Neuromodulation Gated Transformer

We introduce a novel architecture, the Neuromodulation Gated Transformer (NGT), which is a simple implementation of neuromodulation in transformers via a multiplicative effect. We compare it to baselines and show that it results in the best average performance on the SuperGLUE benchmark validation sets.

Emergence of Symbols in Neural Networks for Semantic Understanding and Communication

Being able to create meaningful symbols and proficiently use them for higher cognitive functions such as communication, reasoning, planning, etc., is essential and unique for human intelligence. Current deep neural networks are still far behind human's ability to create symbols for such higher cognitive functions. Here we propose a solution, named SEA-net, to endow neural networks with ability of symbol creation, semantic understanding and communication. SEA-net generates symbols that dynamically configure the network to perform specific tasks. These symbols capture compositional semantic information that enables the system to acquire new functions purely by symbolic manipulation or communication. In addition, we found that these self-generated symbols exhibit an intrinsic structure resembling that of natural language, suggesting a common framework underlying the generation and understanding of symbols in both human brains and artificial neural networks. We hope that it will be instrumental in producing more capable systems in the future that can synergize the strengths of connectionist and symbolic approaches for AI.

Boosting Verified Training for Robust Image Classifications via Abstraction

This paper proposes a novel, abstraction-based, certified training method for robust image classifiers. Via abstraction, all perturbed images are mapped into intervals before feeding into neural networks for training. By training on intervals, all the perturbed images that are mapped to the same interval are classified as the same label, rendering the variance of training sets to be small and the loss landscape of the models to be smooth. Consequently, our approach significantly improves the robustness of trained models. For the abstraction, our training method also enables a sound and complete black-box verification approach, which is orthogonal and scalable to arbitrary types of neural networks regardless of their sizes and architectures. We evaluate our method on a wide range of benchmarks in different scales. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state of the art by (i) reducing the verified errors of trained models up to 95.64%; (ii) totally achieving up to 602.50x speedup; and (iii) scaling up to larger models with up to 138 million trainable parameters. The demo is available at https://github.com/zhangzhaodi233/ABSCERT.git.

A Radiomics-Incorporated Deep Ensemble Learning Model for Multi-Parametric MRI-based Glioma Segmentation

We developed a deep ensemble learning model with a radiomics spatial encoding execution for improved glioma segmentation accuracy using multi-parametric MRI (mp-MRI). This model was developed using 369 glioma patients with a 4-modality mp-MRI protocol: T1, contrast-enhanced T1 (T1-Ce), T2, and FLAIR. In each modality volume, a 3D sliding kernel was implemented across the brain to capture image heterogeneity: fifty-six radiomic features were extracted within the kernel, resulting in a 4th order tensor. Each radiomic feature can then be encoded as a 3D image volume, namely a radiomic feature map (RFM). PCA was employed for data dimension reduction and the first 4 PCs were selected. Four deep neural networks as sub-models following the U-Net architecture were trained for the segmenting of a region-of-interest (ROI): each sub-model utilizes the mp-MRI and 1 of the 4 PCs as a 5-channel input for a 2D execution. The 4 softmax probability results given by the U-net ensemble were superimposed and binarized by Otsu method as the segmentation result. Three ensemble models were trained to segment enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), and whole tumor (WT). The adopted radiomics spatial encoding execution enriches the image heterogeneity information that leads to the successful demonstration of the proposed deep ensemble model, which offers a new tool for mp-MRI based medical image segmentation.

xASTNN: Improved Code Representations for Industrial Practice

The application of deep learning techniques in software engineering becomes increasingly popular. One key problem is developing high-quality and easy-to-use source code representations for code-related tasks. The research community has acquired impressive results in recent years. However, due to the deployment difficulties and performance bottlenecks, seldom these approaches are applied to the industry. In this paper, we present xASTNN, an eXtreme Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based Neural Network for source code representation, aiming to push this technique to industrial practice. The proposed xASTNN has three advantages. First, xASTNN is completely based on widely-used ASTs and does not require complicated data pre-processing, making it applicable to various programming languages and practical scenarios. Second, three closely-related designs are proposed to guarantee the effectiveness of xASTNN, including statement subtree sequence for code naturalness, gated recursive unit for syntactical information, and gated recurrent unit for sequential information. Third, a dynamic batching algorithm is introduced to significantly reduce the time complexity of xASTNN. Two code comprehension downstream tasks, code classification and code clone detection, are adopted for evaluation. The results demonstrate that our xASTNN can improve the state-of-the-art while being faster than the baselines.

Design of a Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Elastic Neck Exoskeleton for Persons with Dropped Head Syndrome

Nonsurgical treatment of Dropped Head Syndrome (DHS) incurs the use of collar-type orthoses that immobilize the neck and cause discomfort and sores under the chin. Articulated orthoses have the potential to support the head posture while allowing partial mobility of the neck and reduced discomfort and sores. This work presents the design, modeling, development, and characterization of a novel multi-degree-of-freedom elastic mechanism designed for neck support. This new type of elastic mechanism allows the bending of the head in the sagittal and coronal planes, and head rotations in the transverse plane. From these articulate movements, the mechanism generates moments that restore the head and neck to the upright posture, thus compensating for the muscle weakness caused by DHS. The experimental results show adherence to the empirical characterization of the elastic mechanism under flexion to the model-based calculations. A neck support orthosis prototype based on the proposed mechanism is presented, which enables the three before-mentioned head motions of a healthy participant, according to the results of preliminary tests.

Geometric Visual Similarity Learning in 3D Medical Image Self-supervised Pre-training

Learning inter-image similarity is crucial for 3D medical images self-supervised pre-training, due to their sharing of numerous same semantic regions. However, the lack of the semantic prior in metrics and the semantic-independent variation in 3D medical images make it challenging to get a reliable measurement for the inter-image similarity, hindering the learning of consistent representation for same semantics. We investigate the challenging problem of this task, i.e., learning a consistent representation between images for a clustering effect of same semantic features. We propose a novel visual similarity learning paradigm, Geometric Visual Similarity Learning, which embeds the prior of topological invariance into the measurement of the inter-image similarity for consistent representation of semantic regions. To drive this paradigm, we further construct a novel geometric matching head, the Z-matching head, to collaboratively learn the global and local similarity of semantic regions, guiding the efficient representation learning for different scale-level inter-image semantic features. Our experiments demonstrate that the pre-training with our learning of inter-image similarity yields more powerful inner-scene, inter-scene, and global-local transferring ability on four challenging 3D medical image tasks. Our codes and pre-trained models will be publicly available on https://github.com/YutingHe-list/GVSL.

Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?

Large language models have demonstrated an emergent capability in answering knowledge intensive questions. With recent progress on web-scale visual and language pre-training, do these models also understand how to answer visual information seeking questions? To answer this question, we present InfoSeek, a Visual Question Answering dataset that focuses on asking information-seeking questions, where the information can not be answered by common sense knowledge. We perform a multi-stage human annotation to collect a natural distribution of high-quality visual information seeking question-answer pairs. We also construct a large-scale, automatically collected dataset by combining existing visual entity recognition datasets and Wikidata, which provides over one million examples for model fine-tuning and validation. Based on InfoSeek, we analyzed various pre-trained Visual QA systems to gain insights into the characteristics of different pre-trained models. Our analysis shows that it is challenging for the state-of-the-art multi-modal pre-trained models to answer visual information seeking questions, but this capability is improved through fine-tuning on the automated InfoSeek dataset. We hope our analysis paves the way to understand and develop the next generation of multi-modal pre-training.

Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition: Towards Recognizing Millions of Wikipedia Entities

Large-scale multi-modal pre-training models such as CLIP and PaLI exhibit strong generalization on various visual domains and tasks. However, existing image classification benchmarks often evaluate recognition on a specific domain (e.g., outdoor images) or a specific task (e.g., classifying plant species), which falls short of evaluating whether pre-trained foundational models are universal visual recognizers. To address this, we formally present the task of Open-domain Visual Entity recognitioN (OVEN), where a model need to link an image onto a Wikipedia entity with respect to a text query. We construct OVEN-Wiki by re-purposing 14 existing datasets with all labels grounded onto one single label space: Wikipedia entities. OVEN challenges models to select among six million possible Wikipedia entities, making it a general visual recognition benchmark with the largest number of labels. Our study on state-of-the-art pre-trained models reveals large headroom in generalizing to the massive-scale label space. We show that a PaLI-based auto-regressive visual recognition model performs surprisingly well, even on Wikipedia entities that have never been seen during fine-tuning. We also find existing pretrained models yield different strengths: while PaLI-based models obtain higher overall performance, CLIP-based models are better at recognizing tail entities.