This work addresses the problem of anonymizing the identity of faces in a dataset of images, such that the privacy of those depicted is not violated, while at the same time the dataset is useful for downstream task such as for training machine learning models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly address this issue and deal with two major drawbacks of the existing state-of-the-art approaches, namely that they (i) require the costly training of additional, purpose-trained neural networks, and/or (ii) fail to retain the facial attributes of the original images in the anonymized counterparts, the preservation of which is of paramount importance for their use in downstream tasks. We accordingly present a task-agnostic anonymization procedure that directly optimizes the images' latent representation in the latent space of a pre-trained GAN. By optimizing the latent codes directly, we ensure both that the identity is of a desired distance away from the original (with an identity obfuscation loss), whilst preserving the facial attributes (using a novel feature-matching loss in FaRL's deep feature space). We demonstrate through a series of both qualitative and quantitative experiments that our method is capable of anonymizing the identity of the images whilst -- crucially -- better-preserving the facial attributes. We make the code and the pre-trained models publicly available at: //github.com/chi0tzp/FALCO.
The clinical notes are usually typed into the system by physicians. They are typically required to be marked by standard medical codes, and each code represents a diagnosis or medical treatment procedure. Annotating these notes is time consuming and prone to error. In this paper, we proposed a multi-view attention based Neural network to predict medical codes from clinical texts. Our method incorporates three aspects of information, the semantic context of the clinical text, the relationship among the label (medical codes) space, and the alignment between each pair of a clinical text and medical code. Our method is verified to be effective on the open source dataset. The experimental result shows that our method achieves better performance against the prior state-of-art on multiple metrics.
Ultrasound b-mode imaging is a qualitative approach and diagnostic quality strongly depends on operators' training and experience. Quantitative approaches can provide information about tissue properties; therefore, can be used for identifying various tissue types, e.g., speed-of-sound in the tissue can be used as a biomarker for tissue malignancy, especially in breast imaging. Recent studies showed the possibility of speed-of-sound reconstruction using deep neural networks that are fully trained on simulated data. However, because of the ever-present domain shift between simulated and measured data, the stability and performance of these models in real setups are still under debate. In prior works, for training data generation, tissue structures were modeled as simplified geometrical structures which does not reflect the complexity of the real tissues. In this study, we proposed a new simulation setup for training data generation based on Tomosynthesis images. We combined our approach with the simplified geometrical model and investigated the impacts of training data diversity on the stability and robustness of an existing network architecture. We studied the sensitivity of the trained network to different simulation parameters, e.g., echogenicity, number of scatterers, noise, and geometry. We showed that the network trained with the joint set of data is more stable on out-of-domain simulated data as well as measured phantom data.
Code completion, a highly valuable topic in the software development domain, has been increasingly promoted for use by recent advances in large language models (LLMs). To date, visible LLM-based code completion frameworks such as GitHub Copilot and GPT are trained using deep learning over vast quantities of unstructured text and open source code. As the paramount component and the cornerstone in daily programming tasks, code completion has largely boosted professionals' efficiency in building real-world software systems. In contrast to this flourishing market, we find that code completion systems often output suspicious results, and to date, an automated testing and enhancement framework for code completion systems is not available. This research proposes CCTEST, a framework to test and repair code completion systems in blackbox settings. CCTEST features a set of novel mutation strategies, namely program structure-correlated (PSC) mutations, to generate mutated code completion inputs. Then, it detects inconsistent outputs, representing possibly erroneous cases, from all the completed code cases. Moreover, CCTEST repairs the code completion outputs by selecting the output that mostly reflects the "average" appearance of all output cases, as the final output of the code completion systems. We detected a total of 33,540 inputs (with a true positive rate of 86%) that can trigger erroneous cases from eight popular LLM-based code completion systems. With repairing, we show that the accuracy of code completion systems is notably increased by 40% and 67% with respect to BLEU score and Levenshtein edit similarity.
Unsupervised domain adaptation methods aim to generalize well on unlabeled test data that may have a different (shifted) distribution from the training data. Such methods are typically developed on image data, and their application to time series data is less explored. Existing works on time series domain adaptation suffer from inconsistencies in evaluation schemes, datasets, and backbone neural network architectures. Moreover, labeled target data are often used for model selection, which violates the fundamental assumption of unsupervised domain adaptation. To address these issues, we develop a benchmarking evaluation suite (AdaTime) to systematically and fairly evaluate different domain adaptation methods on time series data. Specifically, we standardize the backbone neural network architectures and benchmarking datasets, while also exploring more realistic model selection approaches that can work with no labeled data or just a few labeled samples. Our evaluation includes adapting state-of-the-art visual domain adaptation methods to time series data as well as the recent methods specifically developed for time series data. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate 11 state-of-the-art methods on five representative datasets spanning 50 cross-domain scenarios. Our results suggest that with careful selection of hyper-parameters, visual domain adaptation methods are competitive with methods proposed for time series domain adaptation. In addition, we find that hyper-parameters could be selected based on realistic model selection approaches. Our work unveils practical insights for applying domain adaptation methods on time series data and builds a solid foundation for future works in the field. The code is available at \href{//github.com/emadeldeen24/AdaTime}{github.com/emadeldeen24/AdaTime}.
Federated Learning (FL) is a novel approach enabling several clients holding sensitive data to collaboratively train machine learning models, without centralizing data. The cross-silo FL setting corresponds to the case of few ($2$--$50$) reliable clients, each holding medium to large datasets, and is typically found in applications such as healthcare, finance, or industry. While previous works have proposed representative datasets for cross-device FL, few realistic healthcare cross-silo FL datasets exist, thereby slowing algorithmic research in this critical application. In this work, we propose a novel cross-silo dataset suite focused on healthcare, FLamby (Federated Learning AMple Benchmark of Your cross-silo strategies), to bridge the gap between theory and practice of cross-silo FL. FLamby encompasses 7 healthcare datasets with natural splits, covering multiple tasks, modalities, and data volumes, each accompanied with baseline training code. As an illustration, we additionally benchmark standard FL algorithms on all datasets. Our flexible and modular suite allows researchers to easily download datasets, reproduce results and re-use the different components for their research. FLamby is available at~\url{www.github.com/owkin/flamby}.
In this work, we explore a useful but often neglected methodology for robustness analysis of text generation evaluation metrics: stress tests with synthetic data. Basically, we design and synthesize a wide range of potential errors and check whether they result in a commensurate drop in the metric scores. We examine a range of recently proposed evaluation metrics based on pretrained language models, for the tasks of open-ended generation, translation, and summarization. Our experiments reveal interesting insensitivities, biases, or even loopholes in existing metrics. For example, we find that BERTScore is confused by truncation errors in summarization, and MAUVE (built on top of GPT-2) is insensitive to errors at the beginning or middle of generations. Further, we investigate the reasons behind these blind spots and suggest practical workarounds for a more reliable evaluation of text generation. We have released our code and data at //github.com/cloudygoose/blindspot_nlg.
Feature attribution methods are popular in interpretable machine learning. These methods compute the attribution of each input feature to represent its importance, but there is no consensus on the definition of "attribution", leading to many competing methods with little systematic evaluation, complicated in particular by the lack of ground truth attribution. To address this, we propose a dataset modification procedure to induce such ground truth. Using this procedure, we evaluate three common methods: saliency maps, rationales, and attentions. We identify several deficiencies and add new perspectives to the growing body of evidence questioning the correctness and reliability of these methods applied on datasets in the wild. We further discuss possible avenues for remedy and recommend new attribution methods to be tested against ground truth before deployment. The code is available at \url{//github.com/YilunZhou/feature-attribution-evaluation}.
Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such they represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for end-to-end training. Here we propose knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then applies a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we use label smoothness, which assumes that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, we combine knowledge-aware graph neural networks and label smoothness and present the unified model. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. It also achieves strong performance in the scenario where user-item interactions are sparse.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Text classification is an important and classical problem in natural language processing. There have been a number of studies that applied convolutional neural networks (convolution on regular grid, e.g., sequence) to classification. However, only a limited number of studies have explored the more flexible graph convolutional neural networks (convolution on non-grid, e.g., arbitrary graph) for the task. In this work, we propose to use graph convolutional networks for text classification. We build a single text graph for a corpus based on word co-occurrence and document word relations, then learn a Text Graph Convolutional Network (Text GCN) for the corpus. Our Text GCN is initialized with one-hot representation for word and document, it then jointly learns the embeddings for both words and documents, as supervised by the known class labels for documents. Our experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that a vanilla Text GCN without any external word embeddings or knowledge outperforms state-of-the-art methods for text classification. On the other hand, Text GCN also learns predictive word and document embeddings. In addition, experimental results show that the improvement of Text GCN over state-of-the-art comparison methods become more prominent as we lower the percentage of training data, suggesting the robustness of Text GCN to less training data in text classification.