This study systematically investigates the impact of image enhancement techniques on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based Brain Tumor Segmentation, focusing on Histogram Equalization (HE), Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), and their hybrid variations. Employing the U-Net architecture on a dataset of 3064 Brain MRI images, the research delves into preprocessing steps, including resizing and enhancement, to optimize segmentation accuracy. A detailed analysis of the CNN-based U-Net architecture, training, and validation processes is provided. The comparative analysis, utilizing metrics such as Accuracy, Loss, MSE, IoU, and DSC, reveals that the hybrid approach CLAHE-HE consistently outperforms others. Results highlight its superior accuracy (0.9982, 0.9939, 0.9936 for training, testing, and validation, respectively) and robust segmentation overlap, with Jaccard values of 0.9862, 0.9847, and 0.9864, and Dice values of 0.993, 0.9923, and 0.9932 for the same phases, emphasizing its potential in neuro-oncological applications. The study concludes with a call for refinement in segmentation methodologies to further enhance diagnostic precision and treatment planning in neuro-oncology.
The development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the emergence of large multimodal models (LMMs). While LMMs have achieved tremendous success by promoting the synergy between multimodal comprehension and creation, they often face challenges when confronted with out-of-distribution data. This is primarily due to their reliance on image encoders trained to encode images into task-relevant features, which may lead them to disregard irrelevant details. Delving into the modeling capabilities of diffusion models for images naturally prompts the question: Can diffusion models serve as the eyes of large language models for image perception? In this paper, we propose DEEM, a simple and effective approach that utilizes the generative feedback of diffusion models to align the semantic distributions of the image encoder. This addresses the drawbacks of previous methods that solely relied on image encoders like ViT, thereby enhancing the model's resilience against out-of-distribution samples and reducing visual hallucinations. Importantly, this is achieved without requiring additional training modules and with fewer training parameters. We extensively evaluated DEEM on both our newly constructed RobustVQA benchmark and another well-known benchmark, POPE, for object hallucination. Compared to the state-of-the-art interleaved content generation models, DEEM exhibits enhanced robustness and a superior capacity to alleviate model hallucinations while utilizing fewer trainable parameters, less pre-training data (10%), and a smaller base model size.
As the current initialization method in the state-of-the-art Stereo Visual-Inertial SLAM framework, ORB-SLAM3 has limitations. Its success depends on the performance of the pure stereo SLAM system and is based on the underlying assumption that pure visual SLAM can accurately estimate the camera trajectory, which is essential for inertial parameter estimation. Meanwhile, the further improved initialization method for ORB-SLAM3, known as Stereo-NEC, is time-consuming due to applying keypoint tracking to estimate gyroscope bias with normal epipolar constraints. To address the limitations of previous methods, this paper proposes a method aimed at enhancing translation accuracy during the initialization stage. The fundamental concept of our method is to improve the translation estimate with a 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) Bundle Adjustment (BA), independently, while the rotation estimate is fixed, instead of using ORB-SLAM3's 6-DoF BA. Additionally, the rotation estimate will be updated by considering IMU measurements and gyroscope bias, unlike ORB-SLAM3's rotation, which is directly obtained from stereo visual odometry and may yield inferior results when operating in challenging scenarios. We also conduct extensive evaluations on the public benchmark, the EuRoC dataset, demonstrating that our method excels in accuracy.
This study introduces a refined Flooding Injection Rate-adjustable Denial-of-Service (DoS) model for Network-on-Chips (NoCs) and more importantly presents DL2Fence, a novel framework utilizing Deep Learning (DL) and Frame Fusion (2F) for DoS detection and localization. Two Convolutional Neural Networks models for classification and segmentation were developed to detect and localize DoS respectively. It achieves detection and localization accuracies of 95.8% and 91.7%, and precision rates of 98.5% and 99.3% in a 16x16 mesh NoC. The framework's hardware overhead notably decreases by 76.3% when scaling from 8x8 to 16x16 NoCs, and it requires 42.4% less hardware compared to state-of-the-arts. This advancement demonstrates DL2Fence's effectiveness in balancing outstanding detection performance in large-scale NoCs with extremely low hardware overhead.
We introduce ``Generative Fusion Decoding'' (GFD), a novel shallow fusion framework, utilized to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into multi-modal text recognition systems such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR). We derive the formulas necessary to enable GFD to operate across mismatched token spaces of different models by mapping text token space to byte token space, enabling seamless fusion during the decoding process. The framework is plug-and-play, compatible with various auto-regressive models, and does not require re-training for feature alignment, thus overcoming limitations of previous fusion techniques. We highlight three main advantages of GFD: First, by simplifying the complexity of aligning different model sample spaces, GFD allows LLMs to correct errors in tandem with the recognition model, reducing computation latencies. Second, the in-context learning ability of LLMs is fully capitalized by GFD, increasing robustness in long-form speech recognition and instruction aware speech recognition. Third, GFD enables fusing recognition models deficient in Chinese text recognition with LLMs extensively trained on Chinese. Our evaluation demonstrates that GFD significantly improves performance in ASR and OCR tasks, with ASR reaching state-of-the-art in the NTUML2021 benchmark. GFD provides a significant step forward in model integration, offering a unified solution that could be widely applicable to leveraging existing pre-trained models through step by step fusion.
We investigate the fundamental performance limitations of learning algorithms in several Domain Generalisation (DG) settings. Motivated by the difficulty with which previously proposed methods have in reliably outperforming Empirical Risk Minimisation (ERM), we derive upper bounds on the excess risk of ERM, and lower bounds on the minimax excess risk. Our findings show that in all the DG settings we consider, it is not possible to significantly outperform ERM. Our conclusions are limited not only to the standard covariate shift setting, but also two other settings with additional restrictions on how domains can differ. The first constrains all domains to have a non-trivial bound on pairwise distances, as measured by a broad class of integral probability metrics. The second alternate setting considers a restricted class of DG problems where all domains have the same underlying support. Our analysis also suggests how different strategies can be used to optimise the performance of ERM in each of these DG setting. We also experimentally explore hypotheses suggested by our theoretical analysis.
The new generation of observatories and instruments (VLT/ERIS, JWST, ELT) motivate the development of robust methods to detect and characterise faint and close-in exoplanets. Molecular mapping and cross-correlation for spectroscopy use molecular templates to isolate a planet's spectrum from its host star. However, reliance on signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) metrics can lead to missed discoveries, due to strong assumptions of Gaussian independent and identically distributed noise. We introduce machine learning for cross-correlation spectroscopy (MLCCS); the method aims to leverage weak assumptions on exoplanet characterisation, such as the presence of specific molecules in atmospheres, to improve detection sensitivity for exoplanets. MLCCS methods, including a perceptron and unidimensional convolutional neural networks, operate in the cross-correlated spectral dimension, in which patterns from molecules can be identified. We test on mock datasets of synthetic planets inserted into real noise from SINFONI at K-band. The results from MLCCS show outstanding improvements. The outcome on a grid of faint synthetic gas giants shows that for a false discovery rate up to 5%, a perceptron can detect about 26 times the amount of planets compared to an S/N metric. This factor increases up to 77 times with convolutional neural networks, with a statistical sensitivity shift from 0.7% to 55.5%. In addition, MLCCS methods show a drastic improvement in detection confidence and conspicuity on imaging spectroscopy. Once trained, MLCCS methods offer sensitive and rapid detection of exoplanets and their molecular species in the spectral dimension. They handle systematic noise and challenging seeing conditions, can adapt to many spectroscopic instruments and modes, and are versatile regarding atmospheric characteristics, which can enable identification of various planets in archival and future data.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention owing to their ability to handle graph-structured data and the improvement in practical applications. However, many of these models prioritize high utility performance, such as accuracy, with a lack of privacy consideration, which is a major concern in modern society where privacy attacks are rampant. To address this issue, researchers have started to develop privacy-preserving GNNs. Despite this progress, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the attacks and the techniques for preserving privacy in the graph domain. In this survey, we aim to address this gap by summarizing the attacks on graph data according to the targeted information, categorizing the privacy preservation techniques in GNNs, and reviewing the datasets and applications that could be used for analyzing/solving privacy issues in GNNs. We also outline potential directions for future research in order to build better privacy-preserving GNNs.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.