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Stop paying for extra iCloud storage -- This 20 app frees up space instantly

PCWorld

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American Stories: A Large-Scale Structured Text Dataset of Historical U.S. Newspapers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing full text datasets of U.S. public domain newspapers do not recognize the often complex layouts of newspaper scans, and as a result the digitized content scrambles texts from articles, headlines, captions, advertisements, and other layout regions. OCR quality can also be low. This study develops a novel, deep learning pipeline for extracting full article texts from newspaper images and applies it to the nearly 20 million scans in Library of Congress's public domain Chronicling America collection. The pipeline includes layout detection, legibility classification, custom OCR, and association of article texts spanning multiple bounding boxes. To achieve high scalability, it is built with efficient architectures designed for mobile phones. The resulting American Stories dataset provides high quality data that could be used for pre-training a large language model to achieve better understanding of historical English and historical world knowledge. The dataset could also be added to the external database of a retrieval-augmented language model to make historical information - ranging from interpretations of political events to minutiae about the lives of people's ancestors - more widely accessible. Furthermore, structured article texts facilitate using transformer-based methods for popular social science applications like topic classification, detection of reproduced content, and news story clustering. Finally, American Stories provides a massive silver quality dataset for innovating multimodal layout analysis models and other multimodal applications.


Coupled Reconstruction of Cortical Surfaces by Diffeomorphic Mesh Deformation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Accurate reconstruction of cortical surfaces from brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs) remains a challenging task due to the notorious partial volume effect in brain MRIs and the cerebral cortex's thin and highly folded patterns. Although many promising deep learning-based cortical surface reconstruction methods have been developed, they typically fail to model the interdependence between inner (white matter) and outer (pial) cortical surfaces, which can help generate cortical surfaces with spherical topology. To robustly reconstruct the cortical surfaces with topological correctness, we develop a new deep learning framework to jointly reconstruct the inner, outer, and their in-between (midthickness) surfaces and estimate cortical thickness directly from 3D MRIs. Our method first estimates the midthickness surface and then learns three diffeomorphic flows jointly to optimize the midthickness surface and deform it inward and outward to the inner and outer cortical surfaces respectively, regularized by topological correctness. Our method also outputs a cortex thickness value for each surface vertex, estimated from its diffeomorphic deformation trajectory. Our method has been evaluated on two large-scale neuroimaging datasets, including ADNI and OASIS, achieving state-of-the-art cortical surface reconstruction performance in terms of accuracy, surface regularity, and computation efficiency.


Auslan-Daily: Australian Sign Language Translation for Daily Communication and News

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sign language translation (SLT) aims to convert a continuous sign language video clip into a spoken language. Considering different geographic regions generally have their own native sign languages, it is valuable to establish corresponding SLT datasets to support related communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale dataset for SLT.To fill this gap, we curate an Australian Sign Language translation dataset, dubbed Auslan-Daily, which is collected from the Auslan educational TV series and Auslan TV programs. The former involves daily communications among multiple signers in the wild, while the latter comprises sign language videos for up-to-date news, weather forecasts, and documentaries. In particular, Auslan-Daily has two main features: (1) the topics are diverse and signed by multiple signers, and (2) the scenes in our dataset are more complex, e.g., captured in various environments, gesture interference during multi-signers' interactions and various camera positions. With a collection of more than 45 hours of high-quality Auslan video materials, we invite Auslan experts to align different fine-grained visual and language pairs, including video $\leftrightarrow$ fingerspelling, video $\leftrightarrow$ gloss, and video $\leftrightarrow$ sentence. As a result, Auslan-Daily contains multi-grained annotations that can be utilized to accomplish various fundamental sign language tasks, such as signer detection, sign spotting, fingerspelling detection, isolated sign language recognition, sign language translation and alignment.


Auditing for Human Expertise

Neural Information Processing Systems

High-stakes prediction tasks (e.g., patient diagnosis) are often handled by trained human experts. A common source of concern about automation in these settings is that experts may exercise intuition that is difficult to model and/or have access to information (e.g., conversations with a patient) that is simply unavailable to a would-be algorithm. This raises a natural question whether human experts add value which could not be captured by an algorithmic predictor.We develop a statistical framework under which we can pose this question as a natural hypothesis test. Indeed, as our framework highlights, detecting human expertise is more subtle than simply comparing the accuracy of expert predictions to those made by a particular learning algorithm. Instead, we propose a simple procedure which tests whether expert predictions are statistically independent from the outcomes of interest after conditioning on the available inputs ('features'). A rejection of our test thus suggests that human experts may add value to any algorithm trained on the available data, and has direct implications for whether human-AI'complementarity' is achievable in a given prediction task.We highlight the utility of our procedure using admissions data collected from the emergency department of a large academic hospital system, where we show that physicians' admit/discharge decisions for patients with acute gastrointestinal bleeding (AGIB) appear to be incorporating information that is not available to a standard algorithmic screening tool. This is despite the fact that the screening tool is arguably more accurate than physicians' discretionary decisions, highlighting that - even absent normative concerns about accountability or interpretability - accuracy is insufficient to justify algorithmic automation.


Cascading Bandits: Optimizing Recommendation Frequency in Delayed Feedback Environments

Neural Information Processing Systems

Delayed feedback is a critical problem in dynamic recommender systems. In practice, the feedback result often depends on the frequency of recommendation. Most existing online learning literature fails to consider optimization of the recommendation frequency, and regards the reward from each successfully recommended message to be equal. In this paper, we consider a novel cascading bandits setting, where individual messages from a selected list are sent to a user periodically. Whenever a user does not like a message, she may abandon the system with a probability positively correlated with the recommendation frequency.


False Discovery Proportion control for aggregated Knockoffs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Controlled variable selection is an important analytical step in various scientific fields, such as brain imaging or genomics. In these high-dimensional data settings, considering too many variables leads to poor models and high costs, hence the need for statistical guarantees on false positives. Knockoffs are a popular statistical tool for conditional variable selection in high dimension. However, they control for the expected proportion of false discoveries (FDR) and not the actual proportion of false discoveries (FDP). We present a new method, KOPI, that controls the proportion of false discoveries for Knockoff-based inference. The proposed method also relies on a new type of aggregation to address the undesirable randomness associated with classical Knockoff inference. We demonstrate FDP control and substantial power gains over existing Knockoff-based methods in various simulation settings and achieve good sensitivity/specificity tradeoffs on brain imaging data.


Granger Components Analysis: Unsupervised learning of latent temporal dependencies

Neural Information Processing Systems

A new technique for unsupervised learning of time series data based on the notion of Granger causality is presented. The technique learns pairs of projections of a multivariate data set such that the resulting components -- driving and driven -- maximize the strength of the Granger causality between the latent time series (how strongly the past of the driving signal predicts the present of the driven signal). A coordinate descent algorithm that learns pairs of coefficient vectors in an alternating fashion is developed and shown to blindly identify the underlying sources (up to scale) on simulated vector autoregressive (VAR) data. The technique is tested on scalp electroencephalography (EEG) data from a motor imagery experiment where the resulting components lateralize with the side of the cued hand, and also on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, where the recovered components express previously reported resting-state networks.


DiffInfinite: Large Mask-Image Synthesis via Parallel Random Patch Diffusion in Histopathology

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present DiffInfinite, a hierarchical diffusion model that generates arbitrarily large histological images while preserving long-range correlation structural information. Our approach first generates synthetic segmentation masks, subsequently used as conditions for the high-fidelity generative diffusion process. The proposed sampling method can be scaled up to any desired image size while only requiring small patches for fast training. Moreover, it can be parallelized more efficiently than previous large-content generation methods while avoiding tiling artifacts. The training leverages classifier-free guidance to augment a small, sparsely annotated dataset with unlabelled data.


Learning from Active Human Involvement through Proxy Value Propagation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning from active human involvement enables the human subject to actively intervene and demonstrate to the AI agent during training. The interaction and corrective feedback from human brings safety and AI alignment to the learning process. In this work, we propose a new reward-free active human involvement method called Proxy Value Propagation for policy optimization. Our key insight is that a proxy value function can be designed to express human intents, wherein state-action pairs in the human demonstration are labeled with high values, while those agents' actions that are intervened receive low values. Through the TD-learning framework, labeled values of demonstrated state-action pairs are further propagated to other unlabeled data generated from agents' exploration. The proxy value function thus induces a policy that faithfully emulates human behaviors. Human-in-the-loop experiments show the generality and efficiency of our method. With minimal modification to existing reinforcement learning algorithms, our method can learn to solve continuous and discrete control tasks with various human control devices, including the challenging task of driving in Grand Theft Auto V. Demo video and code are available at: https://metadriverse.github.io/pvp.