Deep Learning methods for automatic evaluation of delayed enhancement-MRI. The results of the EMIDEC challenge

A key factor for assessing the state of the heart after myocardial infarction (MI) is to measure whether the myocardium segment is viable after reperfusion or revascularization therapy. Delayed enhancement-MRI or DE-MRI, which is performed several minutes after injection of the contrast agent, provides high contrast between viable and nonviable myocardium and is therefore a method of choice to evaluate the extent of MI. To automatically assess myocardial status, the results of the EMIDEC challenge that focused on this task are presented in this paper. The challenge's main objectives were twofold. First, to evaluate if deep learning methods can distinguish between normal and pathological cases. Second, to automatically calculate the extent of myocardial infarction. The publicly available database consists of 150 exams divided into 50 cases with normal MRI after injection of a contrast agent and 100 cases with myocardial infarction (and then with a hyperenhanced area on DE-MRI), whatever their inclusion in the cardiac emergency department. Along with MRI, clinical characteristics are also provided. The obtained results issued from several works show that the automatic classification of an exam is a reachable task (the best method providing an accuracy of 0.92), and the automatic segmentation of the myocardium is possible. However, the segmentation of the diseased area needs to be improved, mainly due to the small size of these areas and the lack of contrast with the surrounding structures.

FINT: Field-aware INTeraction Neural Network For CTR Prediction

As a critical component for online advertising and marking, click-through rate (CTR) prediction has draw lots of attentions from both industry and academia field. Recently, the deep learning has become the mainstream methodological choice for CTR. Despite of sustainable efforts have been made, existing approaches still pose several challenges. On the one hand, high-order interaction between the features is under-explored. On the other hand, high-order interactions may neglect the semantic information from the low-order fields. In this paper, we proposed a novel prediction method, named FINT, that employs the Field-aware INTeraction layer which captures high-order feature interactions while retaining the low-order field information. To empirically investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the FINT, we perform extensive experiments on the three realistic databases: KDD2012, Criteo and Avazu. The obtained results demonstrate that the FINT can significantly improve the performance compared to the existing methods, without increasing the amount of computation required. Moreover, the proposed method brought about 2.72\% increase to the advertising revenue of a big online video app through A/B testing. To better promote the research in CTR field, we released our code as well as reference implementation at: https://github.com/zhishan01/FINT.

BAGUA: Scaling up Distributed Learning with System Relaxations

Recent years have witnessed a growing list of systems for distributed data-parallel training. Existing systems largely fit into two paradigms, i.e., parameter server and MPI-style collective operations. On the algorithmic side, researchers have proposed a wide range of techniques to lower the communication via system relaxations: quantization, decentralization, and communication delay. However, most, if not all, existing systems only rely on standard synchronous and asynchronous stochastic gradient (SG) based optimization, therefore, cannot take advantage of all possible optimizations that the machine learning community has been developing recently. Given this emerging gap between the current landscapes of systems and theory, we build BAGUA, a communication framework whose design goal is to provide a system abstraction that is both flexible and modular to support state-of-the-art system relaxation techniques of distributed training. Powered by the new system design, BAGUA has a great ability to implement and extend various state-of-the-art distributed learning algorithms. In a production cluster with up to 16 machines (128 GPUs), BAGUA can outperform PyTorch-DDP, Horovod and BytePS in the end-to-end training time by a significant margin (up to 1.95 times) across a diverse range of tasks. Moreover, we conduct a rigorous tradeoff exploration showing that different algorithms and system relaxations achieve the best performance over different network conditions.

Is 2D Heatmap Representation Even Necessary for Human Pose Estimation?

The 2D heatmap representation has dominated human pose estimation for years due to its high performance. However, heatmap-based approaches have some drawbacks: 1) The performance drops dramatically in the low-resolution images, which are frequently encountered in real-world scenarios. 2) To improve the localization precision, multiple upsample layers may be needed to recover the feature map resolution from low to high, which are computationally expensive. 3) Extra coordinate refinement is usually necessary to reduce the quantization error of downscaled heatmaps. To address these issues, we propose a \textbf{Sim}ple yet promising \textbf{D}isentangled \textbf{R}epresentation for keypoint coordinate (\emph{SimDR}), reformulating human keypoint localization as a task of classification. In detail, we propose to disentangle the representation of horizontal and vertical coordinates for keypoint location, leading to a more efficient scheme without extra upsampling and refinement. Comprehensive experiments conducted over COCO dataset show that the proposed \emph{heatmap-free} methods outperform \emph{heatmap-based} counterparts in all tested input resolutions, especially in lower resolutions by a large margin. Code will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/leeyegy/SimDR}.

Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BART

There is a recent interest in investigating few-shot NER, where the low-resource target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain. Existing methods use a similarity-based metric. However, they cannot make full use of knowledge transfer in NER model parameters. To address the issue, we propose a template-based method for NER, treating NER as a language model ranking problem in a sequence-to-sequence framework, where original sentences and statement templates filled by candidate named entity span are regarded as the source sequence and the target sequence, respectively. For inference, the model is required to classify each candidate span based on the corresponding template scores. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 92.55% F1 score on the CoNLL03 (rich-resource task), and significantly better than fine-tuning BERT 10.88%, 15.34%, and 11.73% F1 score on the MIT Movie, the MIT Restaurant, and the ATIS (low-resource task), respectively.

TokenPose: Learning Keypoint Tokens for Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation deeply relies on visual clues and anatomical constraints between parts to locate keypoints. Most existing CNN-based methods do well in visual representation, however, lacking in the ability to explicitly learn the constraint relationships between keypoints. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Token representation for human Pose estimation~(TokenPose). In detail, each keypoint is explicitly embedded as a token to simultaneously learn constraint relationships and appearance cues from images. Extensive experiments show that the small and large TokenPose models are on par with state-of-the-art CNN-based counterparts while being more lightweight. Specifically, our TokenPose-S and TokenPose-L achieve 72.5 AP and 75.8 AP on COCO validation dataset respectively, with significant reduction in parameters ($\downarrow80.6\%$ ; $\downarrow$ $56.8\%$) and GFLOPs ($\downarrow$$ 75.3\%$; $\downarrow$ $24.7\%$).

TransPose: Towards Explainable Human Pose Estimation by Transformer

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made remarkable progress on human pose estimation task. However, there is no explicit understanding of how the locations of body keypoints are predicted by CNN, and it is also unknown what spatial dependency relationships between structural variables are learned in the model. To explore these questions, we construct an explainable model named TransPose based on Transformer architecture and low-level convolutional blocks. Given an image, the attention layers built in Transformer can capture long-range spatial relationships between keypoints and explain what dependencies the predicted keypoints locations highly rely on. We analyze the rationality of using attention as the explanation to reveal the spatial dependencies in this task. The revealed dependencies are image-specific and variable for different keypoint types, layer depths, or trained models. The experiments show that TransPose can accurately predict the positions of keypoints. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on COCO dataset, while being more interpretable, lightweight, and efficient than mainstream fully convolutional architectures.