There is increasing interest in identifying changes in the underlying states of brain networks. The availability of large scale neuroimaging data creates a strong need to develop fast, scalable methods for detecting and localizing in time such changes and also identify their drivers, thus enabling neuroscientists to hypothesize about potential mechanisms. This paper presents a fast method for detecting break points in exceedingly long time series neuroimaging data, based on vector autoregressive (Granger causal) models. It uses a multi-step strategy based on a regularized objective function that leads to fast identification of candidate break points, followed by clustering steps to select the final set of break points and subsequent estimation with false positives control of the underlying Granger causal networks. The latter provides insights into key changes in network connectivity that led to the presence of break points. The proposed methodology is illustrated on synthetic data varying in their length, dimensionality, number of break points, strength of the signal, and also applied to EEG data related to visual tasks.
Anomaly detection among a large number of processes arises in many applications ranging from dynamic spectrum access to cybersecurity. In such problems one can often obtain noisy observations aggregated from a chosen subset of processes that conforms to a tree structure. The distribution of these observations, based on which the presence of anomalies is detected, may be only partially known. This gives rise to the need for a search strategy designed to account for both the sample complexity and the detection accuracy, as well as cope with statistical models that are known only up to some missing parameters. In this work we propose a sequential search strategy using two variations of the Generalized Local Likelihood Ratio statistic. Our proposed Hierarchical Dynamic Search (HDS) strategy is shown to be order-optimal with respect to the size of the search space and asymptotically optimal with respect to the detection accuracy. An explicit upper bound on the error probability of HDS is established for the finite sample regime. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the performance gains of HDS over existing methods.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are one of the most popular architectures that are used to solve classification problems accompanied by graphical information. We present a rigorous theoretical understanding of the effects of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks. We study these effects through the node classification problem of a non-linearly separable Gaussian mixture model coupled with a stochastic block model. First, we show that a single graph convolution expands the regime of the distance between the means where multi-layer networks can classify the data by a factor of at least $1/\sqrt[4]{\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}}$, where $\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}$ denotes the expected degree of a node. Second, we show that with a slightly stronger graph density, two graph convolutions improve this factor to at least $1/\sqrt[4]{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. Finally, we provide both theoretical and empirical insights into the performance of graph convolutions placed in different combinations among the layers of a network, concluding that the performance is mutually similar for all combinations of the placement. We present extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data that illustrate our results.
In this work we present point-level region contrast, a self-supervised pre-training approach for the task of object detection. This approach is motivated by the two key factors in detection: localization and recognition. While accurate localization favors models that operate at the pixel- or point-level, correct recognition typically relies on a more holistic, region-level view of objects. Incorporating this perspective in pre-training, our approach performs contrastive learning by directly sampling individual point pairs from different regions. Compared to an aggregated representation per region, our approach is more robust to the change in input region quality, and further enables us to implicitly improve initial region assignments via online knowledge distillation during training. Both advantages are important when dealing with imperfect regions encountered in the unsupervised setting. Experiments show point-level region contrast improves on state-of-the-art pre-training methods for object detection and segmentation across multiple tasks and datasets, and we provide extensive ablation studies and visualizations to aid understanding. Code will be made available.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
The expensive annotation cost is notoriously known as the main constraint for the development of the point cloud semantic segmentation technique. Active learning methods endeavor to reduce such cost by selecting and labeling only a subset of the point clouds, yet previous attempts ignore the spatial-structural diversity of the selected samples, inducing the model to select clustered candidates with similar shapes in a local area while missing other representative ones in the global environment. In this paper, we propose a new 3D region-based active learning method to tackle this problem. Dubbed SSDR-AL, our method groups the original point clouds into superpoints and incrementally selects the most informative and representative ones for label acquisition. We achieve the selection mechanism via a graph reasoning network that considers both the spatial and structural diversities of superpoints. To deploy SSDR-AL in a more practical scenario, we design a noise-aware iterative labeling strategy to confront the "noisy annotation" problem introduced by the previous "dominant labeling" strategy in superpoints. Extensive experiments on two point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SSDR-AL in the semantic segmentation task. Particularly, SSDR-AL significantly outperforms the baseline method and reduces the annotation cost by up to 63.0% and 24.0% when achieving 90% performance of fully supervised learning, respectively.
Interactive segmentation allows users to extract target masks by making positive/negative clicks. Although explored by many previous works, there is still a gap between academic approaches and industrial needs: first, existing models are not efficient enough to work on low power devices; second, they perform poorly when used to refine preexisting masks as they could not avoid destroying the correct part. FocalClick solves both issues at once by predicting and updating the mask in localized areas. For higher efficiency, we decompose the slow prediction on the entire image into two fast inferences on small crops: a coarse segmentation on the Target Crop, and a local refinement on the Focus Crop. To make the model work with preexisting masks, we formulate a sub-task termed Interactive Mask Correction, and propose Progressive Merge as the solution. Progressive Merge exploits morphological information to decide where to preserve and where to update, enabling users to refine any preexisting mask effectively. FocalClick achieves competitive results against SOTA methods with significantly smaller FLOPs. It also shows significant superiority when making corrections on preexisting masks. Code and data will be released at github.com/XavierCHEN34/ClickSEG
The problem of active mapping aims to plan an informative sequence of sensing views given a limited budget such as distance traveled. This paper consider active occupancy grid mapping using a range sensor, such as LiDAR or depth camera. State-of-the-art methods optimize information-theoretic measures relating the occupancy grid probabilities with the range sensor measurements. The non-smooth nature of ray-tracing within a grid representation makes the objective function non-differentiable, forcing existing methods to search over a discrete space of candidate trajectories. This work proposes a differentiable approximation of the Shannon mutual information between a grid map and ray-based observations that enables gradient ascent optimization in the continuous space of SE(3) sensor poses. Our gradient-based formulation leads to more informative sensing trajectories, while avoiding occlusions and collisions. The proposed method is demonstrated in simulated and real-world experiments in 2-D and 3-D environments.
Consider the problem of training robustly capable agents. One approach is to generate a diverse collection of agent polices. Training can then be viewed as a quality diversity (QD) optimization problem, where we search for a collection of performant policies that are diverse with respect to quantified behavior. Recent work shows that differentiable quality diversity (DQD) algorithms greatly accelerate QD optimization when exact gradients are available. However, agent policies typically assume that the environment is not differentiable. To apply DQD algorithms to training agent policies, we must approximate gradients for performance and behavior. We propose two variants of the current state-of-the-art DQD algorithm that compute gradients via approximation methods common in reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluate our approach on four simulated locomotion tasks. One variant achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art in combining QD and RL, while the other performs comparably in two locomotion tasks. These results provide insight into the limitations of current DQD algorithms in domains where gradients must be approximated. Source code is available at //github.com/icaros-usc/dqd-rl
We have developed an unsupervised anomalous sound detection method for machine condition monitoring that utilizes an auxiliary task -- detecting when the target machine is active. First, we train a model that detects machine activity by using normal data with machine activity labels and then use the activity-detection error as the anomaly score for a given sound clip if we have access to the ground-truth activity labels in the inference phase. If these labels are not available, the anomaly score is calculated through outlier detection on the embedding vectors obtained by the activity-detection model. Solving this auxiliary task enables the model to learn the difference between the target machine sounds and similar background noise, which makes it possible to identify small deviations in the target sounds. Experimental results showed that the proposed method improves the anomaly-detection performance of the conventional method complementarily by means of an ensemble.
Binding operation is fundamental to many cognitive processes, such as cognitive map formation, relational reasoning, and language comprehension. In these processes, two different modalities, such as location and objects, events and their contextual cues, and words and their roles, need to be bound together, but little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. Previous works introduced a binding model based on quadratic functions of bound pairs, followed by vector summation of multiple pairs. Based on this framework, we address following questions: Which classes of quadratic matrices are optimal for decoding relational structures? And what is the resultant accuracy? We introduce a new class of binding matrices based on a matrix representation of octonion algebra, an eight-dimensional extension of complex numbers. We show that these matrices enable a more accurate unbinding than previously known methods when a small number of pairs are present. Moreover, numerical optimization of a binding operator converges to this octonion binding. We also show that when there are a large number of bound pairs, however, a random quadratic binding performs as well as the octonion and previously-proposed binding methods. This study thus provides new insight into potential neural mechanisms of binding operations in the brain.