LaplaceNet: A Hybrid Energy-Neural Model for Deep Semi-Supervised Classification

Semi-supervised learning has received a lot of recent attention as it alleviates the need for large amounts of labelled data which can often be expensive, requires expert knowledge and be time consuming to collect. Recent developments in deep semi-supervised classification have reached unprecedented performance and the gap between supervised and semi-supervised learning is ever-decreasing. This improvement in performance has been based on the inclusion of numerous technical tricks, strong augmentation techniques and costly optimisation schemes with multi-term loss functions. We propose a new framework, LaplaceNet, for deep semi-supervised classification that has a greatly reduced model complexity. We utilise a hybrid energy-neural network where graph based pseudo-labels, generated by minimising the graphical Laplacian, are used to iteratively improve a neural-network backbone. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for deep semi-supervised classification, over several benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we consider the application of strong-augmentations to neural networks theoretically and justify the use of a multi-sampling approach for semi-supervised learning. We demonstrate, through rigorous experimentation, that a multi-sampling augmentation approach improves generalisation and reduces the sensitivity of the network to augmentation.

End-to-end reconstruction meets data-driven regularization for inverse problems

We propose an unsupervised approach for learning end-to-end reconstruction operators for ill-posed inverse problems. The proposed method combines the classical variational framework with iterative unrolling, which essentially seeks to minimize a weighted combination of the expected distortion in the measurement space and the Wasserstein-1 distance between the distributions of the reconstruction and ground-truth. More specifically, the regularizer in the variational setting is parametrized by a deep neural network and learned simultaneously with the unrolled reconstruction operator. The variational problem is then initialized with the reconstruction of the unrolled operator and solved iteratively till convergence. Notably, it takes significantly fewer iterations to converge, thanks to the excellent initialization obtained via the unrolled operator. The resulting approach combines the computational efficiency of end-to-end unrolled reconstruction with the well-posedness and noise-stability guarantees of the variational setting. Moreover, we demonstrate with the example of X-ray computed tomography (CT) that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, and that it outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art supervised learned reconstruction approaches.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Polyp Miss Rates during Colonoscopy

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: Artificial intelligence has the potential to aid gastroenterologists by reducing polyp miss detection rates during colonoscopy screening for colorectal cancer. NEW FINDINGS: We introduce a new deep neural network architecture, the Focus U-Net, which achieves state-of-the-art performance for polyp segmentation across five public datasets containing images of polyps obtained during colonoscopy. LIMITATIONS: The model has been validated on images taken during colonoscopy but requires validation on live video data to ensure generalisability. IMPACT: Once validated on live video data, our polyp segmentation algorithm could be integrated into colonoscopy practice and assist gastroenterologists by reducing the number of polyps missed

An end-to-end Optical Character Recognition approach for ultra-low-resolution printed text images

Some historical and more recent printed documents have been scanned or stored at very low resolutions, such as 60 dpi. Though such scans are relatively easy for humans to read, they still present significant challenges for optical character recognition (OCR) systems. The current state-of-the art is to use super-resolution to reconstruct an approximation of the original high-resolution image and to feed this into a standard OCR system. Our novel end-to-end method bypasses the super-resolution step and produces better OCR results. This approach is inspired from our understanding of the human visual system, and builds on established neural networks for performing OCR. Our experiments have shown that it is possible to perform OCR on 60 dpi scanned images of English text, which is a significantly lower resolution than the state-of-the-art, and we achieved a mean character level accuracy (CLA) of 99.7% and word level accuracy (WLA) of 98.9% across a set of about 1000 pages of 60 dpi text in a wide range of fonts. For 75 dpi images, the mean CLA was 99.9% and the mean WLA was 99.4% on the same sample of texts. We make our code and data (including a set of low-resolution images with their ground truths) publicly available as a benchmark for future work in this field.

Semi-supervised Superpixel-based Multi-Feature Graph Learning for Hyperspectral Image Data

Graphs naturally lend themselves to model the complexities of Hyperspectral Image (HSI) data as well as to serve as semi-supervised classifiers by propagating given labels among nearest neighbours. In this work, we present a novel framework for the classification of HSI data in light of a very limited amount of labelled data, inspired by multi-view graph learning and graph signal processing. Given an a priori superpixel-segmented hyperspectral image, we seek a robust and efficient graph construction and label propagation method to conduct semi-supervised learning (SSL). Since the graph is paramount to the success of the subsequent classification task, particularly in light of the intrinsic complexity of HSI data, we consider the problem of finding the optimal graph to model such data. Our contribution is two-fold: firstly, we propose a multi-stage edge-efficient semi-supervised graph learning framework for HSI data which exploits given label information through pseudo-label features embedded in the graph construction. Secondly, we examine and enhance the contribution of multiple superpixel features embedded in the graph on the basis of pseudo-labels in an extension of the previous framework, which is less reliant on excessive parameter tuning. Ultimately, we demonstrate the superiority of our approaches in comparison with state-of-the-art methods through extensive numerical experiments.

Adversarially learned iterative reconstruction for imaging inverse problems

In numerous practical applications, especially in medical image reconstruction, it is often infeasible to obtain a large ensemble of ground-truth/measurement pairs for supervised learning. Therefore, it is imperative to develop unsupervised learning protocols that are competitive with supervised approaches in performance. Motivated by the maximum-likelihood principle, we propose an unsupervised learning framework for solving ill-posed inverse problems. Instead of seeking pixel-wise proximity between the reconstructed and the ground-truth images, the proposed approach learns an iterative reconstruction network whose output matches the ground-truth in distribution. Considering tomographic reconstruction as an application, we demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised approach not only performs on par with its supervised variant in terms of objective quality measures but also successfully circumvents the issue of over-smoothing that supervised approaches tend to suffer from. The improvement in reconstruction quality comes at the expense of higher training complexity, but, once trained, the reconstruction time remains the same as its supervised counterpart.

Wasserstein GANs Work Because They Fail (to Approximate the Wasserstein Distance)

Wasserstein GANs are based on the idea of minimising the Wasserstein distance between a real and a generated distribution. We provide an in-depth mathematical analysis of differences between the theoretical setup and the reality of training Wasserstein GANs. In this work, we gather both theoretical and empirical evidence that the WGAN loss is not a meaningful approximation of the Wasserstein distance. Moreover, we argue that the Wasserstein distance is not even a desirable loss function for deep generative models, and conclude that the success of Wasserstein GANs can in truth be attributed to a failure to approximate the Wasserstein distance.

Equivariant neural networks for inverse problems

In recent years the use of convolutional layers to encode an inductive bias (translational equivariance) in neural networks has proven to be a very fruitful idea. The successes of this approach have motivated a line of research into incorporating other symmetries into deep learning methods, in the form of group equivariant convolutional neural networks. Much of this work has been focused on roto-translational symmetry of $\mathbf R^d$, but other examples are the scaling symmetry of $\mathbf R^d$ and rotational symmetry of the sphere. In this work, we demonstrate that group equivariant convolutional operations can naturally be incorporated into learned reconstruction methods for inverse problems that are motivated by the variational regularisation approach. Indeed, if the regularisation functional is invariant under a group symmetry, the corresponding proximal operator will satisfy an equivariance property with respect to the same group symmetry. As a result of this observation, we design learned iterative methods in which the proximal operators are modelled as group equivariant convolutional neural networks. We use roto-translationally equivariant operations in the proposed methodology and apply it to the problems of low-dose computerised tomography reconstruction and subsampled magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction. The proposed methodology is demonstrated to improve the reconstruction quality of a learned reconstruction method with a little extra computational cost at training time but without any extra cost at test time.

Depthwise Separable Convolutions Allow for Fast and Memory-Efficient Spectral Normalization

An increasing number of models require the control of the spectral norm of convolutional layers of a neural network. While there is an abundance of methods for estimating and enforcing upper bounds on those during training, they are typically costly in either memory or time. In this work, we introduce a very simple method for spectral normalization of depthwise separable convolutions, which introduces negligible computational and memory overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on image classification tasks using standard architectures like MobileNetV2.