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Jiang Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Jiang Liu.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Flattening Singular Values of Factorized Convolution for Medical Images

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have long been the paradigm of choice for robust medical image processing (MIP). Therefore, it is crucial to effectively and efficiently deploy CNNs on devices with different computing capabilities to support computer-aided diagnosis. Many methods employ factorized convolutional layers to alleviate the burden of limited computational resources at the expense of expressiveness. To this end, given weak medical image-driven CNN model optimization, a Singular value equalization generalizer-induced Factorized Convolution (SFConv) is proposed to improve the expressive power of factorized convolutions in MIP models. We first decompose the weight matrix of convolutional filters into two low-rank matrices to achieve model reduction. Then minimize the KL divergence between the two low-rank weight matrices and the uniform distribution, thereby reducing the number of singular value directions with significant variance. Extensive experiments on fundus and OCTA datasets demonstrate that our SFConv yields competitive expressiveness over vanilla convolutions while reducing complexity.

cs.CV↗

Scale Optimization Using Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Object Detection on Drone Imagery

Object detection in aerial imagery presents a significant challenge due to large scale variations among objects. This paper proposes an evolutionary reinforcement learning agent, integrated within a coarse-to-fine object detection framework, to optimize the scale for more effective detection of objects in such images. Specifically, a set of patches potentially containing objects are first generated. A set of rewards measuring the localization accuracy, the accuracy of predicted labels, and the scale consistency among nearby patches are designed in the agent to guide the scale optimization. The proposed scale-consistency reward ensures similar scales for neighboring objects of the same category. Furthermore, a spatial-semantic attention mechanism is designed to exploit the spatial semantic relations between patches. The agent employs the proximal policy optimization strategy in conjunction with the evolutionary strategy, effectively utilizing both the current patch status and historical experience embedded in the agent. The proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets for object detection on drone imagery. It significantly outperforms all the compared methods.

cs.CV↗

VSR-Net: Vessel-like Structure Rehabilitation Network with Graph Clustering

The morphologies of vessel-like structures, such as blood vessels and nerve fibres, play significant roles in disease diagnosis, e.g., Parkinson's disease. Deep network-based refinement segmentation methods have recently achieved promising vessel-like structure segmentation results. There are still two challenges: (1) existing methods have limitations in rehabilitating subsection ruptures in segmented vessel-like structures; (2) they are often overconfident in predicted segmentation results. To tackle these two challenges, this paper attempts to leverage the potential of spatial interconnection relationships among subsection ruptures from the structure rehabilitation perspective. Based on this, we propose a novel Vessel-like Structure Rehabilitation Network (VSR-Net) to rehabilitate subsection ruptures and improve the model calibration based on coarse vessel-like structure segmentation results. VSR-Net first constructs subsection rupture clusters with Curvilinear Clustering Module (CCM). Then, the well-designed Curvilinear Merging Module (CMM) is applied to rehabilitate the subsection ruptures to obtain the refined vessel-like structures. Extensive experiments on five 2D/3D medical image datasets show that VSR-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) refinement segmentation methods with lower calibration error. Additionally, we provide quantitative analysis to explain the morphological difference between the rehabilitation results of VSR-Net and ground truth (GT), which is smaller than SOTA methods and GT, demonstrating that our method better rehabilitates vessel-like structures by restoring subsection ruptures.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing and Adapting in the Clinic: Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Enhancement

Medical imaging provides many valuable clues involving anatomical structure and pathological characteristics. However, image degradation is a common issue in clinical practice, which can adversely impact the observation and diagnosis by physicians and algorithms. Although extensive enhancement models have been developed, these models require a well pre-training before deployment, while failing to take advantage of the potential value of inference data after deployment. In this paper, we raise an algorithm for source-free unsupervised domain adaptive medical image enhancement (SAME), which adapts and optimizes enhancement models using test data in the inference phase. A structure-preserving enhancement network is first constructed to learn a robust source model from synthesized training data. Then a teacher-student model is initialized with the source model and conducts source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) by knowledge distillation with the test data. Additionally, a pseudo-label picker is developed to boost the knowledge distillation of enhancement tasks. Experiments were implemented on ten datasets from three medical image modalities to validate the advantage of the proposed algorithm, and setting analysis and ablation studies were also carried out to interpret the effectiveness of SAME. The remarkable enhancement performance and benefits for downstream tasks demonstrate the potential and generalizability of SAME. The code is available at https://github.com/liamheng/Annotation-free-Medical-Image-Enhancement.

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Instruct2Attack: Language-Guided Semantic Adversarial Attacks

We propose Instruct2Attack (I2A), a language-guided semantic attack that generates semantically meaningful perturbations according to free-form language instructions. We make use of state-of-the-art latent diffusion models, where we adversarially guide the reverse diffusion process to search for an adversarial latent code conditioned on the input image and text instruction. Compared to existing noise-based and semantic attacks, I2A generates more natural and diverse adversarial examples while providing better controllability and interpretability. We further automate the attack process with GPT-4 to generate diverse image-specific text instructions. We show that I2A can successfully break state-of-the-art deep neural networks even under strong adversarial defenses, and demonstrate great transferability among a variety of network architectures.

cs.CV↗

AutoML for Large Capacity Modeling of Meta's Ranking Systems

Web-scale ranking systems at Meta serving billions of users is complex. Improving ranking models is essential but engineering heavy. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) can release engineers from labor intensive work of tuning ranking models; however, it is unknown if AutoML is efficient enough to meet tight production timeline in real-world and, at the same time, bring additional improvements to the strong baselines. Moreover, to achieve higher ranking performance, there is an ever-increasing demand to scale up ranking models to even larger capacity, which imposes more challenges on the efficiency. The large scale of models and tight production schedule requires AutoML to outperform human baselines by only using a small number of model evaluation trials (around 100). We presents a sampling-based AutoML method, focusing on neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, addressing these challenges in Meta-scale production when building large capacity models. Our approach efficiently handles large-scale data demands. It leverages a lightweight predictor-based searcher and reinforcement learning to explore vast search spaces, significantly reducing the number of model evaluations. Through experiments in large capacity modeling for CTR and CVR applications, we show that our method achieves outstanding Return on Investment (ROI) versus human tuned baselines, with up to 0.09% Normalized Entropy (NE) loss reduction or $25\%$ Query per Second (QPS) increase by only sampling one hundred models on average from a curated search space. The proposed AutoML method has already made real-world impact where a discovered Instagram CTR model with up to -0.36% NE gain (over existing production baseline) was selected for large-scale online A/B test and show statistically significant gain. These production results proved AutoML efficacy and accelerated its adoption in ranking systems at Meta.

cs.IR↗

DIFFNAT: Improving Diffusion Image Quality Using Natural Image Statistics

Diffusion models have advanced generative AI significantly in terms of editing and creating naturalistic images. However, efficiently improving generated image quality is still of paramount interest. In this context, we propose a generic "naturalness" preserving loss function, viz., kurtosis concentration (KC) loss, which can be readily applied to any standard diffusion model pipeline to elevate the image quality. Our motivation stems from the projected kurtosis concentration property of natural images, which states that natural images have nearly constant kurtosis values across different band-pass versions of the image. To retain the "naturalness" of the generated images, we enforce reducing the gap between the highest and lowest kurtosis values across the band-pass versions (e.g., Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)) of images. Note that our approach does not require any additional guidance like classifier or classifier-free guidance to improve the image quality. We validate the proposed approach for three diverse tasks, viz., (1) personalized few-shot finetuning using text guidance, (2) unconditional image generation, and (3) image super-resolution. Integrating the proposed KC loss has improved the perceptual quality across all these tasks in terms of both FID, MUSIQ score, and user evaluation.

cs.CV↗

GlanceSeg: Real-time microaneurysm lesion segmentation with gaze-map-guided foundation model for early detection of diabetic retinopathy

Early-stage diabetic retinopathy (DR) presents challenges in clinical diagnosis due to inconspicuous and minute microangioma lesions, resulting in limited research in this area. Additionally, the potential of emerging foundation models, such as the segment anything model (SAM), in medical scenarios remains rarely explored. In this work, we propose a human-in-the-loop, label-free early DR diagnosis framework called GlanceSeg, based on SAM. GlanceSeg enables real-time segmentation of microangioma lesions as ophthalmologists review fundus images. Our human-in-the-loop framework integrates the ophthalmologist's gaze map, allowing for rough localization of minute lesions in fundus images. Subsequently, a saliency map is generated based on the located region of interest, which provides prompt points to assist the foundation model in efficiently segmenting microangioma lesions. Finally, a domain knowledge filter refines the segmentation of minute lesions. We conducted experiments on two newly-built public datasets, i.e., IDRiD and Retinal-Lesions, and validated the feasibility and superiority of GlanceSeg through visualized illustrations and quantitative measures. Additionally, we demonstrated that GlanceSeg improves annotation efficiency for clinicians and enhances segmentation performance through fine-tuning using annotations. This study highlights the potential of GlanceSeg-based annotations for self-model optimization, leading to enduring performance advancements through continual learning.

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Rankitect: Ranking Architecture Search Battling World-class Engineers at Meta Scale

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has demonstrated its efficacy in computer vision and potential for ranking systems. However, prior work focused on academic problems, which are evaluated at small scale under well-controlled fixed baselines. In industry system, such as ranking system in Meta, it is unclear whether NAS algorithms from the literature can outperform production baselines because of: (1) scale - Meta ranking systems serve billions of users, (2) strong baselines - the baselines are production models optimized by hundreds to thousands of world-class engineers for years since the rise of deep learning, (3) dynamic baselines - engineers may have established new and stronger baselines during NAS search, and (4) efficiency - the search pipeline must yield results quickly in alignment with the productionization life cycle. In this paper, we present Rankitect, a NAS software framework for ranking systems at Meta. Rankitect seeks to build brand new architectures by composing low level building blocks from scratch. Rankitect implements and improves state-of-the-art (SOTA) NAS methods for comprehensive and fair comparison under the same search space, including sampling-based NAS, one-shot NAS, and Differentiable NAS (DNAS). We evaluate Rankitect by comparing to multiple production ranking models at Meta. We find that Rankitect can discover new models from scratch achieving competitive tradeoff between Normalized Entropy loss and FLOPs. When utilizing search space designed by engineers, Rankitect can generate better models than engineers, achieving positive offline evaluation and online A/B test at Meta scale.

cs.LG↗

Polar-Net: A Clinical-Friendly Model for Alzheimer's Disease Detection in OCTA Images

Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) is a promising tool for detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) by imaging the retinal microvasculature. Ophthalmologists commonly use region-based analysis, such as the ETDRS grid, to study OCTA image biomarkers and understand the correlation with AD. However, existing studies have used general deep computer vision methods, which present challenges in providing interpretable results and leveraging clinical prior knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep-learning framework called Polar-Net. Our approach involves mapping OCTA images from Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, which allows for the use of approximate sector convolution and enables the implementation of the ETDRS grid-based regional analysis method commonly used in clinical practice. Furthermore, Polar-Net incorporates clinical prior information of each sector region into the training process, which further enhances its performance. Additionally, our framework adapts to acquire the importance of the corresponding retinal region, which helps researchers and clinicians understand the model's decision-making process in detecting AD and assess its conformity to clinical observations. Through evaluations on private and public datasets, we have demonstrated that Polar-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and provides more valuable pathological evidence for the association between retinal vascular changes and AD. In addition, we also show that the two innovative modules introduced in our framework have a significant impact on improving overall performance.

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RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning

Automating radiology report generation can significantly alleviate radiologists' workloads. Previous research has primarily focused on realizing highly concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that determine the severity of diseases (e.g., small pleural effusion). Since incorrect attributes will lead to imprecise radiology reports, strengthening the generation process with precise attribute modeling becomes necessary. Additionally, the temporal information contained in the historical records, which is crucial in evaluating a patient's current condition (e.g., heart size is unchanged), has also been largely disregarded. To address these issues, we propose RECAP, which generates precise and accurate radiology reports via dynamic disease progression reasoning. Specifically, RECAP first predicts the observations and progressions (i.e., spatiotemporal information) given two consecutive radiographs. It then combines the historical records, spatiotemporal information, and radiographs for report generation, where a disease progression graph and dynamic progression reasoning mechanism are devised to accurately select the attributes of each observation and progression. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

cs.CL↗

ACT-Net: Anchor-context Action Detection in Surgery Videos

Recognition and localization of surgical detailed actions is an essential component of developing a context-aware decision support system. However, most existing detection algorithms fail to provide high-accuracy action classes even having their locations, as they do not consider the surgery procedure's regularity in the whole video. This limitation hinders their application. Moreover, implementing the predictions in clinical applications seriously needs to convey model confidence to earn entrustment, which is unexplored in surgical action prediction. In this paper, to accurately detect fine-grained actions that happen at every moment, we propose an anchor-context action detection network (ACTNet), including an anchor-context detection (ACD) module and a class conditional diffusion (CCD) module, to answer the following questions: 1) where the actions happen; 2) what actions are; 3) how confidence predictions are. Specifically, the proposed ACD module spatially and temporally highlights the regions interacting with the extracted anchor in surgery video, which outputs action location and its class distribution based on anchor-context interactions. Considering the full distribution of action classes in videos, the CCD module adopts a denoising diffusion-based generative model conditioned on our ACD estimator to further reconstruct accurately the action predictions. Moreover, we utilize the stochastic nature of the diffusion model outputs to access model confidence for each prediction. Our method reports the state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of 4.0% mAP against baseline on the surgical video dataset.

cs.CV↗

Correct-by-Construction for Hybrid Systems by Synthesizing Reset Controller

Controller synthesis, including reset controller, feedback controller, and switching logic controller, provides an essential mechanism to guarantee the correctness and reliability of hybrid systems in a correct-by-construction manner. Unfortunately, reset controller synthesis is still in an infant stage in the literature, although it makes theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, we propose a convex programming based method to synthesize reset controllers for polynomial hybrid systems subject to safety, possibly together with liveness. Such a problem essentially corresponds to computing an initial set of continuous states in each mode and a reset map associated with each discrete jump such that any trajectory starting from any computed initial state keeps safe if only safety constraints are given or reaches the target set eventually and keeps safe before that if both safety and liveness are given, through the computed reset maps. Both cases can be reduced to reach-avoid and/or differential invariant generation problems, further encoded as convex optimization problems. Finally, several examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method.

eess.SY↗

Promoting Open-domain Dialogue Generation through Learning Pattern Information between Contexts and Responses

Recently, utilizing deep neural networks to build the opendomain dialogue models has become a hot topic. However, the responses generated by these models suffer from many problems such as responses not being contextualized and tend to generate generic responses that lack information content, damaging the user's experience seriously. Therefore, many studies try introducing more information into the dialogue models to make the generated responses more vivid and informative. Unlike them, this paper improves the quality of generated responses by learning the implicit pattern information between contexts and responses in the training samples. In this paper, we first build an open-domain dialogue model based on the pre-trained language model (i.e., GPT-2). And then, an improved scheduled sampling method is proposed for pre-trained models, by which the responses can be used to guide the response generation in the training phase while avoiding the exposure bias problem. More importantly, we design a response-aware mechanism for mining the implicit pattern information between contexts and responses so that the generated replies are more diverse and approximate to human replies. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model (RAD) on the Persona-Chat and DailyDialog datasets; and the experimental results show that our model outperforms the baselines on most automatic and manual metrics.

cs.CL↗

A Generic Fundus Image Enhancement Network Boosted by Frequency Self-supervised Representation Learning

Fundus photography is prone to suffer from image quality degradation that impacts clinical examination performed by ophthalmologists or intelligent systems. Though enhancement algorithms have been developed to promote fundus observation on degraded images, high data demands and limited applicability hinder their clinical deployment. To circumvent this bottleneck, a generic fundus image enhancement network (GFE-Net) is developed in this study to robustly correct unknown fundus images without supervised or extra data. Levering image frequency information, self-supervised representation learning is conducted to learn robust structure-aware representations from degraded images. Then with a seamless architecture that couples representation learning and image enhancement, GFE-Net can accurately correct fundus images and meanwhile preserve retinal structures. Comprehensive experiments are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of GFE-Net. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, GFE-Net achieves superior performance in data dependency, enhancement performance, deployment efficiency, and scale generalizability. Follow-up fundus image analysis is also facilitated by GFE-Net, whose modules are respectively verified to be effective for image enhancement.

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Constructive Incremental Learning for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings with Ensemble Domain Adaptation

Given the prevalence of rolling bearing fault diagnosis as a practical issue across various working conditions, the limited availability of samples compounds the challenge. Additionally, the complexity of the external environment and the structure of rolling bearings often manifests faults characterized by randomness and fuzziness, hindering the effective extraction of fault characteristics and restricting the accuracy of fault diagnosis. To overcome these problems, this paper presents a novel approach termed constructive Incremental learning-based ensemble domain adaptation (CIL-EDA) approach. Specifically, it is implemented on stochastic configuration networks (SCN) to constructively improve its adaptive performance in multi-domains. Concretely, a cloud feature extraction method is employed in conjunction with wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) to capture the uncertainty of fault information from multiple resolution aspects. Subsequently, constructive Incremental learning-based domain adaptation (CIL-DA) is firstly developed to enhance the cross-domain learning capability of each hidden node through domain matching and construct a robust fault classifier by leveraging limited labeled data from both target and source domains. Finally, fault diagnosis results are obtained by a majority voting of CIL-EDA which integrates CIL-DA and parallel ensemble learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our CIL-DA outperforms several domain adaptation methods and CIL-EDA consistently outperforms state-of-art fault diagnosis methods in few-shot scenarios.

cs.AI↗

Frequency-mixed Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation

The annotation scarcity of medical image segmentation poses challenges in collecting sufficient training data for deep learning models. Specifically, models trained on limited data may not generalize well to other unseen data domains, resulting in a domain shift issue. Consequently, domain generalization (DG) is developed to boost the performance of segmentation models on unseen domains. However, the DG setup requires multiple source domains, which impedes the efficient deployment of segmentation algorithms in clinical scenarios. To address this challenge and improve the segmentation model's generalizability, we propose a novel approach called the Frequency-mixed Single-source Domain Generalization method (FreeSDG). By analyzing the frequency's effect on domain discrepancy, FreeSDG leverages a mixed frequency spectrum to augment the single-source domain. Additionally, self-supervision is constructed in the domain augmentation to learn robust context-aware representations for the segmentation task. Experimental results on five datasets of three modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. FreeSDG outperforms state-of-the-art methods and significantly improves the segmentation model's generalizability. Therefore, FreeSDG provides a promising solution for enhancing the generalization of medical image segmentation models, especially when annotated data is scarce. The code is available at https://github.com/liamheng/Non-IID_Medical_Image_Segmentation.

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Cloud Ensemble Learning for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings with Stochastic Configuration Networks

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is of great significance for post-maintenance in rotating machinery, but it is a challenging work to diagnose faults efficiently with a few samples. Additionally, faults commonly occur with randomness and fuzziness due to the complexity of the external environment and the structure of rolling bearings, hindering effective mining of fault characteristics and eventually restricting accuracy of fault diagnosis. To overcome these problems, stochastic configuration network (SCN) based cloud ensemble learning, called SCN-CEL, is developed in this work. Concretely, a cloud feature extraction method is first developed by using a backward cloud generator of normal cloud model to mine the uncertainty of fault information. Then, a cloud sampling method, which generates enough cloud droplets using bidirectional cloud generator, is proposed to extend the cloud feature samples. Finally, an ensemble model with SCNs is developed to comprehensively characterize the uncertainty of fault information and advance the generalization performance of fault diagnosis machine. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method indeed performs favorably for distinguishing fault categories of rolling bearings in the few shot scenarios.

cs.LG↗