via simulated annealing, just like athletes compete for world record in decathlon. We also propose a decentralized multi-agent, competitive and cooperative DRL method to coordinate the actions of multi-cells to maximize global reward and minimize negative impact to neighbor cells. Using 6 field trials on commercial mobile networks, we demonstrate for the first time that a DRL agent can successfully transfer learning from simulation to complex real world problem with imperfect information, complex rules/dynamics, huge state/action space, and multi-agent interactions, without any training in the real world.

Xin Chen, Yu Zhu, Hua Zhou et al.

In this paper, we introduce a new and challenging large-scale food image dataset called "ChineseFoodNet", which aims to automatically recognizing pictured Chinese dishes. Most of the existing food image datasets collected food images either from recipe pictures or selfie. In our dataset, images of each food category of our dataset consists of not only web recipe and menu pictures but photos taken from real dishes, recipe and menu as well. ChineseFoodNet contains over 180,000 food photos of 208 categories, with each category covering a large variations in presentations of same Chinese food. We present our efforts to build this large-scale image dataset, including food category selection, data collection, and data clean and label, in particular how to use machine learning methods to reduce manual labeling work that is an expensive process. We share a detailed benchmark of several state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on ChineseFoodNet. We further propose a novel two-step data fusion approach referred as "TastyNet", which combines prediction results from different CNNs with voting method. Our proposed approach achieves top-1 accuracies of 81.43% on the validation set and 81.55% on the test set, respectively. The latest dataset is public available for research and can be achieved at https://sites.google.com/view/chinesefoodnet.