Assessing tumor response to systemic therapies is one of the main applications of PET/CT. Routinely, only a small subset of index lesions out of multiple lesions is analyzed. However, this operator dependent selection may bias the results due to possible significant inter-metastatic heterogeneity of response to therapy. Automated, AI based approaches for lesion tracking hold promise in enabling the analysis of many more lesions and thus providing a better assessment of tumor response. This work introduces a Siamese CNN approach for lesion tracking between PET/CT scans. Our approach is applied on the laborious task of tracking a high number of bone lesions in full-body baseline and follow-up [68Ga]Ga- or [18F]F-PSMA PET/CT scans after two cycles of [177Lu]Lu-PSMA therapy of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer patients. Data preparation includes lesion segmentation and affine registration. Our algorithm extracts suitable lesion patches and forwards them into a Siamese CNN trained to classify the lesion patch pairs as corresponding or non-corresponding lesions. Experiments have been performed with different input patch types and a Siamese network in 2D and 3D. The CNN model successfully learned to classify lesion assignments, reaching a lesion tracking accuracy of 83 % in its best configuration with an AUC = 0.91. For remaining lesions the pipeline accomplished a re-identification rate of 89 %. We proved that a CNN may facilitate the tracking of multiple lesions in PSMA PET/CT scans. Future clinical studies are necessary if this improves the prediction of the outcome of therapies.
Agent-based modeling and simulation has evolved as a powerful tool for modeling complex systems, offering insights into emergent behaviors and interactions among diverse agents. Integrating large language models into agent-based modeling and simulation presents a promising avenue for enhancing simulation capabilities. This paper surveys the landscape of utilizing large language models in agent-based modeling and simulation, examining their challenges and promising future directions. In this survey, since this is an interdisciplinary field, we first introduce the background of agent-based modeling and simulation and large language model-empowered agents. We then discuss the motivation for applying large language models to agent-based simulation and systematically analyze the challenges in environment perception, human alignment, action generation, and evaluation. Most importantly, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent works of large language model-empowered agent-based modeling and simulation in multiple scenarios, which can be divided into four domains: cyber, physical, social, and hybrid, covering simulation of both real-world and virtual environments. Finally, since this area is new and quickly evolving, we discuss the open problems and promising future directions.
Multi-modal 3D scene understanding has gained considerable attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as autonomous driving and human-computer interaction. Compared to conventional single-modal 3D understanding, introducing an additional modality not only elevates the richness and precision of scene interpretation but also ensures a more robust and resilient understanding. This becomes especially crucial in varied and challenging environments where solely relying on 3D data might be inadequate. While there has been a surge in the development of multi-modal 3D methods over past three years, especially those integrating multi-camera images (3D+2D) and textual descriptions (3D+language), a comprehensive and in-depth review is notably absent. In this article, we present a systematic survey of recent progress to bridge this gap. We begin by briefly introducing a background that formally defines various 3D multi-modal tasks and summarizes their inherent challenges. After that, we present a novel taxonomy that delivers a thorough categorization of existing methods according to modalities and tasks, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, comparative results of recent approaches on several benchmark datasets, together with insightful analysis, are offered. Finally, we discuss the unresolved issues and provide several potential avenues for future research.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detection. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset, called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.