Automated tumor detection in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) is a difficult task due to natural tumor rarity, breast tissue variability, and high resolution. Given the scarcity of abnormal images and the abundance of normal images for this problem, an anomaly detection/localization approach could be well-suited. However, most anomaly localization research in machine learning focuses on non-medical datasets, and we find that these methods fall short when adapted to medical imaging datasets. The problem is alleviated when we solve the task from the image completion perspective, in which the presence of anomalies can be indicated by a discrepancy between the original appearance and its auto-completion conditioned on the surroundings. However, there are often many valid normal completions given the same surroundings, especially in the DBT dataset, making this evaluation criterion less precise. To address such an issue, we consider pluralistic image completion by exploring the distribution of possible completions instead of generating fixed predictions. This is achieved through our novel application of spatial dropout on the completion network during inference time only, which requires no additional training cost and is effective at generating diverse completions. We further propose minimum completion distance (MCD), a new metric for detecting anomalies, thanks to these stochastic completions. We provide theoretical as well as empirical support for the superiority over existing methods of using the proposed method for anomaly localization. On the DBT dataset, our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by at least 10\% AUROC for pixel-level detection.
In today's world, many technologically advanced countries have realized that real power lies not in physical strength but in educated minds. As a result, every country has embarked on restructuring its education system to meet the demands of technology. As a country in the midst of these developments, we cannot remain indifferent to this transformation in education. In the Information Age of the 21st century, rapid access to information is crucial for the development of individuals and societies. To take our place among the knowledge societies in a world moving rapidly towards globalization, we must closely follow technological innovations and meet the requirements of technology. This can be achieved by providing learning opportunities to anyone interested in acquiring education in their area of interest. This study focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of internet-based learning compared to traditional teaching methods, the importance of computer usage in internet-based learning, negative factors affecting internet-based learning, and the necessary recommendations for addressing these issues. In today's world, it is impossible to talk about education without technology or technology without education.
Anomaly detection (AD) is a fundamental research problem in machine learning and computer vision, with practical applications in industrial inspection, video surveillance, and medical diagnosis. In medical imaging, AD is especially vital for detecting and diagnosing anomalies that may indicate rare diseases or conditions. However, there is a lack of a universal and fair benchmark for evaluating AD methods on medical images, which hinders the development of more generalized and robust AD methods in this specific domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for assessing anomaly detection methods on medical images. This benchmark encompasses six reorganized datasets from five medical domains (i.e. brain MRI, liver CT, retinal OCT, chest X-ray, and digital histopathology) and three key evaluation metrics, and includes a total of fourteen state-of-the-art AD algorithms. This standardized and well-curated medical benchmark with the well-structured codebase enables comprehensive comparisons among recently proposed anomaly detection methods. It will facilitate the community to conduct a fair comparison and advance the field of AD on medical imaging. More information on BMAD is available in our GitHub repository: //github.com/DorisBao/BMAD
Eye blinking detection in the wild plays an essential role in deception detection, driving fatigue detection, etc. Despite the fact that numerous attempts have already been made, the majority of them have encountered difficulties, such as the derived eye images having different resolutions as the distance between the face and the camera changes; or the requirement of a lightweight detection model to obtain a short inference time in order to perform in real-time. In this research, two problems are addressed: how the eye blinking detection model can learn efficiently from different resolutions of eye pictures in diverse conditions; and how to reduce the size of the detection model for faster inference time. We propose to utilize upsampling and downsampling the input eye images to the same resolution as one potential solution for the first problem, then find out which interpolation method can result in the highest performance of the detection model. For the second problem, although a recent spatiotemporal convolutional neural network used for eye blinking detection has a strong capacity to extract both spatial and temporal characteristics, it remains having a high number of network parameters, leading to high inference time. Therefore, using Depth-wise Separable Convolution rather than conventional convolution layers inside each branch is considered in this paper as a feasible solution.
Machine learning (ML) models are costly to train as they can require a significant amount of data, computational resources and technical expertise. Thus, they constitute valuable intellectual property that needs protection from adversaries wanting to steal them. Ownership verification techniques allow the victims of model stealing attacks to demonstrate that a suspect model was in fact stolen from theirs. Although a number of ownership verification techniques based on watermarking or fingerprinting have been proposed, most of them fall short either in terms of security guarantees (well-equipped adversaries can evade verification) or computational cost. A fingerprinting technique, Dataset Inference (DI), has been shown to offer better robustness and efficiency than prior methods. The authors of DI provided a correctness proof for linear (suspect) models. However, in a subspace of the same setting, we prove that DI suffers from high false positives (FPs) -- it can incorrectly identify an independent model trained with non-overlapping data from the same distribution as stolen. We further prove that DI also triggers FPs in realistic, non-linear suspect models. We then confirm empirically that DI in the black-box setting leads to FPs, with high confidence. Second, we show that DI also suffers from false negatives (FNs) -- an adversary can fool DI (at the cost of incurring some accuracy loss) by regularising a stolen model's decision boundaries using adversarial training, thereby leading to an FN. To this end, we demonstrate that black-box DI fails to identify a model adversarially trained from a stolen dataset -- the setting where DI is the hardest to evade. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings, the viability of fingerprinting-based ownership verification in general, and suggest directions for future work.
In recent years, online social networks have been the target of adversaries who seek to introduce discord into societies, to undermine democracies and to destabilize communities. Often the goal is not to favor a certain side of a conflict but to increase disagreement and polarization. To get a mathematical understanding of such attacks, researchers use opinion-formation models from sociology, such as the Friedkin--Johnsen model, and formally study how much discord the adversary can produce when altering the opinions for only a small set of users. In this line of work, it is commonly assumed that the adversary has full knowledge about the network topology and the opinions of all users. However, the latter assumption is often unrealistic in practice, where user opinions are not available or simply difficult to estimate accurately. To address this concern, we raise the following question: Can an attacker sow discord in a social network, even when only the network topology is known? We answer this question affirmatively. We present approximation algorithms for detecting a small set of users who are highly influential for the disagreement and polarization in the network. We show that when the adversary radicalizes these users and if the initial disagreement/polarization in the network is not very high, then our method gives a constant-factor approximation on the setting when the user opinions are known. To find the set of influential users, we provide a novel approximation algorithm for a variant of MaxCut in graphs with positive and negative edge weights. We experimentally evaluate our methods, which have access only to the network topology, and we find that they have similar performance as methods that have access to the network topology and all user opinions. We further present an NP-hardness proof, which was an open question by Chen and Racz [IEEE Trans. Netw. Sci. Eng., 2021].
A computational workflow, also known as workflow, consists of tasks that must be executed in a specific order to attain a specific goal. Often, in fields such as biology, chemistry, physics, and data science, among others, these workflows are complex and are executed in large-scale, distributed, and heterogeneous computing environments that are prone to failures and performance degradations. Therefore, anomaly detection for workflows is an important paradigm that aims to identify unexpected behavior or errors in workflow execution. This crucial task to improve the reliability of workflow executions must be assisted by machine learning-based techniques. However, such application is limited, in large part, due to the lack of open datasets and benchmarking. To address this gap, we make the following contributions in this paper: (1) we systematically inject anomalies and collect raw execution logs from workflows executing on distributed infrastructures; (2) we summarize the statistics of new datasets, as well as a set of open datasets, and provide insightful analyses; (3) we benchmark unsupervised anomaly detection techniques by converting workflows into both tabular and graph-structured data. Our findings allow us to examine the effectiveness and efficiencies of the benchmark methods and identify potential research opportunities for improvement and generalization. The dataset and benchmark code are available online with MIT License for public usage.
We present a deep learning segmentation model that can automatically and robustly segment all major anatomical structures in body CT images. In this retrospective study, 1204 CT examinations (from the years 2012, 2016, and 2020) were used to segment 104 anatomical structures (27 organs, 59 bones, 10 muscles, 8 vessels) relevant for use cases such as organ volumetry, disease characterization, and surgical or radiotherapy planning. The CT images were randomly sampled from routine clinical studies and thus represent a real-world dataset (different ages, pathologies, scanners, body parts, sequences, and sites). The authors trained an nnU-Net segmentation algorithm on this dataset and calculated Dice similarity coefficients (Dice) to evaluate the model's performance. The trained algorithm was applied to a second dataset of 4004 whole-body CT examinations to investigate age dependent volume and attenuation changes. The proposed model showed a high Dice score (0.943) on the test set, which included a wide range of clinical data with major pathologies. The model significantly outperformed another publicly available segmentation model on a separate dataset (Dice score, 0.932 versus 0.871, respectively). The aging study demonstrated significant correlations between age and volume and mean attenuation for a variety of organ groups (e.g., age and aortic volume; age and mean attenuation of the autochthonous dorsal musculature). The developed model enables robust and accurate segmentation of 104 anatomical structures. The annotated dataset (//doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6802613) and toolkit (//www.github.com/wasserth/TotalSegmentator) are publicly available.
Despite the notable accomplishments of deep object detection models, a major challenge that persists is the requirement for extensive amounts of training data. The process of procuring such real-world data is a laborious undertaking, which has prompted researchers to explore new avenues of research, such as synthetic data generation techniques. This study presents a framework for the generation of synthetic datasets by fine-tuning pretrained stable diffusion models. The synthetic datasets are then manually annotated and employed for training various object detection models. These detectors are evaluated on a real-world test set of 331 images and compared against a baseline model that was trained on real-world images. The results of this study reveal that the object detection models trained on synthetic data perform similarly to the baseline model. In the context of apple detection in orchards, the average precision deviation with the baseline ranges from 0.09 to 0.12. This study illustrates the potential of synthetic data generation techniques as a viable alternative to the collection of extensive training data for the training of deep models.
This paper reports Deep LOGISMOS approach to 3D tumor segmentation by incorporating boundary information derived from deep contextual learning to LOGISMOS - layered optimal graph image segmentation of multiple objects and surfaces. Accurate and reliable tumor segmentation is essential to tumor growth analysis and treatment selection. A fully convolutional network (FCN), UNet, is first trained using three adjacent 2D patches centered at the tumor, providing contextual UNet segmentation and probability map for each 2D patch. The UNet segmentation is then refined by Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and morphological operations. The refined UNet segmentation is used to provide the initial shape boundary to build a segmentation graph. The cost for each node of the graph is determined by the UNet probability maps. Finally, a max-flow algorithm is employed to find the globally optimal solution thus obtaining the final segmentation. For evaluation, we applied the method to pancreatic tumor segmentation on a dataset of 51 CT scans, among which 30 scans were used for training and 21 for testing. With Deep LOGISMOS, DICE Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Relative Volume Difference (RVD) reached 83.2+-7.8% and 18.6+-17.4% respectively, both are significantly improved (p<0.05) compared with contextual UNet and/or LOGISMOS alone.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.