arXiv subjects

Yun Li

Publications and source records attributed to Yun Li.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Rethink, Revisit, Revise: A Spiral Reinforced Self-Revised Network for Zero-Shot Learning

Current approaches to Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) struggle to learn generalizable semantic knowledge capable of capturing complex correlations. Inspired by \emph{Spiral Curriculum}, which enhances learning processes by revisiting knowledge, we propose a form of spiral learning which revisits visual representations based on a sequence of attribute groups (e.g., a combined group of \emph{color} and \emph{shape}). Spiral learning aims to learn generalized local correlations, enabling models to gradually enhance global learning and thus understand complex correlations. Our implementation is based on a 2-stage \emph{Reinforced Self-Revised (RSR)} framework: \emph{preview} and \emph{review}. RSR first previews visual information to construct diverse attribute groups in a weakly-supervised manner. Then, it spirally learns refined localities based on attribute groups and uses localities to revise global semantic correlations. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on four benchmark datasets in both zero-shot and generalized zero-shot settings, which demonstrates the effectiveness of spiral learning in learning generalizable and complex correlations. We also conduct extensive analysis to show that attribute groups and reinforced decision processes can capture complementary semantic information to improve predictions and aid explainability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

An Entropy-guided Reinforced Partial Convolutional Network for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to transfer learned knowledge from observed classes to unseen classes via semantic correlations. A promising strategy is to learn a global-local representation that incorporates global information with extra localities (i.e., small parts/regions of inputs). However, existing methods discover localities based on explicit features without digging into the inherent properties and relationships among regions. In this work, we propose a novel Entropy-guided Reinforced Partial Convolutional Network (ERPCNet), which extracts and aggregates localities progressively based on semantic relevance and visual correlations without human-annotated regions. ERPCNet uses reinforced partial convolution and entropy guidance; it not only discovers global-cooperative localities dynamically but also converges faster for policy gradient optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate ERPCNet's performance through comparisons with state-of-the-art methods under ZSL and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) settings on four benchmark datasets. We also show ERPCNet is time efficient and explainable through visualization analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Time-Domain Doppler Biomotion Detections Immune to Unavoidable DC Offsets

In the past decades, continuous Doppler radar sensor-based bio-signal detections have attracted many research interests. A typical example is the Doppler heartbeat detection. While significant progresses have been achieved, reliable, time-domain accurate demodulation of bio-signals in the presence of unavoidable DC offsets remains a technical challenge. Aiming to overcome this difficulty, we propose in this paper a novel demodulation algorithm that does not need to trace and eliminate dynamic DC offsets based on approximating segmented arcs in a quadrature constellation of sampling data to directional chords. Assisted by the principal component analysis, such chords and their directions can be deterministically determined. Simulations and experimental validations showed fully recovery of micron-level pendulum movements and strongly noised human heartbeats, verifying the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages

The availability of parallel sentence simplification (SS) is scarce for neural SS modelings. We propose an unsupervised method to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpora, alleviating the need for SS supervised corpora. Our method is motivated by the following two findings: neural machine translation model usually tends to generate more high-frequency tokens and the difference of text complexity levels exists between the source and target language of a translation corpus. By taking the pair of the source sentences of translation corpus and the translations of their references in a bridge language, we can construct large-scale pseudo parallel SS data. Then, we keep these sentence pairs with a higher complexity difference as SS sentence pairs. The building SS corpora with an unsupervised approach can satisfy the expectations that the aligned sentences preserve the same meanings and have difference in text complexity levels. Experimental results show that SS methods trained by our corpora achieve the state-of-the-art results and significantly outperform the results on English benchmark WikiLarge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Operator level limit of the circular Jacobi $β$-ensemble

We prove an operator level limit for the circular Jacobi $β$-ensemble. As a result, we characterize the counting function of the limit point process via coupled systems of stochastic differential equations. We also show that the normalized characteristic polynomials converge to a random analytic function, which we characterize via the joint distribution of its Taylor coefficients at zero and as the solution of a stochastic differential equation system. We also provide analogous results for the real orthogonal $β$-ensemble.

math.PR↗

arXiv2021

DeepCompress: Efficient Point Cloud Geometry Compression

Point clouds are a basic data type that is increasingly of interest as 3D content becomes more ubiquitous. Applications using point clouds include virtual, augmented, and mixed reality and autonomous driving. We propose a more efficient deep learning-based encoder architecture for point clouds compression that incorporates principles from established 3D object detection and image compression architectures. Through an ablation study, we show that incorporating the learned activation function from Computational Efficient Neural Image Compression (CENIC) and designing more parameter-efficient convolutional blocks yields dramatic gains in efficiency and performance. Our proposed architecture incorporates Generalized Divisive Normalization activations and propose a spatially separable InceptionV4-inspired block. We then evaluate rate-distortion curves on the standard JPEG Pleno 8i Voxelized Full Bodies dataset to evaluate our model's performance. Our proposed modifications outperform the baseline approaches by a small margin in terms of Bjontegard delta rate and PSNR values, yet reduces necessary encoder convolution operations by 8 percent and reduces total encoder parameters by 20 percent. Our proposed architecture, when considered on its own, has a small penalty of 0.02 percent in Chamfer's Distance and 0.32 percent increased bit rate in Point to Plane Distance for the same peak signal-to-noise ratio.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Cyclic subspace codes via the sum of Sidon spaces

Subspace codes, especially cyclic constant subspace codes, are of great use in random network coding. Subspace codes can be constructed by subspaces and subspace polynomials. In particular, many researchers are keen to find special subspaces and subspace polynomials to construct subspace codes with the size and the minimum distance as large as possible. In [14], Roth, Raviv and Tamo constructed several subspace codes using Sidon spaces, and it is proved that subspace codes constructed by Sidon spaces has the largest size and minimum distance. In [12], Niu, Yue and Wu extended some results of [14] and obtained several new subspace codes. In this paper, we first provide a sufficient condition for the sum of Sidon spaces is again a Sidon space. Based on this result, we obtain new cyclic constant subspace codes through the sum of two and three Sidon spaces. Our results generalize the results in [14] and [12].

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Task Aligned Generative Meta-learning for Zero-shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from the novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to train the classifier for unseen classes. However, such models may have a strong bias towards seen classes during training. Meta-learning has been introduced to mitigate the basis, but meta-ZSL methods are inapplicable when tasks used for training are sampled from diverse distributions. In this regard, we propose a novel Task-aligned Generative Meta-learning model for Zero-shot learning (TGMZ). TGMZ mitigates the potentially biased training and enables meta-ZSL to accommodate real-world datasets containing diverse distributions. TGMZ incorporates an attribute-conditioned task-wise distribution alignment network that projects tasks into a unified distribution to deliver an unbiased model. Our comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms show the improvements of 2.1%, 3.0%, 2.5%, and 7.6% achieved by TGMZ on AWA1, AWA2, CUB, and aPY datasets, respectively. TGMZ also outperforms competitors by 3.6% in generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) setting and 7.9% in our proposed fusion-ZSL setting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Generative Adversarial U-Net for Domain-free Medical Image Augmentation

The shortage of annotated medical images is one of the biggest challenges in the field of medical image computing. Without a sufficient number of training samples, deep learning based models are very likely to suffer from over-fitting problem. The common solution is image manipulation such as image rotation, cropping, or resizing. Those methods can help relieve the over-fitting problem as more training samples are introduced. However, they do not really introduce new images with additional information and may lead to data leakage as the test set may contain similar samples which appear in the training set. To address this challenge, we propose to generate diverse images with generative adversarial network. In this paper, we develop a novel generative method named generative adversarial U-Net , which utilizes both generative adversarial network and U-Net. Different from existing approaches, our newly designed model is domain-free and generalizable to various medical images. Extensive experiments are conducted over eight diverse datasets including computed tomography (CT) scan, pathology, X-ray, etc. The visualization and quantitative results demonstrate the efficacy and good generalization of the proposed method on generating a wide array of high-quality medical images.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Lexical Simplification with Pretrained Encoders

Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. We present a simple LS approach that makes use of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) which can consider both the given sentence and the complex word during generating candidate substitutions for the complex word. Specifically, we mask the complex word of the original sentence for feeding into the BERT to predict the masked token. The predicted results will be used as candidate substitutions. Despite being entirely unsupervised, experimental results show that our approach obtains obvious improvement compared with these baselines leveraging linguistic databases and parallel corpus, outperforming the state-of-the-art by more than 12 Accuracy points on three well-known benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Chinese Lexical Simplification

Lexical simplification has attracted much attention in many languages, which is the process of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Although the richness of vocabulary in Chinese makes the text very difficult to read for children and non-native speakers, there is no research work for Chinese lexical simplification (CLS) task. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we manually create the first benchmark dataset for CLS, which can be used for evaluating the lexical simplification systems automatically. In order to acquire more thorough comparison, we present five different types of methods as baselines to generate substitute candidates for the complex word that include synonym-based approach, word embedding-based approach, pretrained language model-based approach, sememe-based approach, and a hybrid approach. Finally, we design the experimental evaluation of these baselines and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. To our best knowledge, this is the first study for CLS task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Solving A Class of Mean-Field LQG Problems

In this work, we study a class of mean-field linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) problems. Under suitable conditions, explicit solutions of the distribution-dependent optimal control problems are obtained. Riccati systems are derived by directly solving the associated master equations. Some extensions on controls with partial observations are also considered.

math.PR↗

arXiv2020

Using Multiple Imputation to Classify Potential Outcomes Subgroups

With medical tests becoming increasingly available, concerns about over-testing and over-treatment dramatically increase. Hence, it is important to understand the influence of testing on treatment selection in general practice. Most statistical methods focus on average effects of testing on treatment decisions. However, this may be ill-advised, particularly for patient subgroups that tend not to benefit from such tests. Furthermore, missing data are common, representing large and often unaddressed threats to the validity of statistical methods. Finally, it is desirable to conduct analyses that can be interpreted causally. We propose to classify patients into four potential outcomes subgroups, defined by whether or not a patient's treatment selection is changed by the test result and by the direction of how the test result changes treatment selection. This subgroup classification naturally captures the differential influence of medical testing on treatment selections for different patients, which can suggest targets to improve the utilization of medical tests. We can then examine patient characteristics associated with patient potential outcomes subgroup memberships. We used multiple imputation methods to simultaneously impute the missing potential outcomes as well as regular missing values. This approach can also provide estimates of many traditional causal quantities. We find that explicitly incorporating causal inference assumptions into the multiple imputation process can improve the precision for some causal estimates of interest. We also find that bias can occur when the potential outcomes conditional independence assumption is violated; sensitivity analyses are proposed to assess the impact of this violation. We applied the proposed methods to examine the influence of 21-gene assay, the most commonly used genomic test, on chemotherapy selection among breast cancer patients.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

LSBert: A Simple Framework for Lexical Simplification

Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning, to simplify the sentence. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. In this paper, we propose a lexical simplification framework LSBert based on pretrained representation model Bert, that is capable of (1) making use of the wider context when both detecting the words in need of simplification and generating substitue candidates, and (2) taking five high-quality features into account for ranking candidates, including Bert prediction order, Bert-based language model, and the paraphrase database PPDB, in addition to the word frequency and word similarity commonly used in other LS methods. We show that our system outputs lexical simplifications that are grammatically correct and semantically appropriate, and obtains obvious improvement compared with these baselines, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 29.8 Accuracy points on three well-known benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Matching methods for obtaining survival functions to estimate the effect of a time-dependent treatment

In observational studies of survival time featuring a binary time-dependent treatment, the hazard ratio (an instantaneous measure) is often used to represent the treatment effect. However, investigators are often more interested in the difference in survival functions. We propose semiparametric methods to estimate the causal effect of treatment among the treated with respect to survival probability. The objective is to compare post-treatment survival with the survival function that would have been observed in the absence of treatment. For each patient, we compute a prognostic score (based on the pre-treatment death hazard) and a propensity score (based on the treatment hazard). Each treated patient is then matched with an alive, uncensored and not-yet-treated patient with similar prognostic and/or propensity scores. The experience of each treated and matched patient is weighted using a variant of Inverse Probability of Censoring Weighting to account for the impact of censoring. We propose estimators of the treatment-specific survival functions (and their difference), computed through weighted Nelson-Aalen estimators. Closed-form variance estimators are proposed which take into consideration the potential replication of subjects across matched sets. The proposed methods are evaluated through simulation, then applied to estimate the effect of kidney transplantation on survival among end-stage renal disease patients using data from a national organ failure registry.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

The Impact of Unmeasured Within- and Between-Cluster Confounding on the Bias of Effect Estimators from Fixed Effect, Mixed effect and Instrumental Variable Models

Instrumental variable methods are popular choices in combating unmeasured confounding to obtain less biased effect estimates. However, we demonstrate that alternative methods may give less biased estimates depending on the nature of unmeasured confounding. Treatment preferences of clusters (e.g., physician practices) are the most f6requently used instruments in instrumental variable analyses (IVA). These preference-based IVAs are usually conducted on data clustered by region, hospital/facility, or physician, where unmeasured confounding often occurs within or between clusters. We aim to quantify the impact of unmeasured confounding on the bias of effect estimators in IVA, as well as alternative methods including ordinary least squares regression, linear mixed models (LMM) and fixed effect models (FE) to study the effect of a continuous exposure (e.g., treatment dose). We derive bias formulae of estimators from these four methods in the presence of unmeasured within- and/or between-cluster confounders. We show that IVAs can provide consistent estimates when unmeasured within-cluster confounding exists, but not when between-cluster confounding exists. On the other hand, FEs and LMMs can provide consistent estimates when unmeasured between-cluster confounding exits, but not for within-cluster confounding. Whether IVAs are advantageous in reducing bias over FEs and LMMs depends on the extent of unmeasured within-cluster confounding relative to between-cluster confounding. Furthermore, the impact of unmeasured between-cluster confounding on IVA estimates is larger than the impact of unmeasured within-cluster confounding on FE and LMM estimates. We illustrate these methods through data applications. Our findings provide guidance for choosing appropriate methods to combat the dominant types of unmeasured confounders and help interpret statistical results in the context of unmeasured confounding

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Agglomerative Neural Networks for Multi-view Clustering

Conventional multi-view clustering methods seek for a view consensus through minimizing the pairwise discrepancy between the consensus and subviews. However, the pairwise comparison cannot portray the inter-view relationship precisely if some of the subviews can be further agglomerated. To address the above challenge, we propose the agglomerative analysis to approximate the optimal consensus view, thereby describing the subview relationship within a view structure. We present Agglomerative Neural Network (ANN) based on Constrained Laplacian Rank to cluster multi-view data directly while avoiding a dedicated postprocessing step (e.g., using K-means). We further extend ANN with learnable data space to handle data of complex scenarios. Our evaluations against several state-of-the-art multi-view clustering approaches on four popular datasets show the promising view-consensus analysis ability of ANN. We further demonstrate ANN's capability in analyzing complex view structures and extensibility in our case study and explain its robustness and effectiveness of data-driven modifications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Taking the pulse of COVID-19: A spatiotemporal perspective

The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, and most states of the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., and New York City became an epicenter of the pandemic by the end of March. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implemented strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, geospatial indicators of the outbreak and evolving forecasts; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.

physics.soc-ph↗