feature regularization
Enhancing Open-World Bacterial Raman Spectra Identification by Feature Regularization for Improved Resilience against Unknown Classes
Balytskyi, Yaroslav, Kalashnyk, Nataliia, Hubenko, Inna, Balytska, Alina, McNear, Kelly
The combination of Deep Learning techniques and Raman spectroscopy shows great potential offering precise and prompt identification of pathogenic bacteria in clinical settings. However, the traditional closed-set classification approaches assume that all test samples belong to one of the known pathogens, and their applicability is limited since the clinical environment is inherently unpredictable and dynamic, unknown or emerging pathogens may not be included in the available catalogs. We demonstrate that the current state-of-the-art Neural Networks identifying pathogens through Raman spectra are vulnerable to unknown inputs, resulting in an uncontrollable false positive rate. To address this issue, first, we developed a novel ensemble of ResNet architectures combined with the attention mechanism which outperforms existing closed-world methods, achieving an accuracy of $87.8 \pm 0.1\%$ compared to the best available model's accuracy of $86.7 \pm 0.4\%$. Second, through the integration of feature regularization by the Objectosphere loss function, our model achieves both high accuracy in identifying known pathogens from the catalog and effectively separates unknown samples drastically reducing the false positive rate. Finally, the proposed feature regularization method during training significantly enhances the performance of out-of-distribution detectors during the inference phase improving the reliability of the detection of unknown classes. Our novel algorithm for Raman spectroscopy enables the detection of unknown, uncatalogued, and emerging pathogens providing the flexibility to adapt to future pathogens that may emerge, and has the potential to improve the reliability of Raman-based solutions in dynamic operating environments where accuracy is critical, such as public safety applications.
Feature prioritization and regularization improve standard accuracy and adversarial robustness
Adversarial training has been successfully applied to build robust models at a certain cost. While the robustness of a model increases, the standard classification accuracy declines. This phenomenon is suggested to be an inherent trade-off. We propose a model that employs feature prioritization by a nonlinear attention module and $L_2$ feature regularization to improve the adversarial robustness and the standard accuracy relative to adversarial training. The attention module encourages the model to rely heavily on robust features by assigning larger weights to them while suppressing non-robust features. The regularizer encourages the model to extract similar features for the natural and adversarial images, effectively ignoring the added perturbation. In addition to evaluating the robustness of our model, we provide justification for the attention module and propose a novel experimental strategy that quantitatively demonstrates that our model is almost ideally aligned with salient data characteristics. Additional experimental results illustrate the power of our model relative to the state of the art methods.