IncreLoRA: Incremental Parameter Allocation Method for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

With the increasing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all the parameters in the model is not efficient, especially when there are a large number of downstream tasks, which incur significant training and storage costs. Many parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches have been proposed, among which, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a representative approach that injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into every target module. Yet LoRA ignores the importance of parameters in different modules. To address this problem, many works have been proposed to prune the parameters of LoRA. However, under limited training conditions, the upper bound of the rank of the pruned parameter matrix is still affected by the preset values. We, therefore, propose IncreLoRA, an incremental parameter allocation method that adaptively adds trainable parameters during training based on the importance scores of each module. This approach is different from the pruning method as it is not limited by the initial number of training parameters, and each parameter matrix has a higher rank upper bound for the same training overhead. We conduct extensive experiments on GLUE to demonstrate the effectiveness of IncreLoRA. The results show that our method owns higher parameter efficiency, especially when under the low-resource settings where our method significantly outperforms the baselines. Our code is publicly available.

CARE-MI: Chinese Benchmark for Misinformation Evaluation in Maternity and Infant Care

The recent advances in NLP, have led to a new trend of applying LLMs to real-world scenarios. While the latest LLMs are astonishingly fluent when interacting with humans, they suffer from the misinformation problem by unintentionally generating factually false statements. This can lead to harmful consequences, especially when produced within sensitive contexts, such as healthcare. Yet few previous works have focused on evaluating misinformation in the long-form generation of LLMs, especially for knowledge-intensive topics. Moreover, although LLMs have been shown to perform well in different languages, misinformation evaluation has been mostly conducted in English. To this end, we present a benchmark, CARE-MI, for evaluating LLM misinformation in: 1) a sensitive topic, specifically the maternity and infant care domain; and 2) a language other than English, namely Chinese. Most importantly, we provide an innovative paradigm for building long-form generation evaluation benchmarks that can be transferred to other knowledge-intensive domains and low-resourced languages. Our proposed benchmark fills the gap between the extensive usage of LLMs and the lack of datasets for assessing the misinformation generated by these models. It contains 1,612 expert-checked questions, accompanied with human-selected references. Using our benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments and found that current Chinese LLMs are far from perfect in the topic of maternity and infant care. In an effort to minimize the reliance on human resources for performance evaluation, we offer a judgment model for automatically assessing the long-form output of LLMs using the benchmark questions. Moreover, we compare potential solutions for long-form generation evaluation and provide insights for building more robust and efficient automated metric.

Learning Bottleneck Concepts in Image Classification

Interpreting and explaining the behavior of deep neural networks is critical for many tasks. Explainable AI provides a way to address this challenge, mostly by providing per-pixel relevance to the decision. Yet, interpreting such explanations may require expert knowledge. Some recent attempts toward interpretability adopt a concept-based framework, giving a higher-level relationship between some concepts and model decisions. This paper proposes Bottleneck Concept Learner (BotCL), which represents an image solely by the presence/absence of concepts learned through training over the target task without explicit supervision over the concepts. It uses self-supervision and tailored regularizers so that learned concepts can be human-understandable. Using some image classification tasks as our testbed, we demonstrate BotCL's potential to rebuild neural networks for better interpretability. Code is available at https://github.com/wbw520/BotCL and a simple demo is available at https://botcl.liangzhili.com/.

The SARAS Endoscopic Surgeon Action Detection (ESAD) dataset: Challenges and methods

For an autonomous robotic system, monitoring surgeon actions and assisting the main surgeon during a procedure can be very challenging. The challenges come from the peculiar structure of the surgical scene, the greater similarity in appearance of actions performed via tools in a cavity compared to, say, human actions in unconstrained environments, as well as from the motion of the endoscopic camera. This paper presents ESAD, the first large-scale dataset designed to tackle the problem of surgeon action detection in endoscopic minimally invasive surgery. ESAD aims at contributing to increase the effectiveness and reliability of surgical assistant robots by realistically testing their awareness of the actions performed by a surgeon. The dataset provides bounding box annotation for 21 action classes on real endoscopic video frames captured during prostatectomy, and was used as the basis of a recent MIDL 2020 challenge. We also present an analysis of the dataset conducted using the baseline model which was released as part of the challenge, and a description of the top performing models submitted to the challenge together with the results they obtained. This study provides significant insight into what approaches can be effective and can be extended further. We believe that ESAD will serve in the future as a useful benchmark for all researchers active in surgeon action detection and assistive robotics at large.

Match Them Up: Visually Explainable Few-shot Image Classification

Few-shot learning (FSL) approaches are usually based on an assumption that the pre-trained knowledge can be obtained from base (seen) categories and can be well transferred to novel (unseen) categories. However, there is no guarantee, especially for the latter part. This issue leads to the unknown nature of the inference process in most FSL methods, which hampers its application in some risk-sensitive areas. In this paper, we reveal a new way to perform FSL for image classification, using visual representations from the backbone model and weights generated by a newly-emerged explainable classifier. The weighted representations only include a minimum number of distinguishable features and the visualized weights can serve as an informative hint for the FSL process. Finally, a discriminator will compare the representations of each pair of the images in the support set and the query set. Pairs with the highest scores will decide the classification results. Experimental results prove that the proposed method can achieve both good accuracy and satisfactory explainability on three mainstream datasets.

Grading the Severity of Arteriolosclerosis from Retinal Arterio-venous Crossing Patterns

The status of retinal arteriovenous crossing is of great significance for clinical evaluation of arteriolosclerosis and systemic hypertension. As an ophthalmology diagnostic criteria, Scheie's classification has been used to grade the severity of arteriolosclerosis. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to support the diagnosis process, which, to the best of our knowledge, is one of the earliest attempts in medical imaging. The proposed pipeline is three-fold. First, we adopt segmentation and classification models to automatically obtain vessels in a retinal image with the corresponding artery/vein labels and find candidate arteriovenous crossing points. Second, we use a classification model to validate the true crossing point. At last, the grade of severity for the vessel crossings is classified. To better address the problem of label ambiguity and imbalanced label distribution, we propose a new model, named multi-diagnosis team network (MDTNet), in which the sub-models with different structures or different loss functions provide different decisions. MDTNet unifies these diverse theories to give the final decision with high accuracy. Our severity grading method was able to validate crossing points with precision and recall of 96.3% and 96.3%, respectively. Among correctly detected crossing points, the kappa value for the agreement between the grading by a retina specialist and the estimated score was 0.85, with an accuracy of 0.92. The numerical results demonstrate that our method can achieve a good performance in both arteriovenous crossing validation and severity grading tasks. By the proposed models, we could build a pipeline reproducing retina specialist's subjective grading without feature extractions. The code is available for reproducibility.

Noisy-LSTM: Improving Temporal Awareness for Video Semantic Segmentation

Semantic video segmentation is a key challenge for various applications. This paper presents a new model named Noisy-LSTM, which is trainable in an end-to-end manner, with convolutional LSTMs (ConvLSTMs) to leverage the temporal coherency in video frames. We also present a simple yet effective training strategy, which replaces a frame in video sequence with noises. This strategy spoils the temporal coherency in video frames during training and thus makes the temporal links in ConvLSTMs unreliable, which may consequently improve feature extraction from video frames, as well as serve as a regularizer to avoid overfitting, without requiring extra data annotation or computational costs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art performances in both the CityScapes and EndoVis2018 datasets.

SCOUTER: Slot Attention-based Classifier for Explainable Image Recognition

Explainable artificial intelligence is gaining attention. However, most existing methods are based on gradients or intermediate features, which are not directly involved in the decision-making process of the classifier. In this paper, we propose a slot attention-based light-weighted classifier called SCOUTER for transparent yet accurate classification. Two major differences from other attention-based methods include: (a) SCOUTER's explanation involves the final confidence for each category, offering more intuitive interpretation, and (b) all the categories have their corresponding positive or negative explanation, which tells "why the image is of a certain category" or "why the image is not of a certain category." We design a new loss tailored for SCOUTER that controls the model's behavior to switch between positive and negative explanations, as well as the size of explanatory regions. Experimental results show that SCOUTER can give better visual explanations while keeping good accuracy on a large dataset.

Joint Learning of Vessel Segmentation and Artery/Vein Classification with Post-processing

Retinal imaging serves as a valuable tool for diagnosis of various diseases. However, reading retinal images is a difficult and time-consuming task even for experienced specialists. The fundamental step towards automated retinal image analysis is vessel segmentation and artery/vein classification, which provide various information on potential disorders. To improve the performance of the existing automated methods for retinal image analysis, we propose a two-step vessel classification. We adopt a UNet-based model, SeqNet, to accurately segment vessels from the background and make prediction on the vessel type. Our model does segmentation and classification sequentially, which alleviates the problem of label distribution bias and facilitates training. To further refine classification results, we post-process them considering the structural information among vessels to propagate highly confident prediction to surrounding vessels. Our experiments show that our method improves AUC to 0.98 for segmentation and the accuracy to 0.92 in classification over DRIVE dataset.

IterNet: Retinal Image Segmentation Utilizing Structural Redundancy in Vessel Networks

Retinal vessel segmentation is of great interest for diagnosis of retinal vascular diseases. To further improve the performance of vessel segmentation, we propose IterNet, a new model based on UNet, with the ability to find obscured details of the vessel from the segmented vessel image itself, rather than the raw input image. IterNet consists of multiple iterations of a mini-UNet, which can be 4$\times$ deeper than the common UNet. IterNet also adopts the weight-sharing and skip-connection features to facilitate training; therefore, even with such a large architecture, IterNet can still learn from merely 10$\sim$20 labeled images, without pre-training or any prior knowledge. IterNet achieves AUCs of 0.9816, 0.9851, and 0.9881 on three mainstream datasets, namely DRIVE, CHASE-DB1, and STARE, respectively, which currently are the best scores in the literature. The source code is available.