Traditional methods of identifying pathologies in X-ray images rely heavily on skilled human interpretation and are often time-consuming. The advent of deep learning techniques has enabled the development of automated disease diagnosis systems, but the performance of such systems is dependent on the quality of the model and the level of interpretability it provides. In this paper, we propose a multi-label disease diagnosis model for chest X-rays using a dense convolutional neural network (DenseNet) and model interpretability using GRADCAM. We trained our model using frontal X-rays and evaluated its performance using various quantitative metrics, including the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Our proposed model achieved the highest AUC score of 0.896 for the condition Cardiomegaly with an accuracy of 0.826, while the lowest AUC score was obtained for Nodule, at 0.655 with an accuracy of 0.66. To promote model interpretability and build trust in decision making, we generated heatmaps on X-rays to visualize the regions where the model paid attention to make certain predictions. Additionally, we estimated the uncertainty in model predictions by presenting the confidence interval of our measurements. Our proposed automated disease diagnosis model obtained high performance metrics in multi-label disease diagnosis tasks and provided visualization of model predictions for model interpretability.
Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) -- answering complex logical queries over large knowledge graphs -- represents an important artificial intelligence task, entailing a range of applications (e.g., cyber threat hunting). However, despite its surging popularity, the potential security risks of KGR are largely unexplored, which is concerning, given the increasing use of such capability in security-critical domains. This work represents a solid initial step towards bridging the striking gap. We systematize the security threats to KGR according to the adversary's objectives, knowledge, and attack vectors. Further, we present ROAR, a new class of attacks that instantiate a variety of such threats. Through empirical evaluation in representative use cases (e.g., medical decision support, cyber threat hunting, and commonsense reasoning), we demonstrate that ROAR is highly effective to mislead KGR to suggest pre-defined answers for target queries, yet with negligible impact on non-target ones. Finally, we explore potential countermeasures against ROAR, including filtering of potentially poisoning knowledge and training with adversarially augmented queries, which leads to several promising research directions.
It has been discovered that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) encounter a remarkable drop in performance when multiple layers are piled up. The main factor that accounts for why deep GCNs fail lies in over-smoothing, which isolates the network output from the input with the increase of network depth, weakening expressivity and trainability. In this paper, we start by investigating refined measures upon DropEdge -- an existing simple yet effective technique to relieve over-smoothing. We term our method as DropEdge++ for its two structure-aware samplers in contrast to DropEdge: layer-dependent sampler and feature-dependent sampler. Regarding the layer-dependent sampler, we interestingly find that increasingly sampling edges from the bottom layer yields superior performance than the decreasing counterpart as well as DropEdge. We theoretically reveal this phenomenon with Mean-Edge-Number (MEN), a metric closely related to over-smoothing. For the feature-dependent sampler, we associate the edge sampling probability with the feature similarity of node pairs, and prove that it further correlates the convergence subspace of the output layer with the input features. Extensive experiments on several node classification benchmarks, including both full- and semi- supervised tasks, illustrate the efficacy of DropEdge++ and its compatibility with a variety of backbones by achieving generally better performance over DropEdge and the no-drop version.
The sensitivity of loss reserving techniques to outliers in the data or deviations from model assumptions is a well known challenge. It has been shown that the popular chain-ladder reserving approach is at significant risk to such aberrant observations in that reserve estimates can be significantly shifted in the presence of even one outlier. As a consequence the chain-ladder reserving technique is non-robust. In this paper we investigate the sensitivity of reserves and mean squared errors of prediction under Mack's Model (Mack, 1993). This is done through the derivation of impact functions which are calculated by taking the first derivative of the relevant statistic of interest with respect to an observation. We also provide and discuss the impact functions for quantiles when total reserves are assumed to be lognormally distributed. Additionally, comparisons are made between the impact functions for individual accident year reserves under Mack's Model and the Bornhuetter-Ferguson methodology. It is shown that the impact of incremental claims on these statistics of interest varies widely throughout a loss triangle and is heavily dependent on other cells in the triangle. Results are illustrated using data from a Belgian non-life insurer.
Machine learning (ML) models are costly to train as they can require a significant amount of data, computational resources and technical expertise. Thus, they constitute valuable intellectual property that needs protection from adversaries wanting to steal them. Ownership verification techniques allow the victims of model stealing attacks to demonstrate that a suspect model was in fact stolen from theirs. Although a number of ownership verification techniques based on watermarking or fingerprinting have been proposed, most of them fall short either in terms of security guarantees (well-equipped adversaries can evade verification) or computational cost. A fingerprinting technique, Dataset Inference (DI), has been shown to offer better robustness and efficiency than prior methods. The authors of DI provided a correctness proof for linear (suspect) models. However, in a subspace of the same setting, we prove that DI suffers from high false positives (FPs) -- it can incorrectly identify an independent model trained with non-overlapping data from the same distribution as stolen. We further prove that DI also triggers FPs in realistic, non-linear suspect models. We then confirm empirically that DI in the black-box setting leads to FPs, with high confidence. Second, we show that DI also suffers from false negatives (FNs) -- an adversary can fool DI (at the cost of incurring some accuracy loss) by regularising a stolen model's decision boundaries using adversarial training, thereby leading to an FN. To this end, we demonstrate that black-box DI fails to identify a model adversarially trained from a stolen dataset -- the setting where DI is the hardest to evade. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings, the viability of fingerprinting-based ownership verification in general, and suggest directions for future work.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have received increasing attention in recent machine learning. 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 optimizing the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the GEneralized Multi-relational Graph Convolutional Networks (GEM-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge-base embedding methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that GEM-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 GEM-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
In Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC), one sample can belong to more than one class. It is observed that most MLTC tasks, there are dependencies or correlations among labels. Existing methods tend to ignore the relationship among labels. In this paper, a graph attention network-based model is proposed to capture the attentive dependency structure among the labels. The graph attention network uses a feature matrix and a correlation matrix to capture and explore the crucial dependencies between the labels and generate classifiers for the task. The generated classifiers are applied to sentence feature vectors obtained from the text feature extraction network (BiLSTM) to enable end-to-end training. Attention allows the system to assign different weights to neighbor nodes per label, thus allowing it to learn the dependencies among labels implicitly. The results of the proposed model are validated on five real-world MLTC datasets. The proposed model achieves similar or better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art models.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
A variety of deep neural networks have been applied in medical image segmentation and achieve good performance. Unlike natural images, medical images of the same imaging modality are characterized by the same pattern, which indicates that same normal organs or tissues locate at similar positions in the images. Thus, in this paper we try to incorporate the prior knowledge of medical images into the structure of neural networks such that the prior knowledge can be utilized for accurate segmentation. Based on this idea, we propose a novel deep network called knowledge-based fully convolutional network (KFCN) for medical image segmentation. The segmentation function and corresponding error is analyzed. We show the existence of an asymptotically stable region for KFCN which traditional FCN doesn't possess. Experiments validate our knowledge assumption about the incorporation of prior knowledge into the convolution kernels of KFCN and show that KFCN can achieve a reasonable segmentation and a satisfactory accuracy.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.