Continuous U-Net: Faster, Greater and Noiseless

Image segmentation is a fundamental task in image analysis and clinical practice. The current state-of-the-art techniques are based on U-shape type encoder-decoder networks with skip connections, called U-Net. Despite the powerful performance reported by existing U-Net type networks, they suffer from several major limitations. Issues include the hard coding of the receptive field size, compromising the performance and computational cost, as well as the fact that they do not account for inherent noise in the data. They have problems associated with discrete layers, and do not offer any theoretical underpinning. In this work we introduce continuous U-Net, a novel family of networks for image segmentation. Firstly, continuous U-Net is a continuous deep neural network that introduces new dynamic blocks modelled by second order ordinary differential equations. Secondly, we provide theoretical guarantees for our network demonstrating faster convergence, higher robustness and less sensitivity to noise. Thirdly, we derive qualitative measures to tailor-made segmentation tasks. We demonstrate, through extensive numerical and visual results, that our model outperforms existing U-Net blocks for several medical image segmentation benchmarking datasets.

Multi-Modal Hypergraph Diffusion Network with Dual Prior for Alzheimer Classification

The automatic early diagnosis of prodromal stages of Alzheimer's disease is of great relevance for patient treatment to improve quality of life. We address this problem as a multi-modal classification task. Multi-modal data provides richer and complementary information. However, existing techniques only consider either lower order relations between the data and single/multi-modal imaging data. In this work, we introduce a novel semi-supervised hypergraph learning framework for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Our framework allows for higher-order relations among multi-modal imaging and non-imaging data whilst requiring a tiny labelled set. Firstly, we introduce a dual embedding strategy for constructing a robust hypergraph that preserves the data semantics. We achieve this by enforcing perturbation invariance at the image and graph levels using a contrastive based mechanism. Secondly, we present a dynamically adjusted hypergraph diffusion model, via a semi-explicit flow, to improve the predictive uncertainty. We demonstrate, through our experiments, that our framework is able to outperform current techniques for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis.

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.

Exploiting the Logits: Joint Sign Language Recognition and Spell-Correction

Machine learning techniques have excelled in the automatic semantic analysis of images, reaching human-level performances on challenging benchmarks. Yet, the semantic analysis of videos remains challenging due to the significantly higher dimensionality of the input data, respectively, the significantly higher need for annotated training examples. By studying the automatic recognition of German sign language videos, we demonstrate that on the relatively scarce training data of 2.800 videos, modern deep learning architectures for video analysis (such as ResNeXt) along with transfer learning on large gesture recognition tasks, can achieve about 75% character accuracy. Considering that this leaves us with a probability of under 25% that a 5 letter word is spelled correctly, spell-correction systems are crucial for producing readable outputs. The contribution of this paper is to propose a convolutional neural network for spell-correction that expects the softmax outputs of the character recognition network (instead of a misspelled word) as an input. We demonstrate that purely learning on softmax inputs in combination with scarce training data yields overfitting as the network learns the inputs by heart. In contrast, training the network on several variants of the logits of the classification output i.e. scaling by a constant factor, adding of random noise, mixing of softmax and hardmax inputs or purely training on hardmax inputs, leads to better generalization while benefitting from the significant information hidden in these outputs (that have 98% top-5 accuracy), yielding a readable text despite the comparably low character accuracy.