Infusing Learned Priors into Model-Based Multispectral Imaging

We introduce a new algorithm for regularized reconstruction of multispectral (MS) images from noisy linear measurements. Unlike traditional approaches, the proposed algorithm regularizes the recovery problem by using a prior specified \emph{only} through a learned denoising function. More specifically, we propose a new accelerated gradient method (AGM) variant of regularization by denoising (RED) for model-based MS image reconstruction. The key ingredient of our approach is the three-dimensional (3D) deep neural net (DNN) denoiser that can fully leverage spationspectral correlations within MS images. Our results suggest the generalizability of our MS-RED algorithm, where a single trained DNN can be used to solve several different MS imaging problems.

Harnessing the Power of Deep Learning Methods in Healthcare: Neonatal Pain Assessment from Crying Sound

Neonatal pain assessment in clinical environments is challenging as it is discontinuous and biased. Facial/body occlusion can occur in such settings due to clinical condition, developmental delays, prone position, or other external factors. In such cases, crying sound can be used to effectively assess neonatal pain. In this paper, we investigate the use of a novel CNN architecture (N-CNN) along with other CNN architectures (VGG16 and ResNet50) for assessing pain from crying sounds of neonates. The experimental results demonstrate that using our novel N-CNN for assessing pain from the sounds of neonates has a strong clinical potential and provides a viable alternative to the current assessment practice.

Online Regularization by Denoising with Applications to Phase Retrieval

Regularization by denoising (RED) is a powerful framework for solving imaging inverse problems. Most RED algorithms are iterative batch procedures, which limits their applicability to very large datasets. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing a novel online RED (On-RED) algorithm, which processes a small subset of the data at a time. We establish the theoretical convergence of On-RED in convex settings and empirically discuss its effectiveness in non-convex ones by illustrating its applicability to phase retrieval. Our results suggest that On-RED is an effective alternative to the traditional RED algorithms when dealing with large datasets.

Multi-Channel Neural Network for Assessing Neonatal Pain from Videos

Neonates do not have the ability to either articulate pain or communicate it non-verbally by pointing. The current clinical standard for assessing neonatal pain is intermittent and highly subjective. This discontinuity and subjectivity can lead to inconsistent assessment, and therefore, inadequate treatment. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel deep learning framework for assessing neonatal pain from videos. The proposed framework integrates information from two pain indicators or channels, namely facial expression and body movement, using convolutional neural network (CNN). It also integrates temporal information using a recurrent neural network (LSTM). The experimental results prove the efficiency and superiority of the proposed temporal and multi-channel framework as compared to existing similar methods.

RLTM: An Efficient Neural IR Framework for Long Documents

Deep neural networks have achieved significant improvements in information retrieval (IR). However, most existing models are computational costly and can not efficiently scale to long documents. This paper proposes a novel End-to-End neural ranking framework called Reinforced Long Text Matching (RLTM) which matches a query with long documents efficiently and effectively. The core idea behind the framework can be analogous to the human judgment process which firstly locates the relevance parts quickly from the whole document and then matches these parts with the query carefully to obtain the final label. Firstly, we select relevant sentences from the long documents by a coarse and efficient matching model. Secondly, we generate a relevance score by a more sophisticated matching model based on the sentence selected. The whole model is trained jointly with reinforcement learning in a pairwise manner by maximizing the expected score gaps between positive and negative examples. Experimental results demonstrate that RLTM has greatly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the state-of-the-art models.

ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding

Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

Predicting Different Types of Conversions with Multi-Task Learning in Online Advertising

Conversion prediction plays an important role in online advertising since Cost-Per-Action (CPA) has become one of the primary campaign performance objectives in the industry. Unlike click prediction, conversions have different types in nature, and each type may be associated with different decisive factors. In this paper, we formulate conversion prediction as a multi-task learning problem, so that the prediction models for different types of conversions can be learned together. These models share feature representations, but have their specific parameters, providing the benefit of information-sharing across all tasks. We then propose Multi-Task Field-weighted Factorization Machine (MT-FwFM) to solve these tasks jointly. Our experiment results show that, compared with two state-of-the-art models, MT-FwFM improve the AUC by 0.74% and 0.84% on two conversion types, and the weighted AUC across all conversion types is also improved by 0.50%.

Accurate Robotic Pouring for Serving Drinks

Pouring is the second most frequently executed motion in cooking scenarios. In this work, we present our system of accurate pouring that generates the angular velocities of the source container using recurrent neural networks. We collected demonstrations of human pouring water. We made a physical system on which the velocities of the source container were generated at each time step and executed by a motor. We tested our system on pouring water from containers that are not used for training and achieved an error of as low as 4 milliliters. We also used the system to pour oil and syrup. The accuracy achieved with oil is slightly lower than but comparable with that of water.

Block Coordinate Regularization by Denoising

We consider the problem of estimating a vector from its noisy measurements using a prior specified only through a denoising function. Recent work on plug-and-play priors (PnP) and regularization-by-denoising (RED) has shown the state-of-the-art performance of estimators under such priors in a range of imaging tasks. In this work, we develop a new block coordinate RED algorithm that decomposes a large-scale estimation problem into a sequence of updates over a small subset of the unknown variables. We theoretically analyze the convergence of the algorithm and discuss its relationship to the traditional proximal optimization. Our analysis complements and extends recent theoretical results for RED-based estimation methods. We numerically validate our method using several denoiser priors, including those based on convolutional neural network (CNN) denoisers.