Biases in automated clinical decision-making using Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) impose significant disparities in patient care and treatment outcomes. Conventional approaches have primarily focused on bias mitigation strategies stemming from single attributes, overlooking intersectional subgroups -- groups formed across various demographic intersections (such as race, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Rendering single-attribute mitigation strategies to intersectional subgroups becomes statistically irrelevant due to the varying distribution and bias patterns across these subgroups. The multimodal nature of EHR -- data from various sources such as combinations of text, time series, tabular, events, and images -- adds another layer of complexity as the influence on minority groups may fluctuate across modalities. In this paper, we take the initial steps to uncover potential intersectional biases in predictions by sourcing extensive multimodal datasets, MIMIC-Eye1 and MIMIC-IV ED, and propose mitigation at the intersectional subgroup level. We perform and benchmark downstream tasks and bias evaluation on the datasets by learning a unified text representation from multimodal sources, harnessing the enormous capabilities of the pre-trained clinical Language Models (LM), MedBERT, Clinical BERT, and Clinical BioBERT. Our findings indicate that the proposed sub-group-specific bias mitigation is robust across different datasets, subgroups, and embeddings, demonstrating effectiveness in addressing intersectional biases in multimodal settings.

In this paper, we study the challenging problem of tracking the trajectory of a moving object in a video with possibly very complex background. In contrast to most existing trackers which only learn the appearance of the tracked object online, we take a different approach, inspired by recent advances in deep learning architectures, by putting more emphasis on the (unsupervised) feature learning problem. Specifically, by using auxiliary natural images, we train a stacked denoising autoencoder offline to learn generic image features that are more robust against variations. This is then followed by knowledge transfer from offline training to the online tracking process. Online tracking involves a classification neural network which is constructed from the encoder part of the trained autoencoder as a feature extractor and an additional classification layer. Both the feature extractor and the classifier can be further tuned to adapt to appearance changes of the moving object. Comparison with the state-of-the-art trackers on some challenging benchmark video sequences shows that our deep learning tracker is more accurate while maintaining low computational cost with real-time performance when our MATLAB implementation of the tracker is used with a modest graphics processing unit (GPU).

Objective: To pre-train fair and unbiased patient representations from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) using a novel weighted loss function that reduces bias and improves fairness in deep representation learning models. Methods: We defined a new loss function, called weighted loss function, in the deep representation learning model to balance the importance of different groups of patients and features. We applied the proposed model, called Fair Patient Model (FPM), to a sample of 34,739 patients from the MIMIC-III dataset and learned patient representations for four clinical outcome prediction tasks. Results: FPM outperformed the baseline models in terms of three fairness metrics: demographic parity, equality of opportunity difference, and equalized odds ratio. FPM also achieved comparable predictive performance with the baselines, with an average accuracy of 0.7912. Feature analysis revealed that FPM captured more information from clinical features than the baselines. Conclusion: FPM is a novel method to pre-train fair and unbiased patient representations from EHR data using a weighted loss function. The learned representations can be used for various downstream tasks in healthcare and can be extended to other domains where bias and fairness are important.

Anomaly detection is a prominent data preprocessing step in learning applications for correction and/or removal of faulty data. Automating this data type with the use of autoencoders could increase the quality of the dataset by isolating anomalies that were missed through manual or basic statistical analysis. A Simple, Deep, and Supervised Deep Autoencoder were trained and compared for anomaly detection over the ASHRAE building energy dataset. Given the restricted parameters under which the models were trained, the Deep Autoencoder perfoms the best, however, the Supervised Deep Autoencoder outperforms the other models in total anomalies detected when considerations for the test datasets are given.

Monitoring gas turbine combustors health, in particular, early detecting abnormal behaviors and incipient faults, is critical in ensuring gas turbines operating efficiently and in preventing costly unplanned maintenance. One popular means of detecting combustor abnormalities is through continuously monitoring exhaust gas temperature profiles. Over the years many anomaly detection technologies have been explored for detecting combustor faults, however, the performance (detection rate) of anomaly detection solutions fielded is still inadequate. Advanced technologies that can improve detection performance are in great need. Aiming for improving anomaly detection performance, in this paper we introduce recently-developed deep learning (DL) in machine learning into the combustors anomaly detection application. Specifically, we use deep learning to hierarchically learn features from the sensor measurements of exhaust gas temperatures. And we then use the learned features as the input to a neural network classifier for performing combustor anomaly detection. Since such deep learned features potentially better capture complex relations among all sensor measurements and the underlying combustor behavior than handcrafted features do, we expect the learned features can lead to a more accurate and robust anomaly detection. Using the data collected from a real-world gas turbine combustion system, we demonstrated that the proposed deep learning based anomaly detection significantly indeed improved combustor anomaly detection performance.

We show that compact fully connected (FC) deep learning networks trained to classify wireless protocols using a hierarchy of multiple denoising autoencoders (AEs) outperform reference FC networks trained in a typical way, i.e., with a stochastic gradient based optimization of a given FC architecture. Not only is the complexity of such FC network, measured in number of trainable parameters and scalar multiplications, much lower than the reference FC and residual models, its accuracy also outperforms both models for nearly all tested SNR values (0 dB to 50dB). Such AE-trained networks are suited for in-situ protocol inference performed by simple mobile devices based on noisy signal measurements. Training is based on the data transmitted by real devices, and collected in a controlled environment, and systematically augmented by a policy-based data synthesis process by adding to the signal any subset of impairments commonly seen in a wireless receiver.

Adversarial attacks on deep learning models have been demonstrated to be imperceptible to a human, while decreasing the model performance considerably. Attempts to provide invariance against such attacks have denoised adversarial samples to only send cleaned samples to the classifier. In a similar spirit this paper proposes a novel effective strategy that allows to relax adversarial samples onto the underlying manifold of the (unknown) target class distribution. Specifically, given an off-manifold adversarial example, our Metroplis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (Mala) guided through a supervised denoising autoencoder network (sDAE) allows to drive the adversarial samples towards high density regions of the data generating distribution. So, in a nutshell the adversarial example is transformed back from off-manifold onto the data manifold for which the learning model was originally trained and where it can perform well and robustly. Experiments on various benchmark datasets show that our novel Malade method exhibits a high robustness against blackbox and whitebox attacks and outperforms state-of-the-art defense algorithms.

Although deep learning has shown some significant achievements in image analysis and classification, their application to medical images has only recently started gaining momentum. This is because medical images are intrinsically noisier and prone to artifacts. Despite these challenges, these techniques have been shown to provide more accurate diagnoses than human doctors in certain scenarios. A major hurdle that has to be overcome in the effective classification of medical images in diagnosis is preprocessing and cleaning. This task is a major bottleneck as it requires a significant amount of time to prepare images for training, is computationally very demanding, and requires expertise about the domain.

Understanding politics is challenging because the politics take the influence from everything. Even we limit ourselves to the political context in the legislative processes; we need a better understanding of latent factors, such as legislators, bills, their ideal points, and their relations. From the modeling perspective, this is difficult 1) because these observations lie in a high dimension that requires learning on low dimensional representations, and 2) because these observations require complex probabilistic modeling with latent variables to reflect the causalities. This paper presents a new model to reflect and understand this political setting, NIPEN, including factors mentioned above in the legislation. We propose two versions of NIPEN: one is a hybrid model of deep learning and probabilistic graphical model, and the other model is a neural tensor model. Our result indicates that NIPEN successfully learns the manifold of the legislative bill's text, and NIPEN utilizes the learned low-dimensional latent variables to increase the prediction performance of legislators' votings. Additionally, by virtue of being a domain-rich probabilistic model, NIPEN shows the hidden strength of the legislators' trust network and their various characteristics on casting votes.

Collaborative filtering (CF) with implicit feedback is a successful method for recommending items to users, which does not require a knowledge of the items or users. CF methods can be mainly classified into two categories. One is point-wise regression based and the other is pair-wise ranking based, where the latter one only tries to find out the items that users prefer while ignores the items that users dislike, and usually gives out a better recommended item list. The performance of CF-based methods degrades significantly when the feedback information is sparse. To address the problem, many kinds of auxiliary information have been utilized such as users’ reviews on items, items’ content and description information, price, brands. In this paper we utilize a weighted recursive autoencoder (RAE) to extract useful features from several heterogeneous auxiliary information and tightly couple the weighted RAE with a pair-wise ranking based CF method. Analysis of the hyperparameters illustrates that auxiliary information from different sources is indeed able to benefit our model. Empirical experiments on six real world datasets show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.