Resolve Domain Conflicts for Generalizable Remote Physiological Measurement

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technology has become increasingly popular due to its non-invasive monitoring of various physiological indicators, making it widely applicable in multimedia interaction, healthcare, and emotion analysis. Existing rPPG methods utilize multiple datasets for training to enhance the generalizability of models. However, they often overlook the underlying conflict issues across different datasets, such as (1) label conflict resulting from different phase delays between physiological signal labels and face videos at the instance level, and (2) attribute conflict stemming from distribution shifts caused by head movements, illumination changes, skin types, etc. To address this, we introduce the DOmain-HArmonious framework (DOHA). Specifically, we first propose a harmonious phase strategy to eliminate uncertain phase delays and preserve the temporal variation of physiological signals. Next, we design a harmonious hyperplane optimization that reduces irrelevant attribute shifts and encourages the model's optimization towards a global solution that fits more valid scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that DOHA significantly improves the performance of existing methods under multiple protocols. Our code is available at https://github.com/SWY666/rPPG-DOHA.

Self-similarity Prior Distillation for Unsupervised Remote Physiological Measurement

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a noninvasive technique that aims to capture subtle variations in facial pixels caused by changes in blood volume resulting from cardiac activities. Most existing unsupervised methods for rPPG tasks focus on the contrastive learning between samples while neglecting the inherent self-similar prior in physiological signals. In this paper, we propose a Self-Similarity Prior Distillation (SSPD) framework for unsupervised rPPG estimation, which capitalizes on the intrinsic self-similarity of cardiac activities. Specifically, we first introduce a physical-prior embedded augmentation technique to mitigate the effect of various types of noise. Then, we tailor a self-similarity-aware network to extract more reliable self-similar physiological features. Finally, we develop a hierarchical self-distillation paradigm to assist the network in disentangling self-similar physiological patterns from facial videos. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the unsupervised SSPD framework achieves comparable or even superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. Meanwhile, SSPD maintains the lowest inference time and computation cost among end-to-end models. The source codes are available at https://github.com/LinXi1C/SSPD.

DACOM: Learning Delay-Aware Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Communication is supposed to improve multi-agent collaboration and overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, such improvements are prevalently limited in practice since most existing communication schemes ignore communication overheads (e.g., communication delays). In this paper, we demonstrate that ignoring communication delays has detrimental effects on collaborations, especially in delay-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. To mitigate this impact, we design a delay-aware multi-agent communication model (DACOM) to adapt communication to delays. Specifically, DACOM introduces a component, TimeNet, that is responsible for adjusting the waiting time of an agent to receive messages from other agents such that the uncertainty associated with delay can be addressed. Our experiments reveal that DACOM has a non-negligible performance improvement over other mechanisms by making a better trade-off between the benefits of communication and the costs of waiting for messages.

Bone marrow sparing for cervical cancer radiotherapy on multimodality medical images

Cervical cancer threatens the health of women seriously. Radiotherapy is one of the main therapy methods but with high risk of acute hematologic toxicity. Delineating the bone marrow (BM) for sparing using computer tomography (CT) images to plan before radiotherapy can effectively avoid this risk. Comparing with magnetic resonance (MR) images, CT lacks the ability to express the activity of BM. Thus, in current clinical practice, medical practitioners manually delineate the BM on CT images by corresponding to MR images. However, the time?consuming delineating BM by hand cannot guarantee the accuracy due to the inconsistency of the CT-MR multimodal images. In this study, we propose a multimodal image oriented automatic registration method for pelvic BM sparing, which consists of three-dimensional bone point cloud reconstruction, a local spherical system iteration closest point registration for marking BM on CT images. Experiments on patient dataset reveal that our proposed method can enhance the multimodal image registration accuracy and efficiency for medical practitioners in sparing BM of cervical cancer radiotherapy. The method proposed in this contribution might also provide references for similar studies in other clinical application.

Machine Learning Applications on Neuroimaging for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Epilepsy: A Review

Machine learning is playing an increasing important role in medical image analysis, spawning new advances in neuroimaging clinical applications. However, previous work and reviews were mainly focused on the electrophysiological signals like EEG or SEEG; the potential of neuroimaging in epilepsy research has been largely overlooked despite of its wide use in clinical practices. In this review, we highlight the interactions between neuroimaging and machine learning in the context of the epilepsy diagnosis and prognosis. We firstly outline typical neuroimaging modalities used in epilepsy clinics, \textit{e.g} MRI, DTI, fMRI and PET. We then introduce two approaches to apply machine learning methods to neuroimaging data: the two-step compositional approach which combines feature engineering and machine learning classifier, and the end-to-end approach which is usually toward deep learning. Later a detailed review on the machine learning tasks on epileptic images is presented, such as segmentation, localization and lateralization tasks, as well as the tasks directly related to the diagnosis and prognosis. In the end, we discuss current achievements, challenges, potential future directions in the field, with the hope to pave a way to computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis of epilepsy.

Probing and Fine-tuning Reading Comprehension Models for Few-shot Event Extraction

We study the problem of event extraction from text data, which requires both detecting target event types and their arguments. Typically, both the event detection and argument detection subtasks are formulated as supervised sequence labeling problems. We argue that the event extraction models so trained are inherently label-hungry, and can generalize poorly across domains and text genres.We propose a reading comprehension framework for event extraction.Specifically, we formulate event detection as a textual entailment prediction problem, and argument detection as a question answer-ing problem. By constructing proper query templates, our approach can effectively distill rich knowledge about tasks and label semantics from pretrained reading comprehension models. Moreover, our model can be fine-tuned with a small amount of data to boost its performance. Our experiment results show that our method performs strongly for zero-shot and few-shot event extraction, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ACE 2005 benchmark when trained with full supervision.

Item Recommendation with Variational Autoencoders and Heterogenous Priors

In recent years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be highly effective in both standard collaborative filtering applications and extensions such as incorporation of implicit feedback. We extend VAEs to collaborative filtering with side information, for instance when ratings are combined with explicit text feedback from the user. Instead of using a user-agnostic standard Gaussian prior, we incorporate user-dependent priors in the latent VAE space to encode users' preferences as functions of the review text. Taking into account both the rating and the text information to represent users in this multimodal latent space is promising to improve recommendation quality. Our proposed model is shown to outperform the existing VAE models for collaborative filtering (up to 29.41% relative improvement in ranking metric) along with other baselines that incorporate both user ratings and text for item recommendation.