The Multiscale Hierarchical Decomposition Method (MHDM) was introduced as an iterative method for total variation regularization, with the aim of recovering details at various scales from images corrupted by additive or multiplicative noise. Given its success beyond image restoration, we extend the MHDM iterates in order to solve larger classes of linear ill-posed problems in Banach spaces. Thus, we define the MHDM for more general convex or even non-convex penalties, and provide convergence results for the data fidelity term. We also propose a flexible version of the method using adaptive convex functionals for regularization, and show an interesting multiscale decomposition of the data. This decomposition result is highlighted for the Bregman iteration method that can be expressed as an adaptive MHDM. Furthermore, we state necessary and sufficient conditions when the MHDM iteration agrees with the variational Tikhonov regularization, which is the case, for instance, for one-dimensional total variation denoising. Finally, we investigate several particular instances and perform numerical experiments that point out the robust behavior of the MHDM.
IMPORTANCE The response effectiveness of different large language models (LLMs) and various individuals, including medical students, graduate students, and practicing physicians, in pediatric ophthalmology consultations, has not been clearly established yet. OBJECTIVE Design a 100-question exam based on pediatric ophthalmology to evaluate the performance of LLMs in highly specialized scenarios and compare them with the performance of medical students and physicians at different levels. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This survey study assessed three LLMs, namely ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), GPT-4, and PaLM2, were assessed alongside three human cohorts: medical students, postgraduate students, and attending physicians, in their ability to answer questions related to pediatric ophthalmology. It was conducted by administering questionnaires in the form of test papers through the LLM network interface, with the valuable participation of volunteers. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Mean scores of LLM and humans on 100 multiple-choice questions, as well as the answer stability, correlation, and response confidence of each LLM. RESULTS GPT-4 performed comparably to attending physicians, while ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and PaLM2 outperformed medical students but slightly trailed behind postgraduate students. Furthermore, GPT-4 exhibited greater stability and confidence when responding to inquiries compared to ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and PaLM2. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Our results underscore the potential for LLMs to provide medical assistance in pediatric ophthalmology and suggest significant capacity to guide the education of medical students.
Hesitant fuzzy sets are widely used in the instances of uncertainty and hesitation. The inclusion relationship is an important and foundational definition for sets. Hesitant fuzzy set, as a kind of set, needs explicit definition of inclusion relationship. Base on the hesitant fuzzy membership degree of discrete form, several kinds of inclusion relationships for hesitant fuzzy sets are proposed. And then some foundational propositions of hesitant fuzzy sets and the families of hesitant fuzzy sets are presented. Finally, some foundational propositions of hesitant fuzzy information systems with respect to parameter reductions are put forward, and an example and an algorithm are given to illustrate the processes of parameter reductions.
We collect robust proposals given in the field of regression models with heteroscedastic errors. Our motivation stems from the fact that the practitioner frequently faces the confluence of two phenomena in the context of data analysis: non--linearity and heteroscedasticity. The impact of heteroscedasticity on the precision of the estimators is well--known, however the conjunction of these two phenomena makes handling outliers more difficult. An iterative procedure to estimate the parameters of a heteroscedastic non--linear model is considered. The studied estimators combine weighted $MM-$regression estimators, to control the impact of high leverage points, and a robust method to estimate the parameters of the variance function.
Block majorization-minimization (BMM) is a simple iterative algorithm for nonconvex constrained optimization that sequentially minimizes majorizing surrogates of the objective function in each block coordinate while the other coordinates are held fixed. BMM entails a large class of optimization algorithms such as block coordinate descent and its proximal-point variant, expectation-minimization, and block projected gradient descent. We establish that for general constrained nonconvex optimization, BMM with strongly convex surrogates can produce an $\epsilon$-stationary point within $O(\epsilon^{-2}(\log \epsilon^{-1})^{2})$ iterations and asymptotically converges to the set of stationary points. Furthermore, we propose a trust-region variant of BMM that can handle surrogates that are only convex and still obtain the same iteration complexity and asymptotic stationarity. These results hold robustly even when the convex sub-problems are inexactly solved as long as the optimality gaps are summable. As an application, we show that a regularized version of the celebrated multiplicative update algorithm for nonnegative matrix factorization by Lee and Seung has iteration complexity of $O(\epsilon^{-2}(\log \epsilon^{-1})^{2})$. The same result holds for a wide class of regularized nonnegative tensor decomposition algorithms as well as the classical block projected gradient descent algorithm. These theoretical results are validated through various numerical experiments.
Two-level stochastic optimization formulations have become instrumental in a number of machine learning contexts such as continual learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning, and hyperparameter tuning. Practical stochastic bilevel optimization problems become challenging in optimization or learning scenarios where the number of variables is high or there are constraints. In this paper, we introduce a bilevel stochastic gradient method for bilevel problems with nonlinear and possibly nonconvex lower-level constraints. We also present a comprehensive convergence theory that addresses both the lower-level unconstrained and constrained cases and covers all inexact calculations of the adjoint gradient (also called hypergradient), such as the inexact solution of the lower-level problem, inexact computation of the adjoint formula (due to the inexact solution of the adjoint equation or use of a truncated Neumann series), and noisy estimates of the gradients, Hessians, and Jacobians involved. To promote the use of bilevel optimization in large-scale learning, we have developed new low-rank practical bilevel stochastic gradient methods (BSG-N-FD and~BSG-1) that do not require second-order derivatives and, in the lower-level unconstrained case, dismiss any matrix-vector products.
We import the algebro-geometric notion of a complete collineation into the study of maximum likelihood estimation in directed Gaussian graphical models. A complete collineation produces a perturbation of sample data, which we call a stabilisation of the sample. While a maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) may not exist or be unique given sample data, it is always unique given a stabilisation. We relate the MLE given a stabilisation to the MLE given original sample data, when one exists, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for the MLE given a stabilisation to be one given the original sample. For linear regression models, we show that the MLE given any stabilisation is the minimal norm choice among the MLEs given an original sample. We show that the MLE has a well-defined limit as the stabilisation of a sample tends to the original sample, and that the limit is an MLE given the original sample, when one exists. Finally, we study which MLEs given a sample can arise as such limits. We reduce this to a question regarding the non-emptiness of certain algebraic varieties.
Quantum computing has recently emerged as a transformative technology. Yet, its promised advantages rely on efficiently translating quantum operations into viable physical realizations. In this work, we use generative machine learning models, specifically denoising diffusion models (DMs), to facilitate this transformation. Leveraging text-conditioning, we steer the model to produce desired quantum operations within gate-based quantum circuits. Notably, DMs allow to sidestep during training the exponential overhead inherent in the classical simulation of quantum dynamics -- a consistent bottleneck in preceding ML techniques. We demonstrate the model's capabilities across two tasks: entanglement generation and unitary compilation. The model excels at generating new circuits and supports typical DM extensions such as masking and editing to, for instance, align the circuit generation to the constraints of the targeted quantum device. Given their flexibility and generalization abilities, we envision DMs as pivotal in quantum circuit synthesis, enhancing both practical applications but also insights into theoretical quantum computation.
Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a significant advancement in surgical procedures, offering a solution to the challenges posed by traditional neuronavigation methods. These conventional techniques often necessitate surgeons to split their focus between the surgical site and a separate monitor that displays guiding images. Over the years, many systems have been developed to register and track the hologram at the targeted locations, each employed its own evaluation technique. On the other hand, hologram displacement measurement is not a straightforward task because of various factors such as occlusion, Vengence-Accomodation Conflict, and unstable holograms in space. In this study, we explore and classify different techniques for assessing an AR-assisted neurosurgery system and propose a new technique to systematize the assessment procedure. Moreover, we conduct a deeper investigation to assess surgeon error in the pre- and intra-operative phases of the surgery based on the respective feedback given. We found that although the system can undergo registration and tracking errors, physical feedback can significantly reduce the error caused by hologram displacement. However, the lack of visual feedback on the hologram does not have a significant effect on the user 3D perception.
Persistent homology (PH) characterizes the shape of brain networks through the persistence features. Group comparison of persistence features from brain networks can be challenging as they are inherently heterogeneous. A recent scale-space representation of persistence diagram (PD) through heat diffusion reparameterizes using the finite number of Fourier coefficients with respect to the Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigenfunction expansion of the domain, which provides a powerful vectorized algebraic representation for group comparisons of PDs. In this study, we advance a transposition-based permutation test for comparing multiple groups of PDs through the heat-diffusion estimates of the PDs. We evaluate the empirical performance of the spectral transposition test in capturing within- and between-group similarity and dissimilarity with respect to statistical variation of topological noise and hole location. We also illustrate how the method extends naturally into a clustering scheme by subtyping individuals with post-stroke aphasia through the PDs of their resting-state functional brain networks.
The goal of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to generate human-interpretable explanations, but there are no computationally precise theories of how humans interpret AI generated explanations. The lack of theory means that validation of XAI must be done empirically, on a case-by-case basis, which prevents systematic theory-building in XAI. We propose a psychological theory of how humans draw conclusions from saliency maps, the most common form of XAI explanation, which for the first time allows for precise prediction of explainee inference conditioned on explanation. Our theory posits that absent explanation humans expect the AI to make similar decisions to themselves, and that they interpret an explanation by comparison to the explanations they themselves would give. Comparison is formalized via Shepard's universal law of generalization in a similarity space, a classic theory from cognitive science. A pre-registered user study on AI image classifications with saliency map explanations demonstrate that our theory quantitatively matches participants' predictions of the AI.