arXiv subjects

Zhenghua Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhenghua Xu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Stable, Fast, and Fully Automatic Learning Algorithm for Predictive Coding Networks

Predictive coding networks are neuroscience-inspired models with roots in both Bayesian statistics and neuroscience. Training such models, however, is quite inefficient and unstable. In this work, we show how by simply changing the temporal scheduling of the update rule for the synaptic weights leads to an algorithm that is much more efficient and stable than the original one, and has theoretical guarantees in terms of convergence. The proposed algorithm, that we call incremental predictive coding (iPC) is also more biologically plausible than the original one, as it it fully automatic. In an extensive set of experiments, we show that iPC constantly performs better than the original formulation on a large number of benchmarks for image classification, as well as for the training of both conditional and masked language models, in terms of test accuracy, efficiency, and convergence with respect to a large set of hyperparameters.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2023

Schwarz lemma for harmonic functions in the unit ball

Recently, it is proven that positive harmonic functions defined in the unit disc or the upper half-plane in $\mathbb{C}$ are contractions in hyperbolic metrics \cite{Markovic}. Furthermore, the same result does not hold in higher dimensions as shown by given counterexamples \cite{Melentijevic-P}. In this paper, we shall show that positive (or bounded) harmonic functions defined in the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ are Lipschitz in hyperbolic metrics. The involved method in main results allows to establish essential improvements of Schwarz type inequalities for monogenic functions in Clifford analysis \cite{Zhang14,Zhang16} and octonionic analysis \cite{Wang-Bian-Liu} in a unified approach.

math.CV↗

arXiv2023

On the Fueter-Sce theorem for generalized partial-slice monogenic functions

In a recent paper, we introduced the concept of generalized partial-slice monogenic functions. The class of these functions includes both the theory of monogenic functions and of slice monogenic functions with values in a Clifford algebra. In this paper, we prove a version of the Fueter-Sce theorem in this new setting, which allows to construct monogenic functions in higher dimensions starting from generalized partial-slice monogenic functions. We also prove that an alternative construction can be obtained by using the dual Radon transform. To this end, we provide a study of the generalized CK-extension.

math.CV↗

arXiv2023

C^2M-DoT: Cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with domain transfer network

In clinical scenarios, multiple medical images with different views are usually generated simultaneously, and these images have high semantic consistency. However, most existing medical report generation methods only consider single-view data. The rich multi-view mutual information of medical images can help generate more accurate reports, however, the dependence of multi-view models on multi-view data in the inference stage severely limits their application in clinical practice. In addition, word-level optimization based on numbers ignores the semantics of reports and medical images, and the generated reports often cannot achieve good performance. Therefore, we propose a cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with a domain transfer network (C^2M-DoT). Specifically, (i) a semantic-based multi-view contrastive learning medical report generation framework is adopted to utilize cross-view information to learn the semantic representation of lesions; (ii) a domain transfer network is further proposed to ensure that the multi-view report generation model can still achieve good inference performance under single-view input; (iii) meanwhile, optimization using a cross-modal consistency loss facilitates the generation of textual reports that are semantically consistent with medical images. Extensive experimental studies on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that C^2M-DoT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in all metrics. Ablation studies also confirmed the validity and necessity of each component in C^2M-DoT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

MvCo-DoT:Multi-View Contrastive Domain Transfer Network for Medical Report Generation

In clinical scenarios, multiple medical images with different views are usually generated at the same time, and they have high semantic consistency. However, the existing medical report generation methods cannot exploit the rich multi-view mutual information of medical images. Therefore, in this work, we propose the first multi-view medical report generation model, called MvCo-DoT. Specifically, MvCo-DoT first propose a multi-view contrastive learning (MvCo) strategy to help the deep reinforcement learning based model utilize the consistency of multi-view inputs for better model learning. Then, to close the performance gaps of using multi-view and single-view inputs, a domain transfer network is further proposed to ensure MvCo-DoT achieve almost the same performance as multi-view inputs using only single-view inputs.Extensive experiments on the IU X-Ray public dataset show that MvCo-DoT outperforms the SOTA medical report generation baselines in all metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

MPS-AMS: Masked Patches Selection and Adaptive Masking Strategy Based Self-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Existing self-supervised learning methods based on contrastive learning and masked image modeling have demonstrated impressive performances. However, current masked image modeling methods are mainly utilized in natural images, and their applications in medical images are relatively lacking. Besides, their fixed high masking strategy limits the upper bound of conditional mutual information, and the gradient noise is considerable, making less the learned representation information. Motivated by these limitations, in this paper, we propose masked patches selection and adaptive masking strategy based self-supervised medical image segmentation method, named MPS-AMS. We leverage the masked patches selection strategy to choose masked patches with lesions to obtain more lesion representation information, and the adaptive masking strategy is utilized to help learn more mutual information and improve performance further. Extensive experiments on three public medical image segmentation datasets (BUSI, Hecktor, and Brats2018) show that our proposed method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Multi-Head Feature Pyramid Networks for Breast Mass Detection

Analysis of X-ray images is one of the main tools to diagnose breast cancer. The ability to quickly and accurately detect the location of masses from the huge amount of image data is the key to reducing the morbidity and mortality of breast cancer. Currently, the main factor limiting the accuracy of breast mass detection is the unequal focus on the mass boxes, leading the network to focus too much on larger masses at the expense of smaller ones. In the paper, we propose the multi-head feature pyramid module (MHFPN) to solve the problem of unbalanced focus of target boxes during feature map fusion and design a multi-head breast mass detection network (MBMDnet). Experimental studies show that, comparing to the SOTA detection baselines, our method improves by 6.58% (in AP@50) and 5.4% (in TPR@50) on the commonly used INbreast dataset, while about 6-8% improvements (in AP@20) are also observed on the public MIAS and BCS-DBT datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Reverse Differentiation via Predictive Coding

Deep learning has redefined the field of artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to the rise of artificial neural networks, which are architectures inspired by their neurological counterpart in the brain. Through the years, this dualism between AI and neuroscience has brought immense benefits to both fields, allowing neural networks to be used in dozens of applications. These networks use an efficient implementation of reverse differentiation, called backpropagation (BP). This algorithm, however, is often criticized for its biological implausibility (e.g., lack of local update rules for the parameters). Therefore, biologically plausible learning methods that rely on predictive coding (PC), a framework for describing information processing in the brain, are increasingly studied. Recent works prove that these methods can approximate BP up to a certain margin on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), and asymptotically on any other complex model, and that zero-divergence inference learning (Z-IL), a variant of PC, is able to exactly implement BP on MLPs. However, the recent literature shows also that there is no biologically plausible method yet that can exactly replicate the weight update of BP on complex models. To fill this gap, in this paper, we generalize (PC and) Z-IL by directly defining them on computational graphs, and show that it can perform exact reverse differentiation. What results is the first biologically plausible algorithm that is equivalent to BP in the way of updating parameters on any neural network, providing a bridge between the interdisciplinary research of neuroscience and deep learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

A Primary Frequency Control Strategy for Variable-Speed Pumped-Storage Plant in Power Generation Based on Adaptive Model Predictive Control

Variable-speed pumped-storage (VSPS) has great potential in helping solve the frequency control problem caused by low inertia, owing to its remarkable flexibility beyond conventional fixed-speed one, to make better use of which, a primary frequency control strategy based on adaptive model predictive control (AMPC) is proposed in this paper for VSPS plant in power generation.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Hybrid Reinforced Medical Report Generation with M-Linear Attention and Repetition Penalty

To reduce doctors' workload, deep-learning-based automatic medical report generation has recently attracted more and more research efforts, where deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are employed to encode the input images, and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are used to decode the visual features into medical reports automatically. However, these state-of-the-art methods mainly suffer from three shortcomings: (i) incomprehensive optimization, (ii) low-order and unidimensional attention mechanisms, and (iii) repeated generation. In this article, we propose a hybrid reinforced medical report generation method with m-linear attention and repetition penalty mechanism (HReMRG-MR) to overcome these problems. Specifically, a hybrid reward with different weights is employed to remedy the limitations of single-metric-based rewards. We also propose a search algorithm with linear complexity to approximate the best weight combination. Furthermore, we use m-linear attention modules to explore high-order feature interactions and to achieve multi-modal reasoning, while a repetition penalty applies penalties to repeated terms during the model's training process. Extensive experimental studies on two public datasets show that HReMRG-MR greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of all metrics. We also conducted a series of ablation experiments to prove the effectiveness of all our proposed components. We also performed a reward search toy experiment to give evidence that our proposed search approach can significantly reduce the search time while approximating the best performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

PCA: Semi-supervised Segmentation with Patch Confidence Adversarial Training

Deep learning based semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods have achieved strong performance in medical image segmentation, which can alleviate doctors' expensive annotation by utilizing a large amount of unlabeled data. Unlike most existing semi-supervised learning methods, adversarial training based methods distinguish samples from different sources by learning the data distribution of the segmentation map, leading the segmenter to generate more accurate predictions. We argue that the current performance restrictions for such approaches are the problems of feature extraction and learning preference. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised adversarial method called Patch Confidence Adversarial Training (PCA) for medical image segmentation. Rather than single scalar classification results or pixel-level confidence maps, our proposed discriminator creates patch confidence maps and classifies them at the scale of the patches. The prediction of unlabeled data learns the pixel structure and context information in each patch to get enough gradient feedback, which aids the discriminator in convergent to an optimal state and improves semi-supervised segmentation performance. Furthermore, at the discriminator's input, we supplement semantic information constraints on images, making it simpler for unlabeled data to fit the expected data distribution. Extensive experiments on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) 2017 dataset and the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2019 challenge dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, which demonstrates its effectiveness for medical image segmentation.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Associative Memories via Predictive Coding

Associative memories in the brain receive and store patterns of activity registered by the sensory neurons, and are able to retrieve them when necessary. Due to their importance in human intelligence, computational models of associative memories have been developed for several decades now. They include autoassociative memories, which allow for storing data points and retrieving a stored data point $s$ when provided with a noisy or partial variant of $s$, and heteroassociative memories, able to store and recall multi-modal data. In this paper, we present a novel neural model for realizing associative memories, based on a hierarchical generative network that receives external stimuli via sensory neurons. This model is trained using predictive coding, an error-based learning algorithm inspired by information processing in the cortex. To test the capabilities of this model, we perform multiple retrieval experiments from both corrupted and incomplete data points. In an extensive comparison, we show that this new model outperforms in retrieval accuracy and robustness popular associative memory models, such as autoencoders trained via backpropagation, and modern Hopfield networks. In particular, in completing partial data points, our model achieves remarkable results on natural image datasets, such as ImageNet, with a surprisingly high accuracy, even when only a tiny fraction of pixels of the original images is presented. Furthermore, we show that this method is able to handle multi-modal data, retrieving images from descriptions, and vice versa. We conclude by discussing the possible impact of this work in the neuroscience community, by showing that our model provides a plausible framework to study learning and retrieval of memories in the brain, as it closely mimics the behavior of the hippocampus as a memory index and generative model.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

RSG: A Simple but Effective Module for Learning Imbalanced Datasets

Imbalanced datasets widely exist in practice and area great challenge for training deep neural models with agood generalization on infrequent classes. In this work, wepropose a new rare-class sample generator (RSG) to solvethis problem. RSG aims to generate some new samplesfor rare classes during training, and it has in particularthe following advantages: (1) it is convenient to use andhighly versatile, because it can be easily integrated intoany kind of convolutional neural network, and it works wellwhen combined with different loss functions, and (2) it isonly used during the training phase, and therefore, no ad-ditional burden is imposed on deep neural networks duringthe testing phase. In extensive experimental evaluations, weverify the effectiveness of RSG. Furthermore, by leveragingRSG, we obtain competitive results on Imbalanced CIFARand new state-of-the-art results on Places-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jianf-Wang/RSG.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Detecting Beneficial Feature Interactions for Recommender Systems

Feature interactions are essential for achieving high accuracy in recommender systems. Many studies take into account the interaction between every pair of features. However, this is suboptimal because some feature interactions may not be that relevant to the recommendation result, and taking them into account may introduce noise and decrease recommendation accuracy. To make the best out of feature interactions, we propose a graph neural network approach to effectively model them, together with a novel technique to automatically detect those feature interactions that are beneficial in terms of recommendation accuracy. The automatic feature interaction detection is achieved via edge prediction with an L0 activation regularization. Our proposed model is proved to be effective through the information bottleneck principle and statistical interaction theory. Experimental results show that our model (i) outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, and (ii) automatically identifies beneficial feature interactions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Predictive Coding Can Do Exact Backpropagation on Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks

Predictive coding networks (PCNs) are an influential model for information processing in the brain. They have appealing theoretical interpretations and offer a single mechanism that accounts for diverse perceptual phenomena of the brain. On the other hand, backpropagation (BP) is commonly regarded to be the most successful learning method in modern machine learning. Thus, it is exciting that recent work formulates inference learning (IL) that trains PCNs to approximate BP. However, there are several remaining critical issues: (i) IL is an approximation to BP with unrealistic/non-trivial requirements, (ii) IL approximates BP in single-step weight updates; whether it leads to the same point as BP after the weight updates are conducted for more steps is unknown, and (iii) IL is computationally significantly more costly than BP. To solve these issues, a variant of IL that is strictly equivalent to BP in fully connected networks has been proposed. In this work, we build on this result by showing that it also holds for more complex architectures, namely, convolutional neural networks and (many-to-one) recurrent neural networks. To our knowledge, we are the first to show that a biologically plausible algorithm is able to exactly replicate the accuracy of BP on such complex architectures, bridging the existing gap between IL and BP, and setting an unprecedented performance for PCNs, which can now be considered as efficient alternatives to BP.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Reinforced Medical Report Generation with X-Linear Attention and Repetition Penalty

To reduce doctors' workload, deep-learning-based automatic medical report generation has recently attracted more and more research efforts, where attention mechanisms and reinforcement learning are integrated with the classic encoder-decoder architecture to enhance the performance of deep models. However, these state-of-the-art solutions mainly suffer from two shortcomings: (i) their attention mechanisms cannot utilize high-order feature interactions, and (ii) due to the use of TF-IDF-based reward functions, these methods are fragile with generating repeated terms. Therefore, in this work, we propose a reinforced medical report generation solution with x-linear attention and repetition penalty mechanisms (ReMRG-XR) to overcome these problems. Specifically, x-linear attention modules are used to explore high-order feature interactions and achieve multi-modal reasoning, while repetition penalty is used to apply penalties to repeated terms during the model's training process. Extensive experimental studies have been conducted on two public datasets, and the results show that ReMRG-XR greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of all metrics.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

FPAENet: Pneumonia Detection Network Based on Feature Pyramid Attention Enhancement

Automatic pneumonia Detection based on deep learning has increasing clinical value. Although the existing Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and its variants have already achieved some great successes, their detection accuracies for pneumonia lesions in medical images are still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a pneumonia detection network based on feature pyramid attention enhancement, which integrates attended high-level semantic features with low-level information. We add another information extracting path equipped with feature enhancement modules, which are conducted with an attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve much better performances, as a higher value of 4.02% and 3.19%, than the baselines in detecting pneumonia lesions.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

SAG-GAN: Semi-Supervised Attention-Guided GANs for Data Augmentation on Medical Images

Recently deep learning methods, in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to a massive breakthrough in the range of computer vision. Also, the large-scale annotated dataset is the essential key to a successful training procedure. However, it is a huge challenge to get such datasets in the medical domain. Towards this, we present a data augmentation method for generating synthetic medical images using cycle-consistency Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We add semi-supervised attention modules to generate images with convincing details. We treat tumor images and normal images as two domains. The proposed GANs-based model can generate a tumor image from a normal image, and in turn, it can also generate a normal image from a tumor image. Furthermore, we show that generated medical images can be used for improving the performance of ResNet18 for medical image classification. Our model is applied to three limited datasets of tumor MRI images. We first generate MRI images on limited datasets, then we trained three popular classification models to get the best model for tumor classification. Finally, we train the classification model using real images with classic data augmentation methods and classification models using synthetic images. The classification results between those trained models showed that the proposed SAG-GAN data augmentation method can boost Accuracy and AUC compare with classic data augmentation methods. We believe the proposed data augmentation method can apply to other medical image domains, and improve the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnosis.

eess.IV↗