The application of ionizing radiation for diagnostic imaging is common around the globe. However, the process of imaging, itself, remains to be a relatively hazardous operation. Therefore, it is preferable to use as low a dose of ionizing radiation as possible, particularly in computed tomography (CT) imaging systems, where multiple x-ray operations are performed for the reconstruction of slices of body tissues. A popular method for radiation dose reduction in CT imaging is known as the quarter-dose technique, which reduces the x-ray dose but can cause a loss of image sharpness. Since CT image reconstruction from directional x-rays is a nonlinear process, it is analytically difficult to correct the effect of dose reduction on image quality. Recent and popular deep-learning approaches provide an intriguing possibility of image enhancement for low-dose artifacts. Some recent works propose combinations of multiple deep-learning and classical methods for this purpose, which over-complicate the process. However, it is observed here that the straight utilization of the well-known U-NET provides very successful results for the correction of low-dose artifacts. Blind tests with actual radiologists reveal that the U-NET enhanced quarter-dose CT images not only provide an immense visual improvement over the low-dose versions, but also become diagnostically preferable images, even when compared to their full-dose CT versions.
World models are a powerful tool for developing intelligent agents. By predicting the outcome of a sequence of actions, world models enable policies to be optimised via on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) using synthetic data, i.e. in "in imagination". Existing world models are autoregressive in that they interleave predicting the next state with sampling the next action from the policy. Prediction error inevitably compounds as the trajectory length grows. In this work, we propose a novel world modelling approach that is not autoregressive and generates entire on-policy trajectories in a single pass through a diffusion model. Our approach, Policy-Guided Trajectory Diffusion (PolyGRAD), leverages a denoising model in addition to the gradient of the action distribution of the policy to diffuse a trajectory of initially random states and actions into an on-policy synthetic trajectory. We analyse the connections between PolyGRAD, score-based generative models, and classifier-guided diffusion models. Our results demonstrate that PolyGRAD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of trajectory prediction error for moderate-length trajectories, with the exception of autoregressive diffusion. At short horizons, PolyGRAD obtains comparable errors to autoregressive diffusion, but with significantly lower computational requirements. Our experiments also demonstrate that PolyGRAD enables performant policies to be trained via on-policy RL in imagination for MuJoCo continuous control domains. Thus, PolyGRAD introduces a new paradigm for scalable and non-autoregressive on-policy world modelling.
Receive generalized spatial modulation (RGSM), as an advanced type of receive spatial modulation (RSM), can be divided into diversity and multiplexing (MUX) schemes according to whether the symbols received by the selected antennas are the same. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted RSM has attracted much attention due to better reception performance and spectral efficiency. The RIS-aided RGSM (RIS-RGSM) with diversity scheme is realized in this paper via a simple improvement based on the state-of-the-art RIS-aided receive generalized space shift keying (RIS-RGSSK) scheme. To increase the transmission rate, the RIS-RGSM with MUX scheme is proposed in this paper, which adjusts the reflecting phase shifts and on/off states of RIS elements. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show that the proposed RIS-RGSM with MUX scheme has better bit error rate (BER) performance than the diversity scheme. Compared to the RIS-RGSSK scheme, the proposed RIS-RGSM scheme can significantly reduce the number of receive antennas while maintaining the transmission rate.
Accurate segmentation of interconnected line networks, such as grain boundaries in polycrystalline material microstructures, poses a significant challenge due to the fragmented masks produced by conventional computer vision algorithms, including convolutional neural networks. These algorithms struggle with thin masks, often necessitating intricate post-processing for effective contour closure and continuity. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces a fast, high-fidelity post-processing technique, leveraging domain knowledge about grain boundary connectivity and employing conditional random fields and perceptual grouping rules. This approach significantly enhances segmentation mask accuracy, achieving a 79% segment identification accuracy in validation with a U-Net model on electron microscopy images of a polycrystalline oxide. Additionally, a novel grain alignment metric is introduced, showing a 51% improvement in grain alignment, providing a more detailed assessment of segmentation performance for complex microstructures. This method not only enables rapid and accurate segmentation but also facilitates an unprecedented level of data analysis, significantly improving the statistical representation of grain boundary networks, making it suitable for a range of disciplines where precise segmentation of interconnected line networks is essential.
Modeling the trajectories of animals is challenging due to the complexity of their behaviors, the influence of unpredictable environmental factors, individual variability, and the lack of detailed data on their movements. Additionally, factors such as migration, hunting, reproduction, and social interactions add additional layers of complexity when attempting to accurately forecast their movements. In the literature, various models exits that aim to study animal telemetry, by modeling the velocity of the telemetry, the telemetry itself or both processes jointly through a Markovian process. In this work, we propose to model the velocity of each coordinate axis for animal telemetry data as a fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process. Then, the integral fOU process models position data in animal telemetry. Compared to traditional methods, the proposed model is flexible in modeling long-range memory. The Hurst parameter $H \in (0,1)$ is a crucial parameter in integral fOU process, as it determines the degree of dependence or long-range memory. The integral fOU process is nonstationary process. In addition, a higher Hurst parameter ($H > 0.5$) indicates a stronger memory, leading to trajectories with transient trends, while a lower Hurst parameter ($H < 0.5$) implies a weaker memory, resulting in trajectories with recurring trends. When H = 0.5, the process reduces to a standard integral Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We develop a fast simulation algorithm of telemetry trajectories using an approach via finite-dimensional distributions. We also develop a maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation and its performance is examined by simulation studies. Finally, we present a telemetry application of Fin Whales that disperse over the Gulf of Mexico.
The debiased estimator is a crucial tool in statistical inference for high-dimensional model parameters. However, constructing such an estimator involves estimating the high-dimensional inverse Hessian matrix, incurring significant computational costs. This challenge becomes particularly acute in distributed setups, where traditional methods necessitate computing a debiased estimator on every machine. This becomes unwieldy, especially with a large number of machines. In this paper, we delve into semi-supervised sparse statistical inference in a distributed setup. An efficient multi-round distributed debiased estimator, which integrates both labeled and unlabelled data, is developed. We will show that the additional unlabeled data helps to improve the statistical rate of each round of iteration. Our approach offers tailored debiasing methods for $M$-estimation and generalized linear models according to the specific form of the loss function. Our method also applies to a non-smooth loss like absolute deviation loss. Furthermore, our algorithm is computationally efficient since it requires only one estimation of a high-dimensional inverse covariance matrix. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by presenting simulation studies and real data applications that highlight the benefits of incorporating unlabeled data.
The prevalence of the powerful multilingual models, such as Whisper, has significantly advanced the researches on speech recognition. However, these models often struggle with handling the code-switching setting, which is essential in multilingual speech recognition. Recent studies have attempted to address this setting by separating the modules for different languages to ensure distinct latent representations for languages. Some other methods considered the switching mechanism based on language identification. In this study, a new attention-guided adaptation is proposed to conduct parameter-efficient learning for bilingual ASR. This method selects those attention heads in a model which closely express language identities and then guided those heads to be correctly attended with their corresponding languages. The experiments on the Mandarin-English code-switching speech corpus show that the proposed approach achieves a 14.2% mixed error rate, surpassing state-of-the-art method, where only 5.6% additional parameters over Whisper are trained.
Quantum Internetworking is a recent field that promises numerous interesting applications, many of which require the distribution of entanglement between arbitrary pairs of users. This work deals with the problem of scheduling in an arbitrary entanglement swapping quantum network - often called first generation quantum network - in its general topology, multicommodity, loss-aware formulation. We introduce a linear algebraic framework that exploits quantum memory through the creation of intermediate entangled links. The framework is then employed to apply Lyapunov Drift Minimization (a standard technique in classical network science) to mathematically derive a natural class of scheduling policies for quantum networks minimizing the square norm of the user demand backlog. Moreover, an additional class of Max-Weight inspired policies is proposed and benchmarked, reducing significantly the computation cost at the price of a slight performance degradation. The policies are compared in terms of information availability, localization and overall network performance through an ad-hoc simulator that admits user-provided network topologies and scheduling policies in order to showcase the potential application of the provided tools to quantum network design.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
Learning latent representations of nodes in graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with widespread applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph visualization. Previous methods on graph representation learning mainly focus on static graphs, however, many real-world graphs are dynamic and evolve over time. In this paper, we present Dynamic Self-Attention Network (DySAT), a novel neural architecture that operates on dynamic graphs and learns node representations that capture both structural properties and temporal evolutionary patterns. Specifically, DySAT computes node representations by jointly employing self-attention layers along two dimensions: structural neighborhood and temporal dynamics. We conduct link prediction experiments on two classes of graphs: communication networks and bipartite rating networks. Our experimental results show that DySAT has a significant performance gain over several different state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines.