Xiao Chen

Gang Xu, Shuhao Wang, Lingyu Zhao et al.

Histopathology image analysis plays a crucial role in cancer diagnosis. However, training a clinically applicable segmentation algorithm requires pathologists to engage in labour-intensive labelling. In contrast, weakly supervised learning methods, which only require coarse-grained labels at the image level, can significantly reduce the labeling efforts. Unfortunately, while these methods perform reasonably well in slide-level prediction, their ability to locate cancerous regions, which is essential for many clinical applications, remains unsatisfactory. Previously, we proposed CAMEL, which achieves comparable results to those of fully supervised baselines in pixel-level segmentation. However, CAMEL requires 1,280x1,280 image-level binary annotations for positive WSIs. Here, we present CAMEL2, by introducing a threshold of the cancerous ratio for positive bags, it allows us to better utilize the information, consequently enabling us to scale up the image-level setting from 1,280x1,280 to 5,120x5,120 while maintaining the accuracy. Our results with various datasets, demonstrate that CAMEL2, with the help of 5,120x5,120 image-level binary annotations, which are easy to annotate, achieves comparable performance to that of a fully supervised baseline in both instance- and slide-level classifications.

Jianqiao Lu, Wenyong Huang, Nianzu Zheng et al.

Training a high performance end-to-end speech (E2E) processing model requires an enormous amount of labeled speech data, especially in the era of data-centric artificial intelligence. However, labeled speech data are usually scarcer and more expensive for collection, compared to textual data. We propose Latent Synthesis (LaSyn), an efficient textual data utilization framework for E2E speech processing models. We train a latent synthesizer to convert textual data into an intermediate latent representation of a pre-trained speech model. These pseudo acoustic representations of textual data augment acoustic data for model training. We evaluate LaSyn on low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks. For ASR, LaSyn improves an E2E baseline trained on LibriSpeech train-clean-100, with relative word error rate reductions over 22.3% on different test sets. For SLU, LaSyn improves our E2E baseline by absolute 4.1% for intent classification accuracy and 3.8% for slot filling SLU-F1 on SLURP, and absolute 4.49% and 2.25% for exact match (EM) and EM-Tree accuracies on STOP respectively. With fewer parameters, the results of LaSyn are competitive to published state-of-the-art works. The results demonstrate the quality of the augmented training data.

Yujie Ding, Shenghua Teng, Zuoyong Li et al.

UNet and its variants have widespread applications in medical image segmentation. However, the substantial number of parameters and computational complexity of these models make them less suitable for use in clinical settings with limited computational resources. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Lightweight Shift U-Net (LSU-Net). We integrate the Light Conv Block and the Tokenized Shift Block in a lightweight manner, combining them with a dynamic weight multi-loss design for efficient dynamic weight allocation. The Light Conv Block effectively captures features with a low parameter count by combining standard convolutions with depthwise separable convolutions. The Tokenized Shift Block optimizes feature representation by shifting and capturing deep features through a combination of the Spatial Shift Block and depthwise separable convolutions. Dynamic adjustment of the loss weights at each layer approaches the optimal solution and enhances training stability. We validated LSU-Net on the UWMGI and MSD Colon datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that LSU-Net outperforms most state-of-the-art segmentation architectures.

Cheng Chen, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang et al.

Task-agnostic knowledge distillation, a teacher-student framework, has been proved effective for BERT compression. Although achieving promising results on NLP tasks, it requires enormous computational resources. In this paper, we propose Extract Then Distill (ETD), a generic and flexible strategy to reuse the teacher's parameters for efficient and effective task-agnostic distillation, which can be applied to students of any size. Specifically, we introduce two variants of ETD, ETD-Rand and ETD-Impt, which extract the teacher's parameters in a random manner and by following an importance metric respectively. In this way, the student has already acquired some knowledge at the beginning of the distillation process, which makes the distillation process converge faster. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ETD on the GLUE benchmark and SQuAD. The experimental results show that: (1) compared with the baseline without an ETD strategy, ETD can save 70\% of computation cost. Moreover, it achieves better results than the baseline when using the same computing resource. (2) ETD is generic and has been proven effective for different distillation methods (e.g., TinyBERT and MiniLM) and students of different sizes. The source code will be publicly available upon publication.

Lantian Li, Dong Wang, Jiawen Kang et al.

Mismatch between enrollment and test conditions causes serious performance degradation on speaker recognition systems. This paper presents a statistics decomposition (SD) approach to solve this problem. This approach decomposes the PLDA score into three components that corresponding to enrollment, prediction and normalization respectively. Given that correct statistics are used in each component, the resultant score is theoretically optimal. A comprehensive experimental study was conducted on three datasets with different types of mismatch: (1) physical channel mismatch, (2) speaking behavior mismatch, (3) near-far recording mismatch. The results demonstrated that the proposed SD approach is highly effective, and outperforms the ad-hoc multi-condition training approach that is commonly adopted but not optimal in theory.

Xiao Alison Chen, Zizhuo Wang

We consider an online matching problem with concave returns. This problem is a significant generalization of the Adwords allocation problem and has vast applications in online advertising. In this problem, a sequence of items arrive sequentially and each has to be allocated to one of the bidders, who bid a certain value for each item. At each time, the decision maker has to allocate the current item to one of the bidders without knowing the future bids and the objective is to maximize the sum of some concave functions of each bidder's aggregate value. In this work, we propose an algorithm that achieves near-optimal performance for this problem when the bids arrive in a random order and the input data satisfies certain conditions. The key idea of our algorithm is to learn the input data pattern dynamically: we solve a sequence of carefully chosen partial allocation problems and use their optimal solutions to assist with the future decision. Our analysis belongs to the primal-dual paradigm, however, the absence of linearity of the objective function and the dynamic feature of the algorithm makes our analysis quite unique.