We propose a disease classification model, called the QC-SPHARM, for the early detection of the Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The proposed QC-SPHARM can distinguish between normal control (NC) subjects and AD patients, as well as between amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) patients having high possibility progressing into AD and those who do not. Using the spherical harmonics (SPHARM) based registration, hippocampal surfaces segmented from the ADNI data are individually registered to a template surface constructed from the NC subjects using SPHARM. Local geometric distortions of the deformation from the template surface to each subject are quantified in terms of conformality distortions and curvatures distortions. The measurements are combined with the spherical harmonics coefficients and the total volume change of the subject from the template. Afterwards, a t-test based feature selection method incorporating the bagging strategy is applied to extract those local regions having high discriminating power of the two classes. The disease diagnosis machine can therefore be built using the data under the Support Vector Machine (SVM) setting. Using 110 NC subjects and 110 AD patients from the ADNI database, the proposed algorithm achieves 85:2% testing accuracy on 80 random samples as testing subjects, with the incorporation of surface geometry in the classification machine. Using 20 aMCI patients who has advanced to AD during a two-year period and another 20 aMCI patients who remain non-AD for the next two years, the algorithm achieves 81:2% accuracy using 10 randomly picked subjects as testing data. Our proposed method is 6%-15% better than other classification models without the incorporation of surface geometry. The results demonstrate the advantages of using local geometric distortions as the discriminating criterion for early AD diagnosis.

In high energy physics experiments Particle Flow (PFlow) algorithms are designed to reach optimal calorimeter reconstruction and jet energy resolution. A computer vision approach to PFlow reconstruction using deep Neural Network techniques based on Convolutional layers (cPFlow) is proposed. The algorithm is trained to learn, from calorimeter and charged particle track images, to distinguish the calorimeter energy deposits from neutral and charged particles in a non-trivial context, where the energy originated by a $\pi^{+}$ and a $\pi^{0}$ is overlapping within calorimeter clusters. The performance of the cPFlow and a traditional parametrized PFlow (pPFlow) algorithm are compared. The cPFlow provides a precise reconstruction of the neutral and charged energy in the calorimeter and therefore outperform more traditional pPFlow algorithm both, in energy response and position resolution.

In this paper, the problem of minimizing energy and time consumption for task computation and transmission is studied in a mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled balloon network. In the considered network, each user needs to process a computational task in each time instant, where high-altitude balloons (HABs), acting as flying wireless base stations, can use their powerful computational abilities to process the tasks offloaded from their associated users. Since the data size of each user's computational task varies over time, the HABs must dynamically adjust the user association, service sequence, and task partition scheme to meet the users' needs. This problem is posed as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the energy and time consumption for task computing and transmission by adjusting the user association, service sequence, and task allocation scheme. To solve this problem, a support vector machine (SVM)-based federated learning (FL) algorithm is proposed to determine the user association proactively. The proposed SVM-based FL method enables each HAB to cooperatively build an SVM model that can determine all user associations without any transmissions of either user historical associations or computational tasks to other HABs. Given the prediction of the optimal user association, the service sequence and task allocation of each user can be optimized so as to minimize the weighted sum of the energy and time consumption. Simulations with real data of city cellular traffic from the OMNILab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the weighted sum of the energy and time consumption of all users by up to 16.1% compared to a conventional centralized method.

In many physical systems, inputs related by intrinsic system symmetries are mapped to the same output. When inverting such systems, i.e., solving the associated inverse problems, there is no unique solution. This causes fundamental difficulties for deploying the emerging end-to-end deep learning approach. Using the generalized phase retrieval problem as an illustrative example, we show that careful symmetry breaking on the training data can help get rid of the difficulties and significantly improve the learning performance. We also extract and highlight the underlying mathematical principle of the proposed solution, which is directly applicable to other inverse problems.

The success and popularity of deep learning is on the rise, partially due to powerful deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch that make it easier to develop deep learning models. However, these libraries also come with steep learning curves, since programming in these frameworks is quite different from traditional imperative programming with explicit loops and conditionals. In this work, we present a tool called TF-Coder for programming by example in TensorFlow. TF-Coder uses a bottom-up weighted enumerative search, with value-based pruning of equivalent expressions and flexible type- and value-based filtering to ensure that expressions adhere to various requirements imposed by the TensorFlow library. We also train models that predict TensorFlow operations from features of the input and output tensors and natural language descriptions of tasks, and use the models to prioritize relevant operations during the search. TF-Coder solves 63 of 70 real-world tasks within 5 minutes, often finding solutions that are simpler than those written by TensorFlow experts.

Recently, substantial research efforts in Deep Metric Learning (DML) focused on designing complex pairwise-distance losses and convoluted sample-mining and implementation strategies to ease optimization. The standard cross-entropy loss for classification has been largely overlooked in DML. On the surface, the cross-entropy may seem unrelated and irrelevant to metric learning as it does not explicitly involve pairwise distances. However, we provide a theoretical analysis that links the cross-entropy to several well-known and recent pairwise losses. Our connections are drawn from two different perspectives: one based on an explicit optimization insight; the other on discriminative and generative views of the mutual information between the labels and the learned features. First, we explicitly demonstrate that the cross-entropy is an upper bound on a new pairwise loss, which has a structure similar to various pairwise losses: it minimizes intra-class distances while maximizing inter-class distances. As a result, minimizing the cross-entropy can be seen as an approximate bound-optimization (or Majorize-Minimize) algorithm for minimizing this pairwise loss. Second, we show that, more generally, minimizing the cross-entropy is actually equivalent to maximizing the mutual information, to which we connect several well-known pairwise losses. These findings indicate that the cross-entropy represents a proxy for maximizing the mutual information -- as pairwise losses do -- without the need for complex sample-mining and optimization schemes. Furthermore, we show that various standard pairwise losses can be explicitly related to one another via bound relationships. Our experiments over four standard DML benchmarks (CUB200, Cars-196, Stanford Online Product and In-Shop) strongly support our findings. We consistently obtained state-of-the-art results, outperforming many recent and complex DML methods.

Music source separation has been a popular topic in signal processing for decades, not only because of its technical difficulty, but also due to its importance to many commercial applications, such as automatic karoake and remixing. In this work, we propose a novel self-attention network to separate voice and accompaniment in music. First, a convolutional neural network (CNN) with densely-connected CNN blocks is built as our base network. We then insert self-attention subnets at different levels of the base CNN to make use of the long-term intra-dependency of music, i.e., repetition. Within self-attention subnets, repetitions of the same musical patterns inform reconstruction of other repetitions, for better source separation performance. Results show the proposed method leads to 19.5% relative improvement in vocals separation in terms of SDR. We compare our methods with state-of-the-art systems i.e. MMDenseNet and MMDenseLSTM.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations on state observations. These perturbations do not alter the environment directly but can mislead the agent into making suboptimal decisions. We analyze the Markov Decision Process (MDP) under this threat model and utilize tools from the neural net-work verification literature to enable robust train-ing for DRL under observational perturbations. Our techniques are general and can be applied to both Deep Q Networks (DQN) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithms for discrete and continuous action control problems. We demonstrate that our proposed training procedure significantly improves the robustness of DQN and DDPG agents under a suite of strong white-box attacks on observations, including a few novel attacks we specifically craft. Additionally, our training procedure can produce provable certificates for the robustness of a Deep RL agent.

To deflect adversarial attacks, a range of "certified" classifiers have been proposed. In addition to labeling an image, certified classifiers produce (when possible) a certificate guaranteeing that the input image is not an $\ell_p$-bounded adversarial example. We present a new attack that exploits not only the labelling function of a classifier, but also the certificate generator. The proposed method applies large perturbations that place images far from a class boundary while maintaining the imperceptibility property of adversarial examples. The proposed "Shadow Attack" causes certifiably robust networks to mislabel an image and simultaneously produce a "spoofed" certificate of robustness.

Image classifiers are typically scored on their test set accuracy, but high accuracy can mask a subtle type of model failure. We find that high scoring convolutional neural networks (CNN) exhibit troubling pathologies that allow them to display high accuracy even in the absence of semantically salient features. When a model provides a high-confidence decision without salient supporting input features we say that the classifier has overinterpreted its input, finding too much class-evidence in patterns that appear nonsensical to humans. Here, we demonstrate that state of the art neural networks for CIFAR-10 and ImageNet suffer from overinterpretation, and find CIFAR-10 trained models make confident predictions even when 95% of an input image has been masked and humans are unable to discern salient features in the remaining pixel subset. Although these patterns portend potential model fragility in real-world deployment, they are in fact valid statistical patterns of the image classification benchmark that alone suffice to attain high test accuracy. We find that ensembling strategies can help mitigate model overinterpretation, and classifiers which rely on more semantically meaningful features can improve accuracy over both the test set and out-of-distribution images from a different source than the training data.