Deep learning is an important element of AI that's helping advance diagnostics and treatment, but it also remains relatively uncharted territory. The most successful applications of the tech to date have been in medical imaging, first author Fei Wang, PhD, and colleagues at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine. Other applications of the AI tech are vast, but scientists are still facing significant barriers. "The potential of deep learning to disentangle complex, subtle discriminative patterns in images suggests that these techniques may be useful in other areas of medicine," Wang and co-authors said. "Substantial challenges must be addressed, however, before deep learning can be applied more broadly." It took 128,175 retinal images and 129,450 skin images for a deep learning model to learn to classify diabetic retinopathy and skin cancer, respectively, Wang et al. wrote.

Graph deep learning models, such as graph convolutional networks (GCN) achieve remarkable performance for tasks on graph data. Similar to other types of deep models, graph deep learning models often suffer from adversarial attacks. However, compared with non-graph data, the discrete features, graph connections and different definitions of imperceptible perturbations bring unique challenges and opportunities for the adversarial attacks and defences for graph data. In this paper, we propose both attack and defence techniques. For attack, we show that the discrete feature problem could easily be resolved by introducing integrated gradients which could accurately reflect the effect of perturbing certain features or edges while still benefiting from the parallel computations. For defence, we propose to partially learn the adjacency matrix to integrate the information of distant nodes so that the prediction of a certain target is supported by more global graph information rather than just few neighbour nodes. This, therefore, makes the attacks harder since one need to perturb more features/edges to make the attacks succeed. Our experiments on a number of datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The deep learning trend has recently impacted a variety of fields, including communication systems, where various approaches have explored the application of neural networks in place of traditional designs. Neural networks flexibly allow for data/simulation-driven optimization, but are often employed as black boxes detached from direct application of domain knowledge. Our work considers learning-based approaches addressing modulation and signal detection design for the non-coherent MIMO channel. We demonstrate that simulation-driven optimization can be performed while entirely avoiding neural networks, yet still perform comparably. Additionally, we show the feasibility of MIMO communications over extremely short coherence windows (i.e., channel coefficient stability period), with as few as two time slots.

We present a novel approach for training deep neural networks in a Bayesian way. Classical, i.e. non-Bayesian, deep learning has two major drawbacks both originating from the fact that network parameters are considered to be deterministic. First, model uncertainty cannot be measured thus limiting the use of deep learning in many fields of application and second, training of deep neural networks is often hampered by overfitting. The proposed approach uses variational inference to approximate the intractable a posteriori distribution on basis of a normal prior. The variational density is designed in such a way that the a posteriori uncertainty of the network parameters is represented per network layer and depending on the estimated parameter expectation values. This way, only a few additional parameters need to be optimized compared to a non-Bayesian network. We apply this Bayesian approach to train and test the LeNet architecture on the MNIST dataset. Compared to classical deep learning, the test error is reduced by 15%. In addition, the trained model contains information about the parameter uncertainty in each layer. We show that this information can be used to calculate credible intervals for the prediction and to optimize the network architecture for a given training data set.

Much of the literature on robotic perception focuses on the visual modality. Vision provides a global observation of a scene, making it broadly useful. However, in the domain of robotic manipulation, vision alone can sometimes prove inadequate: in the presence of occlusions or poor lighting, visual object identification might be difficult. The sense of touch can provide robots with an alternative mechanism for recognizing objects. In this paper, we study the problem of touch-based instance recognition. We propose a novel framing of the problem as multi-modal recognition: the goal of our system is to recognize, given a visual and tactile observation, whether or not these observations correspond to the same object. To our knowledge, our work is the first to address this type of multi-modal instance recognition problem on such a large-scale with our analysis spanning 98 different objects. We employ a robot equipped with two GelSight touch sensors, one on each finger, and a self-supervised, autonomous data collection procedure to collect a dataset of tactile observations and images. Our experimental results show that it is possible to accurately recognize object instances by touch alone, including instances of novel objects that were never seen during training. Our learned model outperforms other methods on this complex task, including that of human volunteers.

The recent advent of automated neural network architecture search led to several methods that outperform state-of-the-art human-designed architectures. However, these approaches are computationally expensive, in extreme cases consuming GPU years. We propose two novel methods which aim to expedite this optimization problem by transferring knowledge acquired from previous tasks to new ones. First, we propose a novel neural architecture selection method which employs this knowledge to identify strong and weak characteristics of neural architectures across datasets. Thus, these characteristics do not need to be rediscovered in every search, a strong weakness of current state-of-the-art searches. Second, we propose a method for learning curve extrapolation to determine if a training process can be terminated early. In contrast to existing work, we propose to learn from learning curves of architectures trained on other datasets to improve the prediction accuracy for novel datasets. On five different image classification benchmarks, we empirically demonstrate that both of our orthogonal contributions independently lead to an acceleration, without any significant loss in accuracy.

Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) using self-game-play has shown remarkable performance on several board games (e.g., Chess and Go) as well as video games (e.g., Atari games and Dota2). It is plausible to consider that RL, starting from zero knowledge, might be able to gradually approximate a winning strategy after a certain amount of training. In this paper, we explore neural Monte-Carlo-Tree-Search (neural MCTS), an RL algorithm which has been applied successfully by DeepMind to play Go and Chess at a super-human level. We try to leverage the computational power of neural MCTS to solve a class of combinatorial optimization problems. Following the idea of Hintikka's Game-Theoretical Semantics, we propose the Zermelo Gamification (ZG) to transform specific combinatorial optimization problems into Zermelo games whose winning strategies correspond to the solutions of the original optimization problem. The ZG also provides a specially designed neural MCTS. We use a combinatorial planning problem for which the ground-truth policy is efficiently computable to demonstrate that ZG is promising.

Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) currently dominate competitions on image segmentation, for neuroimaging analysis tasks, more classical generative approaches based on mixture models are still used in practice to parcellate brains. To bridge the gap between the two, in this paper we propose a marriage between a probabilistic generative model, which has been shown to be robust to variability among magnetic resonance (MR) images acquired via different imaging protocols, and a CNN. The link is in the prior distribution over the unknown tissue classes, which are classically modelled using a Markov random field. In this work we model the interactions among neighbouring pixels by a type of recurrent CNN, which can encode more complex spatial interactions. We validate our proposed model on publicly available MR data, from different centres, and show that it generalises across imaging protocols. This result demonstrates a successful and principled inclusion of a CNN in a generative model, which in turn could be adapted by any probabilistic generative approach for image segmentation.

In this paper, we investigate deep learning (DL)-enabled signal demodulation methods and establish the first open dataset of real modulated signals for wireless communication systems. Specifically, we propose a flexible communication prototype platform for measuring real modulation dataset. Then, based on the measured dataset, two DL-based demodulators, called deep belief network (DBN)-support vector machine (SVM) demodulator and adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) based demodulator, are proposed. The proposed DBN-SVM based demodulator exploits the advantages of both DBN and SVM, i.e., the advantage of DBN as a feature extractor and SVM as a feature classifier. In DBN-SVM based demodulator, the received signals are normalized before being fed to the DBN network. Furthermore, an AdaBoost based demodulator is developed, which employs the $k$-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) as a weak classifier to form a strong combined classifier. Finally, experimental results indicate that the proposed DBN-SVM based demodulator and AdaBoost based demodulator are superior to the single classification method using DBN, SVM, and maximum likelihood (MLD) based demodulator.

This paper studies a new application of deep learning (DL) for optimizing constellations in two-way relaying with physical-layer network coding (PNC), where deep neural network (DNN)-based modulation and demodulation are employed at each terminal and relay node. We train DNNs such that the cross entropy loss is directly minimized, and thus it maximizes the likelihood, rather than considering the Euclidean distance of the constellations. The proposed scheme can be extended to higher level constellations with slight modification of the DNN structure. Simulation results demonstrate a significant performance gain in terms of the achievable sum rate over conventional relaying schemes. Furthermore, since our DNN demodulator directly outputs bit-wise probabilities, it is straightforward to concatenate with soft-decision channel decoding.