Jianguo Zhang

Qingqiao Hu, Hao Wang, Jing Luo et al.

Automated medical image segmentation inherently involves a certain degree of uncertainty. One key factor contributing to this uncertainty is the ambiguity that can arise in determining the boundaries of a target region of interest, primarily due to variations in image appearance. On top of this, even among experts in the field, different opinions can emerge regarding the precise definition of specific anatomical structures. This work specifically addresses the modeling of segmentation uncertainty, known as inter-rater uncertainty. Its primary objective is to explore and analyze the variability in segmentation outcomes that can occur when multiple experts in medical imaging interpret and annotate the same images. We introduce a novel Bayesian neural network-based architecture to estimate inter-rater uncertainty in medical image segmentation. Our approach has three key advancements. Firstly, we introduce a one-encoder-multi-decoder architecture specifically tailored for uncertainty estimation, enabling us to capture the rater-specific representation of each expert involved. Secondly, we propose Bayesian modeling for the new architecture, allowing efficient capture of the inter-rater distribution, particularly in scenarios with limited annotations. Lastly, we enhance the rater-specific representation by integrating an attention module into each decoder. This module facilitates focused and refined segmentation results for each rater. We conduct extensive evaluations using synthetic and real-world datasets to validate our technical innovations rigorously. Our method surpasses existing baseline methods in five out of seven diverse tasks on the publicly available \emph{QUBIQ} dataset, considering two evaluation metrics encompassing different uncertainty aspects. Our codes, models, and the new dataset are available through our GitHub repository: https://github.com/HaoWang420/bOEMD-net .

Guiping Cao, Shengda Luo, Wenjian Huang et al.

Token interaction operation is one of the core modules in MLP-based models to exchange and aggregate information between different spatial locations. However, the power of token interaction on the spatial dimension is highly dependent on the spatial resolution of the feature maps, which limits the model's expressive ability, especially in deep layers where the feature are down-sampled to a small spatial size. To address this issue, we present a novel method called \textbf{Strip-MLP} to enrich the token interaction power in three ways. Firstly, we introduce a new MLP paradigm called Strip MLP layer that allows the token to interact with other tokens in a cross-strip manner, enabling the tokens in a row (or column) to contribute to the information aggregations in adjacent but different strips of rows (or columns). Secondly, a \textbf{C}ascade \textbf{G}roup \textbf{S}trip \textbf{M}ixing \textbf{M}odule (CGSMM) is proposed to overcome the performance degradation caused by small spatial feature size. The module allows tokens to interact more effectively in the manners of within-patch and cross-patch, which is independent to the feature spatial size. Finally, based on the Strip MLP layer, we propose a novel \textbf{L}ocal \textbf{S}trip \textbf{M}ixing \textbf{M}odule (LSMM) to boost the token interaction power in the local region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Strip-MLP significantly improves the performance of MLP-based models on small datasets and obtains comparable or even better results on ImageNet. In particular, Strip-MLP models achieve higher average Top-1 accuracy than existing MLP-based models by +2.44\% on Caltech-101 and +2.16\% on CIFAR-100. The source codes will be available at~\href{https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip_MLP{https://github.com/Med-Process/Strip\_MLP}.

Qingqiao Hu, Hongwei Li, Jianguo Zhang

Medical image synthesis has attracted increasing attention because it could generate missing image data, improving diagnosis and benefits many downstream tasks. However, so far the developed synthesis model is not adaptive to unseen data distribution that presents domain shift, limiting its applicability in clinical routine. This work focuses on exploring domain adaptation (DA) of 3D image-to-image synthesis models. First, we highlight the technical difference in DA between classification, segmentation and synthesis models. Second, we present a novel efficient adaptation approach based on 2D variational autoencoder which approximates 3D distributions. Third, we present empirical studies on the effect of the amount of adaptation data and the key hyper-parameters. Our results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the synthesis accuracy on unseen domains in a 3D setting. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/WinstonHuTiger/2D_VAE_UDA_for_3D_sythesis

Jiahao Xia, Weiwei qu, Wenjian Huang et al.

Heatmap regression methods have dominated face alignment area in recent years while they ignore the inherent relation between different landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Sparse Local Patch Transformer (SLPT) for learning the inherent relation. The SLPT generates the representation of each single landmark from a local patch and aggregates them by an adaptive inherent relation based on the attention mechanism. The subpixel coordinate of each landmark is predicted independently based on the aggregated feature. Moreover, a coarse-to-fine framework is further introduced to incorporate with the SLPT, which enables the initial landmarks to gradually converge to the target facial landmarks using fine-grained features from dynamically resized local patches. Extensive experiments carried out on three popular benchmarks, including WFLW, 300W and COFW, demonstrate that the proposed method works at the state-of-the-art level with much less computational complexity by learning the inherent relation between facial landmarks. The code is available at the project website.

Shuai Wang, Daoan Zhang, Zipei Yan et al.

Test time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt deep neural networks when receiving out of distribution test domain samples. In this setting, the model can only access online unlabeled test samples and pre-trained models on the training domains. We first address TTA as a feature revision problem due to the domain gap between source domains and target domains. After that, we follow the two measurements alignment and uniformity to discuss the test time feature revision. For test time feature uniformity, we propose a test time self-distillation strategy to guarantee the consistency of uniformity between representations of the current batch and all the previous batches. For test time feature alignment, we propose a memorized spatial local clustering strategy to align the representations among the neighborhood samples for the upcoming batch. To deal with the common noisy label problem, we propound the entropy and consistency filters to select and drop the possible noisy labels. To prove the scalability and efficacy of our method, we conduct experiments on four domain generalization benchmarks and four medical image segmentation tasks with various backbones. Experiment results show that our method not only improves baseline stably but also outperforms existing state-of-the-art test time adaptation methods. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}.

Boyan Li, Luziwei Leng, Shuaijie Shen et al.

Advancements in adapting deep convolution architectures for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have significantly enhanced image classification performance and reduced computational burdens. However, the inability of Multiplication-Free Inference (MFI) to align with attention and transformer mechanisms, which are critical to superior performance on high-resolution vision tasks, imposing limitations on these gains. To address this, our research explores a new pathway, drawing inspiration from the progress made in Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). We propose an innovative spiking MLP architecture that uses batch normalization to retain MFI compatibility and introducing a spiking patch encoding layer to enhance local feature extraction capabilities. As a result, we establish an efficient multi-stage spiking MLP network that blends effectively global receptive fields with local feature extraction for comprehensive spike-based computation. Without relying on pre-training or sophisticated SNN training techniques, our network secures a top-1 accuracy of 66.39% on the ImageNet-1K dataset, surpassing the directly trained spiking ResNet-34 by 2.67%. Furthermore, we curtail computational costs, model parameters, and simulation steps. An expanded version of our network compares with the performance of the spiking VGG-16 network with a 71.64% top-1 accuracy, all while operating with a model capacity 2.1 times smaller. Our findings highlight the potential of our deep SNN architecture in effectively integrating global and local learning abilities. Interestingly, the trained receptive field in our network mirrors the activity patterns of cortical cells. Source codes are publicly accessible at https://github.com/EMI-Group/mixer-snn.

Hongwei Bran Li, Chinmay Prabhakar, Suprosanna Shit et al.

Quantifying the perceptual similarity of two images is a long-standing problem in low-level computer vision. The natural image domain commonly relies on supervised learning, e.g., a pre-trained VGG, to obtain a latent representation. However, due to domain shift, pre-trained models from the natural image domain might not apply to other image domains, such as medical imaging. Notably, in medical imaging, evaluating the perceptual similarity is exclusively performed by specialists trained extensively in diverse medical fields. Thus, medical imaging remains devoid of task-specific, objective perceptual measures. This work answers the question: Is it necessary to rely on supervised learning to obtain an effective representation that could measure perceptual similarity, or is self-supervision sufficient? To understand whether recent contrastive self-supervised representation (CSR) may come to the rescue, we start with natural images and systematically evaluate CSR as a metric across numerous contemporary architectures and tasks and compare them with existing methods. We find that in the natural image domain, CSR behaves on par with the supervised one on several perceptual tests as a metric, and in the medical domain, CSR better quantifies perceptual similarity concerning the experts' ratings. We also demonstrate that CSR can significantly improve image quality in two image synthesis tasks. Finally, our extensive results suggest that perceptuality is an emergent property of CSR, which can be adapted to many image domains without requiring annotations.

Jia-Xin Zhuang, Jiabin Cai, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Automated medical image classification is the key component in intelligent diagnosis systems. However, most medical image datasets contain plenty of samples of common diseases and just a handful of rare ones, leading to major class imbalances. Currently, it is an open problem in intelligent diagnosis to effectively learn from imbalanced training data. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework, named \textbf{C}lass \textbf{A}ttention to \textbf{RE}gions of the lesion (CARE), to handle data imbalance issues by embedding attention into the training process of \textbf{C}onvolutional \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etworks (CNNs). The proposed attention module helps CNNs attend to lesion regions of rare diseases, therefore helping CNNs to learn their characteristics more effectively. In addition, this attention module works only during the training phase and does not change the architecture of the original network, so it can be directly combined with any existing CNN architecture. The CARE framework needs bounding boxes to represent the lesion regions of rare diseases. To alleviate the need for manual annotation, we further developed variants of CARE by leveraging the traditional saliency methods or a pretrained segmentation model for bounding box generation. Results show that the CARE variants with automated bounding box generation are comparable to the original CARE framework with \textit{manual} bounding box annotations. A series of experiments on an imbalanced skin image dataset and a pneumonia dataset indicates that our method can effectively help the network focus on the lesion regions of rare diseases and remarkably improves the classification performance of rare diseases.

Wanguang Yin, Zhichao Liang, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Partial least square regression (PLSR) is a widely-used statistical model to reveal the linear relationships of latent factors that comes from the independent variables and dependent variables. However, traditional methods to solve PLSR models are usually based on the Euclidean space, and easily getting stuck into a local minimum. To this end, we propose a new method to solve the partial least square regression, named PLSR via optimization on bi-Grassmann manifold (PLSRbiGr). Specifically, we first leverage the three-factor SVD-type decomposition of the cross-covariance matrix defined on the bi-Grassmann manifold, converting the orthogonal constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained optimization problem on bi-Grassmann manifold, and then incorporate the Riemannian preconditioning of matrix scaling to regulate the Riemannian metric in each iteration. PLSRbiGr is validated with a variety of experiments for decoding EEG signals at motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) task. Experimental results demonstrate that PLSRbiGr outperforms competing algorithms in multiple EEG decoding tasks, which will greatly facilitate small sample data learning.

Yolo Yunlong Tang, Jing Bi, Siting Xu et al.

With the burgeoning growth of online video platforms and the escalating volume of video content, the demand for proficient video understanding tools has intensified markedly. Given the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in language and multimodal tasks, this survey provides a detailed overview of recent advancements in video understanding that harness the power of LLMs (Vid-LLMs). The emergent capabilities of Vid-LLMs are surprisingly advanced, particularly their ability for open-ended multi-granularity (general, temporal, and spatiotemporal) reasoning combined with commonsense knowledge, suggesting a promising path for future video understanding. We examine the unique characteristics and capabilities of Vid-LLMs, categorizing the approaches into three main types: Video Analyzer x LLM, Video Embedder x LLM, and (Analyzer + Embedder) x LLM. Furthermore, we identify five sub-types based on the functions of LLMs in Vid-LLMs: LLM as Summarizer, LLM as Manager, LLM as Text Decoder, LLM as Regressor, and LLM as Hidden Layer. Furthermore, this survey presents a comprehensive study of the tasks, datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation methodologies for Vid-LLMs. Additionally, it explores the expansive applications of Vid-LLMs across various domains, highlighting their remarkable scalability and versatility in real-world video understanding challenges. Finally, it summarizes the limitations of existing Vid-LLMs and outlines directions for future research. For more information, readers are recommended to visit the repository at https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-LLMs-for-Video-Understanding.

Daoan Zhang, Chenming Li, Haoquan Li et al.

Unsupervised image semantic segmentation(UISS) aims to match low-level visual features with semantic-level representations without outer supervision. In this paper, we address the critical properties from the view of feature alignments and feature uniformity for UISS models. We also make a comparison between UISS and image-wise representation learning. Based on the analysis, we argue that the existing MI-based methods in UISS suffer from representation collapse. By this, we proposed a robust network called Semantic Attention Network(SAN), in which a new module Semantic Attention(SEAT) is proposed to generate pixel-wise and semantic features dynamically. Experimental results on multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks show that our unsupervised segmentation framework specializes in catching semantic representations, which outperforms all the unpretrained and even several pretrained methods.

Chenming Li, Daoan Zhang, Wenjian Huang et al.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a robust model from source domains that generalize well on unseen target domains. Recent studies focus on generating novel domain samples or features to diversify distributions complementary to source domains. Yet, these approaches can hardly deal with the restriction that the samples synthesized from various domains can cause semantic distortion. In this paper, we propose an online one-stage Cross Contrasting Feature Perturbation (CCFP) framework to simulate domain shift by generating perturbed features in the latent space while regularizing the model prediction against domain shift. Different from the previous fixed synthesizing strategy, we design modules with learnable feature perturbations and semantic consistency constraints. In contrast to prior work, our method does not use any generative-based models or domain labels. We conduct extensive experiments on a standard DomainBed benchmark with a strict evaluation protocol for a fair comparison. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, and quantitative analyses illustrate that our approach can alleviate the domain shift problem in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.

Daoan Zhang, Mingkai Chen, Chenming Li et al.

Domain Generalization (DG) is a fundamental challenge for machine learning models, which aims to improve model generalization on various domains. Previous methods focus on generating domain invariant features from various source domains. However, we argue that the domain variantions also contain useful information, ie, classification-aware information, for downstream tasks, which has been largely ignored. Different from learning domain invariant features from source domains, we decouple the input images into Domain Expert Features and noise. The proposed domain expert features lie in a learned latent space where the images in each domain can be classified independently, enabling the implicit use of classification-aware domain variations. Based on the analysis, we proposed a novel paradigm called Domain Disentanglement Network (DDN) to disentangle the domain expert features from the source domain images and aggregate the source domain expert features for representing the target test domain. We also propound a new contrastive learning method to guide the domain expert features to form a more balanced and separable feature space. Experiments on the widely-used benchmarks of PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, DomainNet, and TerraIncognita demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared to the recently proposed alternatives.

Qingqiao Hu, Daoan Zhang, Jiebo Luo et al.

Learning meaningful and interpretable representations from high-dimensional volumetric magnetic resonance (MR) images is essential for advancing personalized medicine. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown promise in handling image data, their application to 3D multi-contrast MR images faces challenges due to computational complexity and interpretability. To address this, we propose a novel state-space-model (SSM)-based masked autoencoder which scales ViT-like models to handle high-resolution data effectively while also enhancing the interpretability of learned representations. We propose a latent-to-spatial mapping technique that enables direct visualization of how latent features correspond to specific regions in the input volumes in the context of SSM. We validate our method on two key neuro-oncology tasks: identification of isocitrate dehydrogenase mutation status and 1p/19q co-deletion classification, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of SSM-based self-supervised learning to transform radiomics analysis by combining efficiency and interpretability.

Jianguo Zhang, Tian Lan, Rithesh Murthy et al. · salesforce, stanford

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant research attention. However, fully harnessing the potential of LLMs for agent-based tasks presents inherent challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of diverse data sources featuring multi-turn trajectories. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{AgentOhana} as a comprehensive solution to address these challenges. \textit{AgentOhana} aggregates agent trajectories from distinct environments, spanning a wide array of scenarios. It meticulously standardizes and unifies these trajectories into a consistent format, streamlining the creation of a generic data loader optimized for agent training. Leveraging the data unification, our training pipeline maintains equilibrium across different data sources and preserves independent randomness across devices during dataset partitioning and model training. Additionally, we present \textbf{xLAM-v0.1}, a large action model tailored for AI agents, which demonstrates exceptional performance across various benchmarks. Begin the exploration at \url{https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/xLAM}.

Yao Wan, Yang He, Zhangqian Bi et al.

Code intelligence leverages machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from extensive code corpora, with the aim of developing intelligent tools to improve the quality and productivity of computer programming. Currently, there is already a thriving research community focusing on code intelligence, with efforts ranging from software engineering, machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and programming languages. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on deep learning for code intelligence, from the aspects of code representation learning, deep learning techniques, and application tasks. We also benchmark several state-of-the-art neural models for code intelligence, and provide an open-source toolkit tailored for the rapid prototyping of deep-learning-based code intelligence models. In particular, we inspect the existing code intelligence models under the basis of code representation learning, and provide a comprehensive overview to enhance comprehension of the present state of code intelligence. Furthermore, we publicly release the source code and data resources to provide the community with a ready-to-use benchmark, which can facilitate the evaluation and comparison of existing and future code intelligence models (https://xcodemind.github.io). At last, we also point out several challenging and promising directions for future research.

Jiahao Xia, Wenjian Huang, Min Xu et al.

Object parts serve as crucial intermediate representations in various downstream tasks, but part-level representation learning still has not received as much attention as other vision tasks. Previous research has established that Vision Transformer can learn instance-level attention without labels, extracting high-quality instance-level representations for boosting downstream tasks. In this paper, we achieve unsupervised part-specific attention learning using a novel paradigm and further employ the part representations to improve part discovery performance. Specifically, paired images are generated from the same image with different geometric transformations, and multiple part representations are extracted from these paired images using a novel module, named PartFormer. These part representations from the paired images are then exchanged to improve geometric transformation invariance. Subsequently, the part representations are aligned with the feature map extracted by a feature map encoder, achieving high similarity with the pixel representations of the corresponding part regions and low similarity in irrelevant regions. Finally, the geometric and semantic constraints are applied to the part representations through the intermediate results in alignment for part-specific attention learning, encouraging the PartFormer to focus locally and the part representations to explicitly include the information of the corresponding parts. Moreover, the aligned part representations can further serve as a series of reliable detectors in the testing phase, predicting pixel masks for part discovery. Extensive experiments are carried out on four widely used datasets, and our results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance and robustness due to its part-specific attention.

Liangwei Yang, Jing Ma, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) on text--attributed graphs (TAGs) typically encode node texts using pretrained language models (PLMs) and propagate these embeddings through linear neighborhood aggregation. However, the representation spaces of modern PLMs are highly non--linear and geometrically structured, where textual embeddings reside on curved semantic manifolds rather than flat Euclidean spaces. Linear aggregation on such manifolds inevitably distorts geometry and causes semantic drift--a phenomenon where aggregated representations deviate from the intrinsic manifold, losing semantic fidelity and expressive power. To quantitatively investigate this problem, this work introduces a local PCA--based metric that measures the degree of semantic drift and provides the first quantitative framework to analyze how different aggregation mechanisms affect manifold structure. Building upon these insights, we propose Geodesic Aggregation, a manifold--aware mechanism that aggregates neighbor information along geodesics via log--exp mappings on the unit sphere, ensuring that representations remain faithful to the semantic manifold during message passing. We further develop GeoGNN, a practical instantiation that integrates spherical attention with manifold interpolation. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets and multiple text encoders show that GeoGNN substantially mitigates semantic drift and consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing the importance of manifold--aware aggregation in text--attributed graph learning.

Hao Wang, Shengda Luo, Guosheng Hu et al.

Multimodal learning with incomplete input data (missing modality) is practical and challenging. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of this challenge and find that modality dominance has a significant negative impact on the model training, greatly degrading the missing modality performance. Motivated by Grad-CAM, we introduce a novel indicator, gradients, to monitor and reduce modality dominance which widely exists in the missing-modality scenario. In aid of this indicator, we present a novel Gradient-guided Modality Decoupling (GMD) method to decouple the dependency on dominating modalities. Specifically, GMD removes the conflicted gradient components from different modalities to achieve this decoupling, significantly improving the performance. In addition, to flexibly handle modal-incomplete data, we design a parameter-efficient Dynamic Sharing (DS) framework which can adaptively switch on/off the network parameters based on whether one modality is available. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular multimodal benchmarks, including BraTS 2018 for medical segmentation, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI for sentiment analysis. The results show that our method can significantly outperform the competitors, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Our code is released here: https://github.com/HaoWang420/Gradient-guided-Modality-Decoupling.

Daoan Zhang, Che Jiang, Ruoshi Xu et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have achieved impressive results, yet existing models still struggle with prompts that require rich world knowledge and implicit reasoning: both of which are critical for producing semantically accurate, coherent, and contextually appropriate images in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{WorldGenBench}, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate T2I models' world knowledge grounding and implicit inferential capabilities, covering both the humanities and nature domains. We propose the \textbf{Knowledge Checklist Score}, a structured metric that measures how well generated images satisfy key semantic expectations. Experiments across 21 state-of-the-art models reveal that while diffusion models lead among open-source methods, proprietary auto-regressive models like GPT-4o exhibit significantly stronger reasoning and knowledge integration. Our findings highlight the need for deeper understanding and inference capabilities in next-generation T2I systems. Project Page: \href{https://dwanzhang-ai.github.io/WorldGenBench/}{https://dwanzhang-ai.github.io/WorldGenBench/}

Guiping Cao, Tao Wang, Wenjian Huang et al.

Open-Ended object Detection (OED) is a novel and challenging task that detects objects and generates their category names in a free-form manner, without requiring additional vocabularies during inference. However, the existing OED models, such as GenerateU, require large-scale datasets for training, suffer from slow convergence, and exhibit limited performance. To address these issues, we present a novel and efficient Open-Det framework, consisting of four collaborative parts. Specifically, Open-Det accelerates model training in both the bounding box and object name generation process by reconstructing the Object Detector and the Object Name Generator. To bridge the semantic gap between Vision and Language modalities, we propose a Vision-Language Aligner with V-to-L and L-to-V alignment mechanisms, incorporating with the Prompts Distiller to transfer knowledge from the VLM into VL-prompts, enabling accurate object name generation for the LLM. In addition, we design a Masked Alignment Loss to eliminate contradictory supervision and introduce a Joint Loss to enhance classification, resulting in more efficient training. Compared to GenerateU, Open-Det, using only 1.5% of the training data (0.077M vs. 5.077M), 20.8% of the training epochs (31 vs. 149), and fewer GPU resources (4 V100 vs. 16 A100), achieves even higher performance (+1.0% in APr). The source codes are available at: https://github.com/Med-Process/Open-Det.

Daoan Zhang, Yunhao Luo, Jianguo Zhang

We bring a new perspective to semi-supervised semantic segmentation by providing an analysis on the labeled and unlabeled distributions in training datasets. We first figure out that the distribution gap between labeled and unlabeled datasets cannot be ignored, even though the two datasets are sampled from the same distribution. To address this issue, we theoretically analyze and experimentally prove that appropriately boosting uncertainty on unlabeled data can help minimize the distribution gap, which benefits the generalization of the model. We propose two strategies and design an uncertainty booster algorithm, specially for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments are carried out based on these theories, and the results confirm the efficacy of the algorithm and strategies. Our plug-and-play uncertainty booster is tiny, efficient, and robust to hyperparameters but can significantly promote performance. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in our experiments compared to the current semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods on the popular benchmarks: Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 with different train settings.

Guiping Cao, Xiangyuan Lan, Wenjian Huang et al.

Popular transformer detectors have achieved promising performance through query-based learning using attention mechanisms. However, the roles of existing decoder query types (e.g., content query and positional query) are still underexplored. These queries are generally predefined with a fixed number (fixed-query), which limits their flexibility. We find that the learning of these fixed-query is impaired by Recurrent Opposing inTeractions (ROT) between two attention operations: Self-Attention (query-to-query) and Cross-Attention (query-to-encoder), thereby degrading decoder efficiency. Furthermore, "query ambiguity" arises when shared-weight decoder layers are processed with both one-to-one and one-to-many label assignments during training, violating DETR's one-to-one matching principle. To address these challenges, we propose DS-Det, a more efficient detector capable of detecting a flexible number of objects in images. Specifically, we reformulate and introduce a new unified Single-Query paradigm for decoder modeling, transforming the fixed-query into flexible. Furthermore, we propose a simplified decoder framework through attention disentangled learning: locating boxes with Cross-Attention (one-to-many process), deduplicating predictions with Self-Attention (one-to-one process), addressing "query ambiguity" and "ROT" issues directly, and enhancing decoder efficiency. We further introduce a unified PoCoo loss that leverages box size priors to prioritize query learning on hard samples such as small objects. Extensive experiments across five different backbone models on COCO2017 and WiderPerson datasets demonstrate the general effectiveness and superiority of DS-Det. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Med-Process/DS-Det/.

Guiping Cao, Wenjian Huang, Xiangyuan Lan et al.

Small Object Detection (SOD) poses significant challenges due to limited information and the model's low class prediction score. While Transformer-based detectors have shown promising performance, their potential for SOD remains largely unexplored. In typical DETR-like frameworks, the CNN backbone network, specialized in aggregating local information, struggles to capture the necessary contextual information for SOD. The multiple attention layers in the Transformer Encoder face difficulties in effectively attending to small objects and can also lead to blurring of features. Furthermore, the model's lower class prediction score of small objects compared to large objects further increases the difficulty of SOD. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-DINO. This approach incorporates the deep MLP network to aggregate initial feature representations with both short and long range information for SOD. Then, a new Cross Coding Twice Module (CCTM) is applied to integrate these initial representations to the Transformer Encoder feature, enhancing the details of small objects. Additionally, we introduce a new kind of soft label named Category-Size (CS), integrating the Category and Size of objects. By treating CS as new ground truth, we propose a new loss function called Boost Loss to improve the class prediction score of the model. Extensive experimental results on COCO, WiderPerson, VisDrone, AI-TOD, and SODA-D datasets demonstrate that Cross-DINO efficiently improves the performance of DETR-like models on SOD. Specifically, our model achieves 36.4% APs on COCO for SOD with only 45M parameters, outperforming the DINO by +4.4% APS (36.4% vs. 32.0%) with fewer parameters and FLOPs, under 12 epochs training setting. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/Med-Process/Cross-DINO.

Jiahao Xia, Min Xu, Wenjian Huang et al.

Despite the similar structures of human faces, existing face alignment methods cannot learn unified knowledge from multiple datasets with different landmark annotations. The limited training samples in a single dataset commonly result in fragile robustness in this field. To mitigate knowledge discrepancies among different datasets and train a task-agnostic unified face alignment (TUFA) framework, this paper presents a strategy to unify knowledge from multiple datasets. Specifically, we calculate a mean face shape for each dataset. To explicitly align these mean shapes on an interpretable plane based on their semantics, each shape is then incorporated with a group of semantic alignment embeddings. The 2D coordinates of these aligned shapes can be viewed as the anchors of the plane. By encoding them into structure prompts and further regressing the corresponding facial landmarks using image features, a mapping from the plane to the target faces is finally established, which unifies the learning target of different datasets. Consequently, multiple datasets can be utilized to boost the generalization ability of the model. The successful mitigation of discrepancies also enhances the efficiency of knowledge transferring to a novel dataset, significantly boosts the performance of few-shot face alignment. Additionally, the interpretable plane endows TUFA with a task-agnostic characteristic, enabling it to locate landmarks unseen during training in a zero-shot manner. Extensive experiments are carried on seven benchmarks and the results demonstrate an impressive improvement in face alignment brought by knowledge discrepancies mitigation. The code is available at https://github.com/Jiahao-UTS/TUFA.

Rithesh Murthy, Liangwei Yang, Juntao Tan et al.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

Jianguo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Yao Wan et al.

Pre-trained Transformer-based models were reported to be robust in intent classification. In this work, we first point out the importance of in-domain out-of-scope detection in few-shot intent recognition tasks and then illustrate the vulnerability of pre-trained Transformer-based models against samples that are in-domain but out-of-scope (ID-OOS). We construct two new datasets, and empirically show that pre-trained models do not perform well on both ID-OOS examples and general out-of-scope examples, especially on fine-grained few-shot intent detection tasks. To figure out how the models mistakenly classify ID-OOS intents as in-scope intents, we further conduct analysis on confidence scores and the overlapping keywords, as well as point out several prospective directions for future work. Resources are available on https://github.com/jianguoz/Few-Shot-Intent-Detection.

Liang Kuang, Kuangpu Guo, Jian Liang et al.

Federated Learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. Numerous studies have shown that one significant factor affecting the performance of federated learning models is the heterogeneity of data across different clients, especially when the data is sampled from various domains. A recent paper introduces variance-aware dual-level prototype clustering and uses a novel $α$-sparsity prototype loss, which increases intra-class similarity and reduces inter-class similarity. To ensure that the features converge within specific clusters, we introduce an improved algorithm, Federated Prototype Learning with Convergent Clusters, abbreviated as FedPLCC. To increase inter-class distances, we weight each prototype with the size of the cluster it represents. To reduce intra-class distances, considering that prototypes with larger distances might come from different domains, we select only a certain proportion of prototypes for the loss function calculation. Evaluations on the Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets show that our method performs better than existing approaches.

Tianming Liang, Kun-Yu Lin, Chaolei Tan et al.

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment target objects throughout a video based on a text description. This is challenging as it involves deep vision-language understanding, pixel-level dense prediction and spatiotemporal reasoning. Despite notable progress in recent years, existing methods still exhibit a noticeable gap when considering all these aspects. In this work, we propose \textbf{ReferDINO}, a strong RVOS model that inherits region-level vision-language alignment from foundational visual grounding models, and is further endowed with pixel-level dense perception and cross-modal spatiotemporal reasoning. In detail, ReferDINO integrates two key components: 1) a grounding-guided deformable mask decoder that utilizes location prediction to progressively guide mask prediction through differentiable deformation mechanisms; 2) an object-consistent temporal enhancer that injects pretrained time-varying text features into inter-frame interaction to capture object-aware dynamic changes. Moreover, a confidence-aware query pruning strategy is designed to accelerate object decoding without compromising model performance. Extensive experimental results on five benchmarks demonstrate that our ReferDINO significantly outperforms previous methods (e.g., +3.9% (\mathcal{J}&\mathcal{F}) on Ref-YouTube-VOS) with real-time inference speed (51 FPS).

Murong Yue, Zhiwei Liu, Liangwei Yang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with external tools have demonstrated enhanced performance on complex reasoning tasks. The widespread adoption of this tool-augmented reasoning is hindered by the scarcity of domain-specific tools. For instance, in domains such as physics question answering, suitable and specialized tools are often missing. Recent work has explored automating tool creation by extracting reusable functions from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces; however, these approaches face a critical scalability bottleneck. As the number of generated tools grows, storing them in an unstructured collection leads to significant retrieval challenges, including an expanding search space and ambiguity between function-related tools. To address this, we propose a systematic approach to automatically refactor an unstructured collection of tools into a structured tool library. Our system first generates discrete, task-specific tools and clusters them into semantically coherent topics. Within each cluster, we introduce a multi-agent framework to consolidate scattered functionalities: a code agent refactors code to extract shared logic and creates versatile, aggregated tools, while a reviewing agent ensures that these aggregated tools maintain the complete functional capabilities of the original set. This process transforms numerous question-specific tools into a smaller set of powerful, aggregated tools without loss of functionality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves tool retrieval accuracy and overall reasoning performance across multiple reasoning tasks. Furthermore, our method shows enhanced scalability compared with baselines as the number of question-specific increases.

Yuantao Feng, Shiqi Yu, Hanyang Peng et al.

Face detection is to search all the possible regions for faces in images and locate the faces if there are any. Many applications including face recognition, facial expression recognition, face tracking and head-pose estimation assume that both the location and the size of faces are known in the image. In recent decades, researchers have created many typical and efficient face detectors from the Viola-Jones face detector to current CNN-based ones. However, with the tremendous increase in images and videos with variations in face scale, appearance, expression, occlusion and pose, traditional face detectors are challenged to detect various "in the wild" faces. The emergence of deep learning techniques brought remarkable breakthroughs to face detection along with the price of a considerable increase in computation. This paper introduces representative deep learning-based methods and presents a deep and thorough analysis in terms of accuracy and efficiency. We further compare and discuss the popular and challenging datasets and their evaluation metrics. A comprehensive comparison of several successful deep learning-based face detectors is conducted to uncover their efficiency using two metrics: FLOPs and latency. The paper can guide to choose appropriate face detectors for different applications and also to develop more efficient and accurate detectors.

Jianguo Zhang, Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon et al.

In this work, we focus on a more challenging few-shot intent detection scenario where many intents are fine-grained and semantically similar. We present a simple yet effective few-shot intent detection schema via contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. Specifically, we first conduct self-supervised contrastive pre-training on collected intent datasets, which implicitly learns to discriminate semantically similar utterances without using any labels. We then perform few-shot intent detection together with supervised contrastive learning, which explicitly pulls utterances from the same intent closer and pushes utterances across different intents farther. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under 5-shot and 10-shot settings.

Hongwei Li, Fei-Fei Xue, Krishna Chaitanya et al.

Radiomic representations can quantify properties of regions of interest in medical image data. Classically, they account for pre-defined statistics of shape, texture, and other low-level image features. Alternatively, deep learning-based representations are derived from supervised learning but require expensive annotations from experts and often suffer from overfitting and data imbalance issues. In this work, we address the challenge of learning representations of 3D medical images for an effective quantification under data imbalance. We propose a \emph{self-supervised} representation learning framework to learn high-level features of 3D volumes as a complement to existing radiomics features. Specifically, we demonstrate how to learn image representations in a self-supervised fashion using a 3D Siamese network. More importantly, we deal with data imbalance by exploiting two unsupervised strategies: a) sample re-weighting, and b) balancing the composition of training batches. When combining our learned self-supervised feature with traditional radiomics, we show significant improvement in brain tumor classification and lung cancer staging tasks covering MRI and CT imaging modalities.

Ye Liu, Yao Wan, Jian-Guo Zhang et al.

The non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation through parallelized decoding at the cost of effectiveness when comparing with the autoregressive counterparts. In this paper, we claim that the syntactic and semantic structures among natural language are critical for non-autoregressive machine translation and can further improve the performance. However, these structures are rarely considered in the existing non-autoregressive models. Inspired by this intuition, we propose to incorporate the explicit syntactic and semantic structures of languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer, for the task of neural machine translation. Moreover, we also consider the intermediate latent alignment within target sentences to better learn the long-term token dependencies. Experimental results on two real-world datasets (i.e., WMT14 En-De and WMT16 En-Ro) show that our model achieves a significantly faster speed, as well as keeps the translation quality when compared with several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models.

Jingkun Chen, Wenqi Li, Hongwei Li et al.

Multi-modal medical image segmentation plays an essential role in clinical diagnosis. It remains challenging as the input modalities are often not well-aligned spatially. Existing learning-based methods mainly consider sharing trainable layers across modalities and minimizing visual feature discrepancies. While the problem is often formulated as joint supervised feature learning, multiple-scale features and class-specific representation have not yet been explored. In this paper, we propose an affinity-guided fully convolutional network for multimodal image segmentation. To learn effective representations, we design class-specific affinity matrices to encode the knowledge of hierarchical feature reasoning, together with the shared convolutional layers to ensure the cross-modality generalization. Our affinity matrix does not depend on spatial alignments of the visual features and thus allows us to train with unpaired, multimodal inputs. We extensively evaluated our method on two public multimodal benchmark datasets and outperform state-of-the-art methods.

Wenbin Zhao, Jiabao Lei, Yuxin Wen et al.

Shape modeling and reconstruction from raw point clouds of objects stand as a fundamental challenge in vision and graphics research. Classical methods consider analytic shape priors; however, their performance degraded when the scanned points deviate from the ideal conditions of cleanness and completeness. Important progress has been recently made by data-driven approaches, which learn global and/or local models of implicit surface representations from auxiliary sets of training shapes. Motivated from a universal phenomenon that self-similar shape patterns of local surface patches repeat across the entire surface of an object, we aim to push forward the data-driven strategies and propose to learn a local implicit surface network for a shared, adaptive modeling of the entire surface for a direct surface reconstruction from raw point cloud; we also enhance the leveraging of surface self-similarities by improving correlations among the optimized latent codes of individual surface patches. Given that orientations of raw points could be unavailable or noisy, we extend sign agnostic learning into our local implicit model, which enables our recovery of signed implicit fields of local surfaces from the unsigned inputs. We term our framework as Sign-Agnostic Implicit Learning of Surface Self-Similarities (SAIL-S3). With a global post-optimization of local sign flipping, SAIL-S3 is able to directly model raw, un-oriented point clouds and reconstruct high-quality object surfaces. Experiments show its superiority over existing methods.

Yao Wan, Yang He, Jian-Guo Zhang et al.

We present NaturalCC, an efficient and extensible toolkit to bridge the gap between natural language and programming language, and facilitate the research on big code analysis. Using NaturalCC, researchers both from natural language or programming language communities can quickly and easily reproduce the state-of-the-art baselines and implement their approach. NaturalCC is built upon Fairseq and PyTorch, providing (1) an efficient computation with multi-GPU and mixed-precision data processing for fast model training, (2) a modular and extensible framework that makes it easy to reproduce or implement an approach for big code analysis, and (3) a command line interface and a graphical user interface to demonstrate each model's performance. Currently, we have included several state-of-the-art baselines across different tasks (e.g., code completion, code comment generation, and code retrieval) for demonstration. The video of this demo is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4W5VSI-u3E&t=25s.

Hongwei Li, Jianguo Zhang, Bjoern Menze

Tackling domain shifts in multi-centre and multi-vendor data sets remains challenging for cardiac image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a generalisable segmentation framework for cardiac image segmentation in which multi-centre, multi-vendor, multi-disease datasets are involved. A generative adversarial networks with an attention loss was proposed to translate the images from existing source domains to a target domain, thus to generate good-quality synthetic cardiac structure and enlarge the training set. A stack of data augmentation techniques was further used to simulate real-world transformation to boost the segmentation performance for unseen domains.We achieved an average Dice score of 90.3% for the left ventricle, 85.9% for the myocardium, and 86.5% for the right ventricle on the hidden validation set across four vendors. We show that the domain shifts in heterogeneous cardiac imaging datasets can be drastically reduced by two aspects: 1) good-quality synthetic data by learning the underlying target domain distribution, and 2) stacked classical image processing techniques for data augmentation.

Yan Li, Bin Ji, Xintian Shi et al.

Temporal modeling is key for action recognition in videos. It normally considers both short-range motions and long-range aggregations. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Excitation and Aggregation (TEA) block, including a motion excitation (ME) module and a multiple temporal aggregation (MTA) module, specifically designed to capture both short- and long-range temporal evolution. In particular, for short-range motion modeling, the ME module calculates the feature-level temporal differences from spatiotemporal features. It then utilizes the differences to excite the motion-sensitive channels of the features. The long-range temporal aggregations in previous works are typically achieved by stacking a large number of local temporal convolutions. Each convolution processes a local temporal window at a time. In contrast, the MTA module proposes to deform the local convolution to a group of sub-convolutions, forming a hierarchical residual architecture. Without introducing additional parameters, the features will be processed with a series of sub-convolutions, and each frame could complete multiple temporal aggregations with neighborhoods. The final equivalent receptive field of temporal dimension is accordingly enlarged, which is capable of modeling the long-range temporal relationship over distant frames. The two components of the TEA block are complementary in temporal modeling. Finally, our approach achieves impressive results at low FLOPs on several action recognition benchmarks, such as Kinetics, Something-Something, HMDB51, and UCF101, which confirms its effectiveness and efficiency.

Hongwei Li, Timo Loehr, Anjany Sekuboyina et al.

In medical imaging, the heterogeneity of multi-centre data impedes the applicability of deep learning-based methods and results in significant performance degradation when applying models in an unseen data domain, e.g. a new centreor a new scanner. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for boosting image segmentation performance across multiple domains without using any manual annotations from the new target domains, but by re-calibrating the networks on few images from the target domain. To achieve this, we enforce architectures to be adaptive to new data by rejecting improbable segmentation patterns and implicitly learning through semantic and boundary information, thus to capture disease-specific spatial patterns in an adversarial optimization. The adaptation process needs continuous monitoring, however, as we cannot assume the presence of ground-truth masks for the target domain, we propose two new metrics to monitor the adaptation process, and strategies to train the segmentation algorithm in a stable fashion. We build upon well-established 2D and 3D architectures and perform extensive experiments on three cross-centre brain lesion segmentation tasks, involving multicentre public and in-house datasets. We demonstrate that recalibrating the deep networks on a few unlabeled images from the target domain improves the segmentation accuracy significantly.

Jian-Guo Zhang, Kazuma Hashimoto, Chien-Sheng Wu et al.

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a core component in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing approaches for DST mainly fall into one of two categories, namely, ontology-based and ontology-free methods. An ontology-based method selects a value from a candidate-value list for each target slot, while an ontology-free method extracts spans from dialog contexts. Recent work introduced a BERT-based model to strike a balance between the two methods by pre-defining categorical and non-categorical slots. However, it is not clear enough which slots are better handled by either of the two slot types, and the way to use the pre-trained model has not been well investigated. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective dual-strategy model for DST, by adapting a single BERT-style reading comprehension model to jointly handle both the categorical and non-categorical slots. Our experiments on the MultiWOZ datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the BERT-based counterpart, finding that the key is a deep interaction between the domain-slot and context information. When evaluated on noisy (MultiWOZ 2.0) and cleaner (MultiWOZ 2.1) settings, our method performs competitively and robustly across the two different settings. Our method sets the new state of the art in the noisy setting, while performing more robustly than the best model in the cleaner setting. We also conduct a comprehensive error analysis on the dataset, including the effects of the dual strategy for each slot, to facilitate future research.

Jingkun Chen, Hongwei Li, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Analysis and modeling of the ventricles and myocardium are important in the diagnostic and treatment of heart diseases. Manual delineation of those tissues in cardiac MR (CMR) scans is laborious and time-consuming. The ambiguity of the boundaries makes the segmentation task rather challenging. Furthermore, the annotations on some modalities such as Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) MRI, are often not available. We propose an end-to-end segmentation framework based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and adversarial learning. A dilated residual U-shape network is used as a segmentor to generate the prediction mask; meanwhile, a CNN is utilized as a discriminator model to judge the segmentation quality. To leverage the available annotations across modalities per patient, a new loss function named weak domain-transfer loss is introduced to the pipeline. The proposed model is evaluated on the public dataset released by the challenge organizer in MICCAI 2019, which consists of 45 sets of multi-sequence CMR images. We demonstrate that the proposed adversarial pipeline outperforms baseline deep-learning methods.

Hongwei Li, Johannes C. Paetzold, Anjany Sekuboyina et al.

Synthesizing MR imaging sequences is highly relevant in clinical practice, as single sequences are often missing or are of poor quality (e.g. due to motion). Naturally, the idea arises that a target modality would benefit from multi-modal input, as proprietary information of individual modalities can be synergistic. However, existing methods fail to scale up to multiple non-aligned imaging modalities, facing common drawbacks of complex imaging sequences. We propose a novel, scalable and multi-modal approach called DiamondGAN. Our model is capable of performing exible non-aligned cross-modality synthesis and data infill, when given multiple modalities or any of their arbitrary subsets, learning structured information in an end-to-end fashion. We synthesize two MRI sequences with clinical relevance (i.e., double inversion recovery (DIR) and contrast-enhanced T1 (T1-c)), reconstructed from three common sequences. In addition, we perform a multi-rater visual evaluation experiment and find that trained radiologists are unable to distinguish synthetic DIR images from real ones.

Hugo J. Kuijf, J. Matthijs Biesbroek, Jeroen de Bresser et al.

Quantification of cerebral white matter hyperintensities (WMH) of presumed vascular origin is of key importance in many neurological research studies. Currently, measurements are often still obtained from manual segmentations on brain MR images, which is a laborious procedure. Automatic WMH segmentation methods exist, but a standardized comparison of the performance of such methods is lacking. We organized a scientific challenge, in which developers could evaluate their method on a standardized multi-center/-scanner image dataset, giving an objective comparison: the WMH Segmentation Challenge (https://wmh.isi.uu.nl/). Sixty T1+FLAIR images from three MR scanners were released with manual WMH segmentations for training. A test set of 110 images from five MR scanners was used for evaluation. Segmentation methods had to be containerized and submitted to the challenge organizers. Five evaluation metrics were used to rank the methods: (1) Dice similarity coefficient, (2) modified Hausdorff distance (95th percentile), (3) absolute log-transformed volume difference, (4) sensitivity for detecting individual lesions, and (5) F1-score for individual lesions. Additionally, methods were ranked on their inter-scanner robustness. Twenty participants submitted their method for evaluation. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the results. In brief, there is a cluster of four methods that rank significantly better than the other methods, with one clear winner. The inter-scanner robustness ranking shows that not all methods generalize to unseen scanners. The challenge remains open for future submissions and provides a public platform for method evaluation.

Jianguo Zhang, Ji Wang, Lifang He et al.

With the development of cloud computing and big data, the reliability of data storage systems becomes increasingly important. Previous researchers have shown that machine learning algorithms based on SMART attributes are effective methods to predict hard drive failures. In this paper, we use SMART attributes to predict hard drive health degrees which are helpful for taking different fault tolerant actions in advance. Given the highly imbalanced SMART datasets, it is a nontrivial work to predict the health degree precisely. The proposed model would encounter overfitting and biased fitting problems if it is trained by the traditional methods. In order to resolve this problem, we propose two strategies to better utilize imbalanced data and improve performance. Firstly, we design a layerwise perturbation-based adversarial training method which can add perturbations to any layers of a neural network to improve the generalization of the network. Secondly, we extend the training method to the semi-supervised settings. Then, it is possible to utilize unlabeled data that have a potential of failure to further improve the performance of the model. Our extensive experiments on two real-world hard drive datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed schemes for both supervised and semi-supervised classification. The model trained by the proposed method can correctly predict the hard drive health status 5 and 15 days in advance. Finally, we verify the generality of the proposed training method in other similar anomaly detection tasks where the dataset is imbalanced. The results argue that the proposed methods are applicable to other domains.

Ji Wang, Jianguo Zhang, Weidong Bao et al.

The increasing demand for on-device deep learning services calls for a highly efficient manner to deploy deep neural networks (DNNs) on mobile devices with limited capacity. The cloud-based solution is a promising approach to enabling deep learning applications on mobile devices where the large portions of a DNN are offloaded to the cloud. However, revealing data to the cloud leads to potential privacy risk. To benefit from the cloud data center without the privacy risk, we design, evaluate, and implement a cloud-based framework ARDEN which partitions the DNN across mobile devices and cloud data centers. A simple data transformation is performed on the mobile device, while the resource-hungry training and the complex inference rely on the cloud data center. To protect the sensitive information, a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism consisting of arbitrary data nullification and random noise addition is introduced, which provides strong privacy guarantee. A rigorous privacy budget analysis is given. Nonetheless, the private perturbation to the original data inevitably has a negative impact on the performance of further inference on the cloud side. To mitigate this influence, we propose a noisy training method to enhance the cloud-side network robustness to perturbed data. Through the sophisticated design, ARDEN can not only preserve privacy but also improve the inference performance. To validate the proposed ARDEN, a series of experiments based on three image datasets and a real mobile application are conducted. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ARDEN. Finally, we implement ARDEN on a demo system to verify its practicality.

Hongwei Li, Jianguo Zhang, Mark Muehlau et al.

Segmentation of both large and small white matter hyperintensities/lesions in brain MR images is a challenging task which has drawn much attention in recent years. We propose a multi-scale aggregation model framework to deal with volume-varied lesions. Firstly, we present a specifically-designed network for small lesion segmentation called Stack-Net, in which multiple convolutional layers are connected, aiming to preserve rich local spatial information of small lesions before the sub-sampling layer. Secondly, we aggregate multi-scale Stack-Nets with different receptive fields to learn multi-scale contextual information of both large and small lesions. Our model is evaluated on recent MICCAI WMH Challenge Dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art on lesion recall and lesion F1-score under 5-fold cross validation. In addition, we further test our pre-trained models on a Multiple Sclerosis lesion dataset with 30 subjects under cross-center evaluation. Results show that the aggregation model is effective in learning multi-scale spatial information.It claimed the first place on the hidden test set after independent evaluation by the challenge organizer. In addition, we further test our pre-trained models on a Multiple Sclerosis lesion dataset with 30 subjects under cross-center evaluation. Results show that the aggregation model is effective in learning multi-scale spatial information.

Yan Li, Junge Zhang, Jianguo Zhang et al.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen image categories by learning an embedding space between image and semantic representations. For years, among existing works, it has been the center task to learn the proper mapping matrices aligning the visual and semantic space, whilst the importance to learn discriminative representations for ZSL is ignored. In this work, we retrospect existing methods and demonstrate the necessity to learn discriminative representations for both visual and semantic instances of ZSL. We propose an end-to-end network that is capable of 1) automatically discovering discriminative regions by a zoom network; and 2) learning discriminative semantic representations in an augmented space introduced for both user-defined and latent attributes. Our proposed method is tested extensively on two challenging ZSL datasets, and the experiment results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Yan Li, Junge Zhang, Kaiqi Huang et al.

In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging existing fully labeled categories to improve the weakly supervised detection (WSD) of new object categories, which we refer to as mixed supervised detection (MSD). Different from previous MSD methods that directly transfer the pre-trained object detectors from existing categories to new categories, we propose a more reasonable and robust objectness transfer approach for MSD. In our framework, we first learn domain-invariant objectness knowledge from the existing fully labeled categories. The knowledge is modeled based on invariant features that are robust to the distribution discrepancy between the existing categories and new categories; therefore the resulting knowledge would generalize well to new categories and could assist detection models to reject distractors (e.g., object parts) in weakly labeled images of new categories. Under the guidance of learned objectness knowledge, we utilize multiple instance learning (MIL) to model the concepts of both objects and distractors and to further improve the ability of rejecting distractors in weakly labeled images. Our robust objectness transfer approach outperforms the existing MSD methods, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging ILSVRC2013 detection dataset and the PASCAL VOC datasets.

Hongwei Li, Gongfa Jiang, Jianguo Zhang et al.

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are commonly found in the brains of healthy elderly individuals and have been associated with various neurological and geriatric disorders. In this paper, we present a study using deep fully convolutional network and ensemble models to automatically detect such WMH using fluid attenuation inversion recovery (FLAIR) and T1 magnetic resonance (MR) scans. The algorithm was evaluated and ranked 1 st in the WMH Segmentation Challenge at MICCAI 2017. In the evaluation stage, the implementation of the algorithm was submitted to the challenge organizers, who then independently tested it on a hidden set of 110 cases from 5 scanners. Averaged dice score, precision and robust Hausdorff distance obtained on held-out test datasets were 80%, 84% and 6.30mm respectively. These were the highest achieved in the challenge, suggesting the proposed method is the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we provide detailed descriptions and quantitative analysis on key components of the system. Furthermore, a study of cross-scanner evaluation is presented to discuss how the combination of modalities and data augmentation affect the generalization capability of the system. The adaptability of the system to different scanners and protocols is also investigated. A quantitative study is further presented to test the effect of ensemble size. Additionally, software and models of our method are made publicly available. The effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed system show its potential for real-world clinical practice.