We propose BayesPIM, a Bayesian prevalence-incidence mixture model for estimating time- and covariate-dependent disease incidence from screening and surveillance data. The method is particularly suited to settings where some individuals may have the disease at baseline, baseline tests may be missing or incomplete, and the screening test has imperfect sensitivity. Building on the existing PIMixture framework, which assumes perfect sensitivity, BayesPIM accommodates uncertain test accuracy by incorporating informative priors. By including covariates, the model can quantify heterogeneity in disease risk, thereby informing personalized screening strategies. We motivate the model using data from high-risk familial colorectal cancer (CRC) surveillance through colonoscopy, where adenomas - precursors of CRC - may already be present at baseline and remain undetected due to imperfect test sensitivity. We show that conditioning incidence and prevalence estimates on covariates explains substantial heterogeneity in adenoma risk. Using a Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampler and data augmentation, BayesPIM robustly recovers incidence times while handling latent prevalence. Informative priors on the test sensitivity stabilize estimation and mitigate non-convergence issues. Model fit can be assessed using information criteria and validated against a non-parametric estimator. In this way, BayesPIM enhances estimation accuracy and supports the development of more effective, patient-centered screening policies.
Graph-centric artificial intelligence (graph AI) has achieved remarkable success in modeling interacting systems prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in biology to particle physics. The increasing heterogeneity of data calls for graph neural architectures that can combine multiple inductive biases. However, combining data from various sources is challenging because appropriate inductive bias may vary by data modality. Multimodal learning methods fuse multiple data modalities while leveraging cross-modal dependencies to address this challenge. Here, we survey 140 studies in graph-centric AI and realize that diverse data types are increasingly brought together using graphs and fed into sophisticated multimodal models. These models stratify into image-, language-, and knowledge-grounded multimodal learning. We put forward an algorithmic blueprint for multimodal graph learning based on this categorization. The blueprint serves as a way to group state-of-the-art architectures that treat multimodal data by choosing appropriately four different components. This effort can pave the way for standardizing the design of sophisticated multimodal architectures for highly complex real-world problems.
Few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically assume clean support sets with accurately labeled samples when training on novel classes. This assumption can often be unrealistic: support sets, no matter how small, can still include mislabeled samples. Robustness to label noise is therefore essential for FSL methods to be practical, but this problem surprisingly remains largely unexplored. To address mislabeled samples in FSL settings, we make several technical contributions. (1) We offer simple, yet effective, feature aggregation methods, improving the prototypes used by ProtoNet, a popular FSL technique. (2) We describe a novel Transformer model for Noisy Few-Shot Learning (TraNFS). TraNFS leverages a transformer's attention mechanism to weigh mislabeled versus correct samples. (3) Finally, we extensively test these methods on noisy versions of MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet. Our results show that TraNFS is on-par with leading FSL methods on clean support sets, yet outperforms them, by far, in the presence of label noise.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.
We present self-supervised geometric perception (SGP), the first general framework to learn a feature descriptor for correspondence matching without any ground-truth geometric model labels (e.g., camera poses, rigid transformations). Our first contribution is to formulate geometric perception as an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the feature descriptor and the geometric models given a large corpus of visual measurements (e.g., images, point clouds). Under this optimization formulation, we show that two important streams of research in vision, namely robust model fitting and deep feature learning, correspond to optimizing one block of the unknown variables while fixing the other block. This analysis naturally leads to our second contribution -- the SGP algorithm that performs alternating minimization to solve the joint optimization. SGP iteratively executes two meta-algorithms: a teacher that performs robust model fitting given learned features to generate geometric pseudo-labels, and a student that performs deep feature learning under noisy supervision of the pseudo-labels. As a third contribution, we apply SGP to two perception problems on large-scale real datasets, namely relative camera pose estimation on MegaDepth and point cloud registration on 3DMatch. We demonstrate that SGP achieves state-of-the-art performance that is on-par or superior to the supervised oracles trained using ground-truth labels.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.