Transfer Learning in ECG Diagnosis: Is It Effective?

The adoption of deep learning in ECG diagnosis is often hindered by the scarcity of large, well-labeled datasets in real-world scenarios, leading to the use of transfer learning to leverage features learned from larger datasets. Yet the prevailing assumption that transfer learning consistently outperforms training from scratch has never been systematically validated. In this study, we conduct the first extensive empirical study on the effectiveness of transfer learning in multi-label ECG classification, by investigating comparing the fine-tuning performance with that of training from scratch, covering a variety of ECG datasets and deep neural networks. We confirm that fine-tuning is the preferable choice for small downstream datasets; however, when the dataset is sufficiently large, training from scratch can achieve comparable performance, albeit requiring a longer training time to catch up. Furthermore, we find that transfer learning exhibits better compatibility with convolutional neural networks than with recurrent neural networks, which are the two most prevalent architectures for time-series ECG applications. Our results underscore the importance of transfer learning in ECG diagnosis, yet depending on the amount of available data, researchers may opt not to use it, considering the non-negligible cost associated with pre-training.

Explainable Severity ranking via pairwise n-hidden comparison: a case study of glaucoma

Primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is a chronic and progressive optic nerve condition that results in an acquired loss of optic nerve fibers and potential blindness. The gradual onset of glaucoma results in patients progressively losing their vision without being consciously aware of the changes. To diagnose POAG and determine its severity, patients must undergo a comprehensive dilated eye examination. In this work, we build a framework to rank, compare, and interpret the severity of glaucoma using fundus images. We introduce a siamese-based severity ranking using pairwise n-hidden comparisons. We additionally have a novel approach to explaining why a specific image is deemed more severe than others. Our findings indicate that the proposed severity ranking model surpasses traditional ones in terms of diagnostic accuracy and delivers improved saliency explanations.

Simple Transferability Estimation for Regression Tasks

We consider transferability estimation, the problem of estimating how well deep learning models transfer from a source to a target task. We focus on regression tasks, which received little previous attention, and propose two simple and computationally efficient approaches that estimate transferability based on the negative regularized mean squared error of a linear regression model. We prove novel theoretical results connecting our approaches to the actual transferability of the optimal target models obtained from the transfer learning process. Despite their simplicity, our approaches significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art regression transferability estimators in both accuracy and efficiency. On two large-scale keypoint regression benchmarks, our approaches yield 12% to 36% better results on average while being at least 27% faster than previous state-of-the-art methods.

MELEP: A Novel Predictive Measure of Transferability in Multi-Label ECG Analysis

We introduce MELEP, which stands for Muti-label Expected Log of Empirical Predictions, a novel measure to estimate how effective it is to transfer knowledge from a pre-trained model to a downstream task in a multi-label settings. The measure is generic to work with new target data having a different label set from source data. It is also computationally efficient, only requires forward passing the downstream dataset through the pre-trained model once. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop such a transferability metric for multi-label ECG classification problems. Our experiments show that MELEP can predict the performance of pre-trained convolutional and recurrent deep neural networks, on small and imbalanced ECG data. Specifically, strong correlation coefficients, with absolute values exceeding 0.6 in most cases, were observed between MELEP and the actual average F1 scores of the fine-tuned models.

Hate Speech Detection in Limited Data Contexts using Synthetic Data Generation

A growing body of work has focused on text classification methods for detecting the increasing amount of hate speech posted online. This progress has been limited to only a select number of highly-resourced languages causing detection systems to either under-perform or not exist in limited data contexts. This is majorly caused by a lack of training data which is expensive to collect and curate in these settings. In this work, we propose a data augmentation approach that addresses the problem of lack of data for online hate speech detection in limited data contexts using synthetic data generation techniques. Given a handful of hate speech examples in a high-resource language such as English, we present three methods to synthesize new examples of hate speech data in a target language that retains the hate sentiment in the original examples but transfers the hate targets. We apply our approach to generate training data for hate speech classification tasks in Hindi and Vietnamese. Our findings show that a model trained on synthetic data performs comparably to, and in some cases outperforms, a model trained only on the samples available in the target domain. This method can be adopted to bootstrap hate speech detection models from scratch in limited data contexts. As the growth of social media within these contexts continues to outstrip response efforts, this work furthers our capacities for detection, understanding, and response to hate speech.

EnSolver: Uncertainty-Aware CAPTCHA Solver Using Deep Ensembles

The popularity of text-based CAPTCHA as a security mechanism to protect websites from automated bots has prompted researches in CAPTCHA solvers, with the aim of understanding its failure cases and subsequently making CAPTCHAs more secure. Recently proposed solvers, built on advances in deep learning, are able to crack even the very challenging CAPTCHAs with high accuracy. However, these solvers often perform poorly on out-of-distribution samples that contain visual features different from those in the training set. Furthermore, they lack the ability to detect and avoid such samples, making them susceptible to being locked out by defense systems after a certain number of failed attempts. In this paper, we propose EnSolver, a novel CAPTCHA solver that utilizes deep ensemble uncertainty estimation to detect and skip out-of-distribution CAPTCHAs, making it harder to be detected. We demonstrate the use of our solver with object detection models and show empirically that it performs well on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data, achieving up to 98.1% accuracy when detecting out-of-distribution data and up to 93% success rate when solving in-distribution CAPTCHAs.

Learning for Amalgamation: A Multi-Source Transfer Learning Framework For Sentiment Classification

Transfer learning plays an essential role in Deep Learning, which can remarkably improve the performance of the target domain, whose training data is not sufficient. Our work explores beyond the common practice of transfer learning with a single pre-trained model. We focus on the task of Vietnamese sentiment classification and propose LIFA, a framework to learn a unified embedding from several pre-trained models. We further propose two more LIFA variants that encourage the pre-trained models to either cooperate or compete with one another. Studying these variants sheds light on the success of LIFA by showing that sharing knowledge among the models is more beneficial for transfer learning. Moreover, we construct the AISIA-VN-Review-F dataset, the first large-scale Vietnamese sentiment classification database. We conduct extensive experiments on the AISIA-VN-Review-F and existing benchmarks to demonstrate the efficacy of LIFA compared to other techniques. To contribute to the Vietnamese NLP research, we publish our source code and datasets to the research community upon acceptance.

Generalization Bounds for Deep Transfer Learning Using Majority Predictor Accuracy

We analyze new generalization bounds for deep learning models trained by transfer learning from a source to a target task. Our bounds utilize a quantity called the majority predictor accuracy, which can be computed efficiently from data. We show that our theory is useful in practice since it implies that the majority predictor accuracy can be used as a transferability measure, a fact that is also validated by our experiments.

Partitioned Variational Inference: A Framework for Probabilistic Federated Learning

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be stored on a single machine with compute performed by a single node, making them unsuitable for decentralised training on multiple devices. This deficiency has motivated the development of federated learning algorithms, which allow multiple data owners to train collaboratively and use a shared model whilst keeping local data private. However, many of these algorithms focus on obtaining point estimates of model parameters, rather than probabilistic estimates capable of capturing model uncertainty, which is essential in many applications. Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. In this paper we introduce partitioned variational inference (PVI), a general framework for performing VI in the federated setting. We develop new supporting theory for PVI, demonstrating a number of properties that make it an attractive choice for practitioners; use PVI to unify a wealth of fragmented, yet related literature; and provide empirical results that showcase the effectiveness of PVI in a variety of federated settings.

An Empirical Study on GANs with Margin Cosine Loss and Relativistic Discriminator

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as useful generative models, which are capable of implicitly learning data distributions of arbitrarily complex dimensions. However, the training of GANs is empirically well-known for being highly unstable and sensitive. The loss functions of both the discriminator and generator concerning their parameters tend to oscillate wildly during training. Different loss functions have been proposed to stabilize the training and improve the quality of images generated. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the impact of several loss functions on the performance of standard GAN models, Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs). We introduce a new improvement that employs a relativistic discriminator to replace the classical deterministic discriminator in DCGANs and implement a margin cosine loss function for both the generator and discriminator. This results in a novel loss function, namely Relativistic Margin Cosine Loss (RMCosGAN). We carry out extensive experiments with four datasets: CIFAR-$10$, MNIST, STL-$10$, and CAT. We compare RMCosGAN performance with existing loss functions based on two metrics: Frechet inception distance and inception score. The experimental results show that RMCosGAN outperforms the existing ones and significantly improves the quality of images generated.