ShadowDiffusion: When Degradation Prior Meets Diffusion Model for Shadow Removal

Recent deep learning methods have achieved promising results in image shadow removal. However, their restored images still suffer from unsatisfactory boundary artifacts, due to the lack of degradation prior embedding and the deficiency in modeling capacity. Our work addresses these issues by proposing a unified diffusion framework that integrates both the image and degradation priors for highly effective shadow removal. In detail, we first propose a shadow degradation model, which inspires us to build a novel unrolling diffusion model, dubbed ShandowDiffusion. It remarkably improves the model's capacity in shadow removal via progressively refining the desired output with both degradation prior and diffusive generative prior, which by nature can serve as a new strong baseline for image restoration. Furthermore, ShadowDiffusion progressively refines the estimated shadow mask as an auxiliary task of the diffusion generator, which leads to more accurate and robust shadow-free image generation. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular public datasets, including ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD, to validate our method's effectiveness. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves a significant improvement in terms of PSNR, increasing from 31.69dB to 34.73dB over SRD dataset.

Learning Regularized Positional Encoding for Molecular Prediction

Machine learning has become a promising approach for molecular modeling. Positional quantities, such as interatomic distances and bond angles, play a crucial role in molecule physics. The existing works rely on careful manual design of their representation. To model the complex nonlinearity in predicting molecular properties in an more end-to-end approach, we propose to encode the positional quantities with a learnable embedding that is continuous and differentiable. A regularization technique is employed to encourage embedding smoothness along the physical dimension. We experiment with a variety of molecular property and force field prediction tasks. Improved performance is observed for three different model architectures after plugging in the proposed positional encoding method. In addition, the learned positional encoding allows easier physics-based interpretation. We observe that tasks of similar physics have the similar learned positional encoding.

Supervised Pretraining for Molecular Force Fields and Properties Prediction

Machine learning approaches have become popular for molecular modeling tasks, including molecular force fields and properties prediction. Traditional supervised learning methods suffer from scarcity of labeled data for particular tasks, motivating the use of large-scale dataset for other relevant tasks. We propose to pretrain neural networks on a dataset of 86 millions of molecules with atom charges and 3D geometries as inputs and molecular energies as labels. Experiments show that, compared to training from scratch, fine-tuning the pretrained model can significantly improve the performance for seven molecular property prediction tasks and two force field tasks. We also demonstrate that the learned representations from the pretrained model contain adequate information about molecular structures, by showing that linear probing of the representations can predict many molecular information including atom types, interatomic distances, class of molecular scaffolds, and existence of molecular fragments. Our results show that supervised pretraining is a promising research direction in molecular modeling

Learning to Counterfactually Explain Recommendations

Recommender system practitioners are facing increasing pressure to explain recommendations. We explore how to explain recommendations using counterfactual logic, i.e. "Had you not interacted with the following items before, it is likely we would not recommend this item." Compared to traditional explanation logic, counterfactual explanations are easier to understand and more technically verifiable. The major challenge of generating such explanations is the computational cost because it requires repeatedly retraining the models to obtain the effect on a recommendation caused by removing user (interaction) history. We propose a learning-based framework to generate counterfactual explanations. The key idea is to train a surrogate model to learn the effect of removing a subset of user history on the recommendation. To this end, we first artificially simulate the counterfactual outcomes on the recommendation after deleting subsets of history. Then we train surrogate models to learn the mapping between a history deletion and the change in the recommendation caused by the deletion. Finally, to generate an explanation, we find the history subset predicted by the surrogate model that is most likely to remove the recommendation. Through offline experiments and online user studies, we show our method, compared to baselines, can generate explanations that are more counterfactually valid and more satisfactory considered by users.

Knowledge Distillation to Ensemble Global and Interpretable Prototype-Based Mammogram Classification Models

State-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning mammogram classifiers, trained with weakly-labelled images, often rely on global models that produce predictions with limited interpretability, which is a key barrier to their successful translation into clinical practice. On the other hand, prototype-based models improve interpretability by associating predictions with training image prototypes, but they are less accurate than global models and their prototypes tend to have poor diversity. We address these two issues with the proposal of BRAIxProtoPNet++, which adds interpretability to a global model by ensembling it with a prototype-based model. BRAIxProtoPNet++ distills the knowledge of the global model when training the prototype-based model with the goal of increasing the classification accuracy of the ensemble. Moreover, we propose an approach to increase prototype diversity by guaranteeing that all prototypes are associated with different training images. Experiments on weakly-labelled private and public datasets show that BRAIxProtoPNet++ has higher classification accuracy than SOTA global and prototype-based models. Using lesion localisation to assess model interpretability, we show BRAIxProtoPNet++ is more effective than other prototype-based models and post-hoc explanation of global models. Finally, we show that the diversity of the prototypes learned by BRAIxProtoPNet++ is superior to SOTA prototype-based approaches.

Multi-view Local Co-occurrence and Global Consistency Learning Improve Mammogram Classification Generalisation

When analysing screening mammograms, radiologists can naturally process information across two ipsilateral views of each breast, namely the cranio-caudal (CC) and mediolateral-oblique (MLO) views. These multiple related images provide complementary diagnostic information and can improve the radiologist's classification accuracy. Unfortunately, most existing deep learning systems, trained with globally-labelled images, lack the ability to jointly analyse and integrate global and local information from these multiple views. By ignoring the potentially valuable information present in multiple images of a screening episode, one limits the potential accuracy of these systems. Here, we propose a new multi-view global-local analysis method that mimics the radiologist's reading procedure, based on a global consistency learning and local co-occurrence learning of ipsilateral views in mammograms. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms competing methods, in terms of classification accuracy and generalisation, on a large-scale private dataset and two publicly available datasets, where models are exclusively trained and tested with global labels.

Collaborative Anomaly Detection

In recommendation systems, items are likely to be exposed to various users and we would like to learn about the familiarity of a new user with an existing item. This can be formulated as an anomaly detection (AD) problem distinguishing between "common users" (nominal) and "fresh users" (anomalous). Considering the sheer volume of items and the sparsity of user-item paired data, independently applying conventional single-task detection methods on each item quickly becomes difficult, while correlations between items are ignored. To address this multi-task anomaly detection problem, we propose collaborative anomaly detection (CAD) to jointly learn all tasks with an embedding encoding correlations among tasks. We explore CAD with conditional density estimation and conditional likelihood ratio estimation. We found that: $i$) estimating a likelihood ratio enjoys more efficient learning and yields better results than density estimation. $ii$) It is beneficial to select a small number of tasks in advance to learn a task embedding model, and then use it to warm-start all task embeddings. Consequently, these embeddings can capture correlations between tasks and generalize to new correlated tasks.

DPAUC: Differentially Private AUC Computation in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has gained significant attention recently as a privacy-enhancing tool to jointly train a machine learning model by multiple participants. The prior work on FL has mostly studied how to protect label privacy during model training. However, model evaluation in FL might also lead to potential leakage of private label information. In this work, we propose an evaluation algorithm that can accurately compute the widely used AUC (area under the curve) metric when using the label differential privacy (DP) in FL. Through extensive experiments, we show our algorithms can compute accurate AUCs compared to the ground truth.

REPNP: Plug-and-Play with Deep Reinforcement Learning Prior for Robust Image Restoration

Image restoration schemes based on the pre-trained deep models have received great attention due to their unique flexibility for solving various inverse problems. In particular, the Plug-and-Play (PnP) framework is a popular and powerful tool that can integrate an off-the-shelf deep denoiser for different image restoration tasks with known observation models. However, obtaining the observation model that exactly matches the actual one can be challenging in practice. Thus, the PnP schemes with conventional deep denoisers may fail to generate satisfying results in some real-world image restoration tasks. We argue that the robustness of the PnP framework is largely limited by using the off-the-shelf deep denoisers that are trained by deterministic optimization. To this end, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based PnP framework, dubbed RePNP, by leveraging a light-weight DRL-based denoiser for robust image restoration tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RePNP is robust to the observation model used in the PnP scheme deviating from the actual one. Thus, RePNP can generate more reliable restoration results for image deblurring and super resolution tasks. Compared with several state-of-the-art deep image restoration baselines, RePNP achieves better results subjective to model deviation with fewer model parameters.