We present the meshfree Mixed Collocation Method (MCM) to solve the monodomain model for numerical simulation of cardiac electrophysiology. We apply MCM to simulate cardiac electrical propagation in 2D tissue sheets and 3D tissue slabs as well as in realistic large-scale biventricular anatomies. Capitalizing on the meshfree property of MCM, we introduce an immersed grid approach for automated generation of nodes in the modeled cardiac domains. We demonstrate that MCM solutions are in agreement with FEM solutions, thus confirming their suitability for simulation of cardiac electrophysiology both in healthy and disease conditions, such as left-bundle-branch block (LBBB) and myocardial infarction. Despite the fact that the computational time for MCM calculations is longer than for FEM, its efficiency in dealing with domains presenting irregularity, nonlinearity and discontinuity make MCM a promising alternative for heart's electrical investigations.
Given an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$, the longest induced path problem (LIPP) consists of obtaining a maximum cardinality subset $W\subseteq V$ such that $W$ induces a simple path in $G$. In this paper, we propose two new formulations with an exponential number of constraints for the problem, together with effective branch-and-cut procedures for its solution. While the first formulation (cec) is based on constraints that explicitly eliminate cycles, the second one (cut) ensures connectivity via cutset constraints. We compare, both theoretically and experimentally, the newly proposed approaches with a state-of-the-art formulation recently proposed in the literature. More specifically, we show that the polyhedra defined by formulation cut and that of the formulation available in the literature are the same. Besides, we show that these two formulations are stronger in theory than cec. We also propose a new branch-and-cut procedure using the new formulations. Computational experiments show that the newly proposed formulation cec, although less strong from a theoretical point of view, is the best performing approach as it can solve all but one of the 1065 benchmark instances used in the literature within the given time limit. In addition, our newly proposed approaches outperform the state-of-the-art formulation when it comes to the median times to solve the instances to optimality. Furthermore, we perform extended computational experiments considering more challenging and hard-to-solve larger instances and evaluate the impacts on the results when offering initial feasible solutions (warm starts) to the formulations.
We provide a comprehensive theory of conducting in-sample statistical inference about receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves that are based on predicted values from a first stage model with estimated parameters (such as a logit regression). The term "in-sample" refers to the practice of using the same data for model estimation (training) and subsequent evaluation, i.e., the construction of the ROC curve. We show that in this case the first stage estimation error has a generally non-negligible impact on the asymptotic distribution of the ROC curve and develop the appropriate pointwise and functional limit theory. We propose methods for simulating the distribution of the limit process and show how to use the results in practice in comparing ROC curves.
We present NeRF-SR, a solution for high-resolution (HR) novel view synthesis with mostly low-resolution (LR) inputs. Our method is built upon Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) that predicts per-point density and color with a multi-layer perceptron. While producing images at arbitrary scales, NeRF struggles with resolutions that go beyond observed images. Our key insight is that NeRF has a local prior, which means predictions of a 3D point can be propagated in the nearby region and remain accurate. We first exploit it by a super-sampling strategy that shoots multiple rays at each image pixel, which enforces multi-view constraint at a sub-pixel level. Then, we show that NeRF-SR can further boost the performance of super-sampling by a refinement network that leverages the estimated depth at hand to hallucinate details from related patches on an HR reference image. Experiment results demonstrate that NeRF-SR generates high-quality results for novel view synthesis at HR on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Nonlinear model order reduction has opened the door to parameter optimization and uncertainty quantification in complex physics problems governed by nonlinear equations. In particular, the computational cost of solving these equations can be reduced by means of local reduced-order bases. This article examines the benefits of a physics-informed cluster analysis for the construction of cluster-specific reduced-order bases. We illustrate that the choice of the dissimilarity measure for clustering is fundamental and highly affects the performances of the local reduced-order bases. It is shown that clustering with an angle-based dissimilarity on simulation data efficiently decreases the intra-cluster Kolmogorov $N$-width. Additionally, an a priori efficiency criterion is introduced to assess the relevance of a ROM-net, a methodology for the reduction of nonlinear physics problems introduced in our previous work in [T. Daniel, F. Casenave, N. Akkari, D. Ryckelynck, Model order reduction assisted by deep neural networks (ROM-net), Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7 (16), 2020]. This criterion also provides engineers with a very practical method for ROM-nets' hyperparameters calibration under constrained computational costs for the training phase. On five different physics problems, our physics-informed clustering strategy significantly outperforms classic strategies for the construction of local reduced-order bases in terms of projection errors.
Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global disease burden. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that empathy, the ability to understand and feel the emotions and experiences of others, is a key component leading to positive outcomes in supportive conversations. However, recent studies have shown that highly empathic conversations are rare in online mental health platforms. In this paper, we work towards improving empathy in online mental health support conversations. We introduce a new task of empathic rewriting which aims to transform low-empathy conversational posts to higher empathy. Learning such transformations is challenging and requires a deep understanding of empathy while maintaining conversation quality through text fluency and specificity to the conversational context. Here we propose PARTNER, a deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to make sentence-level edits to posts in order to increase the expressed level of empathy while maintaining conversation quality. Our RL agent leverages a policy network, based on a transformer language model adapted from GPT-2, which performs the dual task of generating candidate empathic sentences and adding those sentences at appropriate positions. During training, we reward transformations that increase empathy in posts while maintaining text fluency, context specificity and diversity. Through a combination of automatic and human evaluation, we demonstrate that PARTNER successfully generates more empathic, specific, and diverse responses and outperforms NLP methods from related tasks like style transfer and empathic dialogue generation. Our work has direct implications for facilitating empathic conversations on web-based platforms.
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
Deep learning has become the most widely used approach for cardiac image segmentation in recent years. In this paper, we provide a review of over 100 cardiac image segmentation papers using deep learning, which covers common imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound (US) and major anatomical structures of interest (ventricles, atria and vessels). In addition, a summary of publicly available cardiac image datasets and code repositories are included to provide a base for encouraging reproducible research. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations with current deep learning-based approaches (scarcity of labels, model generalizability across different domains, interpretability) and suggest potential directions for future research.
We present an approach to learn an object-centric forward model, and show that this allows us to plan for sequences of actions to achieve distant desired goals. We propose to model a scene as a collection of objects, each with an explicit spatial location and implicit visual feature, and learn to model the effects of actions using random interaction data. Our model allows capturing the robot-object and object-object interactions, and leads to more sample-efficient and accurate predictions. We show that this learned model can be leveraged to search for action sequences that lead to desired goal configurations, and that in conjunction with a learned correction module, this allows for robust closed loop execution. We present experiments both in simulation and the real world, and show that our approach improves over alternate implicit or pixel-space forward models. Please see our project page (//judyye.github.io/ocmpc/) for result videos.
Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies such as upper confidence bound algorithms and Thompson sampling fail to appropriately account for heteroscedasticity, even in the bandit setting. Motivated by recent findings that address this issue in bandits, we propose to use Information-Directed Sampling (IDS) for exploration in reinforcement learning. As our main contribution, we build on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning and propose a novel, tractable approximation of IDS for deep Q-learning. The resulting exploration strategy explicitly accounts for both parametric uncertainty and heteroscedastic observation noise. We evaluate our method on Atari games and demonstrate a significant improvement over alternative approaches.
Image-to-image translation tasks have been widely investigated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and dual learning. However, existing models lack the ability to control the translated results in the target domain and their results usually lack of diversity in the sense that a fixed image usually leads to (almost) deterministic translation result. In this paper, we study a new problem, conditional image-to-image translation, which is to translate an image from the source domain to the target domain conditioned on a given image in the target domain. It requires that the generated image should inherit some domain-specific features of the conditional image from the target domain. Therefore, changing the conditional image in the target domain will lead to diverse translation results for a fixed input image from the source domain, and therefore the conditional input image helps to control the translation results. We tackle this problem with unpaired data based on GANs and dual learning. We twist two conditional translation models (one translation from A domain to B domain, and the other one from B domain to A domain) together for inputs combination and reconstruction while preserving domain independent features. We carry out experiments on men's faces from-to women's faces translation and edges to shoes&bags translations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.