We propose a novel anomaly detection method for echocardiogram videos. The introduced method takes advantage of the periodic nature of the heart cycle to learn three variants of a variational latent trajectory model (TVAE). While the first two variants (TVAE-C and TVAE-R) model strict periodic movements of the heart, the third (TVAE-S) is more general and allows shifts in the spatial representation throughout the video. All models are trained on the healthy samples of a novel in-house dataset of infant echocardiogram videos consisting of multiple chamber views to learn a normative prior of the healthy population. During inference, maximum a posteriori (MAP) based anomaly detection is performed to detect out-of-distribution samples in our dataset. The proposed method reliably identifies severe congenital heart defects, such as Ebstein's Anomaly or Shone-complex. Moreover, it achieves superior performance over MAP-based anomaly detection with standard variational autoencoders when detecting pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular dilation. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method enables interpretable explanations of its output through heatmaps highlighting the regions corresponding to anomalous heart structures.
Our research addresses class imbalance issues in heterogeneous graphs using graph neural networks (GNNs). We propose a novel method combining the strengths of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with GNNs, creating synthetic nodes and edges that effectively balance the dataset. This approach directly targets and rectifies imbalances at the data level. The proposed framework resolves issues such as neglecting graph structures during data generation and creating synthetic structures usable with GNN-based classifiers in downstream tasks. It processes node and edge information concurrently, improving edge balance through node augmentation and subgraph sampling. Additionally, our framework integrates a threshold strategy, aiding in determining optimal edge thresholds during training without time-consuming parameter adjustments. Experiments on the Amazon and Yelp Review datasets highlight the effectiveness of the framework we proposed, especially in minority node identification, where it consistently outperforms baseline models across key performance metrics, demonstrating its potential in the field.
This article addresses the obstacle avoidance problem for setpoint stabilization and path-following tasks in complex dynamic 2D environments that go beyond conventional scenes with isolated convex obstacles. A combined motion planner and controller is proposed for setpoint stabilization that integrates the favorable convergence characteristics of closed-form motion planning techniques with the intuitive representation of system constraints through Model Predictive Control (MPC). The method is analytically proven to accomplish collision avoidance and convergence under certain conditions, and it is extended to path-following control. Various simulation scenarios using a non-holonomic unicycle robot are provided to showcase the efficacy of the control scheme and its improved convergence results compared to standard path-following MPC approaches with obstacle avoidance.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Most recent semantic segmentation methods adopt a fully-convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder progressively reduces the spatial resolution and learns more abstract/semantic visual concepts with larger receptive fields. Since context modeling is critical for segmentation, the latest efforts have been focused on increasing the receptive field, through either dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, the encoder-decoder based FCN architecture remains unchanged. In this paper, we aim to provide an alternative perspective by treating semantic segmentation as a sequence-to-sequence prediction task. Specifically, we deploy a pure transformer (ie, without convolution and resolution reduction) to encode an image as a sequence of patches. With the global context modeled in every layer of the transformer, this encoder can be combined with a simple decoder to provide a powerful segmentation model, termed SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR). Extensive experiments show that SETR achieves new state of the art on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU), Pascal Context (55.83% mIoU) and competitive results on Cityscapes. Particularly, we achieve the first (44.42% mIoU) position in the highly competitive ADE20K test server leaderboard.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
We propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.
We study how to generate captions that are not only accurate in describing an image but also discriminative across different images. The problem is both fundamental and interesting, as most machine-generated captions, despite phenomenal research progresses in the past several years, are expressed in a very monotonic and featureless format. While such captions are normally accurate, they often lack important characteristics in human languages - distinctiveness for each caption and diversity for different images. To address this problem, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network for generating diverse captions across images. Instead of estimating the quality of a caption solely on one image, the proposed comparative adversarial learning framework better assesses the quality of captions by comparing a set of captions within the image-caption joint space. By contrasting with human-written captions and image-mismatched captions, the caption generator effectively exploits the inherent characteristics of human languages, and generates more discriminative captions. We show that our proposed network is capable of producing accurate and diverse captions across images.
Dense video captioning aims to generate text descriptions for all events in an untrimmed video. This involves both detecting and describing events. Therefore, all previous methods on dense video captioning tackle this problem by building two models, i.e. an event proposal and a captioning model, for these two sub-problems. The models are either trained separately or in alternation. This prevents direct influence of the language description to the event proposal, which is important for generating accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end transformer model for dense video captioning. The encoder encodes the video into appropriate representations. The proposal decoder decodes from the encoding with different anchors to form video event proposals. The captioning decoder employs a masking network to restrict its attention to the proposal event over the encoding feature. This masking network converts the event proposal to a differentiable mask, which ensures the consistency between the proposal and captioning during training. In addition, our model employs a self-attention mechanism, which enables the use of efficient non-recurrent structure during encoding and leads to performance improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this end-to-end model on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets, where we achieved 10.12 and 6.58 METEOR score, respectively.