Data Noising as Smoothing in Neural Network Language Models

Data noising is an effective technique for regularizing neural network models. While noising is widely adopted in application domains such as vision and speech, commonly used noising primitives have not been developed for discrete sequence-level settings such as language modeling. In this paper, we derive a connection between input noising in neural network language models and smoothing in $n$-gram models. Using this connection, we draw upon ideas from smoothing to develop effective noising schemes. We demonstrate performance gains when applying the proposed schemes to language modeling and machine translation. Finally, we provide empirical analysis validating the relationship between noising and smoothing.

Breast Mass Classification from Mammograms using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Mammography is the most widely used method to screen breast cancer. Because of its mostly manual nature, variability in mass appearance, and low signal-to-noise ratio, a significant number of breast masses are missed or misdiagnosed. In this work, we present how Convolutional Neural Networks can be used to directly classify pre-segmented breast masses in mammograms as benign or malignant, using a combination of transfer learning, careful pre-processing and data augmentation to overcome limited training data. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the DDSM dataset, surpassing human performance, and show interpretability of our model.