A dataset of primary nasopharyngeal carcinoma MRI with multi-modalities segmentation

Multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging data with various sequences facilitate the early diagnosis, tumor segmentation, and disease staging in the management of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). The lack of publicly available, comprehensive datasets limits advancements in diagnosis, treatment planning, and the development of machine learning algorithms for NPC. Addressing this critical need, we introduce the first comprehensive NPC MRI dataset, encompassing MR axial imaging of 277 primary NPC patients. This dataset includes T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted sequences, totaling 831 scans. In addition to the corresponding clinical data, manually annotated and labeled segmentations by experienced radiologists offer high-quality data resources from untreated primary NPC.

XRL-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Comparing Explainable Reinforcement Learning Techniques

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated substantial potential across diverse fields, yet understanding its decision-making process, especially in real-world scenarios where rationality and safety are paramount, is an ongoing challenge. This paper delves in to Explainable RL (XRL), a subfield of Explainable AI (XAI) aimed at unravelling the complexities of RL models. Our focus rests on state-explaining techniques, a crucial subset within XRL methods, as they reveal the underlying factors influencing an agent's actions at any given time. Despite their significant role, the lack of a unified evaluation framework hinders assessment of their accuracy and effectiveness. To address this, we introduce XRL-Bench, a unified standardized benchmark tailored for the evaluation and comparison of XRL methods, encompassing three main modules: standard RL environments, explainers based on state importance, and standard evaluators. XRL-Bench supports both tabular and image data for state explanation. We also propose TabularSHAP, an innovative and competitive XRL method. We demonstrate the practical utility of TabularSHAP in real-world online gaming services and offer an open-source benchmark platform for the straightforward implementation and evaluation of XRL methods. Our contributions facilitate the continued progression of XRL technology.

Sequential Model for Predicting Patient Adherence in Subcutaneous Immunotherapy for Allergic Rhinitis

Objective: Subcutaneous Immunotherapy (SCIT) is the long-lasting causal treatment of allergic rhinitis. How to enhance the adherence of patients to maximize the benefit of allergen immunotherapy (AIT) plays a crucial role in the management of AIT. This study aims to leverage novel machine learning models to precisely predict the risk of non-adherence of patients and related systematic symptom scores, to provide a novel approach in the management of long-term AIT. Methods: The research develops and analyzes two models, Sequential Latent Actor-Critic (SLAC) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), evaluating them based on scoring and adherence prediction capabilities. Results: Excluding the biased samples at the first time step, the predictive adherence accuracy of the SLAC models is from $60\,\%$ to $72\%$, and for LSTM models, it is $66\,\%$ to $84\,\%$, varying according to the time steps. The range of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for SLAC models is between $0.93$ and $2.22$, while for LSTM models it is between $1.09$ and $1.77$. Notably, these RMSEs are significantly lower than the random prediction error of $4.55$. Conclusion: We creatively apply sequential models in the long-term management of SCIT with promising accuracy in the prediction of SCIT nonadherence in Allergic Rhinitis (AR) patients. While LSTM outperforms SLAC in adherence prediction, SLAC excels in score prediction for patients undergoing SCIT for AR. The state-action-based SLAC adds flexibility, presenting a novel and effective approach for managing long-term AIT.

Robust Beamforming for Downlink Multi-Cell Systems: A Bilevel Optimization Perspective

Utilization of inter-base station cooperation for information processing has shown great potential in enhancing the overall quality of communication services (QoS) in wireless communication networks. Nevertheless, such cooperations require the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at base stations (BSs), which is assumed to be perfectly known. However, CSI errors are inevitable in practice which necessitates beamforming techniques that can achieve robust performance in the presence of channel estimation errors. Existing approaches relax the robust beamforming design problems into semidefinite programming (SDP), which can only achieve a solution that is far from being optimal. To this end, this paper views robust beamforming design problems from a bilevel optimization perspective. In particular, we focus on maximizing the worst-case weighted sum-rate (WSR) in the downlink multi-cell multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) system considering bounded CSI errors. We first reformulate this problem into a bilevel optimization problem and then develop an efficient algorithm based on the cutting plane method. A distributed optimization algorithm has also been developed to facilitate the parallel processing in practical settings. Numerical results are provided to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of performance and complexity, particularly in the presence of CSI uncertainties.

PAD: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Patchwise-Scale Adapter for Infrared Images

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for RGB images has achieved significant success, yet there is still limited research on SSL for infrared images, primarily due to three prominent challenges: 1) the lack of a suitable large-scale infrared pre-training dataset, 2) the distinctiveness of non-iconic infrared images rendering common pre-training tasks like masked image modeling (MIM) less effective, and 3) the scarcity of fine-grained textures making it particularly challenging to learn general image features. To address these issues, we construct a Multi-Scene Infrared Pre-training (MSIP) dataset comprising 178,756 images, and introduce object-sensitive random RoI cropping, an image preprocessing method, to tackle the challenge posed by non-iconic images. To alleviate the impact of weak textures on feature learning, we propose a pre-training paradigm called Pre-training with ADapter (PAD), which uses adapters to learn domain-specific features while freezing parameters pre-trained on ImageNet to retain the general feature extraction capability. This new paradigm is applicable to any transformer-based SSL method. Furthermore, to achieve more flexible coordination between pre-trained and newly-learned features in different layers and patches, a patchwise-scale adapter with dynamically learnable scale factors is introduced. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that PAD, with only 1.23M pre-trainable parameters, outperforms other baseline paradigms including continual full pre-training on MSIP. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/casiatao/PAD.

Rethink Baseline of Integrated Gradients from the Perspective of Shapley Value

Numerous approaches have attempted to interpret deep neural networks (DNNs) by attributing the prediction of DNN to its input features. One of the well-studied attribution methods is Integrated Gradients (IG). Specifically, the choice of baselines for IG is a critical consideration for generating meaningful and unbiased explanations for model predictions in different scenarios. However, current practice of exploiting a single baseline fails to fulfill this ambition, thus demanding multiple baselines. Fortunately, the inherent connection between IG and Aumann-Shapley Value forms a unique perspective to rethink the design of baselines. Under certain hypothesis, we theoretically analyse that a set of baseline aligns with the coalitions in Shapley Value. Thus, we propose a novel baseline construction method called Shapley Integrated Gradients (SIG) that searches for a set of baselines by proportional sampling to partly simulate the computation path of Shapley Value. Simulations on GridWorld show that SIG approximates the proportion of Shapley Values. Furthermore, experiments conducted on various image tasks demonstrate that compared to IG using other baseline methods, SIG exhibits an improved estimation of feature's contribution, offers more consistent explanations across diverse applications, and is generic to distinct data types or instances with insignificant computational overhead.

A Model-Agnostic Framework for Recommendation via Interest-aware Item Embeddings

Item representation holds significant importance in recommendation systems, which encompasses domains such as news, retail, and videos. Retrieval and ranking models utilise item representation to capture the user-item relationship based on user behaviours. While existing representation learning methods primarily focus on optimising item-based mechanisms, such as attention and sequential modelling. However, these methods lack a modelling mechanism to directly reflect user interests within the learned item representations. Consequently, these methods may be less effective in capturing user interests indirectly. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Interest-aware Capsule network (IaCN) recommendation model, a model-agnostic framework that directly learns interest-oriented item representations. IaCN serves as an auxiliary task, enabling the joint learning of both item-based and interest-based representations. This framework adopts existing recommendation models without requiring substantial redesign. We evaluate the proposed approach on benchmark datasets, exploring various scenarios involving different deep neural networks, behaviour sequence lengths, and joint learning ratios of interest-oriented item representations. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance enhancements across diverse recommendation models, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Adaptive Value Decomposition with Greedy Marginal Contribution Computation for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Real-world cooperation often requires intensive coordination among agents simultaneously. This task has been extensively studied within the framework of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and value decomposition methods are among those cutting-edge solutions. However, traditional methods that learn the value function as a monotonic mixing of per-agent utilities cannot solve the tasks with non-monotonic returns. This hinders their application in generic scenarios. Recent methods tackle this problem from the perspective of implicit credit assignment by learning value functions with complete expressiveness or using additional structures to improve cooperation. However, they are either difficult to learn due to large joint action spaces or insufficient to capture the complicated interactions among agents which are essential to solving tasks with non-monotonic returns. To address these problems, we propose a novel explicit credit assignment method to address the non-monotonic problem. Our method, Adaptive Value decomposition with Greedy Marginal contribution (AVGM), is based on an adaptive value decomposition that learns the cooperative value of a group of dynamically changing agents. We first illustrate that the proposed value decomposition can consider the complicated interactions among agents and is feasible to learn in large-scale scenarios. Then, our method uses a greedy marginal contribution computed from the value decomposition as an individual credit to incentivize agents to learn the optimal cooperative policy. We further extend the module with an action encoder to guarantee the linear time complexity for computing the greedy marginal contribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements in several non-monotonic domains.

TCFimt: Temporal Counterfactual Forecasting from Individual Multiple Treatment Perspective

Determining causal effects of temporal multi-intervention assists decision-making. Restricted by time-varying bias, selection bias, and interactions of multiple interventions, the disentanglement and estimation of multiple treatment effects from individual temporal data is still rare. To tackle these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework of temporal counterfactual forecasting from an individual multiple treatment perspective (TCFimt). TCFimt constructs adversarial tasks in a seq2seq framework to alleviate selection and time-varying bias and designs a contrastive learning-based block to decouple a mixed treatment effect into separated main treatment effects and causal interactions which further improves estimation accuracy. Through implementing experiments on two real-world datasets from distinct fields, the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in predicting future outcomes with specific treatments and in choosing optimal treatment type and timing than state-of-the-art methods.

Plasticity Neural Network Based on Astrocytic Influence at Critical Periods, Synaptic Competition and Compensation by Current and Mnemonic Brain Plasticity and Synapse Formation

Based on the RNN frame, we accomplished the model construction, formula derivation and algorithm testing for PNN. We elucidated the mechanism of PNN based on the latest MIT research on synaptic compensation, and also grounded our study on the basis of findings of the Stanford research, which suggested that synapse formation is important for competition in dendrite morphogenesis. The influence of astrocytic impacts on brain plasticity and synapse formation is an important mechanism of our Neural Network at critical periods or the end of critical periods.In the model for critical periods, the hypothesis is that the best brain plasticity so far affects current brain plasticity and the best synapse formation so far affects current synapse formation.Furthermore, PNN takes into account the mnemonic gradient informational synapse formation, and brain plasticity and synapse formation change frame of NN is a new method of Deep Learning.The question we proposed is whether the promotion of neuroscience and brain cognition was achieved by model construction, formula derivation or algorithm testing. We resorted to the Artificial Neural Network (ANN), evolutionary computation and other numerical methods for hypotheses, possible explanations and rules, rather than only biological tests which include cutting-edge imaging and genetic tools.And it has no ethics of animal testing.