Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and their variants have achieved remarkable success on natural images. However, their performance degrades when applied to remote sensing (RS) images, and the discriminator often suffers from the overfitting problem. In this paper, we examine the differences between natural and RS images and find that the intrinsic dimensions of RS images are much lower than those of natural images. As the discriminator is more susceptible to overfitting on data with lower intrinsic dimension, it focuses excessively on local characteristics of RS training data and disregards the overall structure of the distribution, leading to a faulty generation model. In respond, we propose a novel approach that leverages the real data manifold to constrain the discriminator and enhance the model performance. Specifically, we introduce a learnable information-theoretic measure to capture the real data manifold. Building upon this measure, we propose manifold alignment regularization, which mitigates the discriminator's overfitting and improves the quality of generated samples. Moreover, we establish a unified GAN framework for manifold alignment, applicable to both supervised and unsupervised RS image generation tasks.
Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is the most prevalent human candidal infection, estimated to afflict approximately 75% of all women at least once in their lifetime. It will lead to several symptoms including pruritus, vaginal soreness, and so on. Automatic whole slide image (WSI) classification is highly demanded, for the huge burden of disease control and prevention. However, the WSI-based computer-aided VCC screening method is still vacant due to the scarce labeled data and unique properties of candida. Candida in WSI is challenging to be captured by conventional classification models due to its distinctive elongated shape, the small proportion of their spatial distribution, and the style gap from WSIs. To make the model focus on the candida easier, we propose an attention-guided method, which can obtain a robust diagnosis classification model. Specifically, we first use a pre-trained detection model as prior instruction to initialize the classification model. Then we design a Skip Self-Attention module to refine the attention onto the fined-grained features of candida. Finally, we use a contrastive learning method to alleviate the overfitting caused by the style gap of WSIs and suppress the attention to false positive regions. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and example data are available at //github.com/cjdbehumble/MICCAI2023-VVC-Screening.
Most deep noise suppression (DNS) models are trained with reference-based losses requiring access to clean speech. However, sometimes an additive microphone model is insufficient for real-world applications. Accordingly, ways to use real training data in supervised learning for DNS models promise to reduce a potential training/inference mismatch. Employing real data for DNS training requires either generative approaches or a reference-free loss without access to the corresponding clean speech. In this work, we propose to employ an end-to-end non-intrusive deep neural network (DNN), named PESQ-DNN, to estimate perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) scores of enhanced real data. It provides a reference-free perceptual loss for employing real data during DNS training, maximizing the PESQ scores. Furthermore, we use an epoch-wise alternating training protocol, updating the DNS model on real data, followed by PESQ-DNN updating on synthetic data. The DNS model trained with the PESQ-DNN employing real data outperforms all reference methods employing only synthetic training data. On synthetic test data, our proposed method excels the Interspeech 2021 DNS Challenge baseline by a significant 0.32 PESQ points. Both on synthetic and real test data, the proposed method beats the baseline by 0.05 DNSMOS points - although PESQ-DNN optimizes for a different perceptual metric.
As surgical interventions trend towards minimally invasive approaches, Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) have been explored for various interventions such as brain, eye, fetoscopic, lung, cardiac and prostate surgeries. Arranged concentrically, each tube is rotated and translated independently to move the robot end-effector position, making kinematics and control challenging. Classical model-based approaches have been previously investigated with developments in deep learning based approaches outperforming more classical approaches in both forward kinematics and shape estimation. We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to control where we generalise across two to four systems, an element not yet achieved in any other deep learning approach for CTRs. In this way we explore the likely robustness of the control approach. Also investigated is the impact of rotational constraints applied on tube actuation and the effects on error metrics. We evaluate inverse kinematics errors and tracking error for path following tasks and compare the results to those achieved using state of the art methods. Additionally, as current results are performed in simulation, we also investigate a domain transfer approach known as domain randomization and evaluate error metrics as an initial step towards hardware implementation. Finally, we compare our method to a Jacobian approach found in literature.
High Performance and Energy Efficiency are critical requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) end-nodes. Exploiting tightly-coupled clusters of programmable processors (CMPs) has recently emerged as a suitable solution to address this challenge. One of the main bottlenecks limiting the performance and energy efficiency of these systems is the instruction cache architecture due to its criticality in terms of timing (i.e., maximum operating frequency), bandwidth, and power. We propose a hierarchical instruction cache tailored to ultra-low-power tightly-coupled processor clusters where a relatively large cache (L1.5) is shared by L1 private caches through a two-cycle latency interconnect. To address the performance loss caused by the L1 capacity misses, we introduce a next-line prefetcher with cache probe filtering (CPF) from L1 to L1.5. We optimize the core instruction fetch (IF) stage by removing the critical core-to-L1 combinational path. We present a detailed comparison of instruction cache architectures' performance and energy efficiency for parallel ultra-low-power (ULP) clusters. Focusing on the implementation, our two-level instruction cache provides better scalability than existing shared caches, delivering up to 20\% higher operating frequency. On average, the proposed two-level cache improves maximum performance by up to 17\% compared to the state-of-the-art while delivering similar energy efficiency for most relevant applications.
Masked Language Models (MLMs) have been successful in many natural language processing tasks. However, real-world stereotype biases are likely to be reflected in MLMs due to their learning from large text corpora. Most of the evaluation metrics proposed in the past adopt different masking strategies, designed with the log-likelihood of MLMs. They lack holistic considerations such as variance for stereotype bias and anti-stereotype bias samples. In this paper, the log-likelihoods of stereotype bias and anti-stereotype bias samples output by MLMs are considered Gaussian distributions. Two evaluation metrics, Kullback Leibler Divergence Score (KLDivS) and Jensen Shannon Divergence Score (JSDivS) are proposed to evaluate social biases in MLMs The experimental results on the public datasets StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs demonstrate that KLDivS and JSDivS are more stable and interpretable compared to the metrics proposed in the past.
Data in Knowledge Graphs often represents part of the current state of the real world. Thus, to stay up-to-date the graph data needs to be updated frequently. To utilize information from Knowledge Graphs, many state-of-the-art machine learning approaches use embedding techniques. These techniques typically compute an embedding, i.e., vector representations of the nodes as input for the main machine learning algorithm. If a graph update occurs later on -- specifically when nodes are added or removed -- the training has to be done all over again. This is undesirable, because of the time it takes and also because downstream models which were trained with these embeddings have to be retrained if they change significantly. In this paper, we investigate embedding updates that do not require full retraining and evaluate them in combination with various embedding models on real dynamic Knowledge Graphs covering multiple use cases. We study approaches that place newly appearing nodes optimally according to local information, but notice that this does not work well. However, we find that if we continue the training of the old embedding, interleaved with epochs during which we only optimize for the added and removed parts, we obtain good results in terms of typical metrics used in link prediction. This performance is obtained much faster than with a complete retraining and hence makes it possible to maintain embeddings for dynamic Knowledge Graphs.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Knowledge graphs (KGs), which could provide essential relational information between entities, have been widely utilized in various knowledge-driven applications. Since the overall human knowledge is innumerable that still grows explosively and changes frequently, knowledge construction and update inevitably involve automatic mechanisms with less human supervision, which usually bring in plenty of noises and conflicts to KGs. However, most conventional knowledge representation learning methods assume that all triple facts in existing KGs share the same significance without any noises. To address this problem, we propose a novel confidence-aware knowledge representation learning framework (CKRL), which detects possible noises in KGs while learning knowledge representations with confidence simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce the triple confidence to conventional translation-based methods for knowledge representation learning. To make triple confidence more flexible and universal, we only utilize the internal structural information in KGs, and propose three kinds of triple confidences considering both local and global structural information. In experiments, We evaluate our models on knowledge graph noise detection, knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our confidence-aware models achieve significant and consistent improvements on all tasks, which confirms the capability of CKRL modeling confidence with structural information in both KG noise detection and knowledge representation learning.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at //github.com/2051/RSICD_optimal