Data-Algorithm-Architecture Co-Optimization for Fair Neural Networks on Skin Lesion Dataset

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly integrates into our daily lives, fairness has emerged as a critical concern, particularly in medical AI, where datasets often reflect inherent biases due to social factors like the underrepresentation of marginalized communities and socioeconomic barriers to data collection. Traditional approaches to mitigating these biases have focused on data augmentation and the development of fairness-aware training algorithms. However, this paper argues that the architecture of neural networks, a core component of Machine Learning (ML), plays a crucial role in ensuring fairness. We demonstrate that addressing fairness effectively requires a holistic approach that simultaneously considers data, algorithms, and architecture. Utilizing Automated ML (AutoML) technology, specifically Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a novel framework, BiaslessNAS, designed to achieve fair outcomes in analyzing skin lesion datasets. BiaslessNAS incorporates fairness considerations at every stage of the NAS process, leading to the identification of neural networks that are not only more accurate but also significantly fairer. Our experiments show that BiaslessNAS achieves a 2.55% increase in accuracy and a 65.50% improvement in fairness compared to traditional NAS methods, underscoring the importance of integrating fairness into neural network architecture for better outcomes in medical AI applications.

EdgeOL: Efficient in-situ Online Learning on Edge Devices

Emerging applications, such as robot-assisted eldercare and object recognition, generally employ deep learning neural networks (DNNs) models and naturally require: i) handling streaming-in inference requests and ii) adapting to possible deployment scenario changes. Online model fine-tuning is widely adopted to satisfy these needs. However, fine-tuning involves significant energy consumption, making it challenging to deploy on edge devices. In this paper, we propose EdgeOL, an edge online learning framework that optimizes inference accuracy, fine-tuning execution time, and energy efficiency through both inter-tuning and intra-tuning optimizations. Experimental results show that, on average, EdgeOL reduces overall fine-tuning execution time by 82%, energy consumption by 74%, and improves average inference accuracy by 1.70% over the immediate online learning strategy.

Enabling On-Device Large Language Model Personalization with Self-Supervised Data Selection and Synthesis

After a large language model (LLM) is deployed on edge devices, it is desirable for these devices to learn from user-generated conversation data to generate user-specific and personalized responses in real-time. However, user-generated data usually contains sensitive and private information, and uploading such data to the cloud for annotation is not preferred if not prohibited. While it is possible to obtain annotation locally by directly asking users to provide preferred responses, such annotations have to be sparse to not affect user experience. In addition, the storage of edge devices is usually too limited to enable large-scale fine-tuning with full user-generated data. It remains an open question how to enable on-device LLM personalization, considering sparse annotation and limited on-device storage. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to select and store the most representative data online in a self-supervised way. Such data has a small memory footprint and allows infrequent requests of user annotations for further fine-tuning. To enhance fine-tuning quality, multiple semantically similar pairs of question texts and expected responses are generated using the LLM. Our experiments show that the proposed framework achieves the best user-specific content-generating capability (accuracy) and fine-tuning speed (performance) compared with vanilla baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first on-device LLM personalization framework.

Additional Positive Enables Better Representation Learning for Medical Images

This paper presents a new way to identify additional positive pairs for BYOL, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-supervised learning framework, to improve its representation learning ability. Unlike conventional BYOL which relies on only one positive pair generated by two augmented views of the same image, we argue that information from different images with the same label can bring more diversity and variations to the target features, thus benefiting representation learning. To identify such pairs without any label, we investigate TracIn, an instance-based and computationally efficient influence function, for BYOL training. Specifically, TracIn is a gradient-based method that reveals the impact of a training sample on a test sample in supervised learning. We extend it to the self-supervised learning setting and propose an efficient batch-wise per-sample gradient computation method to estimate the pairwise TracIn to represent the similarity of samples in the mini-batch during training. For each image, we select the most similar sample from other images as the additional positive and pull their features together with BYOL loss. Experimental results on two public medical datasets (i.e., ISIC 2019 and ChestX-ray) demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the classification performance compared to other competitive baselines in both semi-supervised and transfer learning settings.

BiTrackGAN: Cascaded CycleGANs to Constraint Face Aging

With the increased accuracy of modern computer vision technology, many access control systems are equipped with face recognition functions for faster identification. In order to maintain high recognition accuracy, it is necessary to keep the face database up-to-date. However, it is impractical to collect the latest facial picture of the system's user through human effort. Thus, we propose a bottom-up training method for our proposed network to address this challenge. Essentially, our proposed network is a translation pipeline that cascades two CycleGAN blocks (a widely used unpaired image-to-image translation generative adversarial network) called BiTrackGAN. By bottom-up training, it induces an ideal intermediate state between these two CycleGAN blocks, namely the constraint mechanism. Experimental results show that BiTrackGAN achieves more reasonable and diverse cross-age facial synthesis than other CycleGAN-related methods. As far as we know, it is a novel and effective constraint mechanism for more reason and accurate aging synthesis through the CycleGAN approach.

Development of A Real-time POCUS Image Quality Assessment and Acquisition Guidance System

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is one of the most commonly applied tools for cardiac function imaging in the clinical routine of the emergency department and pediatric intensive care unit. The prior studies demonstrate that AI-assisted software can guide nurses or novices without prior sonography experience to acquire POCUS by recognizing the interest region, assessing image quality, and providing instructions. However, these AI algorithms cannot simply replace the role of skilled sonographers in acquiring diagnostic-quality POCUS. Unlike chest X-ray, CT, and MRI, which have standardized imaging protocols, POCUS can be acquired with high inter-observer variability. Though being with variability, they are usually all clinically acceptable and interpretable. In challenging clinical environments, sonographers employ novel heuristics to acquire POCUS in complex scenarios. To help novice learners to expedite the training process while reducing the dependency on experienced sonographers in the curriculum implementation, We will develop a framework to perform real-time AI-assisted quality assessment and probe position guidance to provide training process for novice learners with less manual intervention.

FedCoCo: A Memory Efficient Federated Self-supervised Framework for On-Device Visual Representation Learning

The ubiquity of edge devices has led to a growing amount of unlabeled data produced at the edge. Deep learning models deployed on edge devices are required to learn from these unlabeled data to continuously improve accuracy. Self-supervised representation learning has achieved promising performances using centralized unlabeled data. However, the increasing awareness of privacy protection limits centralizing the distributed unlabeled image data on edge devices. While federated learning has been widely adopted to enable distributed machine learning with privacy preservation, without a data selection method to efficiently select streaming data, the traditional federated learning framework fails to handle these huge amounts of decentralized unlabeled data with limited storage resources on edge. To address these challenges, we propose a Federated on-device Contrastive learning framework with Coreset selection, which we call FedCoCo, to automatically select a coreset that consists of the most representative samples into the replay buffer on each device. It preserves data privacy as each client does not share raw data while learning good visual representations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of the proposed method in visual representation learning.

Enabling Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization from On-Device Learning of the Video Stream

Detecting actions in videos have been widely applied in on-device applications. Practical on-device videos are always untrimmed with both action and background. It is desirable for a model to both recognize the class of action and localize the temporal position where the action happens. Such a task is called temporal action location (TAL), which is always trained on the cloud where multiple untrimmed videos are collected and labeled. It is desirable for a TAL model to continuously and locally learn from new data, which can directly improve the action detection precision while protecting customers' privacy. However, it is non-trivial to train a TAL model, since tremendous video samples with temporal annotations are required. However, annotating videos frame by frame is exorbitantly time-consuming and expensive. Although weakly-supervised TAL (W-TAL) has been proposed to learn from untrimmed videos with only video-level labels, such an approach is also not suitable for on-device learning scenarios. In practical on-device learning applications, data are collected in streaming. Dividing such a long video stream into multiple video segments requires lots of human effort, which hinders the exploration of applying the TAL tasks to realistic on-device learning applications. To enable W-TAL models to learn from a long, untrimmed streaming video, we propose an efficient video learning approach that can directly adapt to new environments. We first propose a self-adaptive video dividing approach with a contrast score-based segment merging approach to convert the video stream into multiple segments. Then, we explore different sampling strategies on the TAL tasks to request as few labels as possible. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first attempt to directly learn from the on-device, long video stream.

Federated Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning and Masked Autoencoder for Dermatological Disease Diagnosis

In dermatological disease diagnosis, the private data collected by mobile dermatology assistants exist on distributed mobile devices of patients. Federated learning (FL) can use decentralized data to train models while keeping data local. Existing FL methods assume all the data have labels. However, medical data often comes without full labels due to high labeling costs. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, contrastive learning (CL) and masked autoencoders (MAE), can leverage the unlabeled data to pre-train models, followed by fine-tuning with limited labels. However, combining SSL and FL has unique challenges. For example, CL requires diverse data but each device only has limited data. For MAE, while Vision Transformer (ViT) based MAE has higher accuracy over CNNs in centralized learning, MAE's performance in FL with unlabeled data has not been investigated. Besides, the ViT synchronization between the server and clients is different from traditional CNNs. Therefore, special synchronization methods need to be designed. In this work, we propose two federated self-supervised learning frameworks for dermatological disease diagnosis with limited labels. The first one features lower computation costs, suitable for mobile devices. The second one features high accuracy and fits high-performance servers. Based on CL, we proposed federated contrastive learning with feature sharing (FedCLF). Features are shared for diverse contrastive information without sharing raw data for privacy. Based on MAE, we proposed FedMAE. Knowledge split separates the global and local knowledge learned from each client. Only global knowledge is aggregated for higher generalization performance. Experiments on dermatological disease datasets show superior accuracy of the proposed frameworks over state-of-the-arts.

Achieving Fairness in Dermatological Disease Diagnosis through Automatic Weight Adjusting Federated Learning and Personalization

Dermatological diseases pose a major threat to the global health, affecting almost one-third of the world's population. Various studies have demonstrated that early diagnosis and intervention are often critical to prognosis and outcome. To this end, the past decade has witnessed the rapid evolvement of deep learning based smartphone apps, which allow users to conveniently and timely identify issues that have emerged around their skins. In order to collect sufficient data needed by deep learning and at the same time protect patient privacy, federated learning is often used, where individual clients aggregate a global model while keeping datasets local. However, existing federated learning frameworks are mostly designed to optimize the overall performance, while common dermatological datasets are heavily imbalanced. When applying federated learning to such datasets, significant disparities in diagnosis accuracy may occur. To address such a fairness issue, this paper proposes a fairness-aware federated learning framework for dermatological disease diagnosis. The framework is divided into two stages: In the first in-FL stage, clients with different skin types are trained in a federated learning process to construct a global model for all skin types. An automatic weight aggregator is used in this process to assign higher weights to the client with higher loss, and the intensity of the aggregator is determined by the level of difference between losses. In the latter post-FL stage, each client fine-tune its personalized model based on the global model in the in-FL stage. To achieve better fairness, models from different epochs are selected for each client to keep the accuracy difference of different skin types within 0.05. Experiments indicate that our proposed framework effectively improves both fairness and accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art.