Multi-View Attention Learning for Residual Disease Prediction of Ovarian Cancer

In the treatment of ovarian cancer, precise residual disease prediction is significant for clinical and surgical decision-making. However, traditional methods are either invasive (e.g., laparoscopy) or time-consuming (e.g., manual analysis). Recently, deep learning methods make many efforts in automatic analysis of medical images. Despite the remarkable progress, most of them underestimated the importance of 3D image information of disease, which might brings a limited performance for residual disease prediction, especially in small-scale datasets. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-View Attention Learning (MuVAL) method for residual disease prediction, which focuses on the comprehensive learning of 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images in a multi-view manner. Specifically, we first obtain multi-view of 3D CT images from transverse, coronal and sagittal views. To better represent the image features in a multi-view manner, we further leverage attention mechanism to help find the more relevant slices in each view. Extensive experiments on a dataset of 111 patients show that our method outperforms existing deep-learning methods.

Semi-Implicit Denoising Diffusion Models (SIDDMs)

Despite the proliferation of generative models, achieving fast sampling during inference without compromising sample diversity and quality remains challenging. Existing models such as Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) deliver high-quality, diverse samples but are slowed by an inherently high number of iterative steps. The Denoising Diffusion Generative Adversarial Networks (DDGAN) attempted to circumvent this limitation by integrating a GAN model for larger jumps in the diffusion process. However, DDGAN encountered scalability limitations when applied to large datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that tackles the problem by matching implicit and explicit factors. More specifically, our approach involves utilizing an implicit model to match the marginal distributions of noisy data and the explicit conditional distribution of the forward diffusion. This combination allows us to effectively match the joint denoising distributions. Unlike DDPM but similar to DDGAN, we do not enforce a parametric distribution for the reverse step, enabling us to take large steps during inference. Similar to the DDPM but unlike DDGAN, we take advantage of the exact form of the diffusion process. We demonstrate that our proposed method obtains comparable generative performance to diffusion-based models and vastly superior results to models with a small number of sampling steps.

Document Entity Retrieval with Massive and Noisy Pre-training

Visually-Rich Document Entity Retrieval (VDER) is a type of machine learning task that aims at recovering text spans in the documents for each of the entities in question. VDER has gained significant attention in recent years thanks to its broad applications in enterprise AI. Unfortunately, as document images often contain personally identifiable information (PII), publicly available data have been scarce, not only because of privacy constraints but also the costs of acquiring annotations. To make things worse, each dataset would often define its own sets of entities, and the non-overlapping entity spaces between datasets make it difficult to transfer knowledge between documents. In this paper, we propose a method to collect massive-scale, noisy, and weakly labeled data from the web to benefit the training of VDER models. Such a method will generate a huge amount of document image data to compensate for the lack of training data in many VDER settings. Moreover, the collected dataset named DocuNet would not need to be dependent on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. Empowered by DocuNet, we present a lightweight multimodal architecture named UniFormer, which can learn a unified representation from text, layout, and image crops without needing extra visual pertaining. We experiment with our methods on popular VDER models in various settings and show the improvements when this massive dataset is incorporated with UniFormer on both classic entity retrieval and few-shot learning settings.

An Empirical Study on the Language Modal in Visual Question Answering

Generalization beyond in-domain experience to out-of-distribution data is of paramount significance in the AI domain. Of late, state-of-the-art Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have shown impressive performance on in-domain data, partially due to the language priors bias which, however, hinders the generalization ability in practice. This paper attempts to provide new insights into the influence of language modality on VQA performance from an empirical study perspective. To achieve this, we conducted a series of experiments on six models. The results of these experiments revealed that, 1) apart from prior bias caused by question types, there is a notable influence of postfix-related bias in inducing biases, and 2) training VQA models with word-sequence-related variant questions demonstrated improved performance on the out-of-distribution benchmark, and the LXMERT even achieved a 10-point gain without adopting any debiasing methods. We delved into the underlying reasons behind these experimental results and put forward some simple proposals to reduce the models' dependency on language priors. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving performance on the out-of-distribution benchmark, VQA-CPv2. We hope this study can inspire novel insights for future research on designing bias-reduction approaches.

Towards Hierarchical Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation with Hypergraph-based Reinforcement Learning

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to timely and proactively acquire user dynamic preferred attributes through conversations for item recommendation. In each turn of CRS, there naturally have two decision-making processes with different roles that influence each other: 1) director, which is to select the follow-up option (i.e., ask or recommend) that is more effective for reducing the action space and acquiring user preferences; and 2) actor, which is to accordingly choose primitive actions (i.e., asked attribute or recommended item) that satisfy user preferences and give feedback to estimate the effectiveness of the director's option. However, existing methods heavily rely on a unified decision-making module or heuristic rules, while neglecting to distinguish the roles of different decision procedures, as well as the mutual influences between them. To address this, we propose a novel Director-Actor Hierarchical Conversational Recommender (DAHCR), where the director selects the most effective option, followed by the actor accordingly choosing primitive actions that satisfy user preferences. Specifically, we develop a dynamic hypergraph to model user preferences and introduce an intrinsic motivation to train from weak supervision over the director. Finally, to alleviate the bad effect of model bias on the mutual influence between the director and actor, we model the director's option by sampling from a categorical distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAHCR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking

Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can hardly incorporate long-range information. To tackle the problem, we propose a new task, named unsupervised long-document question answering (ULQA), aiming to generate high-quality long-document QA instances in an unsupervised manner. Besides, we propose AttenWalker, a novel unsupervised method to aggregate and generate answers with long-range dependency so as to construct long-document QA pairs. Specifically, AttenWalker is composed of three modules, i.e., span collector, span linker and answer aggregator. Firstly, the span collector takes advantage of constituent parsing and reconstruction loss to select informative candidate spans for constructing answers. Secondly, by going through the attention graph of a pre-trained long-document model, potentially interrelated text spans (that might be far apart) could be linked together via an attention-walking algorithm. Thirdly, in the answer aggregator, linked spans are aggregated into the final answer via the mask-filling ability of a pre-trained model. Extensive experiments show that AttenWalker outperforms previous methods on Qasper and NarrativeQA. In addition, AttenWalker also shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting.

Glocal Energy-based Learning for Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition

Few-shot open-set recognition (FSOR) is a challenging task of great practical value. It aims to categorize a sample to one of the pre-defined, closed-set classes illustrated by few examples while being able to reject the sample from unknown classes. In this work, we approach the FSOR task by proposing a novel energy-based hybrid model. The model is composed of two branches, where a classification branch learns a metric to classify a sample to one of closed-set classes and the energy branch explicitly estimates the open-set probability. To achieve holistic detection of open-set samples, our model leverages both class-wise and pixel-wise features to learn a glocal energy-based score, in which a global energy score is learned using the class-wise features, while a local energy score is learned using the pixel-wise features. The model is enforced to assign large energy scores to samples that are deviated from the few-shot examples in either the class-wise features or the pixel-wise features, and to assign small energy scores otherwise. Experiments on three standard FSOR datasets show the superior performance of our model.

Progressive Transfer Learning for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation with Multi-Fingered Anthropomorphic Hand

Dexterous in-hand manipulation for a multi-fingered anthropomorphic hand is extremely difficult because of the high-dimensional state and action spaces, rich contact patterns between the fingers and objects. Even though deep reinforcement learning has made moderate progress and demonstrated its strong potential for manipulation, it is still faced with certain challenges, such as large-scale data collection and high sample complexity. Especially, for some slight change scenes, it always needs to re-collect vast amounts of data and carry out numerous iterations of fine-tuning. Remarkably, humans can quickly transfer learned manipulation skills to different scenarios with little supervision. Inspired by human flexible transfer learning capability, we propose a novel dexterous in-hand manipulation progressive transfer learning framework (PTL) based on efficiently utilizing the collected trajectories and the source-trained dynamics model. This framework adopts progressive neural networks for dynamics model transfer learning on samples selected by a new samples selection method based on dynamics properties, rewards and scores of the trajectories. Experimental results on contact-rich anthropomorphic hand manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently and effectively learn in-hand manipulation skills with a few online attempts and adjustment learning under the new scene. Compared to learning from scratch, our method can reduce training time costs by 95%.

Generalized Anthropomorphic Functional Grasping with Minimal Demonstrations

This article investigates the challenge of achieving functional tool-use grasping with high-DoF anthropomorphic hands, with the aim of enabling anthropomorphic hands to perform tasks that require human-like manipulation and tool-use. However, accomplishing human-like grasping in real robots present many challenges, including obtaining diverse functional grasps for a wide variety of objects, handling generalization ability for kinematically diverse robot hands and precisely completing object shapes from a single-view perception. To tackle these challenges, we propose a six-step grasp synthesis algorithm based on fine-grained contact modeling that generates physically plausible and human-like functional grasps for category-level objects with minimal human demonstrations. With the contact-based optimization and learned dense shape correspondence, the proposed algorithm is adaptable to various objects in same category and a board range of robot hand models. To further demonstrate the robustness of the framework, over 10K functional grasps are synthesized to train our neural network, named DexFG-Net, which generates diverse sets of human-like functional grasps based on the reconstructed object model produced by a shape completion module. The proposed framework is extensively validated in simulation and on a real robot platform. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods by a large margin in terms of grasp functionality and success rate. Real robot experiments show that our method achieved an overall success rate of 79\% and 68\% for tool-use grasp on 3-D printed and real test objects, respectively, using a 5-Finger Schunk Hand. The experimental results indicate a step towards human-like grasping with anthropomorphic hands.

ALUM: Adversarial Data Uncertainty Modeling from Latent Model Uncertainty Compensation

It is critical that the models pay attention not only to accuracy but also to the certainty of prediction. Uncertain predictions of deep models caused by noisy data raise significant concerns in trustworthy AI areas. To explore and handle uncertainty due to intrinsic data noise, we propose a novel method called ALUM to simultaneously handle the model uncertainty and data uncertainty in a unified scheme. Rather than solely modeling data uncertainty in the ultimate layer of a deep model based on randomly selected training data, we propose to explore mined adversarial triplets to facilitate data uncertainty modeling and non-parametric uncertainty estimations to compensate for the insufficiently trained latent model layers. Thus, the critical data uncertainty and model uncertainty caused by noisy data can be readily quantified for improving model robustness. Our proposed ALUM is model-agnostic which can be easily implemented into any existing deep model with little extra computation overhead. Extensive experiments on various noisy learning tasks validate the superior robustness and generalization ability of our method. The code is released at https://github.com/wwzjer/ALUM.