Bispectrum-based Cross-frequency Functional Connectivity: Classification of Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease known to affect brain functional connectivity (FC). Linear FC measures have been applied to study the differences in AD by splitting neurophysiological signals such as electroencephalography (EEG) recordings into discrete frequency bands and analysing them in isolation. We address this limitation by quantifying cross-frequency FC in addition to the traditional within-band approach. Cross-bispectrum, a higher-order spectral analysis, is used to measure the nonlinear FC and is compared with the cross-spectrum, which only measures the linear FC within bands. Each frequency coupling is then used to construct an FC network, which is in turn vectorised and used to train a classifier. We show that fusing features from networks improves classification accuracy. Although both within-frequency and cross-frequency networks can be used to predict AD with high accuracy, our results show that bispectrum-based FC outperforms cross-spectrum suggesting an important role of cross-frequency FC.

PanopticDepth: A Unified Framework for Depth-aware Panoptic Segmentation

This paper presents a unified framework for depth-aware panoptic segmentation (DPS), which aims to reconstruct 3D scene with instance-level semantics from one single image. Prior works address this problem by simply adding a dense depth regression head to panoptic segmentation (PS) networks, resulting in two independent task branches. This neglects the mutually-beneficial relations between these two tasks, thus failing to exploit handy instance-level semantic cues to boost depth accuracy while also producing sub-optimal depth maps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified framework for the DPS task by applying a dynamic convolution technique to both the PS and depth prediction tasks. Specifically, instead of predicting depth for all pixels at a time, we generate instance-specific kernels to predict depth and segmentation masks for each instance. Moreover, leveraging the instance-wise depth estimation scheme, we add additional instance-level depth cues to assist with supervising the depth learning via a new depth loss. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes-DPS and SemKITTI-DPS show the effectiveness and promise of our method. We hope our unified solution to DPS can lead a new paradigm in this area. Code is available at https://github.com/NaiyuGao/PanopticDepth.

Multi-Phase Locking Value: A Generalized Method for Determining Instantaneous Multi-frequency Phase Coupling

Many physical, biological and neural systems behave as coupled oscillators, with characteristic phase coupling across different frequencies. Methods such as $n:m$ phase locking value and bi-phase locking value have previously been proposed to quantify phase coupling between two resonant frequencies (e.g. $f$, $2f/3$) and across three frequencies (e.g. $f_1$, $f_2$, $f_1+f_2$), respectively. However, the existing phase coupling metrics have their limitations and limited applications. They cannot be used to detect or quantify phase coupling across multiple frequencies (e.g. $f_1$, $f_2$, $f_3$, $f_4$, $f_1+f_2+f_3-f_4$), or coupling that involves non-integer multiples of the frequencies (e.g. $f_1$, $f_2$, $2f_1/3+f_2/3$). To address the gap, this paper proposes a generalized approach, named multi-phase locking value (M-PLV), for the quantification of various types of instantaneous multi-frequency phase coupling. Different from most instantaneous phase coupling metrics that measure the simultaneous phase coupling, the proposed M-PLV method also allows the detection of delayed phase coupling and the associated time lag between coupled oscillators. The M-PLV has been tested on cases where synthetic coupled signals are generated using white Gaussian signals, and a system comprised of multiple coupled R\"ossler oscillators. Results indicate that the M-PLV can provide a reliable estimation of the time window and frequency combination where the phase coupling is significant, as well as a precise determination of time lag in the case of delayed coupling. This method has the potential to become a powerful new tool for exploring phase coupling in complex nonlinear dynamic systems.

Characterising Alzheimer's Disease with EEG-based Energy Landscape Analysis

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases, with around 50 million patients worldwide. Accessible and non-invasive methods of diagnosing and characterising AD are therefore urgently required. Electroencephalography (EEG) fulfils these criteria and is often used when studying AD. Several features derived from EEG were shown to predict AD with high accuracy, e.g. signal complexity and synchronisation. However, the dynamics of how the brain transitions between stable states have not been properly studied in the case of AD and EEG data. Energy landscape analysis is a method that can be used to quantify these dynamics. This work presents the first application of this method to both AD and EEG. Energy landscape assigns energy value to each possible state, i.e. pattern of activations across brain regions. The energy is inversely proportional to the probability of occurrence. By studying the features of energy landscapes of 20 AD patients and 20 healthy age-matched counterparts, significant differences were found. The dynamics of AD patients' brain networks were shown to be more constrained - with more local minima, less variation in basin size, and smaller basins. We show that energy landscapes can predict AD with high accuracy, performing significantly better than baseline models.

Google Crowdsourced Speech Corpora and Related Open-Source Resources for Low-Resource Languages and Dialects: An Overview

This paper presents an overview of a program designed to address the growing need for developing freely available speech resources for under-represented languages. At present we have released 38 datasets for building text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition applications for languages and dialects of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. The paper describes the methodology used for developing such corpora and presents some of our findings that could benefit under-represented language communities.

Clustering with Fast, Automated and Reproducible assessment applied to longitudinal neural tracking

Across many areas, from neural tracking to database entity resolution, manual assessment of clusters by human experts presents a bottleneck in rapid development of scalable and specialized clustering methods. To solve this problem we develop C-FAR, a novel method for Fast, Automated and Reproducible assessment of multiple hierarchical clustering algorithms simultaneously. Our algorithm takes any number of hierarchical clustering trees as input, then strategically queries pairs for human feedback, and outputs an optimal clustering among those nominated by these trees. While it is applicable to large dataset in any domain that utilizes pairwise comparisons for assessment, our flagship application is the cluster aggregation step in spike-sorting, the task of assigning waveforms (spikes) in recordings to neurons. On simulated data of 96 neurons under adverse conditions, including drifting and 25\% blackout, our algorithm produces near-perfect tracking relative to the ground truth. Our runtime scales linearly in the number of input trees, making it a competitive computational tool. These results indicate that C-FAR is highly suitable as a model selection and assessment tool in clustering tasks.

Fast OBDD Reordering using Neural Message Passing on Hypergraph

Ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) are an efficient data structure for representing and manipulating Boolean formulas. With respect to different variable orders, the OBDDs' sizes may vary from linear to exponential in the number of the Boolean variables. Finding the optimal variable order has been proved a NP-complete problem. Many heuristics have been proposed to find a near-optimal solution of this problem. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based method to predict near-optimal variable orders for unknown formulas. Viewing these formulas as hypergraphs, and lifting the message passing neural network into 3-hypergraph (MPNN3), we are able to learn the patterns of Boolean formula. Compared to the traditional methods, our method can find a near-the-best solution with an extremely shorter time, even for some hard examples.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on applying neural network to OBDD reordering.

Doubly Robust Data-Driven Distributionally Robust Optimization

Data-driven Distributionally Robust Optimization (DD-DRO) via optimal transport has been shown to encompass a wide range of popular machine learning algorithms. The distributional uncertainty size is often shown to correspond to the regularization parameter. The type of regularization (e.g. the norm used to regularize) corresponds to the shape of the distributional uncertainty. We propose a data-driven robust optimization methodology to inform the transportation cost underlying the definition of the distributional uncertainty. We show empirically that this additional layer of robustification, which produces a method we called doubly robust data-driven distributionally robust optimization (DD-R-DRO), allows to enhance the generalization properties of regularized estimators while reducing testing error relative to state-of-the-art classifiers in a wide range of data sets.

Beyond $χ^2$ Difference: Learning Optimal Metric for Boundary Detection

This letter focuses on solving the challenging problem of detecting natural image boundaries. A boundary usually refers to the border between two regions with different semantic meanings. Therefore, a measurement of dissimilarity between image regions plays a pivotal role in boundary detection of natural images. To improve the performance of boundary detection, a Learning-based Boundary Metric (LBM) is proposed to replace $\chi^2$ difference adopted by the classical algorithm mPb. Compared with $\chi^2$ difference, LBM is composed of a single layer neural network and an RBF kernel, and is fine-tuned by supervised learning rather than human-crafted. It is more effective in describing the dissimilarity between natural image regions while tolerating large variance of image data. After substituting $\chi^2$ difference with LBM, the F-measure metric of mPb on the BSDS500 benchmark is increased from 0.69 to 0.71. Moreover, when image features are computed on a single scale, the proposed LBM algorithm still achieves competitive results compared with \emph{mPb}, which makes use of multi-scale image features.

Seeing the Big Picture: Deep Embedding with Contextual Evidences

In the Bag-of-Words (BoW) model based image retrieval task, the precision of visual matching plays a critical role in improving retrieval performance. Conventionally, local cues of a keypoint are employed. However, such strategy does not consider the contextual evidences of a keypoint, a problem which would lead to the prevalence of false matches. To address this problem, this paper defines "true match" as a pair of keypoints which are similar on three levels, i.e., local, regional, and global. Then, a principled probabilistic framework is established, which is capable of implicitly integrating discriminative cues from all these feature levels. Specifically, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is employed to extract features from regional and global patches, leading to the so-called "Deep Embedding" framework. CNN has been shown to produce excellent performance on a dozen computer vision tasks such as image classification and detection, but few works have been done on BoW based image retrieval. In this paper, firstly we show that proper pre-processing techniques are necessary for effective usage of CNN feature. Then, in the attempt to fit it into our model, a novel indexing structure called "Deep Indexing" is introduced, which dramatically reduces memory usage. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that, the proposed Deep Embedding method greatly promotes the retrieval accuracy when CNN feature is integrated. We show that our method is efficient in terms of both memory and time cost, and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods.