Pulse timing is an important topic in nuclear instrumentation, with far-reaching applications from high energy physics to radiation imaging. While high-speed analog-to-digital converters become more and more developed and accessible, their potential uses and merits in nuclear detector signal processing are still uncertain, partially due to associated timing algorithms which are not fully understood and utilized. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on deep learning for timing analysis of modularized nuclear detectors without explicit needs of labelling event data. By taking advantage of the inner time correlation of individual detectors, a label-free loss function with a specially designed regularizer is formed to supervise the training of neural networks towards a meaningful and accurate mapping function. We mathematically demonstrate the existence of the optimal function desired by the method, and give a systematic algorithm for training and calibration of the model. The proposed method is validated on two experimental datasets. In the toy experiment, the neural network model achieves the single-channel time resolution of 8.8 ps and exhibits robustness against concept drift in the dataset. In the electromagnetic calorimeter experiment, several neural network models (FC, CNN and LSTM) are tested to show their conformance to the underlying physical constraint and to judge their performance against traditional methods. In total, the proposed method works well in either ideal or noisy experimental condition and recovers the time information from waveform samples successfully and precisely.
Deep learning-based medical image segmentation models suffer from performance degradation when deployed to a new healthcare center. To address this issue, unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-source domain generalization methods have been proposed, which, however, are less favorable for clinical practice due to the cost of acquiring target-domain data and the privacy concerns associated with redistributing the data from multiple source domains. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{C}hannel-level \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{S}ingle \textbf{D}omain \textbf{G}eneralization (\textbf{C$^2$SDG}) model for medical image segmentation. In C$^2$SDG, the shallower features of each image and its style-augmented counterpart are extracted and used for contrastive training, resulting in the disentangled style representations and structure representations. The segmentation is performed based solely on the structure representations. Our method is novel in the contrastive perspective that enables channel-wise feature disentanglement using a single source domain. We evaluated C$^2$SDG against six SDG methods on a multi-domain joint optic cup and optic disc segmentation benchmark. Our results suggest the effectiveness of each module in C$^2$SDG and also indicate that C$^2$SDG outperforms the baseline and all competing methods with a large margin. The code will be available at \url{//github.com/ShishuaiHu/CCSDG}.
This paper considers a data detection problem in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with hardware impairments. To address challenges posed by nonlinear and unknown distortion in received signals, two learning-based detection methods, referred to as model-driven and data-driven, are presented. The model-driven method employs a generalized Gaussian distortion model to approximate the conditional distribution of the distorted received signal. By using the outputs of coarse data detection as noisy training data, the model-driven method avoids the need for additional training overhead beyond traditional pilot overhead for channel estimation. An expectation-maximization algorithm is devised to accurately learn the parameters of the distortion model from noisy training data. To resolve a model mismatch problem in the model-driven method, the data-driven method employs a deep neural network (DNN) for approximating a-posteriori probabilities for each received signal. This method uses the outputs of the model-driven method as noisy labels and therefore does not require extra training overhead. To avoid the overfitting problem caused by noisy labels, a robust DNN training algorithm is devised, which involves a warm-up period, sample selection, and loss correction. Simulation results demonstrate that the two proposed methods outperform existing solutions with the same overhead under various hardware impairment scenarios.
Infrared imaging systems have a vast array of potential applications in pedestrian detection and autonomous driving, and their safety performance is of great concern. However, few studies have explored the safety of infrared imaging systems in real-world settings. Previous research has used physical perturbations such as small bulbs and thermal "QR codes" to attack infrared imaging detectors, but such methods are highly visible and lack stealthiness. Other researchers have used hot and cold blocks to deceive infrared imaging detectors, but this method is limited in its ability to execute attacks from various angles. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel physical attack called adversarial infrared blocks (AdvIB). By optimizing the physical parameters of the adversarial infrared blocks, this method can execute a stealthy black-box attack on thermal imaging system from various angles. We evaluate the proposed method based on its effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness. Our physical tests show that the proposed method achieves a success rate of over 80% under most distance and angle conditions, validating its effectiveness. For stealthiness, our method involves attaching the adversarial infrared block to the inside of clothing, enhancing its stealthiness. Additionally, we test the proposed method on advanced detectors, and experimental results demonstrate an average attack success rate of 51.2%, proving its robustness. Overall, our proposed AdvIB method offers a promising avenue for conducting stealthy, effective and robust black-box attacks on thermal imaging system, with potential implications for real-world safety and security applications.
Purpose: Congenital heart defect (CHD) is the most common birth defect. Thoracic echocardiography (TTE) can provide sufficient cardiac structure information, evaluate hemodynamics and cardiac function, and is an effective method for atrial septal defect (ASD) examination. This paper aims to study a deep learning method based on cardiac ultrasound video to assist in ASD diagnosis. Materials and methods: We select two standard views of the atrial septum (subAS) and low parasternal four-compartment view (LPS4C) as the two views to identify ASD. We enlist data from 300 children patients as part of a double-blind experiment for five-fold cross-validation to verify the performance of our model. In addition, data from 30 children patients (15 positives and 15 negatives) are collected for clinician testing and compared to our model test results (these 30 samples do not participate in model training). We propose an echocardiography video-based atrial septal defect diagnosis system. In our model, we present a block random selection, maximal agreement decision and frame sampling strategy for training and testing respectively, resNet18 and r3D networks are used to extract the frame features and aggregate them to build a rich video-level representation. Results: We validate our model using our private dataset by five-cross validation. For ASD detection, we achieve 89.33 AUC, 84.95 accuracy, 85.70 sensitivity, 81.51 specificity and 81.99 F1 score. Conclusion: The proposed model is multiple instances learning-based deep learning model for video atrial septal defect detection which effectively improves ASD detection accuracy when compared to the performances of previous networks and clinical doctors.
Despite significant advances in the field of deep learning in ap-plications to various areas, an explanation of the learning pro-cess of neural network models remains an important open ques-tion. The purpose of this paper is a comprehensive comparison and description of neural network architectures in terms of ge-ometry and topology. We focus on the internal representation of neural networks and on the dynamics of changes in the topology and geometry of a data manifold on different layers. In this paper, we use the concepts of topological data analysis (TDA) and persistent homological fractal dimension. We present a wide range of experiments with various datasets and configurations of convolutional neural network (CNNs) architectures and Transformers in CV and NLP tasks. Our work is a contribution to the development of the important field of explainable and interpretable AI within the framework of geometrical deep learning.
Tabular data sharing serves as a common method for data exchange. However, sharing sensitive information without adequate privacy protection can compromise individual privacy. Thus, ensuring privacy-preserving data sharing is crucial. Differential privacy (DP) is regarded as the gold standard in data privacy. Despite this, current DP methods tend to generate privacy-preserving tabular datasets that often suffer from limited practical utility due to heavy perturbation and disregard for the tables' utility dynamics. Besides, there has not been much research on selective attribute release, particularly in the context of controlled partially perturbed data sharing. This has significant implications for scenarios such as cross-agency data sharing in real-world situations. We introduce OptimShare: a utility-focused, multi-criteria solution designed to perturb input datasets selectively optimized for specific real-world applications. OptimShare combines the principles of differential privacy, fuzzy logic, and probability theory to establish an integrated tool for privacy-preserving data sharing. Empirical assessments confirm that OptimShare successfully strikes a balance between better data utility and robust privacy, effectively serving various real-world problem scenarios.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
The content based image retrieval aims to find the similar images from a large scale dataset against a query image. Generally, the similarity between the representative features of the query image and dataset images is used to rank the images for retrieval. In early days, various hand designed feature descriptors have been investigated based on the visual cues such as color, texture, shape, etc. that represent the images. However, the deep learning has emerged as a dominating alternative of hand-designed feature engineering from a decade. It learns the features automatically from the data. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning based developments in the past decade for content based image retrieval. The categorization of existing state-of-the-art methods from different perspectives is also performed for greater understanding of the progress. The taxonomy used in this survey covers different supervision, different networks, different descriptor type and different retrieval type. A performance analysis is also performed using the state-of-the-art methods. The insights are also presented for the benefit of the researchers to observe the progress and to make the best choices. The survey presented in this paper will help in further research progress in image retrieval using deep learning.
It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to treat all samples equally and target at maximizing the performance on average. In this work, we revisit this paradigm through a careful study on how different samples contribute to the overall performance measured in terms of mAP. Our study suggests that the samples in each mini-batch are neither independent nor equally important, and therefore a better classifier on average does not necessarily mean higher mAP. Motivated by this study, we propose the notion of Prime Samples, those that play a key role in driving the detection performance. We further develop a simple yet effective sampling and learning strategy called PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) that directs the focus of the training process towards such samples. Our experiments demonstrate that it is often more effective to focus on prime samples than hard samples when training a detector. Particularly, On the MSCOCO dataset, PISA outperforms the random sampling baseline and hard mining schemes, e.g. OHEM and Focal Loss, consistently by more than 1% on both single-stage and two-stage detectors, with a strong backbone ResNeXt-101.