Pan Xiao

Peijie Qiu, Pan Xiao, Wenhui Zhu et al.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) has been widely used in weakly supervised whole slide image (WSI) classification. Typical MIL methods include a feature embedding part, which embeds the instances into features via a pre-trained feature extractor, and an MIL aggregator that combines instance embeddings into predictions. Most efforts have typically focused on improving these parts. This involves refining the feature embeddings through self-supervised pre-training as well as modeling the correlations between instances separately. In this paper, we proposed a sparsely coding MIL (SC-MIL) method that addresses those two aspects at the same time by leveraging sparse dictionary learning. The sparse dictionary learning captures the similarities of instances by expressing them as sparse linear combinations of atoms in an over-complete dictionary. In addition, imposing sparsity improves instance feature embeddings by suppressing irrelevant instances while retaining the most relevant ones. To make the conventional sparse coding algorithm compatible with deep learning, we unrolled it into a sparsely coded module leveraging deep unrolling. The proposed SC module can be incorporated into any existing MIL framework in a plug-and-play manner with an acceptable computational cost. The experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrated that the proposed SC module could substantially boost the performance of state-of-the-art MIL methods. The codes are available at \href{https://github.com/sotiraslab/SCMIL.git}{https://github.com/sotiraslab/SCMIL.git}.

Pan Xiao, Peijie Qiu, Sungmin Ha et al.

Learning rich data representations from unlabeled data is a key challenge towards applying deep learning algorithms in downstream tasks. Several variants of variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been proposed to learn compact data representations by encoding high-dimensional data in a lower dimensional space. Two main classes of VAEs methods may be distinguished depending on the characteristics of the meta-priors that are enforced in the representation learning step. The first class of methods derives a continuous encoding by assuming a static prior distribution in the latent space. The second class of methods learns instead a discrete latent representation using vector quantization (VQ) along with a codebook. However, both classes of methods suffer from certain challenges, which may lead to suboptimal image reconstruction results. The first class suffers from posterior collapse, whereas the second class suffers from codebook collapse. To address these challenges, we introduce a new VAE variant, termed sparse coding-based VAE with learned ISTA (SC-VAE), which integrates sparse coding within variational autoencoder framework. The proposed method learns sparse data representations that consist of a linear combination of a small number of predetermined orthogonal atoms. The sparse coding problem is solved using a learnable version of the iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (ISTA). Experiments on two image datasets demonstrate that our model achieves improved image reconstruction results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that the use of learned sparse code vectors allows us to perform downstream tasks like image generation and unsupervised image segmentation through clustering image patches.