arXiv subjects

Min Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Min Wu.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Automatic Vertebra Localization and Identification in CT by Spine Rectification and Anatomically-constrained Optimization

Accurate vertebra localization and identification are required in many clinical applications of spine disorder diagnosis and surgery planning. However, significant challenges are posed in this task by highly varying pathologies (such as vertebral compression fracture, scoliosis, and vertebral fixation) and imaging conditions (such as limited field of view and metal streak artifacts). This paper proposes a robust and accurate method that effectively exploits the anatomical knowledge of the spine to facilitate vertebra localization and identification. A key point localization model is trained to produce activation maps of vertebra centers. They are then re-sampled along the spine centerline to produce spine-rectified activation maps, which are further aggregated into 1-D activation signals. Following this, an anatomically-constrained optimization module is introduced to jointly search for the optimal vertebra centers under a soft constraint that regulates the distance between vertebrae and a hard constraint on the consecutive vertebra indices. When being evaluated on a major public benchmark of 302 highly pathological CT images, the proposed method reports the state of the art identification (id.) rate of 97.4%, and outperforms the best competing method of 94.7% id. rate by reducing the relative id. error rate by half.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Identification of Repurposable Drugs and Adverse Drug Reactions for Various Courses of COVID-19 Based on Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Data

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has impacted almost every part of human life worldwide, posing a massive threat to human health. There is no specific drug for COVID-19, highlighting the urgent need for the development of effective therapeutics. To identify potentially repurposable drugs, we employed a systematic approach to mine candidates from U.S. FDA-approved drugs and preclinical small-molecule compounds by integrating the gene expression perturbation data for chemicals from the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures project with a publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing dataset from mild and severe COVID-19 patients. We identified 281 FDA-approved drugs that have the potential to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 infection, 16 of which are currently undergoing clinical trials to evaluate their efficacy against COVID-19. We experimentally tested the inhibitory effects of tyrphostin-AG-1478 and brefeldin-a on the replication of the single-stranded ribonucleic acid (ssRNA) virus influenza A virus. In conclusion, we have identified a list of repurposable anti-SARS-CoV-2 drugs using a systems biology approach.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2020

Assessing Robustness of Text Classification through Maximal Safe Radius Computation

Neural network NLP models are vulnerable to small modifications of the input that maintain the original meaning but result in a different prediction. In this paper, we focus on robustness of text classification against word substitutions, aiming to provide guarantees that the model prediction does not change if a word is replaced with a plausible alternative, such as a synonym. As a measure of robustness, we adopt the notion of the maximal safe radius for a given input text, which is the minimum distance in the embedding space to the decision boundary. Since computing the exact maximal safe radius is not feasible in practice, we instead approximate it by computing a lower and upper bound. For the upper bound computation, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search in conjunction with syntactic filtering to analyse the effect of single and multiple word substitutions. The lower bound computation is achieved through an adaptation of the linear bounding techniques implemented in tools CNN-Cert and POPQORN, respectively for convolutional and recurrent network models. We evaluate the methods on sentiment analysis and news classification models for four datasets (IMDB, SST, AG News and NEWS) and a range of embeddings, and provide an analysis of robustness trends. We also apply our framework to interpretability analysis and compare it with LIME.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Adaptive Multi-Trace Carving for Robust Frequency Tracking in Forensic Applications

In the field of information forensics, many emerging problems involve a critical step that estimates and tracks weak frequency components in noisy signals. It is often challenging for the prior art of frequency tracking to i)achieve a high accuracy under noisy conditions, ii)detect and track multiple frequency components efficiently, or iii)strike a good trade-off of the processing delay versus the resilience and the accuracy of tracking. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Multi-Trace Carving (AMTC), a unified approach for detecting and tracking one or more subtle frequency components under very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions and in near real time. AMTC takes as input a time-frequency representation of the system's preprocessing results (such as the spectrogram), and identifies frequency components through iterative dynamic programming and adaptive trace compensation. The proposed algorithm considers relatively high energy traces sustaining over a certain duration as an indicator of the presence of frequency/oscillation components of interest and track their time-varying trend. Extensive experiments using both synthetic data and real-world forensic data of power signatures and physiological monitoring reveal that the proposed method outperforms representative prior art under low SNR conditions, and can be implemented in near real-time settings. The proposed AMTC algorithm can empower the development of new information forensic technologies that harness very small signals.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Attention Sequence to Sequence Model for Machine Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Accurate estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) of industrial equipment can enable advanced maintenance schedules, increase equipment availability and reduce operational costs. However, existing deep learning methods for RUL prediction are not completely successful due to the following two reasons. First, relying on a single objective function to estimate the RUL will limit the learned representations and thus affect the prediction accuracy. Second, while longer sequences are more informative for modelling the sensor dynamics of equipment, existing methods are less effective to deal with very long sequences, as they mainly focus on the latest information. To address these two problems, we develop a novel attention-based sequence to sequence with auxiliary task (ATS2S) model. In particular, our model jointly optimizes both reconstruction loss to empower our model with predictive capabilities (by predicting next input sequence given current input sequence) and RUL prediction loss to minimize the difference between the predicted RUL and actual RUL. Furthermore, to better handle longer sequence, we employ the attention mechanism to focus on all the important input information during training process. Finally, we propose a new dual-latent feature representation to integrate the encoder features and decoder hidden states, to capture rich semantic information in data. We conduct extensive experiments on four real datasets to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve superior performance over 13 state-of-the-art methods consistently.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Three-dimensional topological semimetal phase in layered TaNiTe5 probed by de Haas-van Alphen effect

Layered three-dimensional (3D) topological semimetals have attracted intensively attention due to the exotic phenomena and abundantly tunable properties. Here we report the experimental evidence for the 3D topological semimetal phase in layered material TaNiTe5 single crystals through quantum oscillations. Strong quantum oscillations have been observed with diamagnetism background in TaNiTe5. By analyzing the de Haas-van Alphen oscillations, multi-periodic oscillations were extracted, in content with magnetotransport measurements. Moreover, nontrivial "π" Berry phase with 3D Fermi surface is identified, indicating the topologically nontrivial feature in TaNiTe5. Additionally, we demonstrated the thin-layer of TaNiTe5 crystals is highly feasible by the mechanical exfoliation, which offers a platform to explore exotic properties in low dimensional topological semimetal and paves the way for potential applications in nanodevices.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Transparency Tools for Fairness in AI (Luskin)

We propose new tools for policy-makers to use when assessing and correcting fairness and bias in AI algorithms. The three tools are: - A new definition of fairness called "controlled fairness" with respect to choices of protected features and filters. The definition provides a simple test of fairness of an algorithm with respect to a dataset. This notion of fairness is suitable in cases where fairness is prioritized over accuracy, such as in cases where there is no "ground truth" data, only data labeled with past decisions (which may have been biased). - Algorithms for retraining a given classifier to achieve "controlled fairness" with respect to a choice of features and filters. Two algorithms are presented, implemented and tested. These algorithms require training two different models in two stages. We experiment with combinations of various types of models for the first and second stage and report on which combinations perform best in terms of fairness and accuracy. - Algorithms for adjusting model parameters to achieve a notion of fairness called "classification parity". This notion of fairness is suitable in cases where accuracy is prioritized. Two algorithms are presented, one which assumes that protected features are accessible to the model during testing, and one which assumes protected features are not accessible during testing. We evaluate our tools on three different publicly available datasets. We find that the tools are useful for understanding various dimensions of bias, and that in practice the algorithms are effective in starkly reducing a given observed bias when tested on new data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Towards Threshold Invariant Fair Classification

Effective machine learning models can automatically learn useful information from a large quantity of data and provide decisions in a high accuracy. These models may, however, lead to unfair predictions in certain sense among the population groups of interest, where the grouping is based on such sensitive attributes as race and gender. Various fairness definitions, such as demographic parity and equalized odds, were proposed in prior art to ensure that decisions guided by the machine learning models are equitable. Unfortunately, the "fair" model trained with these fairness definitions is threshold sensitive, i.e., the condition of fairness may no longer hold true when tuning the decision threshold. This paper introduces the notion of threshold invariant fairness, which enforces equitable performances across different groups independent of the decision threshold. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes to equalize the risk distributions among the groups via two approximation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology is effective to alleviate the threshold sensitivity in machine learning models designed to achieve fairness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A Survey of Safety and Trustworthiness of Deep Neural Networks: Verification, Testing, Adversarial Attack and Defence, and Interpretability

In the past few years, significant progress has been made on deep neural networks (DNNs) in achieving human-level performance on several long-standing tasks. With the broader deployment of DNNs on various applications, the concerns over their safety and trustworthiness have been raised in public, especially after the widely reported fatal incidents involving self-driving cars. Research to address these concerns is particularly active, with a significant number of papers released in the past few years. This survey paper conducts a review of the current research effort into making DNNs safe and trustworthy, by focusing on four aspects: verification, testing, adversarial attack and defence, and interpretability. In total, we survey 202 papers, most of which were published after 2017.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Contextualized Graph Attention Network for Recommendation with Item Knowledge Graph

Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently been applied to exploit knowledge graph (KG) for recommendation. Existing GNN-based methods explicitly model the dependency between an entity and its local graph context in KG (i.e., the set of its first-order neighbors), but may not be effective in capturing its non-local graph context (i.e., the set of most related high-order neighbors). In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework, named Contextualized Graph Attention Network (CGAT), which can explicitly exploit both local and non-local graph context information of an entity in KG. Specifically, CGAT captures the local context information by a user-specific graph attention mechanism, considering a user's personalized preferences on entities. Moreover, CGAT employs a biased random walk sampling process to extract the non-local context of an entity, and utilizes a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to model the dependency between the entity and its non-local contextual entities. To capture the user's personalized preferences on items, an item-specific attention mechanism is also developed to model the dependency between a target item and the contextual items extracted from the user's historical behaviors. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CGAT, compared with state-of-the-art KG-based recommendation methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Robustness Guarantees for Deep Neural Networks on Videos

The widespread adoption of deep learning models places demands on their robustness. In this paper, we consider the robustness of deep neural networks on videos, which comprise both the spatial features of individual frames extracted by a convolutional neural network and the temporal dynamics between adjacent frames captured by a recurrent neural network. To measure robustness, we study the maximum safe radius problem, which computes the minimum distance from the optical flow sequence obtained from a given input to that of an adversarial example in the neighbourhood of the input. We demonstrate that, under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity, the problem can be approximated using finite optimisation via discretising the optical flow space, and the approximation has provable guarantees. We then show that the finite optimisation problem can be solved by utilising a two-player turn-based game in a cooperative setting, where the first player selects the optical flows and the second player determines the dimensions to be manipulated in the chosen flow. We employ an anytime approach to solve the game, in the sense of approximating the value of the game by monotonically improving its upper and lower bounds. We exploit a gradient-based search algorithm to compute the upper bounds, and the admissible A* algorithm to update the lower bounds. Finally, we evaluate our framework on the UCF101 video dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Lower Assouad type dimensions of uniformly perfect sets in doubling metric spaces

In this paper, we are concerned with the relationship among the lower Assouad type dimensions. For uniformly perfect sets in doubling metric spaces, we obtain a variational result between two different but closely related lower Assouad spectra. As an application, we show that the limit of the lower Assouad spectrum as $θ$ tends to 1 equals to the quasi-lower Assouad dimension, which provides an equivalent definition to the latter. On the other hand, although the limit of the lower Assouad spectrum as $θ$ tends to 0 exists, there exist uniformly perfect sets such that this limit is not equal to the lower box-counting dimension. Moreover, by the example of Cantor cut-out sets, we show that the new definition of quasi lower Assouad dimension is more accessible, and indicate that the lower Assouad dimension could be strictly smaller than the lower spectra and the quasi lower Assouad dimension.

math.CA↗

arXiv2019

A Type of Virtual Force based Energy-hole Mitigation Strategy for Sensor Networks

In the era of Big Data and Mobile Internet, how to ensure the terminal devices (e.g., sensor nodes) work steadily for a long time is one of the key issues to improve the efficiency of the whole network. However, a lot of facts have shown that the unattended equipments are prone to failure due to energy exhaustion, physical damage and other reasons. This may result in the emergence of energy-hole, seriously affecting network performance and shortening its lifetime. To reduce data redundancy and avoid the generation of sensing blind areas, a type of Virtual Force based Energy-hole Mitigation strategy (VFEM) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the virtual force (gravitation and repulsion) between nodes is introduced that makes nodes distribute as uniformly as possible. Secondly, in order to alleviate the "energy-hole problem", the network is divided into several annuluses with the same width. Then, another type of virtual force, named "virtual gravity generated by annulus", is proposed to further optimize the positions of nodes in each annulus. Finally, with the help of the "data forwarding area", the optimal paths for data uploading can be selected out, which effectively balances energy consumption of nodes. Experiment results show that, VFEM has a relatively good performance on postponing the generation time of energy-holes as well as prolonging the network lifetime compared with other typical energy-hole mitigation methods.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Respiratory Rate Estimation from Face Videos

Vital signs, such as heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate (RR), are important indicators for a person's health. Vital signs are traditionally measured with contact sensors, and may be inconvenient and cause discomfort during continuous monitoring. Commercial cameras are promising contact-free sensors, and remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) have been studied to remotely monitor heart rate from face videos. For remote RR measurement, most prior art was based on small periodical motions of chest regions caused by breathing cycles, which are vulnerable to subjects' voluntary movements. This paper explores remote RR measurement based on rPPG obtained from face videos. The paper employs motion compensation, two-phase temporal filtering, and signal pruning to capture signals with high quality. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can obtain accurate RR results and can provide HR, HRV and RR measurement synergistically in one framework.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Uniform recurrence properties for beta-transformation

For any $β> 1$, let $T_β: [0,1)\rightarrow [0,1)$ be the $β$-transformation defined by $T_βx=βx \mod 1$. We study the uniform recurrence properties of the orbit of a point under the $β$-transformation to the point itself. The size of the set of points with prescribed uniform recurrence rate is obtained. More precisely, for any $0\leq \hat{r}\leq +\infty$, the set $$\left\{x \in [0,1): \forall\ N\gg1, \exists\ 1\leq n \leq N, {\rm\ s.t.}\ |T^n_βx-x|\leq β^{-\hat{r}N}\right\}$$ is of Hausdorff dimension $\left(\frac{1-\hat{r}}{1+\hat{r}}\right)^2$ if $0\leq \hat{r}\leq 1$ and is countable if $\hat{r}>1$.

math.DS↗

arXiv2019

A Deep Framework for Bone Age Assessment based on Finger Joint Localization

Bone age assessment is an important clinical trial to measure skeletal child maturity and diagnose of growth disorders. Conventional approaches such as the Tanner-Whitehouse (TW) and Greulich and Pyle (GP) may not perform well due to their large inter-observer and intra-observer variations. In this paper, we propose a finger joint localization strategy to filter out most non-informative parts of images. When combining with the conventional full image-based deep network, we observe a much-improved performance. % Our approach utilizes full hand and specific joints images for skeletal maturity prediction. In this study, we applied powerful deep neural network and explored a process in the forecast of skeletal bone age with the specifically combine joints images to increase the performance accuracy compared with the whole hand images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Effects of controlling parameter on symbolic nonlinear complexity detection

Symbolic transformation, a coarse-graining process, is a crucial prerequisite for and has evidential influence to the symbolic time series analysis. We employ Shannon entropy for a parameter-dependent symbolization, KW (Kurths-Wessel) symbolic method, to test the effects of controlling parameter on its symbolic nonlinear complexity detection. Two chaotic models, logistic and Henon series, and heartbeats of CHF (Congestive Heart Failure) patients, healthy young and elderly subjects from PhysioNet are applied to test the KW symbolic entropy. The complexity-loss theory about aging and diseases in heart rates is validated and reasons that may account for some paradoxes in nonlinear analysis are discussed. Tests results suggest that due to different structural or dynamical properties of different nonlinear systems, controlling parameter of the KW symbolization should be adjusted accordingly to have reliable symbolic nonlinear analysis.

physics.bio-ph↗

arXiv2019

ECG Reconstruction via PPG: A Pilot Study

In this paper, the relation between electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals is studied, and the waveform of ECG is inferred via the PPG signals. In order to address this inverse problem, a transform is proposed to map the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of each PPG cycle to those of the corresponding ECG cycle. The resulting DCT coefficients of the ECG cycle are inversely transformed to obtain the reconstructed ECG waveform. The proposed method is evaluated on a benchmark dataset of subjects with a variety of combinations of age and weight. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a high accuracy at 0.98 in averaged correlation.

eess.SP↗