Data scarcity is a notable problem, especially in the medical domain, due to patient data laws. Therefore, efficient Pre-Training techniques could help in combating this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model trained on the time direction of functional neuro-imaging data could help in any downstream task, for example, classifying diseases from healthy controls in fMRI data. We train a Deep Neural Network on Independent components derived from fMRI data using the Independent component analysis (ICA) technique. It learns time direction in the ICA-based data. This pre-trained model is further trained to classify brain disorders in different datasets. Through various experiments, we have shown that learning time direction helps a model learn some causal relation in fMRI data that helps in faster convergence, and consequently, the model generalizes well in downstream classification tasks even with fewer data records.
We present a generalized linear structural causal model, coupled with a novel data-adaptive linear regularization, to recover causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from time series. By leveraging a recently developed stochastic monotone Variational Inequality (VI) formulation, we cast the causal discovery problem as a general convex optimization. Furthermore, we develop a non-asymptotic recovery guarantee and quantifiable uncertainty by solving a linear program to establish confidence intervals for a wide range of non-linear monotone link functions. We validate our theoretical results and show the competitive performance of our method via extensive numerical experiments. Most importantly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in recovering highly interpretable causal DAGs over Sepsis Associated Derangements (SADs) while achieving comparable prediction performance to powerful ``black-box'' models such as XGBoost. Thus, the future adoption of our proposed method to conduct continuous surveillance of high-risk patients by clinicians is much more likely.
Deep image denoising networks have achieved impressive success with the help of a considerably large number of synthetic train datasets. However, real-world denoising is a still challenging problem due to the dissimilarity between distributions of real and synthetic noisy datasets. Although several real-world noisy datasets have been presented, the number of train datasets (i.e., pairs of clean and real noisy images) is limited, and acquiring more real noise datasets is laborious and expensive. To mitigate this problem, numerous attempts to simulate real noise models using generative models have been studied. Nevertheless, previous works had to train multiple networks to handle multiple different noise distributions. By contrast, we propose a new generative model that can synthesize noisy images with multiple different noise distributions. Specifically, we adopt recent contrastive learning to learn distinguishable latent features of the noise. Moreover, our model can generate new noisy images by transferring the noise characteristics solely from a single reference noisy image. We demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of our noise model for both known and unknown noise removal.
A good feature representation is the key to image classification. In practice, image classifiers may be applied in scenarios different from what they have been trained on. This so-called domain shift leads to a significant performance drop in image classification. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) reduces the domain shift by transferring the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. We perform feature disentanglement for UDA by distilling category-relevant features and excluding category-irrelevant features from the global feature maps. This disentanglement prevents the network from overfitting to category-irrelevant information and makes it focus on information useful for classification. This reduces the difficulty of domain alignment and improves the classification accuracy on the target domain. We propose a coarse-to-fine domain adaptation method called Domain Adaptation via Feature Disentanglement~(DAFD), which has two components: (1)the Category-Relevant Feature Selection (CRFS) module, which disentangles the category-relevant features from the category-irrelevant features, and (2)the Dynamic Local Maximum Mean Discrepancy (DLMMD) module, which achieves fine-grained alignment by reducing the discrepancy within the category-relevant features from different domains. Combined with the CRFS, the DLMMD module can align the category-relevant features properly. We conduct comprehensive experiment on four standard datasets. Our results clearly demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our approach in domain adaptive image classification tasks and its competitiveness to the state of the art.
The spread of rumors along with breaking events seriously hinders the truth in the era of social media. Previous studies reveal that due to the lack of annotated resources, rumors presented in minority languages are hard to be detected. Furthermore, the unforeseen breaking events not involved in yesterday's news exacerbate the scarcity of data resources. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot framework based on prompt learning to detect rumors falling in different domains or presented in different languages. More specifically, we firstly represent rumor circulated on social media as diverse propagation threads, then design a hierarchical prompt encoding mechanism to learn language-agnostic contextual representations for both prompts and rumor data. To further enhance domain adaptation, we model the domain-invariant structural features from the propagation threads, to incorporate structural position representations of influential community response. In addition, a new virtual response augmentation method is used to improve model training. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for detecting rumors at early stages.
Test sets are an integral part of evaluating models and gauging progress in object recognition, and more broadly in computer vision and AI. Existing test sets for object recognition, however, suffer from shortcomings such as bias towards the ImageNet characteristics and idiosyncrasies (e.g., ImageNet-V2), being limited to certain types of stimuli (e.g., indoor scenes in ObjectNet), and underestimating the model performance (e.g., ImageNet-A). To mitigate these problems, we introduce a new test set, called D2O, which is sufficiently different from existing test sets. Images are a mix of generated images as well as images crawled from the web. They are diverse, unmodified, and representative of real-world scenarios and cause state-of-the-art models to misclassify them with high confidence. To emphasize generalization, our dataset by design does not come paired with a training set. It contains 8,060 images spread across 36 categories, out of which 29 appear in ImageNet. The best Top-1 accuracy on our dataset is around 60% which is much lower than 91% best Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. We find that popular vision APIs perform very poorly in detecting objects over D2O categories such as ``faces'', ``cars'', and ``cats''. Our dataset also comes with a ``miscellaneous'' category, over which we test the image tagging models. Overall, our investigations demonstrate that the D2O test set contain a mix of images with varied levels of difficulty and is predictive of the average-case performance of models. It can challenge object recognition models for years to come and can spur more research in this fundamental area.
Sounds reach one microphone in a stereo pair sooner than the other, resulting in an interaural time delay that conveys their directions. Estimating a sound's time delay requires finding correspondences between the signals recorded by each microphone. We propose to learn these correspondences through self-supervision, drawing on recent techniques from visual tracking. We adapt the contrastive random walk of Jabri et al. to learn a cycle-consistent representation from unlabeled stereo sounds, resulting in a model that performs on par with supervised methods on "in the wild" internet recordings. We also propose a multimodal contrastive learning model that solves a visually-guided localization task: estimating the time delay for a particular person in a multi-speaker mixture, given a visual representation of their face. Project site: //ificl.github.io/stereocrw/
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods operate on unlabeled data to learn robust representations useful for downstream tasks. Most SSL methods rely on augmentations obtained by transforming the 2D image pixel map. These augmentations ignore the fact that biological vision takes place in an immersive three-dimensional, temporally contiguous environment, and that low-level biological vision relies heavily on depth cues. Using a signal provided by a pretrained state-of-the-art monocular RGB-to-depth model (the \emph{Depth Prediction Transformer}, Ranftl et al., 2021), we explore two distinct approaches to incorporating depth signals into the SSL framework. First, we evaluate contrastive learning using an RGB+depth input representation. Second, we use the depth signal to generate novel views from slightly different camera positions, thereby producing a 3D augmentation for contrastive learning. We evaluate these two approaches on three different SSL methods -- BYOL, SimSiam, and SwAV -- using ImageNette (10 class subset of ImageNet), ImageNet-100 and ImageNet-1k datasets. We find that both approaches to incorporating depth signals improve the robustness and generalization of the baseline SSL methods, though the first approach (with depth-channel concatenation) is superior. For instance, BYOL with the additional depth channel leads to an increase in downstream classification accuracy from 85.3\% to 88.0\% on ImageNette and 84.1\% to 87.0\% on ImageNet-C.
The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an efficient algorithm to mitigate this bias. However, this comes at the price of an underestimation of action values, in addition to increased memory requirements and a slower convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new way to address the maximization bias in the form of a "self-correcting algorithm" for approximating the maximum of an expected value. Our method balances the overestimation of the single estimator used in conventional Q-learning and the underestimation of the double estimator used in Double Q-learning. Applying this strategy to Q-learning results in Self-correcting Q-learning. We show theoretically that this new algorithm enjoys the same convergence guarantees as Q-learning while being more accurate. Empirically, it performs better than Double Q-learning in domains with rewards of high variance, and it even attains faster convergence than Q-learning in domains with rewards of zero or low variance. These advantages transfer to a Deep Q Network implementation that we call Self-correcting DQN and which outperforms regular DQN and Double DQN on several tasks in the Atari 2600 domain.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
Time Series Classification (TSC) is an important and challenging problem in data mining. With the increase of time series data availability, hundreds of TSC algorithms have been proposed. Among these methods, only a few have considered Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform this task. This is surprising as deep learning has seen very successful applications in the last years. DNNs have indeed revolutionized the field of computer vision especially with the advent of novel deeper architectures such as Residual and Convolutional Neural Networks. Apart from images, sequential data such as text and audio can also be processed with DNNs to reach state-of-the-art performance for document classification and speech recognition. In this article, we study the current state-of-the-art performance of deep learning algorithms for TSC by presenting an empirical study of the most recent DNN architectures for TSC. We give an overview of the most successful deep learning applications in various time series domains under a unified taxonomy of DNNs for TSC. We also provide an open source deep learning framework to the TSC community where we implemented each of the compared approaches and evaluated them on a univariate TSC benchmark (the UCR/UEA archive) and 12 multivariate time series datasets. By training 8,730 deep learning models on 97 time series datasets, we propose the most exhaustive study of DNNs for TSC to date.