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 Deep Learning


Per-Pixel Lung Thickness and Lung Capacity Estimation on Chest X-Rays using Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Estimating the lung depth on x-ray images could provide both an accurate opportunistic lung volume estimation during clinical routine and improve image contrast in modern structural chest imaging techniques like x-ray dark-field imaging. We present a method based on a convolutional neural network that allows a per-pixel lung thickness estimation and subsequent total lung capacity estimation. The network was trained and validated using 5250 simulated radiographs generated from 525 real CT scans. Furthermore, we are able to infer the model trained with simulation data on real radiographs. For 35 patients, quantitative and qualitative evaluation was performed on standard clinical radiographs. The ground-truth for each patient's total lung volume was defined based on the patients' corresponding CT scan. The mean-absolute error between the estimated lung volume on the 35 real radiographs and groundtruth volume was 0.73 liter. Additionally, we predicted the lung thicknesses on a synthetic dataset of 131 radiographs, where the mean-absolute error was 0.27 liter. The results show, that it is possible to transfer the knowledge obtained in a simulation model to real x-ray images.


Influential Papers in Artificial Intelligence and Paediatrics: Assessing RPYS by Experts Review

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Interestingly, no historical bibliometric study analysing the knowledge development in this specific paediatric field has been performed yet, thus our study aimed to close this gap. References Publication Years Spectrography (RPYS), more precisely CitedReferenceExplorer (CRE) software tool was employed to achieve this aim. We identified 28 influential papers and domain experts validation showed that both, the RPYS method and CRE tool performed adequately in in the identification process. Key words: Artificial intelligence, Paediatrics, Bibliometrics, Influential papers, RPYS, CRE INTRODUCTION The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine can be traced back to 1963 when Rand Corporation published its memorandum on AI and brain mechanisms (Maron 1963). The descriptions of some of the first practical applications were published in 1968.


Masked LARk: Masked Learning, Aggregation and Reporting worKflow

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little oversight on how that data can be used. Thus, most browsers are moving towards removal of 3PC in subsequent browser iterations. In order to substantially improve end-user privacy while allowing sites to continue to sustain their business through ad funding, new privacy-preserving primitives need to be introduced. In this paper, we discuss a new proposal, called Masked LARk, for aggregation of user engagement measurement and model training that prevents cross-site tracking, while remaining (a) flexible, for engineering development and maintenance, (b) secure, in the sense that cross-site tracking and tracing are blocked and (c) open for continued model development and training, allowing advertisers to serve relevant ads to interested users. We introduce a secure multi-party compute (MPC) protocol that utilizes "helper" parties to train models, so that once data leaves the browser, no downstream system can individually construct a complete picture of the user activity. For training, our key innovation is through the usage of masking, or the obfuscation of the true labels, while still allowing a gradient to be accurately computed in aggregate over a batch of data. Our protocol only utilizes light cryptography, at such a level that an interested yet inexperienced reader can understand the core algorithm. We develop helper endpoints that implement this system, and give example usage of training in PyTorch.


Regularized Frank-Wolfe for Dense CRFs: Generalizing Mean Field and Beyond

arXiv.org Machine Learning

W e introduce regularized Frank-W olfe, a general and effective algorithm for inference and learning of dense conditional random fields (CRFs). The algorithm optimizes a nonconvex continuous relaxation of the CRF inferenc e problem using vanilla Frank-W olfe with approximate updates, which are equivalen t to minimizing a regularized energy function. Our proposed method is a generaliz ation of existing algorithms such as mean field or concave-convex procedure. This p erspective not only offers a unified analysis of these algorithms, but also allow s an easy way of exploring different variants that potentially yield better performa nce. W e illustrate this in our empirical results on standard semantic segmentation datas ets, where several instantiations of our regularized Frank-W olfe outperform mean fie ld inference, both as a standalone component and as an end-to-end trainable layer i n a neural network. W e also show that dense CRFs, coupled with our new algorithms, p roduce significant improvements over strong CNN baselines.


Identifiable Generative Models for Missing Not at Random Data Imputation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Real-world datasets often have missing values associated with complex generative processes, where the cause of the missingness may not be fully observed. This is known as missing not at random (MNAR) data. However, many imputation methods do not take into account the missingness mechanism, resulting in biased imputation values when MNAR data is present. Although there are a few methods that have considered the MNAR scenario, their model's identifiability under MNAR is generally not guaranteed. That is, model parameters can not be uniquely determined even with infinite data samples, hence the imputation results given by such models can still be biased. This issue is especially overlooked by many modern deep generative models. In this work, we fill in this gap by systematically analyzing the identifiability of generative models under MNAR. Furthermore, we propose a practical deep generative model which can provide identifiability guarantees under mild assumptions, for a wide range of MNAR mechanisms. Our method demonstrates a clear advantage for tasks on both synthetic data and multiple real-world scenarios with MNAR data.


VACA: Design of Variational Graph Autoencoders for Interventional and Counterfactual Queries

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for graph representation learning and have been proven to excel in practical complex problems like neural machine translation [1], traffic forecasting [5, 47], or drug discovery [11]. In this work, we investigate to which extent the inductive bias of GNNs-encoding the causal graph information-can be exploited to answer interventional and counterfactual queries. More specifically, to approximate the interventional and counterfactual distributions induced by interventions on a casual model. To this end, we assume i) causal sufficiency-i.e., absence of hidden confounders; and, ii) access to observational data and the true causal graph. We stress that the causal graph can often be inferred from expert knowledge [52] or via one of the approaches for causal discovery [12, 42]. With this analysis we aim to complement the concurrent line of research that theoretically studies the use of Neural Networks (NN) [45], and more recently GNNs [49], for causal inference. To this end, we describe the architectural design conditions that a variational graph autoencoder (VGAE)-as a density estimator that leverages a priori graph structure-must fulfill so that it can approximate causal interventions (do-operator) and abduction-action-prediction steps [33]. The resulting Variational Causal Graph Autoencoder, referred to as VACA, enables approximating the observational, interventional and counterfactual distributions induced by a causal model with unknown structural equations. We remark that parametric assumptions on the structural causal equations are in general not testable, may thus not hold in practice [34] and may lead to inaccurate results, if misspecified.


LSTM-RPA: A Simple but Effective Long Sequence Prediction Algorithm for Music Popularity Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The big data about music history contains information about time and users' behavior. Researchers could predict the trend of popular songs accurately by analyzing this data. The traditional trend prediction models can better predict the short trend than the long trend. In this paper, we proposed the improved LSTM Rolling Prediction Algorithm (LSTM-RPA), which combines LSTM historical input with current prediction results as model input for next time prediction. Meanwhile, this algorithm converts the long trend prediction task into multiple short trend prediction tasks. The evaluation results show that the LSTM-RPA model increased F score by 13.03%, 16.74%, 11.91%, 18.52%, compared with LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU and RNN.


Self-supervised EEG Representation Learning for Automatic Sleep Staging

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Objective: In this paper, we aim to learn robust vector representations from massive unlabeled Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, such that the learned representations (1) are expressive enough to replace the raw signals in the sleep staging task; and (2) provide better predictive performance than supervised models in scenarios of fewer labels and noisy samples. Materials and Methods: We propose a self-supervised model, named Contrast with the World Representation (ContraWR), for EEG signal representation learning, which uses global statistics from the dataset to distinguish signals associated with different sleep stages. The ContraWR model is evaluated on three real-world EEG datasets that include both at-home and in-lab recording settings. Results: ContraWR outperforms recent self-supervised learning methods, MoCo, SimCLR, BYOL, SimSiam on the sleep staging task across three datasets. ContraWR also beats supervised learning when fewer training labels are available (e.g., 4% accuracy improvement when less than 2% data is labeled). Moreover, the model provides informative representations in 2D projection. Discussion: The proposed model can be generalized to other unsupervised physiological signal learning tasks. Future directions include exploring task-specific data augmentations and combining self-supervised with supervised methods, building upon the initial success of self-supervised learning in this paper. Conclusions: We show that ContraWR is robust to noise and can provide high-quality EEG representations for downstream prediction tasks. In low-label scenarios (e.g., only 2% data has labels), ContraWR shows much better predictive power (e.g., 4% improvement on sleep staging accuracy) than supervised baselines.


A Scenario-Based Platform for Testing Autonomous Vehicle Behavior Prediction Models in Simulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Behavior prediction remains one of the most challenging tasks in the autonomous vehicle (AV) software stack. Forecasting the future trajectories of nearby agents plays a critical role in ensuring road safety, as it equips AVs with the necessary information to plan safe routes of travel. However, these prediction models are data-driven and trained on data collected in real life that may not represent the full range of scenarios an AV can encounter. Hence, it is important that these prediction models are extensively tested in various test scenarios involving interactive behaviors prior to deployment. To support this need, we present a simulation-based testing platform which supports (1) intuitive scenario modeling with a probabilistic programming language called Scenic, (2) specifying a multi-objective evaluation metric with a partial priority ordering, (3) falsification of the provided metric, and (4) parallelization of simulations for scalable testing. As a part of the platform, we provide a library of 25 Scenic programs that model challenging test scenarios involving interactive traffic participant behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the scalability of our platform by testing a trained behavior prediction model and searching for failure scenarios.


Graph Communal Contrastive Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph representation learning is crucial for many real-world applications (e.g. social relation analysis). A fundamental problem for graph representation learning is how to effectively learn representations without human labeling, which is usually costly and time-consuming. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) addresses this problem by pulling the positive node pairs (or similar nodes) closer while pushing the negative node pairs (or dissimilar nodes) apart in the representation space. Despite the success of the existing GCL methods, they primarily sample node pairs based on the node-level proximity yet the community structures have rarely been taken into consideration. As a result, two nodes from the same community might be sampled as a negative pair. We argue that the community information should be considered to identify node pairs in the same communities, where the nodes insides are semantically similar. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Communal Contrastive Learning (gCooL) framework to jointly learn the community partition and learn node representations in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, the proposed gCooL consists of two components: a Dense Community Aggregation (DeCA) algorithm for community detection and a Reweighted Self-supervised Cross-contrastive (ReSC) training scheme to utilize the community information. Additionally, the real-world graphs are complex and often consist of multiple views. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed gCooL can also be naturally adapted to multiplex graphs. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed gCooL on a variety of real-world graphs. The experimental results show that the gCooL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.