South America
Towards machine learning guided by best practices
Nowadays, machine learning (ML) is being used in software systems with multiple application fields, from medicine to software engineering (SE). On the one hand, the popularity of ML in the industry can be seen in the statistics showing its growth and adoption. On the other hand, its popularity can also be seen in research, particularly in SE, where not only have multiple studies been published in SE conferences and journals but also in the multiple workshops and co-located conferences in software engineering conferences. At the same time, researchers and practitioners have shown that machine learning has some particular challenges and pitfalls. In particular, research has shown that ML-enabled systems have a different development process than traditional SE, which also describes some of the challenges of ML applications. In order to mitigate some of the identified challenges and pitfalls, white and gray literature has proposed a set of recommendations based on their own experiences and focused on their domain (e.g., biomechanics), but for the best of our knowledge, there is no guideline focused on the SE community. This thesis aims to reduce this gap by answering research questions that help to understand the practices used and discussed by practitioners and researchers in the SE community by analyzing possible sources of practices such as question and answer communities and also previous research studies to present a set of practices with an SE perspective.
Are AI chatbots in courts putting justice at risk?
But when he refused bail to a man accused of assault and murder, he turned to ChatGPT to help justify his reasoning. He is among a growing number of justices using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to assist them in rulings, with supporters saying the tech can streamline court processes while critics warn it risks bias and injustice. "AI cannot replace a judge โฆ However, it has immense potential as an aid in judicial processes," said Chitkara. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.
Interpretable Machine Learning for Science with PySR and SymbolicRegression.jl
PySR is an open-source library for practical symbolic regression, a type of machine learning which aims to discover human-interpretable symbolic models. PySR was developed to democratize and popularize symbolic regression for the sciences, and is built on a high-performance distributed back-end, a flexible search algorithm, and interfaces with several deep learning packages. PySR's internal search algorithm is a multi-population evolutionary algorithm, which consists of a unique evolve-simplify-optimize loop, designed for optimization of unknown scalar constants in newly-discovered empirical expressions. PySR's backend is the extremely optimized Julia library SymbolicRegression.jl, which can be used directly from Julia. It is capable of fusing user-defined operators into SIMD kernels at runtime, performing automatic differentiation, and distributing populations of expressions to thousands of cores across a cluster. In describing this software, we also introduce a new benchmark, "EmpiricalBench," to quantify the applicability of symbolic regression algorithms in science. This benchmark measures recovery of historical empirical equations from original and synthetic datasets.
Data Curation for Image Captioning with Text-to-Image Generative Models
Li, Wenyan, Lotz, Jonas F., Qiu, Chen, Elliott, Desmond
Recent advances in image captioning are mainly driven by large-scale vision-language pretraining, relying heavily on computational resources and increasingly large multimodal datasets. Instead of scaling up pretraining data, we ask whether it is possible to improve performance by improving the quality of the samples in existing datasets. We pursue this question through two approaches to data curation: one that assumes that some examples should be avoided due to mismatches between the image and caption, and one that assumes that the mismatch can be addressed by replacing the image, for which we use the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model. These approaches are evaluated using the BLIP model on MS COCO and Flickr30K in both finetuning and few-shot learning settings. Our simple yet effective approaches consistently outperform baselines, indicating that better image captioning models can be trained by curating existing resources. Finally, we conduct a human study to understand the errors made by the Stable Diffusion model and highlight directions for future work in text-to-image generation.
Tree species classification from hyperspectral data using graph-regularized neural networks
Bandyopadhyay, Debmita, Mukherjee, Subhadip, Ball, James, Vincent, Grรฉgoire, Coomes, David A., Schรถnlieb, Carola-Bibiane
We propose a novel graph-regularized neural network (GRNN) algorithm for tree species classification. The proposed algorithm encompasses superpixel-based segmentation for graph construction, a pixel-wise neural network classifier, and the label propagation technique to generate an accurate and realistic (emulating tree crowns) classification map on a sparsely annotated data set. GRNN outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques not only for the standard Indian Pines HSI but also achieves a high classification accuracy (approx. 92%) on a new HSI data set collected over the heterogeneous forests of French Guiana (FG) when less than 1% of the pixels are labeled. We further show that GRNN is competitive with the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods and exhibits a small deviation in accuracy for different numbers of training samples and over repeated trials with randomly sampled labeled pixels for training.
ChordMixer: A Scalable Neural Attention Model for Sequences with Different Lengths
Khalitov, Ruslan, Yu, Tong, Cheng, Lei, Yang, Zhirong
Sequential data naturally have different lengths in many domains, with some very long sequences. As an important modeling tool, neural attention should capture long-range interaction in such sequences. However, most existing neural attention models admit only short sequences, or they have to employ chunking or padding to enforce a constant input length. Here we propose a simple neural network building block called ChordMixer which can model the attention for long sequences with variable lengths. Each ChordMixer block consists of a positionwise rotation layer without learnable parameters and an element-wise MLP layer. Repeatedly applying such blocks forms an effective network backbone that mixes the input signals towards the learning targets. We have tested ChordMixer on the synthetic adding problem, long document classification, and DNA sequence-based taxonomy classification. The experiment results show that our method substantially outperforms other neural attention models. Sequential data appear widely in data science. In many domains, the sequences have a diverse distribution of lengths. Meanwhile, long-range interactions between DNA elements are common and can be up to 20,000 bases away (Gasperini et al., 2020). Modeling interactions in such sequences is a fundamental problem in machine learning and brings great challenges to attention approaches based on deep neural networks. Most existing neural attention methods cannot handle long sequences with different lengths. For efficient batch processing, architectures such as Transformer and its variants have been proposed, they usually assume constant input length.
FLamby: Datasets and Benchmarks for Cross-Silo Federated Learning in Realistic Healthcare Settings
Terrail, Jean Ogier du, Ayed, Samy-Safwan, Cyffers, Edwige, Grimberg, Felix, He, Chaoyang, Loeb, Regis, Mangold, Paul, Marchand, Tanguy, Marfoq, Othmane, Mushtaq, Erum, Muzellec, Boris, Philippenko, Constantin, Silva, Santiago, Teleลczuk, Maria, Albarqouni, Shadi, Avestimehr, Salman, Bellet, Aurรฉlien, Dieuleveut, Aymeric, Jaggi, Martin, Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth, Lorenzi, Marco, Neglia, Giovanni, Tommasi, Marc, Andreux, Mathieu
Federated Learning (FL) is a novel approach enabling several clients holding sensitive data to collaboratively train machine learning models, without centralizing data. The cross-silo FL setting corresponds to the case of few ($2$--$50$) reliable clients, each holding medium to large datasets, and is typically found in applications such as healthcare, finance, or industry. While previous works have proposed representative datasets for cross-device FL, few realistic healthcare cross-silo FL datasets exist, thereby slowing algorithmic research in this critical application. In this work, we propose a novel cross-silo dataset suite focused on healthcare, FLamby (Federated Learning AMple Benchmark of Your cross-silo strategies), to bridge the gap between theory and practice of cross-silo FL. FLamby encompasses 7 healthcare datasets with natural splits, covering multiple tasks, modalities, and data volumes, each accompanied with baseline training code. As an illustration, we additionally benchmark standard FL algorithms on all datasets. Our flexible and modular suite allows researchers to easily download datasets, reproduce results and re-use the different components for their research. FLamby is available at~\url{www.github.com/owkin/flamby}.
Zoo Guide to Network Embedding
Baptista, Anthony, Sรกnchez-Garcรญa, Rubรฉn J., Baudot, Anaรฏs, Bianconi, Ginestra
Networks have provided extremely successful models of data and complex systems. Yet, as combinatorial objects, networks do not have in general intrinsic coordinates and do not typically lie in an ambient space. The process of assigning an embedding space to a network has attracted lots of interest in the past few decades, and has been efficiently applied to fundamental problems in network inference, such as link prediction, node classification, and community detection. In this review, we provide a user-friendly guide to the network embedding literature and current trends in this field which will allow the reader to navigate through the complex landscape of methods and approaches emerging from the vibrant research activity on these subjects.
Zero-shot performance of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in 2D medical imaging: A comprehensive evaluation and practical guidelines
Mattjie, Christian, de Moura, Luis Vinicius, Ravazio, Rafaela Cappelari, Kupssinskรผ, Lucas Silveira, Parraga, Otรกvio, Delucis, Marcelo Mussi, Barros, Rodrigo Coelho
Segmentation in medical imaging is a critical component for the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of various diseases and medical conditions. Presently, the medical segmentation landscape is dominated by numerous specialized deep learning models, each fine-tuned for specific segmentation tasks and image modalities. The recently-introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) employs the ViT neural architecture and harnesses a massive training dataset to segment nearly any object; however, its suitability to the medical domain has not yet been investigated. In this study, we explore the zero-shot performance of SAM in medical imaging by implementing eight distinct prompt strategies across six datasets from four imaging modalities, including X-ray, ultrasound, dermatoscopy, and colonoscopy. Our findings reveal that SAM's zero-shot performance is not only comparable to, but in certain cases, surpasses the current state-of-the-art. Based on these results, we propose practical guidelines that require minimal interaction while consistently yielding robust outcomes across all assessed contexts.
Open Information Extraction via Chunks
Dong, Kuicai, Sun, Aixin, Kim, Jung-Jae, Li, Xiaoli
Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Existing OIE systems split a sentence into tokens and recognize token spans as tuple relations and arguments. We instead propose Sentence as Chunk sequence (SaC) and recognize chunk spans as tuple relations and arguments. We argue that SaC has better quantitative and qualitative properties for OIE than sentence as token sequence, and evaluate four choices of chunks (i.e., CoNLL chunks, simple phrases, NP chunks, and spans from SpanOIE) against gold OIE tuples. Accordingly, we propose a simple BERT-based model for sentence chunking, and propose Chunk-OIE for tuple extraction on top of SaC. Chunk-OIE achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple OIE datasets, showing that SaC benefits OIE task.