Alzheimer's Disease is the most common cause of dementia. Accurate diagnosis and prognosis of this disease are essential to design an appropriate treatment plan, increasing the life expectancy of the patient. Intense research has been conducted on the use of machine learning to identify Alzheimer's Disease from neuroimaging data, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging. In recent years, advances of deep learning in computer vision suggest a new research direction for this problem. Current deep learning-based approaches in this field, however, have a number of drawbacks, including the interpretability of model decisions, a lack of generalizability information and a lower performance compared to traditional machine learning techniques. In this paper, we design a two-stage framework to overcome these limitations. In the first stage, an ensemble of 125 U-Nets is used to grade the input image, producing a 3D map that reflects the disease severity at voxel-level. This map can help to localize abnormal brain areas caused by the disease. In the second stage, we model a graph per individual using the generated grading map and other information about the subject. We propose to use a graph convolutional neural network classifier for the final classification. As a result, our framework demonstrates comparative performance to the state-of-the-art methods in different datasets for both diagnosis and prognosis. We also demonstrate that the use of a large ensemble of U-Nets offers a better generalization capacity for our framework.
ChatGPT is a recent chatbot service released by OpenAI and is receiving increasing attention over the past few months. While evaluations of various aspects of ChatGPT have been done, its robustness, i.e., the performance to unexpected inputs, is still unclear to the public. Robustness is of particular concern in responsible AI, especially for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of the robustness of ChatGPT from the adversarial and out-of-distribution (OOD) perspective. To do so, we employ the AdvGLUE and ANLI benchmarks to assess adversarial robustness and the Flipkart review and DDXPlus medical diagnosis datasets for OOD evaluation. We select several popular foundation models as baselines. Results show that ChatGPT shows consistent advantages on most adversarial and OOD classification and translation tasks. However, the absolute performance is far from perfection, which suggests that adversarial and OOD robustness remains a significant threat to foundation models. Moreover, ChatGPT shows astounding performance in understanding dialogue-related texts and we find that it tends to provide informal suggestions for medical tasks instead of definitive answers. Finally, we present in-depth discussions of possible research directions.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.
It has been a long time that computer architecture and systems are optimized to enable efficient execution of machine learning (ML) algorithms or models. Now, it is time to reconsider the relationship between ML and systems, and let ML transform the way that computer architecture and systems are designed. This embraces a twofold meaning: the improvement of designers' productivity, and the completion of the virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of work that applies ML for system design, which can be grouped into two major categories, ML-based modelling that involves predictions of performance metrics or some other criteria of interest, and ML-based design methodology that directly leverages ML as the design tool. For ML-based modelling, we discuss existing studies based on their target level of system, ranging from the circuit level to the architecture/system level. For ML-based design methodology, we follow a bottom-up path to review current work, with a scope of (micro-)architecture design (memory, branch prediction, NoC), coordination between architecture/system and workload (resource allocation and management, data center management, and security), compiler, and design automation. We further provide a future vision of opportunities and potential directions, and envision that applying ML for computer architecture and systems would thrive in the community.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
Deep Learning has enabled remarkable progress over the last years on a variety of tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. One crucial aspect for this progress are novel neural architectures. Currently employed architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Because of this, there is growing interest in automated neural architecture search methods. We provide an overview of existing work in this field of research and categorize them according to three dimensions: search space, search strategy, and performance estimation strategy.