A Concept-based Interpretable Model for the Diagnosis of Choroid Neoplasias using Multimodal Data

Diagnosing rare diseases presents a common challenge in clinical practice, necessitating the expertise of specialists for accurate identification. The advent of machine learning offers a promising solution, while the development of such technologies is hindered by the scarcity of data on rare conditions and the demand for models that are both interpretable and trustworthy in a clinical context. Interpretable AI, with its capacity for human-readable outputs, can facilitate validation by clinicians and contribute to medical education. In the current work, we focus on choroid neoplasias, the most prevalent form of eye cancer in adults, albeit rare with 5.1 per million. We built the so-far largest dataset consisting of 750 patients, incorporating three distinct imaging modalities collected from 2004 to 2022. Our work introduces a concept-based interpretable model that distinguishes between three types of choroidal tumors, integrating insights from domain experts via radiological reports. Remarkably, this model not only achieves an F1 score of 0.91, rivaling that of black-box models, but also boosts the diagnostic accuracy of junior doctors by 42%. This study highlights the significant potential of interpretable machine learning in improving the diagnosis of rare diseases, laying a groundwork for future breakthroughs in medical AI that could tackle a wider array of complex health scenarios.

VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation

We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/

PolyMaX: General Dense Prediction with Mask Transformer

Dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction, can be easily formulated as per-pixel classification (discrete outputs) or regression (continuous outputs). This per-pixel prediction paradigm has remained popular due to the prevalence of fully convolutional networks. However, on the recent frontier of segmentation task, the community has been witnessing a shift of paradigm from per-pixel prediction to cluster-prediction with the emergence of transformer architectures, particularly the mask transformers, which directly predicts a label for a mask instead of a pixel. Despite this shift, methods based on the per-pixel prediction paradigm still dominate the benchmarks on the other dense prediction tasks that require continuous outputs, such as depth estimation and surface normal prediction. Motivated by the success of DORN and AdaBins in depth estimation, achieved by discretizing the continuous output space, we propose to generalize the cluster-prediction based method to general dense prediction tasks. This allows us to unify dense prediction tasks with the mask transformer framework. Remarkably, the resulting model PolyMaX demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks of NYUD-v2 dataset. We hope our simple yet effective design can inspire more research on exploiting mask transformers for more dense prediction tasks. Code and model will be made available.

SANPO: A Scene Understanding, Accessibility, Navigation, Pathfinding, Obstacle Avoidance Dataset

We introduce SANPO, a large-scale egocentric video dataset focused on dense prediction in outdoor environments. It contains stereo video sessions collected across diverse outdoor environments, as well as rendered synthetic video sessions. (Synthetic data was provided by Parallel Domain.) All sessions have (dense) depth and odometry labels. All synthetic sessions and a subset of real sessions have temporally consistent dense panoptic segmentation labels. To our knowledge, this is the first human egocentric video dataset with both large scale dense panoptic segmentation and depth annotations. In addition to the dataset we also provide zero-shot baselines and SANPO benchmarks for future research. We hope that the challenging nature of SANPO will help advance the state-of-the-art in video segmentation, depth estimation, multi-task visual modeling, and synthetic-to-real domain adaptation, while enabling human navigation systems. SANPO is available here: https://google-research-datasets.github.io/sanpo_dataset/

MLP Based Continuous Gait Recognition of a Powered Ankle Prosthesis with Serial Elastic Actuator

Powered ankle prostheses effectively assist people with lower limb amputation to perform daily activities. High performance prostheses with adjustable compliance and capability to predict and implement amputee's intent are crucial for them to be comparable to or better than a real limb. However, current designs fail to provide simple yet effective compliance of the joint with full potential of modification, and lack accurate gait prediction method in real time. This paper proposes an innovative design of powered ankle prosthesis with serial elastic actuator (SEA), and puts forward a MLP based gait recognition method that can accurately and continuously predict more gait parameters for motion sensing and control. The prosthesis mimics biological joint with similar weight, torque, and power which can assist walking of up to 4 m/s. A new design of planar torsional spring is proposed for the SEA, which has better stiffness, endurance, and potential of modification than current designs. The gait recognition system simultaneously generates locomotive speed, gait phase, ankle angle and angular velocity only utilizing signals of single IMU, holding advantage in continuity, adaptability for speed range, accuracy, and capability of multi-functions.

VideoGLUE: Video General Understanding Evaluation of Foundation Models

We evaluate existing foundation models video understanding capabilities using a carefully designed experiment protocol consisting of three hallmark tasks (action recognition, temporal localization, and spatiotemporal localization), eight datasets well received by the community, and four adaptation methods tailoring a foundation model (FM) for a downstream task. Moreover, we propose a scalar VideoGLUE score (VGS) to measure an FMs efficacy and efficiency when adapting to general video understanding tasks. Our main findings are as follows. First, task-specialized models significantly outperform the six FMs studied in this work, in sharp contrast to what FMs have achieved in natural language and image understanding. Second,video-native FMs, whose pretraining data contains the video modality, are generally better than image-native FMs in classifying motion-rich videos, localizing actions in time, and understanding a video of more than one action. Third, the video-native FMs can perform well on video tasks under light adaptations to downstream tasks(e.g., freezing the FM backbones), while image-native FMs win in full end-to-end finetuning. The first two observations reveal the need and tremendous opportunities to conduct research on video-focused FMs, and the last confirms that both tasks and adaptation methods matter when it comes to the evaluation of FMs.

DaTaSeg: Taming a Universal Multi-Dataset Multi-Task Segmentation Model

Observing the close relationship among panoptic, semantic and instance segmentation tasks, we propose to train a universal multi-dataset multi-task segmentation model: DaTaSeg.We use a shared representation (mask proposals with class predictions) for all tasks. To tackle task discrepancy, we adopt different merge operations and post-processing for different tasks. We also leverage weak-supervision, allowing our segmentation model to benefit from cheaper bounding box annotations. To share knowledge across datasets, we use text embeddings from the same semantic embedding space as classifiers and share all network parameters among datasets. We train DaTaSeg on ADE semantic, COCO panoptic, and Objects365 detection datasets. DaTaSeg improves performance on all datasets, especially small-scale datasets, achieving 54.0 mIoU on ADE semantic and 53.5 PQ on COCO panoptic. DaTaSeg also enables weakly-supervised knowledge transfer on ADE panoptic and Objects365 instance segmentation. Experiments show DaTaSeg scales with the number of training datasets and enables open-vocabulary segmentation through direct transfer. In addition, we annotate an Objects365 instance segmentation set of 1,000 images and will release it as a public benchmark.

Spatial-temporal traffic modeling with a fusion graph reconstructed by tensor decomposition

Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is essential for helping traffic managers to take control measures and drivers to choose the optimal travel routes. Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been widely used in traffic flow prediction owing to their powerful ability to capture spatial-temporal dependencies. The design of the spatial-temporal graph adjacency matrix is a key to the success of GCNs, and it is still an open question. This paper proposes reconstructing the binary adjacency matrix via tensor decomposition, and a traffic flow forecasting method is proposed. First, we reformulate the spatial-temporal fusion graph adjacency matrix into a three-way adjacency tensor. Then, we reconstructed the adjacency tensor via Tucker decomposition, wherein more informative and global spatial-temporal dependencies are encoded. Finally, a Spatial-temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional module for localized spatial-temporal correlations learning and a Dilated Convolution module for global correlations learning are assembled to aggregate and learn the comprehensive spatial-temporal dependencies of the road network. Experimental results on four open-access datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the prediction performance and computational cost.

MMGA: Multimodal Learning with Graph Alignment

Multimodal pre-training breaks down the modality barriers and allows the individual modalities to be mutually augmented with information, resulting in significant advances in representation learning. However, graph modality, as a very general and important form of data, cannot be easily interacted with other modalities because of its non-regular nature. In this paper, we propose MMGA (Multimodal learning with Graph Alignment), a novel multimodal pre-training framework to incorporate information from graph (social network), image and text modalities on social media to enhance user representation learning. In MMGA, a multi-step graph alignment mechanism is proposed to add the self-supervision from graph modality to optimize the image and text encoders, while using the information from the image and text modalities to guide the graph encoder learning. We conduct experiments on the dataset crawled from Instagram. The experimental results show that MMGA works well on the dataset and improves the fans prediction task's performance. We release our dataset, the first social media multimodal dataset with graph, of 60,000 users labeled with specific topics based on 2 million posts to facilitate future research.

On Label Granularity and Object Localization

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to learn representations that encode object location using only image-level category labels. However, many objects can be labeled at different levels of granularity. Is it an animal, a bird, or a great horned owl? Which image-level labels should we use? In this paper we study the role of label granularity in WSOL. To facilitate this investigation we introduce iNatLoc500, a new large-scale fine-grained benchmark dataset for WSOL. Surprisingly, we find that choosing the right training label granularity provides a much larger performance boost than choosing the best WSOL algorithm. We also show that changing the label granularity can significantly improve data efficiency.