Dense Cross-Query-and-Support Attention Weighted Mask Aggregation for Few-Shot SegmentationXinyu Shi, Dong Wei, Yu Zhang et al.
Research into Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) has attracted great attention, with the goal to segment target objects in a query image given only a few annotated support images of the target class. A key to this challenging task is to fully utilize the information in the support images by exploiting fine-grained correlations between the query and support images. However, most existing approaches either compressed the support information into a few class-wise prototypes, or used partial support information (e.g., only foreground) at the pixel level, causing non-negligible information loss. In this paper, we propose Dense pixel-wise Cross-query-and-support Attention weighted Mask Aggregation (DCAMA), where both foreground and background support information are fully exploited via multi-level pixel-wise correlations between paired query and support features. Implemented with the scaled dot-product attention in the Transformer architecture, DCAMA treats every query pixel as a token, computes its similarities with all support pixels, and predicts its segmentation label as an additive aggregation of all the support pixels' labels -- weighted by the similarities. Based on the unique formulation of DCAMA, we further propose efficient and effective one-pass inference for n-shot segmentation, where pixels of all support images are collected for the mask aggregation at once. Experiments show that our DCAMA significantly advances the state of the art on standard FSS benchmarks of PASCAL-5i, COCO-20i, and FSS-1000, e.g., with 3.1%, 9.7%, and 3.6% absolute improvements in 1-shot mIoU over previous best records. Ablative studies also verify the design DCAMA.
Deformer: Towards Displacement Field Learning for Unsupervised Medical Image RegistrationJiashun Chen, Donghuan Lu, Yu Zhang et al.
Recently, deep-learning-based approaches have been widely studied for deformable image registration task. However, most efforts directly map the composite image representation to spatial transformation through the convolutional neural network, ignoring its limited ability to capture spatial correspondence. On the other hand, Transformer can better characterize the spatial relationship with attention mechanism, its long-range dependency may be harmful to the registration task, where voxels with too large distances are unlikely to be corresponding pairs. In this study, we propose a novel Deformer module along with a multi-scale framework for the deformable image registration task. The Deformer module is designed to facilitate the mapping from image representation to spatial transformation by formulating the displacement vector prediction as the weighted summation of several bases. With the multi-scale framework to predict the displacement fields in a coarse-to-fine manner, superior performance can be achieved compared with traditional and learning-based approaches. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Deformer module as well as the multi-scale framework.
2.6LGNov 28, 2024
Deep Neural Network-Based Prediction of B-Cell Epitopes for SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2: Enhancing Vaccine Design through Machine LearningXinyu Shi, Yixin Tao, Shih-Chi Lin
The accurate prediction of B-cell epitopes is critical for guiding vaccine development against infectious diseases, including SARS and COVID-19. This study explores the use of a deep neural network (DNN) model to predict B-cell epitopes for SARS-CoVandSARS-CoV-2,leveraging a dataset that incorporates essential protein and peptide features. Traditional sequence-based methods often struggle with large, complex datasets, but deep learning offers promising improvements in predictive accuracy. Our model employs regularization techniques, such as dropout and early stopping, to enhance generalization, while also analyzing key features, including isoelectric point and aromaticity, that influence epitope recognition. Results indicate an overall accuracy of 82% in predicting COVID-19 negative and positive cases, with room for improvement in detecting positive samples. This research demonstrates the applicability of deep learning in epitope mapping, suggesting that such approaches can enhance the speed and precision of vaccine design for emerging pathogens. Future work could incorporate structural data and diverse viral strains to further refine prediction capabilities.