The reasons for this are clear.

The reasons for this are clear.

Lightweight deep learning approaches for malaria detection have gained attention for their potential to enhance diagnostics in resource constrained environments. For our study, we selected SqueezeNet1.1 as it is one of the most popular lightweight architectures. SqueezeNet1.1 is a later version of SqueezeNet1.0 and is 2.4 times more computationally efficient than the original model. We proposed and implemented three ultra-lightweight architecture variants to SqueezeNet1.1 architecture, namely Variant 1 (one fire module), Variant 2 (two fire modules), and Variant 3 (four fire modules), which are even more compact than SqueezeNetV1.1 (eight fire modules). These models were implemented to evaluate the best performing variant that achieves superior computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy in malaria blood cell classification. The models were trained and evaluated using the NIH Malaria dataset. We assessed each model's performance based on metrics including accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC). The results show that the SqueezeNet1.1 model achieves the highest performance across all metrics, with a classification accuracy of 97.12%. Variant 3 (four fire modules) offers a competitive alternative, delivering almost identical results (accuracy 96.55%) with a 6x reduction in computational overhead compared to SqueezeNet1.1. Variant 2 and Variant 1 perform slightly lower than Variant 3, with Variant 2 (two fire modules) reducing computational overhead by 28x, and Variant 1 (one fire module) achieving a 54x reduction in trainable parameters compared to SqueezeNet1.1. These findings demonstrate that our SqueezeNet1.1 architecture variants provide a flexible approach to malaria detection, enabling the selection of a variant that balances resource constraints and performance.

The rapid advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great potential in tackling mathematical reasoning tasks that involve visual context. Unlike humans who can reliably apply solution steps to similar problems with minor modifications, we found that SOTA VLMs like GPT-4o can consistently fail in these scenarios, revealing limitations in their mathematical reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the mathematical reasoning robustness in VLMs and evaluate how well these models perform under different variants of the same question, such as changes in visual numerical values or function graphs. While several vision-based math benchmarks have been developed to assess VLMs' problem-solving capabilities, these benchmarks contain only static sets of problems and cannot easily evaluate mathematical reasoning robustness. To fill this gap, we introduce DynaMath, a dynamic visual math benchmark designed for in-depth assessment of VLMs. DynaMath includes 501 high-quality, multi-topic seed questions, each represented as a Python program. Those programs are carefully designed and annotated to enable the automatic generation of a much larger set of concrete questions, including many different types of visual and textual variations. DynaMath allows us to evaluate the generalization ability of VLMs, by assessing their performance under varying input conditions of a seed question. We evaluated 14 SOTA VLMs with 5,010 generated concrete questions. Our results show that the worst-case model accuracy, defined as the percentage of correctly answered seed questions in all 10 variants, is significantly lower than the average-case accuracy. Our analysis emphasizes the need to study the robustness of VLMs' reasoning abilities, and DynaMath provides valuable insights to guide the development of more reliable models for mathematical reasoning.

Tuning the hyperparameters of differentially private (DP) machine learning (ML) algorithms often requires use of sensitive data and this may leak private information via hyperparameter values. Recently, Papernot and Steinke (2022) proposed a certain class of DP hyperparameter tuning algorithms, where the number of random search samples is randomized itself. Commonly, these algorithms still considerably increase the DP privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ over non-tuned DP ML model training and can be computationally heavy as evaluating each hyperparameter candidate requires a new training run. We focus on lowering both the DP bounds and the computational cost of these methods by using only a random subset of the sensitive data for the hyperparameter tuning and by extrapolating the optimal values to a larger dataset. We provide a R\'enyi differential privacy analysis for the proposed method and experimentally show that it consistently leads to better privacy-utility trade-off than the baseline method by Papernot and Steinke.

Achieving gender equality is an important pillar for humankind's sustainable future. Pioneering data-driven gender bias research is based on large-scale public records such as scientific papers, patents, and company registrations, covering female researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs, and so on. Since gender information is often missing in relevant datasets, studies rely on tools to infer genders from names. However, available open-sourced Chinese gender-guessing tools are not yet suitable for scientific purposes, which may be partially responsible for female Chinese being underrepresented in mainstream gender bias research and affect their universality. Specifically, these tools focus on character-level information while overlooking the fact that the combinations of Chinese characters in multi-character names, as well as the components and pronunciations of characters, convey important messages. As a first effort, we design a Chinese Heterogeneous Graph Attention (CHGAT) model to capture the heterogeneity in component relationships and incorporate the pronunciations of characters. Our model largely surpasses current tools and also outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm. Last but not least, the most popular Chinese name-gender dataset is single-character based with far less female coverage from an unreliable source, naturally hindering relevant studies. We open-source a more balanced multi-character dataset from an official source together with our code, hoping to help future research promoting gender equality.

We consider the problem of improving the human instance segmentation mask quality for a given test image using keypoints estimation. We compare two alternative approaches. The first approach is a test-time adaptation (TTA) method, where we allow test-time modification of the segmentation network's weights using a single unlabeled test image. In this approach, we do not assume test-time access to the labeled source dataset. More specifically, our TTA method consists of using the keypoints estimates as pseudo labels and backpropagating them to adjust the backbone weights. The second approach is a training-time generalization (TTG) method, where we permit offline access to the labeled source dataset but not the test-time modification of weights. Furthermore, we do not assume the availability of any images from or knowledge about the target domain. Our TTG method consists of augmenting the backbone features with those generated by the keypoints head and feeding the aggregate vector to the mask head. Through a comprehensive set of ablations, we evaluate both approaches and identify several factors limiting the TTA gains. In particular, we show that in the absence of a significant domain shift, TTA may hurt and TTG show only a small gain in performance, whereas for a large domain shift, TTA gains are smaller and dependent on the heuristics used, while TTG gains are larger and robust to architectural choices.

Recent works have demonstrated that it is possible to reconstruct training images and their labels from gradients of an image-classification model when its architecture is known. Unfortunately, there is still an incomplete theoretical understanding of the efficacy and failure of these gradient-leakage attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to analyse training-data leakage from gradients that draws insights from both analytic and optimisation-based gradient-leakage attacks. We formulate the reconstruction problem as solving a linear system from each layer iteratively, accompanied by corrections using gradient matching. Under this framework, we claim that the solubility of the reconstruction problem is primarily determined by that of the linear system at each layer. As a result, we are able to partially attribute the leakage of the training data in a deep network to its architecture. We also propose a metric to measure the level of security of a deep learning model against gradient-based attacks on the training data.

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) environments typically are the same for both the training and testing phases. Hence, current RL methods are largely not generalizable to a test environment which is conceptually similar but different from what the method has been trained on, which we term the novel test environment. As an effort to push RL research towards algorithms which can generalize to novel test environments, we introduce the Brick Tic-Tac-Toe (BTTT) test bed, where the brick position in the test environment is different from that in the training environment. Using a round-robin tournament on the BTTT environment, we show that traditional RL state-search approaches such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Minimax are more generalizable to novel test environments than AlphaZero is. This is surprising because AlphaZero has been shown to achieve superhuman performance in environments such as Go, Chess and Shogi, which may lead one to think that it performs well in novel test environments. Our results show that BTTT, though simple, is rich enough to explore the generalizability of AlphaZero. We find that merely increasing MCTS lookahead iterations was insufficient for AlphaZero to generalize to some novel test environments. Rather, increasing the variety of training environments helps to progressively improve generalizability across all possible starting brick configurations.

Purpose: Mitral valve repair is a complex minimally invasive surgery of the heart valve. In this context, suture detection from endoscopic images is a highly relevant task that provides quantitative information to analyse suturing patterns, assess prosthetic configurations and produce augmented reality visualisations. Facial or anatomical landmark detection tasks typically contain a fixed number of landmarks, and use regression or fixed heatmap-based approaches to localize the landmarks. However in endoscopy, there are a varying number of sutures in every image, and the sutures may occur at any location in the annulus, as they are not semantically unique. Method: In this work, we formulate the suture detection task as a multi-instance deep heatmap regression problem, to identify entry and exit points of sutures. We extend our previous work, and introduce the novel use of a 2D Gaussian layer followed by a differentiable 2D spatial Soft-Argmax layer to function as a local non-maximum suppression. Results: We present extensive experiments with multiple heatmap distribution functions and two variants of the proposed model. In the intra-operative domain, Variant 1 showed a mean F1 of +0.0422 over the baseline. Similarly, in the simulator domain, Variant 1 showed a mean F1 of +0.0865 over the baseline. Conclusion: The proposed model shows an improvement over the baseline in the intra-operative and the simulator domains. The data is made publicly available within the scope of the MICCAI AdaptOR2021 Challenge https://adaptor2021.github.io/, and the code at https://github.com/Cardio-AI/suture-detection-pytorch/. DOI:10.1007/s11548-021-02523-w. The link to the open access article can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11548-021-02523-w