The deep learning technique has been shown to be effectively addressed several image analysis tasks in the computer-aided diagnosis scheme for mammography. The training of an efficacious deep learning model requires large data with diverse styles and qualities. The diversity of data often comes from the use of various scanners of vendors. But, in practice, it is impractical to collect a sufficient amount of diverse data for training. To this end, a novel contrastive learning is developed to equip the deep learning models with better style generalization capability. Specifically, the multi-style and multi-view unsupervised self-learning scheme is carried out to seek robust feature embedding against style diversity as a pretrained model. Afterward, the pretrained network is further fine-tuned to the downstream tasks, e.g., mass detection, matching, BI-RADS rating, and breast density classification. The proposed method has been evaluated extensively and rigorously with mammograms from various vendor style domains and several public datasets. The experimental results suggest that the proposed domain generalization method can effectively improve performance of four mammographic image tasks on the data from both seen and unseen domains, and outperform many state-of-the-art (SOTA) generalization methods.
The synthetic control method (SCM) has become a popular tool for estimating causal effects in policy evaluation, where a single treated unit is observed, and a heterogeneous set of untreated units with pre- and post-policy change data are also observed. However, the synthetic control method faces challenges in accurately predicting post-intervention potential outcome had, contrary to fact, the treatment been withheld, when the pre-intervention period is short or the post-intervention period is long. To address these issues, we propose a novel method that leverages post-intervention information, specifically time-varying correlates of the causal effect called "surrogates", within the synthetic control framework. We establish conditions for identifying model parameters using the proximal inference framework and apply the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach for estimation and inference about the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Interestingly, we uncover specific conditions under which exclusively using post-intervention data suffices for estimation within our framework. Moreover, we explore several extensions, including covariates adjustment, relaxing linearity assumptions through non-parametric identification, and incorporating so-called "contaminated" surrogates, which do not exactly satisfy conditions to be valid surrogates but nevertheless can be incorporated via a simple modification of the proposed approach. Through a simulation study, we demonstrate that our method can outperform other synthetic control methods in estimating both short-term and long-term effects, yielding more accurate inferences. In an empirical application examining the Panic of 1907, one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history, we confirm the practical relevance of our theoretical results.
Conducting causal inference with panel data is a core challenge in social science research. We adapt a deep neural architecture for time series forecasting (the N-BEATS algorithm) to more accurately predict the counterfactual evolution of a treated unit had treatment not occurred. Across a range of settings, the resulting estimator ("SyNBEATS") significantly outperforms commonly employed methods (synthetic controls, two-way fixed effects), and attains comparable or more accurate performance compared to recently proposed methods (synthetic difference-in-differences, matrix completion). Our results highlight how advances in the forecasting literature can be harnessed to improve causal inference in panel data settings.
Unsupervised representation learning has recently helped automatic speech recognition (ASR) to tackle tasks with limited labeled data. Following this, hardware limitations and applications give rise to the question how to take advantage of large pre-trained models efficiently and reduce their complexity. In this work, we study a challenging low resource conversational telephony speech corpus from the medical domain in Vietnamese and German. We show the benefits of using unsupervised techniques beyond simple fine-tuning of large pre-trained models, discuss how to adapt them to a practical telephony task including bandwidth transfer and investigate different data conditions for pre-training and fine-tuning. We outperform the project baselines by 22% relative using pretraining techniques. Further gains of 29% can be achieved by refinements of architecture and training and 6% by adding 0.8 h of in-domain adaptation data.
Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these pretrained models may come with their own biases which would propagate into the finetuned model. In this work, we investigate bias when conceptualized as both spurious correlations between the target task and a sensitive attribute as well as underrepresentation of a particular group in the dataset. Under both notions of bias, we find that (1) models finetuned on top of pretrained models can indeed inherit their biases, but (2) this bias can be corrected for through relatively minor interventions to the finetuning dataset, and often with a negligible impact to performance. Our findings imply that careful curation of the finetuning dataset is important for reducing biases on a downstream task, and doing so can even compensate for bias in the pretrained model.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
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.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
Neural machine translation (NMT) is a deep learning based approach for machine translation, which yields the state-of-the-art translation performance in scenarios where large-scale parallel corpora are available. Although the high-quality and domain-specific translation is crucial in the real world, domain-specific corpora are usually scarce or nonexistent, and thus vanilla NMT performs poorly in such scenarios. Domain adaptation that leverages both out-of-domain parallel corpora as well as monolingual corpora for in-domain translation, is very important for domain-specific translation. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques for NMT.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.