The realm of medical image diagnosis has advanced significantly with the integration of computer-aided diagnosis and surgical systems. However, challenges persist, particularly in achieving precise image segmentation. While deep learning techniques show potential, obstacles like limited resources, slow convergence, and class imbalance impede their effectiveness. Traditional patch-based methods, though common, struggle to capture intricate tumor boundaries and often lead to redundant samples, compromising computational efficiency and feature quality. To tackle these issues, this research introduces an innovative approach centered on the tumor itself for patch-based image analysis. This novel tumor-centered patching method aims to address the class imbalance and boundary deficiencies, enabling focused and accurate tumor segmentation. By aligning patches with the tumor's anatomical context, this technique enhances feature extraction accuracy and reduces computational load. Experimental results demonstrate improved class imbalance, with segmentation scores of 0.78, 0.76, and 0.71 for whole, core, and enhancing tumors, respectively using a lightweight simple U-Net. This approach shows potential for enhancing medical image segmentation and improving computer-aided diagnosis systems.
Neural shape representation generally refers to representing 3D geometry using neural networks, e.g., to compute a signed distance or occupancy value at a specific spatial position. Previous methods tend to rely on the auto-decoder paradigm, which often requires densely-sampled and accurate signed distances to be known during training and testing, as well as an additional optimization loop during inference. This introduces a lot of computational overhead, in addition to having to compute signed distances analytically, even during testing. In this paper, we present a novel encoder-decoder neural network for embedding 3D shapes in a single forward pass. Our architecture is based on a multi-scale hybrid system incorporating graph-based and voxel-based components, as well as a continuously differentiable decoder. Furthermore, the network is trained to solve the Eikonal equation and only requires knowledge of the zero-level set for training and inference. Additional volumetric samples can be generated on-the-fly, and incorporated in an unsupervised manner. This means that in contrast to most previous work, our network is able to output valid signed distance fields without explicit prior knowledge of non-zero distance values or shape occupancy. In other words, our network computes approximate solutions to the boundary-valued Eikonal equation. It also requires only a single forward pass during inference, instead of the common latent code optimization. We further propose a modification of the loss function in case that surface normals are not well defined, e.g., in the context of non-watertight surface-meshes and non-manifold geometry. We finally demonstrate the efficacy, generalizability and scalability of our method on datasets consisting of deforming 3D shapes, single class encoding and multiclass encoding, showcasing a wide range of possible applications.
Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting when learning a sequence of newly emerging relations. Recent CRE studies have found that catastrophic forgetting arises from the model's lack of robustness against future analogous relations. To address the issue, we introduce rationale, i.e., the explanations of relation classification results generated by large language models (LLM), into CRE task. Specifically, we design the multi-task rationale tuning strategy to help the model learn current relations robustly. We also conduct contrastive rationale replay to further distinguish analogous relations. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models.
Imitation learning considerably simplifies policy synthesis compared to alternative approaches by exploiting access to expert demonstrations. For such imitation policies, errors away from the training samples are particularly critical. Even rare slip-ups in the policy action outputs can compound quickly over time, since they lead to unfamiliar future states where the policy is still more likely to err, eventually causing task failures. We revisit simple supervised ``behavior cloning'' for conveniently training the policy from nothing more than pre-recorded demonstrations, but carefully design the model class to counter the compounding error phenomenon. Our ``memory-consistent neural network'' (MCNN) outputs are hard-constrained to stay within clearly specified permissible regions anchored to prototypical ``memory'' training samples. We provide a guaranteed upper bound for the sub-optimality gap induced by MCNN policies. Using MCNNs on 9 imitation learning tasks, with MLP, Transformer, and Diffusion backbones, spanning dexterous robotic manipulation and driving, proprioceptive inputs and visual inputs, and varying sizes and types of demonstration data, we find large and consistent gains in performance, validating that MCNNs are better-suited than vanilla deep neural networks for imitation learning applications. Website: //sites.google.com/view/mcnn-imitation
Analytical dexterous grasping synthesis is often driven by grasp quality metrics. However, existing metrics possess many problems, such as being computationally expensive, physically inaccurate, and non-differentiable. Moreover, none of them can facilitate the synthesis of non-force-closure grasps, which account for a significant portion of task-oriented grasping such as lid screwing and button pushing. The main challenge behind all the above drawbacks is the difficulty in modeling the complex Grasp Wrench Space (GWS). In this work, we overcome this challenge by proposing a novel GWS estimator, thus enabling gradient-based task-oriented dexterous grasp synthesis for the first time. Our key contribution is a fast, accurate, and differentiable technique to estimate the GWS boundary with good physical interpretability by parallel sampling and mapping, which does not require iterative optimization. Second, based on our differentiable GWS estimator, we derive a task-oriented energy function to enable gradient-based grasp synthesis and a metric to evaluate non-force-closure grasps. Finally, we improve the previous dexterous grasp synthesis pipeline mainly by a novel technique to make nearest-point calculation differentiable, even on mesh edges and vertices. Extensive experiments are performed to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods. Our GWS estimator can run in several milliseconds on GPUs with minimal memory cost, more than three orders of magnitude faster than the classic discretization-based method. Using this GWS estimator, we synthesize 0.1 million dexterous grasps to show that our pipeline can significantly outperform the SOTA method, even in task-unaware force-closure-grasp synthesis. For task-oriented grasp synthesis, we provide some qualitative results. Our project page is //pku-epic.github.io/TaskDexGrasp/.
Continual Learning is a burgeoning domain in next-generation AI, focusing on training neural networks over a sequence of tasks akin to human learning. While CL provides an edge over traditional supervised learning, its central challenge remains to counteract catastrophic forgetting and ensure the retention of prior tasks during subsequent learning. Amongst various strategies to tackle this, replay based methods have emerged as preeminent, echoing biological memory mechanisms. However, these methods are memory intensive, often preserving entire data samples, an approach inconsistent with humans selective memory retention of salient experiences. While some recent works have explored the storage of only significant portions of data in episodic memory, the inherent nature of partial data necessitates innovative retrieval mechanisms. Current solutions, like inpainting, approximate full data reconstruction from partial cues, a method that diverges from genuine human memory processes. Addressing these nuances, this paper presents the Saliency Guided Hidden Associative Replay for Continual Learning. This novel framework synergizes associative memory with replay-based strategies. SHARC primarily archives salient data segments via sparse memory encoding. Importantly, by harnessing associative memory paradigms, it introduces a content focused memory retrieval mechanism, promising swift and near-perfect recall, bringing CL a step closer to authentic human memory processes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for various continual learning tasks.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Human doctors with well-structured medical knowledge can diagnose a disease merely via a few conversations with patients about symptoms. In contrast, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems often require a large number of dialogue instances to learn as they fail to capture the correlations between different diseases and neglect the diagnostic experience shared among them. To address this issue, we propose a more natural and practical paradigm, i.e., low-resource medical dialogue generation, which can transfer the diagnostic experience from source diseases to target ones with a handful of data for adaptation. It is capitalized on a commonsense knowledge graph to characterize the prior disease-symptom relations. Besides, we develop a Graph-Evolving Meta-Learning (GEML) framework that learns to evolve the commonsense graph for reasoning disease-symptom correlations in a new disease, which effectively alleviates the needs of a large number of dialogues. More importantly, by dynamically evolving disease-symptom graphs, GEML also well addresses the real-world challenges that the disease-symptom correlations of each disease may vary or evolve along with more diagnostic cases. Extensive experiment results on the CMDD dataset and our newly-collected Chunyu dataset testify the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, our GEML can generate an enriched dialogue-sensitive knowledge graph in an online manner, which could benefit other tasks grounded on knowledge graph.
Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.