arXiv subjects

Yun Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yun Liu.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Informational Size in School Choice

This paper introduces a novel measurement of informational size to school choice problems, which inherits its ideas from Mount and Reiter (1974). This concept measures a matching mechanism's information size by counting the maximal relevant preference and priority rankings to secure a certain pairwise assignment of a student to a school across all possible matching problems. Our analysis uncovers two key insights. First, the three prominent strategy-proof matching mechanisms, the deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism, the top trading cycles (TTC) mechanism, and the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism, is (strictly) less informative than the non-strategy-proof immediate acceptance (IA) mechanism. This result highlights a previously omitted advantage of IA in term of its information demand, which partially explain the its popularity in real-world matching problems especially when acquiring information is both pecuniarily and cognitively costly. Second, when the matching problem contains at least four students, the TTC demands less information compared to the DA to implement a desired allocation. The issue of comparison between TTC and DA has puzzled researchers both in theory (Gonczarowski and Thomas, 2023) and in experiment (Hakimov and Kubler, 2021). Our result responds to this issue from an informational perspective: in experiments with relatively fewer students, agents tend to prefer DA over TTC as DA requires fewer information to secure one's allocation in all problems (Guillen and Veszteg, 2021), while the opposite is true when the market size increases (Pais et al., 2011). Among others, our informational size concept offers a new perspective to understand the differences in auditability (Grigoryan and Moller, 2024), manipulation vulnerability (Pathak and Sonmez, 2013), and privacy protection (Haupt and Hitzig, 2022), among some commonly used matching mechanisms.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Using generative AI to investigate medical imagery models and datasets

AI models have shown promise in many medical imaging tasks. However, our ability to explain what signals these models have learned is severely lacking. Explanations are needed in order to increase the trust in AI-based models, and could enable novel scientific discovery by uncovering signals in the data that are not yet known to experts. In this paper, we present a method for automatic visual explanations leveraging team-based expertise by generating hypotheses of what visual signals in the images are correlated with the task. We propose the following 4 steps: (i) Train a classifier to perform a given task (ii) Train a classifier guided StyleGAN-based image generator (StylEx) (iii) Automatically detect and visualize the top visual attributes that the classifier is sensitive towards (iv) Formulate hypotheses for the underlying mechanisms, to stimulate future research. Specifically, we present the discovered attributes to an interdisciplinary panel of experts so that hypotheses can account for social and structural determinants of health. We demonstrate results on eight prediction tasks across three medical imaging modalities: retinal fundus photographs, external eye photographs, and chest radiographs. We showcase examples of attributes that capture clinically known features, confounders that arise from factors beyond physiological mechanisms, and reveal a number of physiologically plausible novel attributes. Our approach has the potential to enable researchers to better understand, improve their assessment, and extract new knowledge from AI-based models. Importantly, we highlight that attributes generated by our framework can capture phenomena beyond physiology or pathophysiology, reflecting the real world nature of healthcare delivery and socio-cultural factors. Finally, we intend to release code to enable researchers to train their own StylEx models and analyze their predictive tasks.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

PathAlign: A vision-language model for whole slide images in histopathology

Microscopic interpretation of histopathology images underlies many important diagnostic and treatment decisions. While advances in vision-language modeling raise new opportunities for analysis of such images, the gigapixel-scale size of whole slide images (WSIs) introduces unique challenges. Additionally, pathology reports simultaneously highlight key findings from small regions while also aggregating interpretation across multiple slides, often making it difficult to create robust image-text pairs. As such, pathology reports remain a largely untapped source of supervision in computational pathology, with most efforts relying on region-of-interest annotations or self-supervision at the patch-level. In this work, we develop a vision-language model based on the BLIP-2 framework using WSIs paired with curated text from pathology reports. This enables applications utilizing a shared image-text embedding space, such as text or image retrieval for finding cases of interest, as well as integration of the WSI encoder with a frozen large language model (LLM) for WSI-based generative text capabilities such as report generation or AI-in-the-loop interactions. We utilize a de-identified dataset of over 350,000 WSIs and diagnostic text pairs, spanning a wide range of diagnoses, procedure types, and tissue types. We present pathologist evaluation of text generation and text retrieval using WSI embeddings, as well as results for WSI classification and workflow prioritization (slide-level triaging). Model-generated text for WSIs was rated by pathologists as accurate, without clinically significant error or omission, for 78% of WSIs on average. This work demonstrates exciting potential capabilities for language-aligned WSI embeddings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Cosmological Forecast of the Void Size Function Measurement from the CSST Spectroscopic Survey

Void size function (VSF) contains information of the cosmic large-scale structure (LSS), and can be used to derive the properties of dark energy and dark matter. We predict the VSFs measured from the spectroscopic galaxy survey operated by the China Space Station Telescope (CSST), and study the strength of cosmological constraint. We employ a high-resolution Jiutian simulation to get CSST galaxy mock samples based on an improved semi-analytical model. We identify voids from this galaxy catalog using the watershed algorithm without assuming a spherical shape, and estimate the VSFs at different redshift bins from $z=0.5$ to 1.1. We propose a void selection method based on the ellipticity, and assume the void linear underdensity threshold $δ_{\rm v}$ in the theoretical model is redshift-dependent and set it as a free parameter in each redshift bin. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is adopted to implement the constraints on the cosmological and void parameters. We find that the CSST VSF measurement can constrain the cosmological parameters to a few percent level. The best-fit values of $δ_{\rm v}$ are ranging from $\sim-0.4$ to $-0.1$ as the redshift increases from 0.5 to 1.1, which has a distinct difference from the theoretical calculation with $δ_{\rm v}\simeq-2.7$ assuming the spherical evolution and using particles as tracer. Our method can provide a good reference for void identification and selection in the VSF analysis of the spectroscopic galaxy surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2024

STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset with Real Queries Issued by Non-professionals

Statute retrieval aims to find relevant statutory articles for specific queries. This process is the basis of a wide range of legal applications such as legal advice, automated judicial decisions, legal document drafting, etc. Existing statute retrieval benchmarks focus on formal and professional queries from sources like bar exams and legal case documents, thereby neglecting non-professional queries from the general public, which often lack precise legal terminology and references. To address this gap, we introduce the STAtute Retrieval Dataset (STARD), a Chinese dataset comprising 1,543 query cases collected from real-world legal consultations and 55,348 candidate statutory articles. Unlike existing statute retrieval datasets, which primarily focus on professional legal queries, STARD captures the complexity and diversity of real queries from the general public. Through a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval baselines, we reveal that existing retrieval approaches all fall short of these real queries issued by non-professional users. The best method only achieves a Recall@100 of 0.907, suggesting the necessity for further exploration and additional research in this area. All the codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/oneal2000/STARD/tree/main

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Target Speaker Extraction with Curriculum Learning

This paper presents a novel approach to target speaker extraction (TSE) using Curriculum Learning (CL) techniques, addressing the challenge of distinguishing a target speaker's voice from a mixture containing interfering speakers. For efficient training, we propose designing a curriculum that selects subsets of increasing complexity, such as increasing similarity between target and interfering speakers, and that selects training data strategically. Our CL strategies include both variants using predefined difficulty measures (e.g. gender, speaker similarity, and signal-to-distortion ratio) and ones using the TSE's standard objective function, each designed to expose the model gradually to more challenging scenarios. Comprehensive testing on the Libri2talker dataset demonstrated that our CL strategies for TSE improved the performance, and the results markedly exceeded baseline models without CL about 1 dB.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2024

Towards a Personal Health Large Language Model

In health, most large language model (LLM) research has focused on clinical tasks. However, mobile and wearable devices, which are rarely integrated into such tasks, provide rich, longitudinal data for personal health monitoring. Here we present Personal Health Large Language Model (PH-LLM), fine-tuned from Gemini for understanding and reasoning over numerical time-series personal health data. We created and curated three datasets that test 1) production of personalized insights and recommendations from sleep patterns, physical activity, and physiological responses, 2) expert domain knowledge, and 3) prediction of self-reported sleep outcomes. For the first task we designed 857 case studies in collaboration with domain experts to assess real-world scenarios in sleep and fitness. Through comprehensive evaluation of domain-specific rubrics, we observed that Gemini Ultra 1.0 and PH-LLM are not statistically different from expert performance in fitness and, while experts remain superior for sleep, fine-tuning PH-LLM provided significant improvements in using relevant domain knowledge and personalizing information for sleep insights. We evaluated PH-LLM domain knowledge using multiple choice sleep medicine and fitness examinations. PH-LLM achieved 79% on sleep and 88% on fitness, exceeding average scores from a sample of human experts. Finally, we trained PH-LLM to predict self-reported sleep quality outcomes from textual and multimodal encoding representations of wearable data, and demonstrate that multimodal encoding is required to match performance of specialized discriminative models. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical personal health domain, these results demonstrate both the broad knowledge and capabilities of Gemini models and the benefit of contextualizing physiological data for personal health applications as done with PH-LLM.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Parallel Cross Strip Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing

The objective of single image dehazing is to restore hazy images and produce clear, high-quality visuals. Traditional convolutional models struggle with long-range dependencies due to their limited receptive field size. While Transformers excel at capturing such dependencies, their quadratic computational complexity in relation to feature map resolution makes them less suitable for pixel-to-pixel dense prediction tasks. Moreover, fixed kernels or tokens in most models do not adapt well to varying blur sizes, resulting in suboptimal dehazing performance. In this study, we introduce a novel dehazing network based on Parallel Stripe Cross Attention (PCSA) with a multi-scale strategy. PCSA efficiently integrates long-range dependencies by simultaneously capturing horizontal and vertical relationships, allowing each pixel to capture contextual cues from an expanded spatial domain. To handle different sizes and shapes of blurs flexibly, We employs a channel-wise design with varying convolutional kernel sizes and strip lengths in each PCSA to capture context information at different scales.Additionally, we incorporate a softmax-based adaptive weighting mechanism within PCSA to prioritize and leverage more critical features.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Advancing Multimodal Medical Capabilities of Gemini

Many clinical tasks require an understanding of specialized data, such as medical images and genomics, which is not typically found in general-purpose large multimodal models. Building upon Gemini's multimodal models, we develop several models within the new Med-Gemini family that inherit core capabilities of Gemini and are optimized for medical use via fine-tuning with 2D and 3D radiology, histopathology, ophthalmology, dermatology and genomic data. Med-Gemini-2D sets a new standard for AI-based chest X-ray (CXR) report generation based on expert evaluation, exceeding previous best results across two separate datasets by an absolute margin of 1% and 12%, where 57% and 96% of AI reports on normal cases, and 43% and 65% on abnormal cases, are evaluated as "equivalent or better" than the original radiologists' reports. We demonstrate the first ever large multimodal model-based report generation for 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes using Med-Gemini-3D, with 53% of AI reports considered clinically acceptable, although additional research is needed to meet expert radiologist reporting quality. Beyond report generation, Med-Gemini-2D surpasses the previous best performance in CXR visual question answering (VQA) and performs well in CXR classification and radiology VQA, exceeding SoTA or baselines on 17 of 20 tasks. In histopathology, ophthalmology, and dermatology image classification, Med-Gemini-2D surpasses baselines across 18 out of 20 tasks and approaches task-specific model performance. Beyond imaging, Med-Gemini-Polygenic outperforms the standard linear polygenic risk score-based approach for disease risk prediction and generalizes to genetically correlated diseases for which it has never been trained. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical medical domain, our results highlight the potential of Med-Gemini across a wide range of medical tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Learning Local and Global Temporal Contexts for Video Semantic Segmentation

Contextual information plays a core role for video semantic segmentation (VSS). This paper summarizes contexts for VSS in two-fold: local temporal contexts (LTC) which define the contexts from neighboring frames, and global temporal contexts (GTC) which represent the contexts from the whole video. As for LTC, it includes static and motional contexts, corresponding to static and moving content in neighboring frames, respectively. Previously, both static and motional contexts have been studied. However, there is no research about simultaneously learning static and motional contexts (highly complementary). Hence, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Feature Mining (CFFM) technique to learn a unified presentation of LTC. CFFM contains two parts: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Assembling (CFFA) and Cross-frame Feature Mining (CFM). CFFA abstracts static and motional contexts, and CFM mines useful information from nearby frames to enhance target features. To further exploit more temporal contexts, we propose CFFM++ by additionally learning GTC from the whole video. Specifically, we uniformly sample certain frames from the video and extract global contextual prototypes by k-means. The information within those prototypes is mined by CFM to refine target features. Experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate that CFFM and CFFM++ perform favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/GuoleiSun/VSS-CFFM

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Vision Transformers with Hierarchical Attention

This paper tackles the high computational/space complexity associated with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) in vanilla vision transformers. To this end, we propose Hierarchical MHSA (H-MHSA), a novel approach that computes self-attention in a hierarchical fashion. Specifically, we first divide the input image into patches as commonly done, and each patch is viewed as a token. Then, the proposed H-MHSA learns token relationships within local patches, serving as local relationship modeling. Then, the small patches are merged into larger ones, and H-MHSA models the global dependencies for the small number of the merged tokens. At last, the local and global attentive features are aggregated to obtain features with powerful representation capacity. Since we only calculate attention for a limited number of tokens at each step, the computational load is reduced dramatically. Hence, H-MHSA can efficiently model global relationships among tokens without sacrificing fine-grained information. With the H-MHSA module incorporated, we build a family of Hierarchical-Attention-based Transformer Networks, namely HAT-Net. To demonstrate the superiority of HAT-Net in scene understanding, we conduct extensive experiments on fundamental vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Therefore, HAT-Net provides a new perspective for vision transformers. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/yun-liu/HAT-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

TACO: Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Tool-ACtion-Object Understanding

Humans commonly work with multiple objects in daily life and can intuitively transfer manipulation skills to novel objects by understanding object functional regularities. However, existing technical approaches for analyzing and synthesizing hand-object manipulation are mostly limited to handling a single hand and object due to the lack of data support. To address this, we construct TACO, an extensive bimanual hand-object-interaction dataset spanning a large variety of tool-action-object compositions for daily human activities. TACO contains 2.5K motion sequences paired with third-person and egocentric views, precise hand-object 3D meshes, and action labels. To rapidly expand the data scale, we present a fully automatic data acquisition pipeline combining multi-view sensing with an optical motion capture system. With the vast research fields provided by TACO, we benchmark three generalizable hand-object-interaction tasks: compositional action recognition, generalizable hand-object motion forecasting, and cooperative grasp synthesis. Extensive experiments reveal new insights, challenges, and opportunities for advancing the studies of generalizable hand-object motion analysis and synthesis. Our data and code are available at https://taco2024.github.io.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Enhanced Index Modulation Aided Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access via Constellation Rotation

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been widely nominated as an emerging spectral efficiency (SE) multiple access technique for the next generation of wireless communication network. To meet the growing demands in massive connectivity and huge data in transmission, a novel index modulation aided NOMA with the rotation of signal constellation of low power users (IM-NOMA-RC) is developed to the downlink transmission. In the proposed IM-NOMA-RC system, the users are classified into far-user group and near-user group according to their channel conditions, where the rotation constellation based IM operation is performed only on the users who belong to the near-user group that are allocated lower power compared with the far ones to transmit extra information. In the proposed IM-NOMA-RC, all the subcarriers are activated to transmit information to multiple users to achieve higher SE. With the aid of the multiple dimension modulation in IM-NOMA-RC, more users can be supported over an orthogonal resource block. Then, both maximum likelihood (ML) detector and successive interference cancellation (SIC) detector are studied for all the user. Numerical simulation results of the proposed IM-NOMARC scheme are investigate for the ML detector and the SIC detector for each users, which shows that proposed scheme can outperform conventional NOMA.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2024

Mobile-Seed: Joint Semantic Segmentation and Boundary Detection for Mobile Robots

Precise and rapid delineation of sharp boundaries and robust semantics is essential for numerous downstream robotic tasks, such as robot grasping and manipulation, real-time semantic mapping, and online sensor calibration performed on edge computing units. Although boundary detection and semantic segmentation are complementary tasks, most studies focus on lightweight models for semantic segmentation but overlook the critical role of boundary detection. In this work, we introduce Mobile-Seed, a lightweight, dual-task framework tailored for simultaneous semantic segmentation and boundary detection. Our framework features a two-stream encoder, an active fusion decoder (AFD) and a dual-task regularization approach. The encoder is divided into two pathways: one captures category-aware semantic information, while the other discerns boundaries from multi-scale features. The AFD module dynamically adapts the fusion of semantic and boundary information by learning channel-wise relationships, allowing for precise weight assignment of each channel. Furthermore, we introduce a regularization loss to mitigate the conflicts in dual-task learning and deep diversity supervision. Compared to existing methods, the proposed Mobile-Seed offers a lightweight framework to simultaneously improve semantic segmentation performance and accurately locate object boundaries. Experiments on the Cityscapes dataset have shown that Mobile-Seed achieves notable improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline by 2.2 percentage points (pp) in mIoU and 4.2 pp in mF-score, while maintaining an online inference speed of 23.9 frames-per-second (FPS) with 1024x2048 resolution input on an RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Additional experiments on CamVid and PASCAL Context datasets confirm our method's generalizability. Code and additional results are publicly available at https://whu-usi3dv.github.io/Mobile-Seed/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ContrastDiagnosis: Enhancing Interpretability in Lung Nodule Diagnosis Using Contrastive Learning

With the ongoing development of deep learning, an increasing number of AI models have surpassed the performance levels of human clinical practitioners. However, the prevalence of AI diagnostic products in actual clinical practice remains significantly lower than desired. One crucial reason for this gap is the so-called `black box' nature of AI models. Clinicians' distrust of black box models has directly hindered the clinical deployment of AI products. To address this challenge, we propose ContrastDiagnosis, a straightforward yet effective interpretable diagnosis framework. This framework is designed to introduce inherent transparency and provide extensive post-hoc explainability for deep learning model, making them more suitable for clinical medical diagnosis. ContrastDiagnosis incorporates a contrastive learning mechanism to provide a case-based reasoning diagnostic rationale, enhancing the model's transparency and also offers post-hoc interpretability by highlighting similar areas. High diagnostic accuracy was achieved with AUC of 0.977 while maintain a high transparency and explainability.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Rethinking Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

This paper revisits few-shot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (FS-PCS), with a focus on two significant issues in the state-of-the-art: foreground leakage and sparse point distribution. The former arises from non-uniform point sampling, allowing models to distinguish the density disparities between foreground and background for easier segmentation. The latter results from sampling only 2,048 points, limiting semantic information and deviating from the real-world practice. To address these issues, we introduce a standardized FS-PCS setting, upon which a new benchmark is built. Moreover, we propose a novel FS-PCS model. While previous methods are based on feature optimization by mainly refining support features to enhance prototypes, our method is based on correlation optimization, referred to as Correlation Optimization Segmentation (COSeg). Specifically, we compute Class-specific Multi-prototypical Correlation (CMC) for each query point, representing its correlations to category prototypes. Then, we propose the Hyper Correlation Augmentation (HCA) module to enhance CMC. Furthermore, tackling the inherent property of few-shot training to incur base susceptibility for models, we propose to learn non-parametric prototypes for the base classes during training. The learned base prototypes are used to calibrate correlations for the background class through a Base Prototypes Calibration (BPC) module. Experiments on popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of COSeg over existing methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/COSeg

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Closing the AI generalization gap by adjusting for dermatology condition distribution differences across clinical settings

Recently, there has been great progress in the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to classify dermatological conditions from clinical photographs. However, little is known about the robustness of these algorithms in real-world settings where several factors can lead to a loss of generalizability. Understanding and overcoming these limitations will permit the development of generalizable AI that can aid in the diagnosis of skin conditions across a variety of clinical settings. In this retrospective study, we demonstrate that differences in skin condition distribution, rather than in demographics or image capture mode are the main source of errors when an AI algorithm is evaluated on data from a previously unseen source. We demonstrate a series of steps to close this generalization gap, requiring progressively more information about the new source, ranging from the condition distribution to training data enriched for data less frequently seen during training. Our results also suggest comparable performance from end-to-end fine tuning versus fine tuning solely the classification layer on top of a frozen embedding model. Our approach can inform the adaptation of AI algorithms to new settings, based on the information and resources available.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

MINT: A wrapper to make multi-modal and multi-image AI models interactive

During the diagnostic process, doctors incorporate multimodal information including imaging and the medical history - and similarly medical AI development has increasingly become multimodal. In this paper we tackle a more subtle challenge: doctors take a targeted medical history to obtain only the most pertinent pieces of information; how do we enable AI to do the same? We develop a wrapper method named MINT (Make your model INTeractive) that automatically determines what pieces of information are most valuable at each step, and ask for only the most useful information. We demonstrate the efficacy of MINT wrapping a skin disease prediction model, where multiple images and a set of optional answers to $25$ standard metadata questions (i.e., structured medical history) are used by a multi-modal deep network to provide a differential diagnosis. We show that MINT can identify whether metadata inputs are needed and if so, which question to ask next. We also demonstrate that when collecting multiple images, MINT can identify if an additional image would be beneficial, and if so, which type of image to capture. We showed that MINT reduces the number of metadata and image inputs needed by 82% and 36.2% respectively, while maintaining predictive performance. Using real-world AI dermatology system data, we show that needing fewer inputs can retain users that may otherwise fail to complete the system submission and drop off without a diagnosis. Qualitative examples show MINT can closely mimic the step-by-step decision making process of a clinical workflow and how this is different for straight forward cases versus more difficult, ambiguous cases. Finally we demonstrate how MINT is robust to different underlying multi-model classifiers and can be easily adapted to user requirements without significant model re-training.

cs.HC↗