Purpose: We propose a general framework for quantifying predictive uncertainties of dose-related quantities and leveraging this information in a dose mimicking problem in the context of automated radiation therapy treatment planning. Methods: A three-step pipeline, comprising feature extraction, dose statistic prediction and dose mimicking, is employed. In particular, the features are produced by a convolutional variational autoencoder and used as inputs in a previously developed nonparametric Bayesian statistical method, estimating the multivariate predictive distribution of a collection of predefined dose statistics. Specially developed objective functions are then used to construct a probabilistic dose mimicking problem based on the produced distributions, creating deliverable treatment plans. Results: The numerical experiments are performed using a dataset of 94 retrospective treatment plans of prostate cancer patients. We show that the features extracted by the variational autoencoder capture geometric information of substantial relevance to the dose statistic prediction problem and are related to dose statistics in a more regularized fashion than hand-crafted features. The estimated predictive distributions are reasonable and outperforms a non-input-dependent benchmark method, and the deliverable plans produced by the probabilistic dose mimicking agree better with their clinical counterparts than for a non-probabilistic formulation. Conclusions: We demonstrate that prediction of dose-related quantities may be extended to include uncertainty estimation and that such probabilistic information may be leveraged in a dose mimicking problem. The treatment plans produced by the proposed pipeline resemble their original counterparts well, illustrating the merits of a holistic approach to automated planning based on probabilistic modeling.
We consider a multi-armed bandit problem motivated by situations where only the extreme values, as opposed to expected values in the classical bandit setting, are of interest. We propose distribution free algorithms using robust statistics and characterize the statistical properties. We show that the provided algorithms achieve vanishing extremal regret under weaker conditions than existing algorithms. Performance of the algorithms is demonstrated for the finite-sample setting using numerical experiments. The results show superior performance of the proposed algorithms compared to the well known algorithms.
Deep learning has the potential to augment many components of the clinical workflow, such as medical image interpretation. However, the translation of these black box algorithms into clinical practice has been marred by the relative lack of transparency compared to conventional machine learning methods, hindering in clinician trust in the systems for critical medical decision-making. Specifically, common deep learning approaches do not have intuitive ways of expressing uncertainty with respect to cases that might require further human review. Furthermore, the possibility of algorithmic bias has caused hesitancy regarding the use of developed algorithms in clinical settings. To these ends, we explore how conformal methods can complement deep learning models by providing both clinically intuitive way (by means of confidence prediction sets) of expressing model uncertainty as well as facilitating model transparency in clinical workflows. In this paper, we conduct a field survey with clinicians to assess clinical use-cases of conformal predictions. Next, we conduct experiments with a mammographic breast density and dermatology photography datasets to demonstrate the utility of conformal predictions in "rule-in" and "rule-out" disease scenarios. Further, we show that conformal predictors can be used to equalize coverage with respect to patient demographics such as race and skin tone. We find that a conformal predictions to be a promising framework with potential to increase clinical usability and transparency for better collaboration between deep learning algorithms and clinicians.
The annotation of domain experts is important for some medical applications where the objective groundtruth is ambiguous to define, e.g., the rehabilitation for some chronic diseases, and the prescreening of some musculoskeletal abnormalities without further medical examinations. However, improper uses of the annotations may hinder developing reliable models. On one hand, forcing the use of a single groundtruth generated from multiple annotations is less informative for the modeling. On the other hand, feeding the model with all the annotations without proper regularization is noisy given existing disagreements. For such issues, we propose a novel agreement learning framework to tackle the challenge of learning from multiple annotators without objective groundtruth. The framework has two streams, with one stream fitting with the multiple annotators and the other stream learning agreement information between the annotators. In particular, the agreement learning stream produces regularization information to the classifier stream, tuning its decision to be better in line with the agreement between the annotators. The proposed method can be easily plugged to existing backbones developed with majority-voted groundtruth or multiple annotations. Thereon, experiments on two medical datasets demonstrate improved agreement levels with annotators.
Deception is virtually ubiquitous in warfare, and should be a central consideration for military operations research. However, studies of agent behaviour in simulated operations have typically neglected to include explicit models of deception. This paper proposes that a computational model that approximates the human deceptive planning process would enable the authentic representation of strategic deception in multi-agent systems. The proposed deceptive planning model provides a framework for studying, explaining, and discovering deceptive behaviours, enabling the generation of novel solutions to adversarial planning problems.
To generate "accurate" scene graphs, almost all existing methods predict pairwise relationships in a deterministic manner. However, we argue that visual relationships are often semantically ambiguous. Specifically, inspired by linguistic knowledge, we classify the ambiguity into three types: Synonymy Ambiguity, Hyponymy Ambiguity, and Multi-view Ambiguity. The ambiguity naturally leads to the issue of \emph{implicit multi-label}, motivating the need for diverse predictions. In this work, we propose a novel plug-and-play Probabilistic Uncertainty Modeling (PUM) module. It models each union region as a Gaussian distribution, whose variance measures the uncertainty of the corresponding visual content. Compared to the conventional deterministic methods, such uncertainty modeling brings stochasticity of feature representation, which naturally enables diverse predictions. As a byproduct, PUM also manages to cover more fine-grained relationships and thus alleviates the issue of bias towards frequent relationships. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Visual Genome benchmark show that combining PUM with newly proposed ResCAGCN can achieve state-of-the-art performances, especially under the mean recall metric. Furthermore, we prove the universal effectiveness of PUM by plugging it into some existing models and provide insightful analysis of its ability to generate diverse yet plausible visual relationships.
A semantic feature extraction method for multitemporal high resolution aerial image registration is proposed in this paper. These features encode properties or information about temporally invariant objects such as roads and help deal with issues such as changing foliage in image registration, which classical handcrafted features are unable to address. These features are extracted from a semantic segmentation network and have shown good robustness and accuracy in registering aerial images across years and seasons in the experiments.
Data augmentation has been widely used for training deep learning systems for medical image segmentation and plays an important role in obtaining robust and transformation-invariant predictions. However, it has seldom been used at test time for segmentation and not been formulated in a consistent mathematical framework. In this paper, we first propose a theoretical formulation of test-time augmentation for deep learning in image recognition, where the prediction is obtained through estimating its expectation by Monte Carlo simulation with prior distributions of parameters in an image acquisition model that involves image transformations and noise. We then propose a novel uncertainty estimation method based on the formulated test-time augmentation. Experiments with segmentation of fetal brains and brain tumors from 2D and 3D Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) showed that 1) our test-time augmentation outperforms a single-prediction baseline and dropout-based multiple predictions, and 2) it provides a better uncertainty estimation than calculating the model-based uncertainty alone and helps to reduce overconfident incorrect predictions.
Accurately classifying malignancy of lesions detected in a screening scan plays a critical role in reducing false positives. Through extracting and analyzing a large numbers of quantitative image features, radiomics holds great potential to differentiate the malignant tumors from benign ones. Since not all radiomic features contribute to an effective classifying model, selecting an optimal feature subset is critical. This work proposes a new multi-objective based feature selection (MO-FS) algorithm that considers both sensitivity and specificity simultaneously as the objective functions during the feature selection. In MO-FS, we developed a modified entropy based termination criterion (METC) to stop the algorithm automatically rather than relying on a preset number of generations. We also designed a solution selection methodology for multi-objective learning using the evidential reasoning approach (SMOLER) to automatically select the optimal solution from the Pareto-optimal set. Furthermore, an adaptive mutation operation was developed to generate the mutation probability in MO-FS automatically. The MO-FS was evaluated for classifying lung nodule malignancy in low-dose CT and breast lesion malignancy in digital breast tomosynthesis. Compared with other commonly used feature selection methods, the experimental results for both lung nodule and breast lesion malignancy classification demonstrated that the feature set by selected MO-FS achieved better classification performance.
The task of face attribute manipulation has found increasing applications, but still remains challeng- ing with the requirement of editing the attributes of a face image while preserving its unique details. In this paper, we choose to combine the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for photorealistic image genera- tion. We propose an effective method to modify a modest amount of pixels in the feature maps of an encoder, changing the attribute strength contin- uously without hindering global information. Our training objectives of VAE and GAN are reinforced by the supervision of face recognition loss and cy- cle consistency loss for faithful preservation of face details. Moreover, we generate facial masks to en- force background consistency, which allows our training to focus on manipulating the foreground face rather than background. Experimental results demonstrate our method, called Mask-Adversarial AutoEncoder (M-AAE), can generate high-quality images with changing attributes and outperforms prior methods in detail preservation.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.