Data-Efficient Unsupervised Interpolation Without Any Intermediate Frame for 4D Medical Images

4D medical images, which represent 3D images with temporal information, are crucial in clinical practice for capturing dynamic changes and monitoring long-term disease progression. However, acquiring 4D medical images poses challenges due to factors such as radiation exposure and imaging duration, necessitating a balance between achieving high temporal resolution and minimizing adverse effects. Given these circumstances, not only is data acquisition challenging, but increasing the frame rate for each dataset also proves difficult. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a simple yet effective Unsupervised Volumetric Interpolation framework, UVI-Net. This framework facilitates temporal interpolation without the need for any intermediate frames, distinguishing it from the majority of other existing unsupervised methods. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate significant improvements across diverse evaluation metrics compared to unsupervised and supervised baselines. Remarkably, our approach achieves this superior performance even when trained with a dataset as small as one, highlighting its exceptional robustness and efficiency in scenarios with sparse supervision. This positions UVI-Net as a compelling alternative for 4D medical imaging, particularly in settings where data availability is limited. The source code is available at https://github.com/jungeun122333/UVI-Net.

DHR: Dual Features-Driven Hierarchical Rebalancing in Inter- and Intra-Class Regions for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSS) ensures high-quality segmentation with limited data and excels when employed as input seed masks for large-scale vision models such as Segment Anything. However, WSS faces challenges related to minor classes since those are overlooked in images with adjacent multiple classes, a limitation originating from the overfitting of traditional expansion methods like Random Walk. We first address this by employing unsupervised and weakly-supervised feature maps instead of conventional methodologies, allowing for hierarchical mask enhancement. This method distinctly categorizes higher-level classes and subsequently separates their associated lower-level classes, ensuring all classes are correctly restored in the mask without losing minor ones. Our approach, validated through extensive experimentation, significantly improves WSS across five benchmarks (VOC: 79.8\%, COCO: 53.9\%, Context: 49.0\%, ADE: 32.9\%, Stuff: 37.4\%), reducing the gap with fully supervised methods by over 84\% on the VOC validation set. Code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/DHR.

TTD: Text-Tag Self-Distillation Enhancing Image-Text Alignment in CLIP to Alleviate Single Tag Bias

We identify a critical bias in contemporary CLIP-based models, which we denote as \textit{single tag bias}. This bias manifests as a disproportionate focus on a singular tag (word) while neglecting other pertinent tags, stemming from CLIP's text embeddings that prioritize one specific tag in image-text relationships. When deconstructing text into individual tags, only one tag tends to have high relevancy with CLIP's image embedding, leading to an imbalanced tag relevancy. This results in an uneven alignment among multiple tags present in the text. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel two-step fine-tuning approach. First, our method leverages the similarity between tags and their nearest pixels for scoring, enabling the extraction of image-relevant tags from the text. Second, we present a self-distillation strategy aimed at aligning the combined masks from extracted tags with the text-derived mask. This approach mitigates the single tag bias, thereby significantly improving the alignment of CLIP's model without necessitating additional data or supervision. Our technique demonstrates model-agnostic improvements in multi-tag classification and segmentation tasks, surpassing competing methods that rely on external resources. Code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/TTD.

Integrating ChatGPT into Secure Hospital Networks: A Case Study on Improving Radiology Report Analysis

This study demonstrates the first in-hospital adaptation of a cloud-based AI, similar to ChatGPT, into a secure model for analyzing radiology reports, prioritizing patient data privacy. By employing a unique sentence-level knowledge distillation method through contrastive learning, we achieve over 95% accuracy in detecting anomalies. The model also accurately flags uncertainties in its predictions, enhancing its reliability and interpretability for physicians with certainty indicators. These advancements represent significant progress in developing secure and efficient AI tools for healthcare, suggesting a promising future for in-hospital AI applications with minimal supervision.

MARS: Model-agnostic Biased Object Removal without Additional Supervision for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation aims to reduce labeling costs by training semantic segmentation models using weak supervision, such as image-level class labels. However, most approaches struggle to produce accurate localization maps and suffer from false predictions in class-related backgrounds (i.e., biased objects), such as detecting a railroad with the train class. Recent methods that remove biased objects require additional supervision for manually identifying biased objects for each problematic class and collecting their datasets by reviewing predictions, limiting their applicability to the real-world dataset with multiple labels and complex relationships for biasing. Following the first observation that biased features can be separated and eliminated by matching biased objects with backgrounds in the same dataset, we propose a fully-automatic/model-agnostic biased removal framework called MARS (Model-Agnostic biased object Removal without additional Supervision), which utilizes semantically consistent features of an unsupervised technique to eliminate biased objects in pseudo labels. Surprisingly, we show that MARS achieves new state-of-the-art results on two popular benchmarks, PASCAL VOC 2012 (val: 77.7%, test: 77.2%) and MS COCO 2014 (val: 49.4%), by consistently improving the performance of various WSSS models by at least 30% without additional supervision.

Enhanced artificial intelligence-based diagnosis using CBCT with internal denoising: Clinical validation for discrimination of fungal ball, sinusitis, and normal cases in the maxillary sinus

The cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) provides 3D volumetric imaging of a target with low radiation dose and cost compared with conventional computed tomography, and it is widely used in the detection of paranasal sinus disease. However, it lacks the sensitivity to detect soft tissue lesions owing to reconstruction constraints. Consequently, only physicians with expertise in CBCT reading can distinguish between inherent artifacts or noise and diseases, restricting the use of this imaging modality. The development of artificial intelligence (AI)-based computer-aided diagnosis methods for CBCT to overcome the shortage of experienced physicians has attracted substantial attention. However, advanced AI-based diagnosis addressing intrinsic noise in CBCT has not been devised, discouraging the practical use of AI solutions for CBCT. To address this issue, we propose an AI-based computer-aided diagnosis method using CBCT with a denoising module. This module is implemented before diagnosis to reconstruct the internal ground-truth full-dose scan corresponding to an input CBCT image and thereby improve the diagnostic performance. The external validation results for the unified diagnosis of sinus fungal ball, chronic rhinosinusitis, and normal cases show that the proposed method improves the micro-, macro-average AUC, and accuracy by 7.4, 5.6, and 9.6% (from 86.2, 87.0, and 73.4 to 93.6, 92.6, and 83.0%), respectively, compared with a baseline while improving human diagnosis accuracy by 11% (from 71.7 to 83.0%), demonstrating technical differentiation and clinical effectiveness. This pioneering study on AI-based diagnosis using CBCT indicates denoising can improve diagnostic performance and reader interpretability in images from the sinonasal area, thereby providing a new approach and direction to radiographic image reconstruction regarding the development of AI-based diagnostic solutions.

Show Me the Instruments: Musical Instrument Retrieval from Mixture Audio

As digital music production has become mainstream, the selection of appropriate virtual instruments plays a crucial role in determining the quality of music. To search the musical instrument samples or virtual instruments that make one's desired sound, music producers use their ears to listen and compare each instrument sample in their collection, which is time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, we call this task as Musical Instrument Retrieval and propose a method for retrieving desired musical instruments using reference music mixture as a query. The proposed model consists of the Single-Instrument Encoder and the Multi-Instrument Encoder, both based on convolutional neural networks. The Single-Instrument Encoder is trained to classify the instruments used in single-track audio, and we take its penultimate layer's activation as the instrument embedding. The Multi-Instrument Encoder is trained to estimate multiple instrument embeddings using the instrument embeddings computed by the Single-Instrument Encoder as a set of target embeddings. For more generalized training and realistic evaluation, we also propose a new dataset called Nlakh. Experimental results showed that the Single-Instrument Encoder was able to learn the mapping from the audio signal of unseen instruments to the instrument embedding space and the Multi-Instrument Encoder was able to extract multiple embeddings from the mixture of music and retrieve the desired instruments successfully. The code used for the experiment and audio samples are available at: https://github.com/minju0821/musical_instrument_retrieval

Improving Audio-Language Learning with MixGen and Multi-Level Test-Time Augmentation

In this paper, we propose two novel augmentation methods 1) audio-language MixGen (AL-MixGen) and 2) multi-level test-time augmentation (Multi-TTA) for audio-language learning. Inspired by MixGen, which is originally applied to vision-language learning, we introduce an augmentation method for the audio-language domain. We also explore the impact of test-time augmentations and present Multi-TTA which generalizes test-time augmentation over multiple layers of a deep learning model. Incorporating AL-MixGen and Multi-TTA into the baseline achieves 47.5 SPIDEr on audio captioning, which is an +18.2% over the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art approach with a 5x smaller model. In audio-text retrieval, the proposed methods surpass the baseline performance as well.

Scale-invariant Bayesian Neural Networks with Connectivity Tangent Kernel

Explaining generalizations and preventing over-confident predictions are central goals of studies on the loss landscape of neural networks. Flatness, defined as loss invariability on perturbations of a pre-trained solution, is widely accepted as a predictor of generalization in this context. However, the problem that flatness and generalization bounds can be changed arbitrarily according to the scale of a parameter was pointed out, and previous studies partially solved the problem with restrictions: Counter-intuitively, their generalization bounds were still variant for the function-preserving parameter scaling transformation or limited only to an impractical network structure. As a more fundamental solution, we propose new prior and posterior distributions invariant to scaling transformations by \textit{decomposing} the scale and connectivity of parameters, thereby allowing the resulting generalization bound to describe the generalizability of a broad class of networks with the more practical class of transformations such as weight decay with batch normalization. We also show that the above issue adversely affects the uncertainty calibration of Laplace approximation and propose a solution using our invariant posterior. We empirically demonstrate our posterior provides effective flatness and calibration measures with low complexity in such a practical parameter transformation case, supporting its practical effectiveness in line with our rationale.

Collaborative Method for Incremental Learning on Classification and Generation

Although well-trained deep neural networks have shown remarkable performance on numerous tasks, they rapidly forget what they have learned as soon as they begin to learn with additional data with the previous data stop being provided. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm, Incremental Class Learning with Attribute Sharing (ICLAS), for incremental class learning with deep neural networks. As one of its component, we also introduce a generative model, incGAN, which can generate images with increased variety compared with the training data. Under challenging environment of data deficiency, ICLAS incrementally trains classification and the generation networks. Since ICLAS trains both networks, our algorithm can perform multiple times of incremental class learning. The experiments on MNIST dataset demonstrate the advantages of our algorithm.