Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used to assist in designing artificial valves and planning procedures, focusing on local flow features. However, assessing the impact on overall cardiovascular function or predicting longer-term outcomes may require more comprehensive whole heart CFD models. Fitting such models to patient data requires numerous computationally expensive simulations, and depends on specific clinical measurements to constrain model parameters, hampering clinical adoption. Surrogate models can help to accelerate the fitting process while accounting for the added uncertainty. We create a validated patient-specific four-chamber heart CFD model based on the Navier-Stokes-Brinkman (NSB) equations and test Gaussian Process Emulators (GPEs) as a surrogate model for performing a variance-based global sensitivity analysis (GSA). GSA identified preload as the dominant driver of flow in both the right and left side of the heart, respectively. Left-right differences were seen in terms of vascular outflow resistances, with pulmonary artery resistance having a much larger impact on flow than aortic resistance. Our results suggest that GPEs can be used to identify parameters in personalized whole heart CFD models, and highlight the importance of accurate preload measurements.
Generalization of time series prediction remains an important open issue in machine learning, wherein earlier methods have either large generalization error or local minima. We develop an analytically solvable, unsupervised learning scheme that extracts the most informative components for predicting future inputs, termed predictive principal component analysis (PredPCA). Our scheme can effectively remove unpredictable noise and minimize test prediction error through convex optimization. Mathematical analyses demonstrate that, provided with sufficient training samples and sufficiently high-dimensional observations, PredPCA can asymptotically identify hidden states, system parameters, and dimensionalities of canonical nonlinear generative processes, with a global convergence guarantee. We demonstrate the performance of PredPCA using sequential visual inputs comprising hand-digits, rotating 3D objects, and natural scenes. It reliably estimates distinct hidden states and predicts future outcomes of previously unseen test input data, based exclusively on noisy observations. The simple architecture and low computational cost of PredPCA are highly desirable for neuromorphic hardware.
One of the potential solutions for model interpretation is to train a surrogate model: a more transparent model that approximates the behavior of the model to be explained. Typically, classification rules or decision trees are used due to the intelligibility of their logic-based expressions. However, decision trees can grow too deep and rule sets can become too large to approximate a complex model. Unlike paths on a decision tree that must share ancestor nodes (conditions), rules are more flexible. However, the unstructured visual representation of rules makes it hard to make inferences across rules. To address these issues, we present a workflow that includes novel algorithmic and interactive solutions. First, we present Hierarchical Surrogate Rules (HSR), an algorithm that generates hierarchical rules based on user-defined parameters. We also contribute SuRE, a visual analytics (VA) system that integrates HSR and interactive surrogate rule visualizations. Particularly, we present a novel feature-aligned tree to overcome the shortcomings of existing rule visualizations. We evaluate the algorithm in terms of parameter sensitivity, time performance, and comparison with surrogate decision trees and find that it scales reasonably well and outperforms decision trees in many respects. We also evaluate the visualization and the VA system by a usability study with 24 volunteers and an observational study with 7 domain experts. Our investigation shows that the participants can use feature-aligned trees to perform non-trivial tasks with very high accuracy. We also discuss many interesting observations that can be useful for future research on designing effective rule-based VA systems.
Electronic health records (EHRs) contain patients' heterogeneous data that are collected from medical providers involved in the patient's care, including medical notes, clinical events, laboratory test results, symptoms, and diagnoses. In the field of modern healthcare, predicting whether patients would experience any risks based on their EHRs has emerged as a promising research area, in which artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role. To make AI models practically applicable, it is required that the prediction results should be both accurate and interpretable. To achieve this goal, this paper proposed a label-dependent and event-guided risk prediction model (LERP) to predict the presence of multiple disease risks by mainly extracting information from unstructured medical notes. Our model is featured in the following aspects. First, we adopt a label-dependent mechanism that gives greater attention to words from medical notes that are semantically similar to the names of risk labels. Secondly, as the clinical events (e.g., treatments and drugs) can also indicate the health status of patients, our model utilizes the information from events and uses them to generate an event-guided representation of medical notes. Thirdly, both label-dependent and event-guided representations are integrated to make a robust prediction, in which the interpretability is enabled by the attention weights over words from medical notes. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, we apply it to the MIMIC-III dataset, which contains real-world EHRs collected from hospitals. Our method is evaluated in both quantitative and qualitative ways.
5G has been designed to support applications such as connected and automated driving. To this aim, 5G includes a highly flexible New Radio (NR) interface that can be configured to utilize different subcarrier spacings (SCS), slot durations, scheduling, and retransmissions mechanisms. This flexibility can be exploited to support advanced V2X services with strict latency and reliability requirements using V2N2V (Vehicle-to-Network-to-Vehicles) communications instead of direct or sidelink V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle). To analyze this possibility, this paper presents a novel analytical model that estimates the latency of 5G at the radio network level. The model accounts for the use of different numerologies (SCS, slot durations and Cyclic Prefixes), modulation and coding schemes, full-slots or mini-slots, semi-static and dynamic scheduling, different retransmission mechanisms, and broadcast/multicast or unicast transmissions. The model has been used to first analyze the impact of different 5G NR radio configurations on the latency. We then identify which radio configurations and scenarios can 5G NR satisfy the latency and reliability requirements of V2X services using V2N2V communications. This paper considers cooperative lane changes as a case study. The results show that 5G can support advanced V2X services at the radio network level using V2N2V communications under certain conditions that depend on the radio configuration, bandwidth, service requirements and cell traffic load.
Current state of the art acoustic models can easily comprise more than 100 million parameters. This growing complexity demands larger training datasets to maintain a decent generalization of the final decision function. An ideal dataset is not necessarily large in size, but large with respect to the amount of unique speakers, utilized hardware and varying recording conditions. This enables a machine learning model to explore as much of the domain-specific input space as possible during parameter estimation. This work introduces Common Phone, a gender-balanced, multilingual corpus recorded from more than 76.000 contributors via Mozilla's Common Voice project. It comprises around 116 hours of speech enriched with automatically generated phonetic segmentation. A Wav2Vec 2.0 acoustic model was trained with the Common Phone to perform phonetic symbol recognition and validate the quality of the generated phonetic annotation. The architecture achieved a PER of 18.1 % on the entire test set, computed with all 101 unique phonetic symbols, showing slight differences between the individual languages. We conclude that Common Phone provides sufficient variability and reliable phonetic annotation to help bridging the gap between research and application of acoustic models.
Eigendecomposition of symmetric matrices is at the heart of many computer vision algorithms. However, the derivatives of the eigenvectors tend to be numerically unstable, whether using the SVD to compute them analytically or using the Power Iteration (PI) method to approximate them. This instability arises in the presence of eigenvalues that are close to each other. This makes integrating eigendecomposition into deep networks difficult and often results in poor convergence, particularly when dealing with large matrices. While this can be mitigated by partitioning the data into small arbitrary groups, doing so has no theoretical basis and makes it impossible to exploit the full power of eigendecomposition. In previous work, we mitigated this using SVD during the forward pass and PI to compute the gradients during the backward pass. However, the iterative deflation procedure required to compute multiple eigenvectors using PI tends to accumulate errors and yield inaccurate gradients. Here, we show that the Taylor expansion of the SVD gradient is theoretically equivalent to the gradient obtained using PI without relying in practice on an iterative process and thus yields more accurate gradients. We demonstrate the benefits of this increased accuracy for image classification and style transfer.
Many video classification applications require access to personal data, thereby posing an invasive security risk to the users' privacy. We propose a privacy-preserving implementation of single-frame method based video classification with convolutional neural networks that allows a party to infer a label from a video without necessitating the video owner to disclose their video to other entities in an unencrypted manner. Similarly, our approach removes the requirement of the classifier owner from revealing their model parameters to outside entities in plaintext. To this end, we combine existing Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols for private image classification with our novel MPC protocols for oblivious single-frame selection and secure label aggregation across frames. The result is an end-to-end privacy-preserving video classification pipeline. We evaluate our proposed solution in an application for private human emotion recognition. Our results across a variety of security settings, spanning honest and dishonest majority configurations of the computing parties, and for both passive and active adversaries, demonstrate that videos can be classified with state-of-the-art accuracy, and without leaking sensitive user information.
This work focuses on mitigating two limitations in the joint learning of local feature detectors and descriptors. First, the ability to estimate the local shape (scale, orientation, etc.) of feature points is often neglected during dense feature extraction, while the shape-awareness is crucial to acquire stronger geometric invariance. Second, the localization accuracy of detected keypoints is not sufficient to reliably recover camera geometry, which has become the bottleneck in tasks such as 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we present ASLFeat, with three light-weight yet effective modifications to mitigate above issues. First, we resort to deformable convolutional networks to densely estimate and apply local transformation. Second, we take advantage of the inherent feature hierarchy to restore spatial resolution and low-level details for accurate keypoint localization. Finally, we use a peakiness measurement to relate feature responses and derive more indicative detection scores. The effect of each modification is thoroughly studied, and the evaluation is extensively conducted across a variety of practical scenarios. State-of-the-art results are reported that demonstrate the superiority of our methods.
Recently, Attention-Gated Convolutional Neural Networks (AGCNNs) perform well on several essential sentence classification tasks and show robust performance in practical applications. However, AGCNNs are required to set many hyperparameters, and it is not known how sensitive the model's performance changes with them. In this paper, we conduct a sensitivity analysis on the effect of different hyperparameters s of AGCNNs, e.g., the kernel window size and the number of feature maps. Also, we investigate the effect of different combinations of hyperparameters settings on the model's performance to analyze to what extent different parameters settings contribute to AGCNNs' performance. Meanwhile, we draw practical advice from a wide range of empirical results. Through the sensitivity analysis experiment, we improve the hyperparameters settings of AGCNNs. Experiments show that our proposals achieve an average of 0.81% and 0.67% improvements on AGCNN-NLReLU-rand and AGCNN-SELU-rand, respectively; and an average of 0.47% and 0.45% improvements on AGCNN-NLReLU-static and AGCNN-SELU-static, respectively.
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become an important pillar in modern "smart city" framework which demands intelligent involvement of machines. Traffic load recognition can be categorized as an important and challenging issue for such systems. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have drawn considerable amount of interest in many areas such as weather classification, human rights violation detection through images, due to its accurate prediction capabilities. This work tackles real-life traffic load recognition problem on System-On-a-Programmable-Chip (SOPC) platform and coin it as MAT-CNN- SOPC, which uses an intelligent re-training mechanism of the CNN with known environments. The proposed methodology is capable of enhancing the efficacy of the approach by 2.44x in comparison to the state-of-art and proven through experimental analysis. We have also introduced a mathematical equation, which is capable of quantifying the suitability of using different CNN models over the other for a particular application based implementation.