Echocardiography (echo) is the first imaging modality used when assessing cardiac function. The measurement of functional biomarkers from echo relies upon the segmentation of cardiac structures and deep learning models have been proposed to automate the segmentation process. However, in order to translate these tools to widespread clinical use it is important that the segmentation models are robust to a wide variety of images (e.g. acquired from different scanners, by operators with different levels of expertise etc.). To achieve this level of robustness it is necessary that the models are trained with multiple diverse datasets. A significant challenge faced when training with multiple diverse datasets is the variation in label presence, i.e. the combined data are often partially-labelled. Adaptations of the cross entropy loss function have been proposed to deal with partially labelled data. In this paper we show that training naively with such a loss function and multiple diverse datasets can lead to a form of shortcut learning, where the model associates label presence with domain characteristics, leading to a drop in performance. To address this problem, we propose a novel label dropout scheme to break the link between domain characteristics and the presence or absence of labels. We demonstrate that label dropout improves echo segmentation Dice score by 62% and 25% on two cardiac structures when training using multiple diverse partially labelled datasets.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) harness electroencephalographic signals for direct neural control of devices, offering a significant benefit for individuals with motor impairments. Traditional machine learning methods for EEG-based motor imagery (MI) classification encounter challenges such as manual feature extraction and susceptibility to noise. This paper introduces EEGEncoder, a deep learning framework that employs transformer models to surmount these limitations. Our innovative multi-scale fusion architecture captures both immediate and extended temporal features, thereby enhancing MI task classification precision. EEGEncoder's key innovations include the inaugural application of transformers in MI-EEG signal classification, a mixup data augmentation strategy for bolstered generalization, and a multi-task learning approach for refined predictive accuracy. When tested on the BCI Competition IV dataset 2a, our model established a new benchmark with its state-of-the-art performance. EEGEncoder signifies a substantial advancement in BCI technology, offering a robust, efficient, and effective tool for transforming thought into action, with the potential to significantly enhance the quality of life for those dependent on BCIs.
Mainstream poisoning attacks on large language models (LLMs) typically set a fixed trigger in the input instance and specific responses for triggered queries. However, the fixed trigger setting (e.g., unusual words) may be easily detected by human detection, limiting the effectiveness and practicality in real-world scenarios. To enhance the stealthiness of the trigger, we present a poisoning attack against LLMs that is triggered by a generation/output condition-token limitation, which is a commonly adopted strategy by users for reducing costs. The poisoned model performs normally for output without token limitation, while becomes harmful for output with limited tokens. To achieve this objective, we introduce BrieFool, an efficient attack framework. It leverages the characteristics of generation limitation by efficient instruction sampling and poisoning data generation, thereby influencing the behavior of LLMs under target conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that BrieFool is effective across safety domains and knowledge domains. For instance, with only 20 generated poisoning examples against GPT-3.5-turbo, BrieFool achieves a 100% Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a 9.28/10 average Harmfulness Score (HS) under token limitation conditions while maintaining the benign performance.
Speech emotion recognition is crucial in human-computer interaction, but extracting and using emotional cues from audio poses challenges. This paper introduces MFHCA, a novel method for Speech Emotion Recognition using Multi-Spatial Fusion and Hierarchical Cooperative Attention on spectrograms and raw audio. We employ the Multi-Spatial Fusion module (MF) to efficiently identify emotion-related spectrogram regions and integrate Hubert features for higher-level acoustic information. Our approach also includes a Hierarchical Cooperative Attention module (HCA) to merge features from various auditory levels. We evaluate our method on the IEMOCAP dataset and achieve 2.6\% and 1.87\% improvements on the weighted accuracy and unweighted accuracy, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) aims to automate the prediction of correct answers for medical images and questions, thereby assisting physicians in reducing repetitive tasks and alleviating their workload. Existing approaches primarily focus on pre-training models using additional and comprehensive datasets, followed by fine-tuning to enhance performance in downstream tasks. However, there is also significant value in exploring existing models to extract clinically relevant information. In this paper, we propose the Latent Prompt Assist model (LaPA) for medical visual question answering. Firstly, we design a latent prompt generation module to generate the latent prompt with the constraint of the target answer. Subsequently, we propose a multi-modal fusion block with latent prompt fusion module that utilizes the latent prompt to extract clinical-relevant information from uni-modal and multi-modal features. Additionally, we introduce a prior knowledge fusion module to integrate the relationship between diseases and organs with the clinical-relevant information. Finally, we combine the final integrated information with image-language cross-modal information to predict the final answers. Experimental results on three publicly available Med-VQA datasets demonstrate that LaPA outperforms the state-of-the-art model ARL, achieving improvements of 1.83%, 0.63%, and 1.80% on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and VQA-2019, respectively. The code is publicly available at //github.com/GaryGuTC/LaPA_model.
Federated Learning (FL) as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm has been widely adopted in Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications. However, the efficiency and inference capability of FL is seriously limited due to the presence of stragglers and data imbalance across massive AIoT devices, respectively. To address the above challenges, we present a novel asynchronous FL approach named CaBaFL, which includes a hierarchical Cache-based aggregation mechanism and a feature Balance-guided device selection strategy. CaBaFL maintains multiple intermediate models simultaneously for local training. The hierarchical cache-based aggregation mechanism enables each intermediate model to be trained on multiple devices to align the training time and mitigate the straggler issue. In specific, each intermediate model is stored in a low-level cache for local training and when it is trained by sufficient local devices, it will be stored in a high-level cache for aggregation. To address the problem of imbalanced data, the feature balance-guided device selection strategy in CaBaFL adopts the activation distribution as a metric, which enables each intermediate model to be trained across devices with totally balanced data distributions before aggregation. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art FL methods, CaBaFL achieves up to 9.26X training acceleration and 19.71\% accuracy improvements.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This allows one to reason about the effects of changes to this process (i.e., interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (i.e., counterfactuals). We categorize work in \causalml into five groups according to the problems they tackle: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, (5) causal reinforcement learning. For each category, we systematically compare its methods and point out open problems. Further, we review modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.
The remarkable success of deep learning has prompted interest in its application to medical diagnosis. Even tough state-of-the-art deep learning models have achieved human-level accuracy on the classification of different types of medical data, these models are hardly adopted in clinical workflows, mainly due to their lack of interpretability. The black-box-ness of deep learning models has raised the need for devising strategies to explain the decision process of these models, leading to the creation of the topic of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In this context, we provide a thorough survey of XAI applied to medical diagnosis, including visual, textual, and example-based explanation methods. Moreover, this work reviews the existing medical imaging datasets and the existing metrics for evaluating the quality of the explanations . Complementary to most existing surveys, we include a performance comparison among a set of report generation-based methods. Finally, the major challenges in applying XAI to medical imaging are also discussed.
Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, factors with semantics are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure which renders these factors dependent. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes a Causal Layer to transform independent exogenous factors into causal endogenous ones that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We further analyze the model identifiabitily, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic and real word benchmark CelebA. Results show that the causal representations learned by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and their causal relationship as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is identified with good accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed CausalVAE model is able to generate counterfactual data through "do-operation" to the causal factors.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.