Energy-Based Concept Bottleneck Models: Unifying Prediction, Concept Intervention, and Conditional Interpretations

Existing methods, such as concept bottleneck models (CBMs), have been successful in providing concept-based interpretations for black-box deep learning models. They typically work by predicting concepts given the input and then predicting the final class label given the predicted concepts. However, (1) they often fail to capture the high-order, nonlinear interaction between concepts, e.g., correcting a predicted concept (e.g., "yellow breast") does not help correct highly correlated concepts (e.g., "yellow belly"), leading to suboptimal final accuracy; (2) they cannot naturally quantify the complex conditional dependencies between different concepts and class labels (e.g., for an image with the class label "Kentucky Warbler" and a concept "black bill", what is the probability that the model correctly predicts another concept "black crown"), therefore failing to provide deeper insight into how a black-box model works. In response to these limitations, we propose Energy-based Concept Bottleneck Models (ECBMs). Our ECBMs use a set of neural networks to define the joint energy of candidate (input, concept, class) tuples. With such a unified interface, prediction, concept correction, and conditional dependency quantification are then represented as conditional probabilities, which are generated by composing different energy functions. Our ECBMs address both limitations of existing CBMs, providing higher accuracy and richer concept interpretations. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on real-world datasets.

FSDiffReg: Feature-wise and Score-wise Diffusion-guided Unsupervised Deformable Image Registration for Cardiac Images

Unsupervised deformable image registration is one of the challenging tasks in medical imaging. Obtaining a high-quality deformation field while preserving deformation topology remains demanding amid a series of deep-learning-based solutions. Meanwhile, the diffusion model's latent feature space shows potential in modeling the deformation semantics. To fully exploit the diffusion model's ability to guide the registration task, we present two modules: Feature-wise Diffusion-Guided Module (FDG) and Score-wise Diffusion-Guided Module (SDG). Specifically, FDG uses the diffusion model's multi-scale semantic features to guide the generation of the deformation field. SDG uses the diffusion score to guide the optimization process for preserving deformation topology with barely any additional computation. Experiment results on the 3D medical cardiac image registration task validate our model's ability to provide refined deformation fields with preserved topology effectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/FSDiffReg.git.

A Review of Intelligent Music Generation Systems

Intelligent music generation, one of the most popular subfields of computer creativity, can lower the creative threshold for non-specialists and increase the efficiency of music creation. In the last five years, the quality of algorithm-based automatic music generation has increased significantly, motivated by the use of modern generative algorithms to learn the patterns implicit within a piece of music based on rule constraints or a musical corpus, thus generating music samples in various styles. Some of the available literature reviews lack a systematic benchmark of generative models and are traditional and conservative in their perspective, resulting in a vision of the future development of the field that is not deeply integrated with the current rapid scientific progress. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of recent intelligent music generation techniques,provide a critical discussion, explicitly identify their respective characteristics, and present them in a general table. We first introduce how music as a stream of information is encoded and the relevant datasets, then compare different types of generation algorithms, summarize their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss existing methods for evaluation. Finally, the development of artificial intelligence in composition is studied, especially by comparing the different characteristics of music generation techniques in the East and West and analyzing the development prospects in this field.

Democratizing Production-Scale Distributed Deep Learning

The interest and demand for training deep neural networks have been experiencing rapid growth, spanning a wide range of applications in both academia and industry. However, training them distributed and at scale remains difficult due to the complex ecosystem of tools and hardware involved. One consequence is that the responsibility of orchestrating these complex components is often left to one-off scripts and glue code customized for specific problems. To address these restrictions, we introduce \emph{Alchemist} - an internal service built at Apple from the ground up for \emph{easy}, \emph{fast}, and \emph{scalable} distributed training. We discuss its design, implementation, and examples of running different flavors of distributed training. We also present case studies of its internal adoption in the development of autonomous systems, where training times have been reduced by 10x to keep up with the ever-growing data collection.

A region-growing approach for automatic outcrop fracture extraction from a three-dimensional point cloud

Conventional manual surveys of rock mass fractures usually require large amounts of time and labor; yet, they provide a relatively small set of data that cannot be considered representative of the study region. Terrestrial laser scanners are increasingly used for fracture surveys because they can efficiently acquire large area, high-resolution, three-dimensional (3D) point clouds from outcrops. However, extracting fractures and other planar surfaces from 3D outcrop point clouds is still a challenging task. No method has been reported that can be used to automatically extract the full extent of every individual fracture from a 3D outcrop point cloud. In this study, we propose a method using a region-growing approach to address this problem; the method also estimates the orientation of each fracture. In this method, criteria based on the local surface normal and curvature of the point cloud are used to initiate and control the growth of the fracture region. In tests using outcrop point cloud data, the proposed method identified and extracted the full extent of individual fractures with high accuracy. Compared with manually acquired field survey data, our method obtained better-quality fracture data, thereby demonstrating the high potential utility of the proposed method.