Instance Segmentation of Unlabeled Modalities via Cyclic Segmentation GAN

Instance segmentation for unlabeled imaging modalities is a challenging but essential task as collecting expert annotation can be expensive and time-consuming. Existing works segment a new modality by either deploying a pre-trained model optimized on diverse training data or conducting domain translation and image segmentation as two independent steps. In this work, we propose a novel Cyclic Segmentation Generative Adversarial Network (CySGAN) that conducts image translation and instance segmentation jointly using a unified framework. Besides the CycleGAN losses for image translation and supervised losses for the annotated source domain, we introduce additional self-supervised and segmentation-based adversarial objectives to improve the model performance by leveraging unlabeled target domain images. We benchmark our approach on the task of 3D neuronal nuclei segmentation with annotated electron microscopy (EM) images and unlabeled expansion microscopy (ExM) data. Our CySGAN outperforms both pretrained generalist models and the baselines that sequentially conduct image translation and segmentation. Our implementation and the newly collected, densely annotated ExM nuclei dataset, named NucExM, are available at https://connectomics-bazaar.github.io/proj/CySGAN/index.html.

Boosting Active Learning via Improving Test Performance

Central to active learning (AL) is what data should be selected for annotation. Existing works attempt to select highly uncertain or informative data for annotation. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how selected data impacts the test performance of the task model used in AL. In this work, we explore such an impact by theoretically proving that selecting unlabeled data of higher gradient norm leads to a lower upper bound of test loss, resulting in a better test performance. However, due to the lack of label information, directly computing gradient norm for unlabeled data is infeasible. To address this challenge, we propose two schemes, namely expected-gradnorm and entropy-gradnorm. The former computes the gradient norm by constructing an expected empirical loss while the latter constructs an unsupervised loss with entropy. Furthermore, we integrate the two schemes in a universal AL framework. We evaluate our method on classical image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. To demonstrate its competency in domain applications and its robustness to noise, we also validate our method on a cellular imaging analysis task, namely cryo-Electron Tomography subtomogram classification. Results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance against the state-of-the-art. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xulabs/aitom

FINO: Flow-based Joint Image and Noise Model

One of the fundamental challenges in image restoration is denoising, where the objective is to estimate the clean image from its noisy measurements. To tackle such an ill-posed inverse problem, the existing denoising approaches generally focus on exploiting effective natural image priors. The utilization and analysis of the noise model are often ignored, although the noise model can provide complementary information to the denoising algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel Flow-based joint Image and NOise model (FINO) that distinctly decouples the image and noise in the latent space and losslessly reconstructs them via a series of invertible transformations. We further present a variable swapping strategy to align structural information in images and a noise correlation matrix to constrain the noise based on spatially minimized correlation information. Experimental results demonstrate FINO's capacity to remove both synthetic additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and real noise. Furthermore, the generalization of FINO to the removal of spatially variant noise and noise with inaccurate estimation surpasses that of the popular and state-of-the-art methods by large margins.

AutoGCL: Automated Graph Contrastive Learning via Learnable View Generators

Contrastive learning has been widely applied to graph representation learning, where the view generators play a vital role in generating effective contrastive samples. Most of the existing contrastive learning methods employ pre-defined view generation methods, e.g., node drop or edge perturbation, which usually cannot adapt to input data or preserve the original semantic structures well. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework named Automated Graph Contrastive Learning (AutoGCL) in this paper. Specifically, AutoGCL employs a set of learnable graph view generators orchestrated by an auto augmentation strategy, where every graph view generator learns a probability distribution of graphs conditioned by the input. While the graph view generators in AutoGCL preserve the most representative structures of the original graph in generation of every contrastive sample, the auto augmentation learns policies to introduce adequate augmentation variances in the whole contrastive learning procedure. Furthermore, AutoGCL adopts a joint training strategy to train the learnable view generators, the graph encoder, and the classifier in an end-to-end manner, resulting in topological heterogeneity yet semantic similarity in the generation of contrastive samples. Extensive experiments on semi-supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and transfer learning demonstrate the superiority of our AutoGCL framework over the state-of-the-arts in graph contrastive learning. In addition, the visualization results further confirm that the learnable view generators can deliver more compact and semantically meaningful contrastive samples compared against the existing view generation methods.

Cross-Model Consensus of Explanations and Beyond for Image Classification Models: An Empirical Study

Existing interpretation algorithms have found that, even deep models make the same and right predictions on the same image, they might rely on different sets of input features for classification. However, among these sets of features, some common features might be used by the majority of models. In this paper, we are wondering what are the common features used by various models for classification and whether the models with better performance may favor those common features. For this purpose, our works uses an interpretation algorithm to attribute the importance of features (e.g., pixels or superpixels) as explanations, and proposes the cross-model consensus of explanations to capture the common features. Specifically, we first prepare a set of deep models as a committee, then deduce the explanation for every model, and obtain the consensus of explanations across the entire committee through voting. With the cross-model consensus of explanations, we conduct extensive experiments using 80+ models on 5 datasets/tasks. We find three interesting phenomena as follows: (1) the consensus obtained from image classification models is aligned with the ground truth of semantic segmentation; (2) we measure the similarity of the explanation result of each model in the committee to the consensus (namely consensus score), and find positive correlations between the consensus score and model performance; and (3) the consensus score coincidentally correlates to the interpretability.

Semi-Supervised Active Learning with Temporal Output Discrepancy

While deep learning succeeds in a wide range of tasks, it highly depends on the massive collection of annotated data which is expensive and time-consuming. To lower the cost of data annotation, active learning has been proposed to interactively query an oracle to annotate a small proportion of informative samples in an unlabeled dataset. Inspired by the fact that the samples with higher loss are usually more informative to the model than the samples with lower loss, in this paper we present a novel deep active learning approach that queries the oracle for data annotation when the unlabeled sample is believed to incorporate high loss. The core of our approach is a measurement Temporal Output Discrepancy (TOD) that estimates the sample loss by evaluating the discrepancy of outputs given by models at different optimization steps. Our theoretical investigation shows that TOD lower-bounds the accumulated sample loss thus it can be used to select informative unlabeled samples. On basis of TOD, we further develop an effective unlabeled data sampling strategy as well as an unsupervised learning criterion that enhances model performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Due to the simplicity of TOD, our active learning approach is efficient, flexible, and task-agnostic. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performances than the state-of-the-art active learning methods on image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.

ReLLIE: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Customized Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a pervasive yet challenging problem, since: 1) low-light measurements may vary due to different imaging conditions in practice; 2) images can be enlightened subjectively according to diverse preferences by each individual. To tackle these two challenges, this paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning based method, dubbed ReLLIE, for customized low-light enhancement. ReLLIE models LLIE as a markov decision process, i.e., estimating the pixel-wise image-specific curves sequentially and recurrently. Given the reward computed from a set of carefully crafted non-reference loss functions, a lightweight network is proposed to estimate the curves for enlightening of a low-light image input. As ReLLIE learns a policy instead of one-one image translation, it can handle various low-light measurements and provide customized enhanced outputs by flexibly applying the policy different times. Furthermore, ReLLIE can enhance real-world images with hybrid corruptions, e.g., noise, by using a plug-and-play denoiser easily. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of ReLLIE, comparing to the state-of-the-art methods.

Practical Assessment of Generalization Performance Robustness for Deep Networks via Contrastive Examples

Training images with data transformations have been suggested as contrastive examples to complement the testing set for generalization performance evaluation of deep neural networks (DNNs). In this work, we propose a practical framework ContRE (The word "contre" means "against" or "versus" in French.) that uses Contrastive examples for DNN geneRalization performance Estimation. Specifically, ContRE follows the assumption in contrastive learning that robust DNN models with good generalization performance are capable of extracting a consistent set of features and making consistent predictions from the same image under varying data transformations. Incorporating with a set of randomized strategies for well-designed data transformations over the training set, ContRE adopts classification errors and Fisher ratios on the generated contrastive examples to assess and analyze the generalization performance of deep models in complement with a testing set. To show the effectiveness and the efficiency of ContRE, extensive experiments have been done using various DNN models on three open source benchmark datasets with thorough ablation studies and applicability analyses. Our experiment results confirm that (1) behaviors of deep models on contrastive examples are strongly correlated to what on the testing set, and (2) ContRE is a robust measure of generalization performance complementing to the testing set in various settings.

BM-NAS: Bilevel Multimodal Neural Architecture Search

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown superior performances on various multimodal learning problems. However, it often requires huge efforts to adapt DNNs to individual multimodal tasks by manually engineering unimodal features and designing multimodal feature fusion strategies. This paper proposes Bilevel Multimodal Neural Architecture Search (BM-NAS) framework, which makes the architecture of multimodal fusion models fully searchable via a bilevel searching scheme. At the upper level, BM-NAS selects the inter/intra-modal feature pairs from the pretrained unimodal backbones. At the lower level, BM-NAS learns the fusion strategy for each feature pair, which is a combination of predefined primitive operations. The primitive operations are elaborately designed and they can be flexibly combined to accommodate various effective feature fusion modules such as multi-head attention (Transformer) and Attention on Attention (AoA). Experimental results on three multimodal tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed BM-NAS framework. BM-NAS achieves competitive performances with much less search time and fewer model parameters in comparison with the existing generalized multimodal NAS methods.

ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows

Universal style transfer retains styles from reference images in content images. While existing methods have achieved state-of-the-art style transfer performance, they are not aware of the content leak phenomenon that the image content may corrupt after several rounds of stylization process. In this paper, we propose ArtFlow to prevent content leak during universal style transfer. ArtFlow consists of reversible neural flows and an unbiased feature transfer module. It supports both forward and backward inferences and operates in a projection-transfer-reversion scheme. The forward inference projects input images into deep features, while the backward inference remaps deep features back to input images in a lossless and unbiased way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtFlow achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art style transfer methods while avoiding content leak.