Fairness AI aims to detect and alleviate bias across the entire AI development life cycle, encompassing data curation, modeling, evaluation, and deployment-a pivotal aspect of ethical AI implementation. Addressing data bias, particularly concerning sensitive attributes like gender and race, reweighting samples proves efficient for fairness AI. This paper contributes a systematic examination of reweighting samples for traditional machine learning (ML) models, employing five models for binary classification on the Adult Income and COMPUS datasets with various protected attributes. The study evaluates prediction results using five fairness metrics, uncovering the nuanced and model-specific nature of reweighting sample effectiveness in achieving fairness in traditional ML models, as well as revealing the complexity of bias dynamics.
The identification of key factors such as medications, diseases, and relationships within electronic health records and clinical notes has a wide range of applications in the clinical field. In the N2C2 2022 competitions, various tasks were presented to promote the identification of key factors in electronic health records (EHRs) using the Contextualized Medication Event Dataset (CMED). Pretrained large language models (LLMs) demonstrated exceptional performance in these tasks. This study aims to explore the utilization of LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, for data augmentation to overcome the limited availability of annotated data for identifying the key factors in EHRs. Additionally, different pre-trained BERT models, initially trained on extensive datasets like Wikipedia and MIMIC, were employed to develop models for identifying these key variables in EHRs through fine-tuning on augmented datasets. The experimental results of two EHR analysis tasks, namely medication identification and medication event classification, indicate that data augmentation based on ChatGPT proves beneficial in improving performance for both medication identification and medication event classification.
Image segmentation is a very popular and important task in computer vision. In this paper, inverse quantum Fourier transform (IQFT) for image segmentation has been explored and a novel IQFT-inspired algorithm is proposed and implemented by leveraging the underlying mathematical structure of the IQFT. Specifically, the proposed method takes advantage of the phase information of the pixels in the image by encoding the pixels' intensity into qubit relative phases and applying IQFT to classify the pixels into different segments automatically and efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of using IQFT for unsupervised image segmentation. The proposed method has low computational cost comparing to the deep learning-based methods and more importantly it does not require training, thus make it suitable for real-time applications. The performance of the proposed method is compared with K-means and Otsu-thresholding. The proposed method outperforms both of them on the PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark and the xVIEW2 challenge dataset by as much as 50% in terms of mean Intersection-Over-Union (mIOU).
Underwater acoustic (UWA) communications have been widely used but greatly impaired due to the complicated nature of the underwater environment. In order to improve UWA communications, modeling and understanding the UWA channel is indispensable. However, there exist many challenges due to the high uncertainties of the underwater environment and the lack of real-world measurement data. In this work, the capability of reservoir computing and deep learning has been explored for modeling the UWA communication channel accurately using real underwater data collected from a water tank with disturbance and from Lake Tahoe. We leverage the capability of reservoir computing for modeling dynamical systems and provided a data-driven approach to modeling the UWA channel using Echo State Network (ESN). In addition, the potential application of transfer learning to reservoir computing has been examined. Experimental results show that ESN is able to model chaotic UWA channels with better performance compared to popular deep learning models in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), specifically, ESN has outperformed deep neural network by 2% and as much as 40% in benign and chaotic UWA respectively.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Imaging tests such as chest X-ray (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) can provide useful information to clinical staff for facilitating a diagnosis of COVID-19 in a more efficient and comprehensive manner. As a breakthrough of artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning has been applied to perform COVID-19 infection region segmentation and disease classification by analyzing CXR and CT data. However, prediction uncertainty of deep learning models for these tasks, which is very important to safety-critical applications like medical image processing, has not been comprehensively investigated. In this work, we propose a novel ensemble deep learning model through integrating bagging deep learning and model calibration to not only enhance segmentation performance, but also reduce prediction uncertainty. The proposed method has been validated on a large dataset that is associated with CXR image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the segmentation performance, as well as decrease prediction uncertainties.
The fast execution speed and energy efficiency of analog hardware has made them a strong contender for deployment of deep learning model at the edge. However, there are concerns about the presence of analog noise which causes changes to the weight of the models, leading to performance degradation of deep learning model, despite their inherent noise resistant characteristics. The effect of the popular batch normalization layer on the noise resistant ability of deep learning model is investigated in this work. This systematic study has been carried out by first training different models with and without batch normalization layer on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 dataset. The weights of the resulting models are then injected with analog noise and the performance of the models on the test dataset is obtained and compared. The results show that the presence of batch normalization layer negatively impacts noise resistant property of deep learning model and the impact grows with the increase of the number of batch normalization layers.
The interest in analog computation has grown tremendously in recent years due to its fast computation speed and excellent energy efficiency, which is very important for edge and IoT devices in the sub-watt power envelope for deep learning inferencing. However, significant performance degradation suffered by deep learning models due to the inherent noise present in the analog computation can limit their use in mission-critical applications. Hence, there is a need to understand the impact of critical model hyperparameters choice on the resulting model noise-resistant property. This need is critical as the insight obtained can be used to design deep learning models that are robust to analog noise. In this paper, the impact of the learning rate, a critical design choice, on the noise-resistant property is investigated. The study is achieved by first training deep learning models using different learning rates. Thereafter, the models are injected with analog noise and the noise-resistant property of the resulting models is examined by measuring the performance degradation due to the analog noise. The results showed there exists a sweet spot of learning rate values that achieves a good balance between model prediction performance and model noise-resistant property. Furthermore, the theoretical justification of the observed phenomenon is provided.
Analog hardware has become a popular choice for machine learning on resource-constrained devices recently due to its fast execution and energy efficiency. However, the inherent presence of noise in analog hardware and the negative impact of the noise on deployed deep neural network (DNN) models limit their usage. The degradation in performance due to the noise calls for the novel design of DNN models that have excellent noiseresistant property, leveraging the properties of the fundamental building block of DNN models. In this work, the use of L1 or TopK BatchNorm type, a fundamental DNN model building block, in designing DNN models with excellent noise-resistant property is proposed. Specifically, a systematic study has been carried out by training DNN models with L1/TopK BatchNorm type, and the performance is compared with DNN models with L2 BatchNorm types. The resulting model noise-resistant property is tested by injecting additive noise to the model weights and evaluating the new model inference accuracy due to the noise. The results show that L1 and TopK BatchNorm type has excellent noise-resistant property, and there is no sacrifice in performance due to the change in the BatchNorm type from L2 to L1/TopK BatchNorm type.
With the recent increase in the number of underwater activities, having effective underwater communication systems has become increasingly important. Underwater acoustic communication has been widely used but greatly impaired due to the complicated nature of the underwater environment. In a bid to better understand the underwater acoustic channel so as to help in the design and improvement of underwater communication systems, attempts have been made to model the underwater acoustic channel using mathematical equations and approximations under some assumptions. In this paper, we explore the capability of machine learning and deep learning methods to learn and accurately model the underwater acoustic channel using real underwater data collected from a water tank with disturbance and from lake Tahoe. Specifically, Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) are applied to model the underwater acoustic channel. Experimental results show that these models are able to model the underwater acoustic communication channel well and that deep learning models, especially LSTM are better models in terms of mean absolute percentage error.
Social media has become an effective platform to generate and spread fake news that can mislead people and even distort public opinion. Centralized methods for fake news detection, however, cannot effectively protect user privacy during the process of centralized data collection for training models. Moreover, it cannot fully involve user feedback in the loop of learning detection models for further enhancing fake news detection. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposed a novel decentralized method, Human-in-the-loop Based Swarm Learning (HBSL), to integrate user feedback into the loop of learning and inference for recognizing fake news without violating user privacy in a decentralized manner. It consists of distributed nodes that are able to independently learn and detect fake news on local data. Furthermore, detection models trained on these nodes can be enhanced through decentralized model merging. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized method in regard of detecting fake news on a benchmark dataset.