We address the challenge of correlated predictors in high-dimensional GLMs, where regression coefficients range from sparse to dense, by proposing a data-driven random projection method. This is particularly relevant for applications where the number of predictors is (much) larger than the number of observations and the underlying structure -- whether sparse or dense -- is unknown. We achieve this by using ridge-type estimates for variable screening and random projection to incorporate information about the response-predictor relationship when performing dimensionality reduction. We demonstrate that a ridge estimator with a small penalty is effective for random projection and screening, but the penalty value must be carefully selected. Unlike in linear regression, where penalties approaching zero work well, this approach leads to overfitting in non-Gaussian families. Instead, we recommend a data-driven method for penalty selection. This data-driven random projection improves prediction performance over conventional random projections, even surpassing benchmarks like elastic net. Furthermore, an ensemble of multiple such random projections combined with probabilistic variable screening delivers the best aggregated results in prediction and variable ranking across varying sparsity levels in simulations at a rather low computational cost. Finally, three applications with count and binary responses demonstrate the method's advantages in interpretability and prediction accuracy.
The main challenges hindering the adoption of deep learning-based systems in clinical settings are the scarcity of annotated data and the lack of interpretability and trust in these systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer inherent interpretability by constraining the final disease prediction on a set of human-understandable concepts. However, this inherent interpretability comes at the cost of greater annotation burden. Additionally, adding new concepts requires retraining the entire system. In this work, we introduce a novel two-step methodology that addresses both of these challenges. By simulating the two stages of a CBM, we utilize a pretrained Vision Language Model (VLM) to automatically predict clinical concepts, and a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate disease diagnoses based on the predicted concepts. We validate our approach on three skin lesion datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms traditional CBMs and state-of-the-art explainable methods, all without requiring any training and utilizing only a few annotated examples. The code is available at //github.com/CristianoPatricio/2-step-concept-based-skin-diagnosis.
We propose a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the base station (BS) passively senses the channel parameters using the information carrying signals from a user. To simultaneously guarantee decoding and sensing performance, the user adopts sparse regression codes (SPARCs) with cyclic redundancy check (CRC) to transmit its information bits. The BS generates an initial coarse channel estimation of the parameters after receiving the pilot signal. Then, a novel iterative decoding and parameter sensing algorithm is proposed, where the correctly decoded codewords indicated by the CRC bits are utilized to improve the sensing and channel estimation performance at the BS. In turn, the improved estimate of the channel parameters lead to a better decoding performance. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed iterative decoding and sensing algorithm, where both the sensing and the communication performance are significantly improved with a few iterations. Extensive ablation studies concerning different channel estimation methods and number of CRC bits are carried out for a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed scheme.
Recent RGB-guided depth super-resolution methods have achieved impressive performance under the assumption of fixed and known degradation (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, in real-world scenarios, captured depth data often suffer from unconventional and unknown degradation due to sensor limitations and complex imaging environments (e.g., low reflective surfaces, varying illumination). Consequently, the performance of these methods significantly declines when real-world degradation deviate from their assumptions. In this paper, we propose the Degradation Oriented and Regularized Network (DORNet), a novel framework designed to adaptively address unknown degradation in real-world scenes through implicit degradation representations. Our approach begins with the development of a self-supervised degradation learning strategy, which models the degradation representations of low-resolution depth data using routing selection-based degradation regularization. To facilitate effective RGB-D fusion, we further introduce a degradation-oriented feature transformation module that selectively propagates RGB content into the depth data based on the learned degradation priors. Extensive experimental results on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DORNet in handling unknown degradation, outperforming existing methods. The code is available at //github.com/yanzq95/DORNet.
Depth estimation under adverse conditions remains a significant challenge. Recently, multi-spectral depth estimation, which integrates both visible light and thermal images, has shown promise in addressing this issue. However, existing algorithms struggle with precise pixel-level feature matching, limiting their ability to fully exploit geometric constraints across different spectra. To address this, we propose a novel framework incorporating stereo depth estimation to enforce accurate geometric constraints. In particular, we treat the visible light and thermal images as a stereo pair and utilize a Cross-modal Feature Matching (CFM) Module to construct a cost volume for pixel-level matching. To mitigate the effects of poor lighting on stereo matching, we introduce Degradation Masking, which leverages robust monocular thermal depth estimation in degraded regions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Multi-Spectral Stereo (MS2) dataset, with qualitative evaluations demonstrating high-quality depth maps under varying lighting conditions.
Content moderation on a global scale must navigate a complex array of local cultural distinctions, which can hinder effective enforcement. While global policies aim for consistency and broad applicability, they often miss the subtleties of regional language interpretation, cultural beliefs, and local legislation. This work introduces a flexible framework that enhances foundation language models with cultural knowledge. Our approach involves fine-tuning encoder-decoder models on media-diet data to capture cultural nuances, and applies a continued training regime to effectively integrate these models into a content moderation pipeline. We evaluate this framework in a case study of an online podcast platform with content spanning various regions. The results show that our culturally adapted models improve the accuracy of local violation detection and offer explanations that align more closely with regional cultural norms. Our findings reinforce the need for an adaptable content moderation approach that remains flexible in response to the diverse cultural landscapes it operates in and represents a step towards a more equitable and culturally sensitive framework for content moderation, demonstrating what is achievable in this domain.
We address unsupervised discontinuous constituency parsing, where we observe a high variance in the performance of the only previous model in the literature. We propose to build an ensemble of different runs of the existing discontinuous parser by averaging the predicted trees, to stabilize and boost performance. To begin with, we provide comprehensive computational complexity analysis (in terms of P and NP-complete) for tree averaging under different setups of binarity and continuity. We then develop an efficient exact algorithm to tackle the task, which runs in a reasonable time for all samples in our experiments. Results on three datasets show our method outperforms all baselines in all metrics; we also provide in-depth analyses of our approach.
Many human interactions, such as political debates, are carried out in group settings, where there are arbitrarily many participants, each with different views and agendas. To explore such complex social settings, we present SAUCE: a customizable Python platform, allowing researchers to plug-and-play various LLMs participating in discussions on any topic chosen by the user. Our platform takes care of instantiating the models, scheduling their responses, managing the discussion history, and producing a comprehensive output log, all customizable through configuration files, requiring little to no coding skills. A novel feature of SAUCE is our asynchronous communication feature, where models decide when to speak in addition to what to say, thus modeling an important facet of human communication. We show SAUCE's attractiveness in two initial experiments, and invite the community to use it in simulating various group simulations.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.